Say, is that a stoat in the refrigerator, or…
Tomorrow I’m going to see something I haven’t seen in over a year: morning!
They’re delivering a new fridge some time between seven in the morning and seven in the evening (nice of them to narrow it down for us). I’m taking the morning shift.
Our old fridge died two days before Christmas. Not flat out died, mind you. It just started storing food at dangerously high temperatures. We’ve spent the last month asking ourselves, “is this the fatal duckliver paté?”
We always meant to get a larger fridge anyhow. The standard around here are those little bar-sized Euro-fridges. (My mother once called me up after watching some BBC comedy and asked me why the lady kept putting the milk in the dishwasher).
This isn’t exactly the honkin’ huge Body Cooler 3000 my folks have back in the States, but it’s substantially bigger than the old one. I think that’s the actual make and model there in the picture.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have mayonnaise to throw out.
January 18, 2010 — 5:33 pm
Comments: 28
Pull right!
I’ll be honest with you: I had fuck-all in mind to post tonight, so I was paging through some old unpublished draft posteses. I found this illustration I never used (I remember it looked pretty good in color, I just don’t remember what I made it for). Children yanking an elephant rightwards goes nicely with this very interesting article that Ace pointed to today.
It’s about how the Tea Partiers are taking over the GOP from the very bottom: signing up to be precinct leaders, which is a political rung so low it’s often left empty. But precinct leaders get to vote for the people on the next rungs up. And, let us hope, so on up. That is the way to do the thing, rather than haring off into a third party cul-de-sac.
It’s a mistake to look at the Tea Parties as a movement, I think. It’s just the conservatives in the party. We’ve always been there, and we’ve been getting grouchier and grouchier since, like, Reagan.
Bob Dole was not our guy. Neither of the Georges Bush were our guy. John McCain sure as shit wasn’t our guy (but at least he damaged the idea of the electable moderate). I don’t know if Sarah Palin is our guy, but I know I’m sick of GOP ‘moderates’ complaining that the unfair criticism of her is drowning out all the fair criticism of her.
I’m not even going to mention Massachusetts — I don’t want to jinx anything. I am, however, planning to sacrifice several small animals over the weekend. Because, let’s face it, traditional blood rituals have been lacking in the GOP for far too long.
January 15, 2010 — 7:46 pm
Comments: 37
DPlot thickens
You know how I was bitching in my last post about no longer owning any graphing software? Well, a very nice bloke took notice (he has a Google Alerts set for “graphing software”) and offered me a free license to his graphing software program DPlot.
It’s my policy never to say no to free stuff. It’s my policy now, anyway — I didn’t have to have a policy before, since nobody ever offered me any free stuff. So I downloaded DPlot, followed the simple installation instructions, and in no time at all, I was feeling severely mentally retarded.
Seriously, it’s all math and shit. I know some of you are actual engineers and science type peeps, so you should probably mosey over and check it out. I mean, he’s an awfully nice guy and he’s got testimonials from other nerds saying how great his program is. I know you poindexters don’t dare lie to each other, on account of your huge brains, so it’s probably pretty good at whatever the hell it does.
Look! I made boobies!
January 14, 2010 — 6:30 pm
Comments: 24
Hmmmm…
Dawn sent me links to the Real Clear Politics job approval numbers for Bush and Obama to date (thanks Dawn!), and I thought to myself, “self — I’d really like to see those two line graphs superimposed.”
Being a profoundly lazy woman who no longer owns graphing software, I didn’t go back and replot them from the original data. I just took the two images, knocked out the disapproval line, superimposed them and — using the magic of Photoshop — tugged and squeezed until all the axes aligned. That’s why the lines look funky and chewed. They are reasonably accurate, though.
I don’t think there’s a profound idea to be taken away from this. We’ll never know what Bush’s presidency would have been like without September 11 erupting early on. Or whether he’d have won a second term. I’m not even sure we can read anything into the apparent volatility of Bush’s numbers (that’s probably an artifact of the squashing and stretching I had to do).
Still, that trend can’t make Obama’s political folk happy. When you run as all things to all men and turn out to be not much for not many, the public disillusionment is profound. And disillusionment is a sausage machine: you can’t turn the handle the other way and get your pig back.
Oh, and not a WORD about the line colors, okay? This is a monochrome blog; I’ve got two dramatic choices and I thought the fatter line should be the lighter color. Then I got all through and went, “oh, fuck.”
I hate that I have to think about these things.
January 13, 2010 — 6:02 pm
Comments: 30
Adventures in capitalism
Shhhh…look up. Up top. Right sidebar. Just over the dead guy. Yeah, where it says “your ad here.”
There’s going to be ads there.
Unless it’s really irritating, in which case I’ll biff it. Or not irritating enough, in which case I’ll put one of those flashing lime-green banner ads that’s says, “NO SHIT — YOU REALLY ARE THE ONE-MILLIONTH VIEWER!”
I expect to make pennies and pennies on this deal.
January 12, 2010 — 11:54 am
Comments: 57
I could almost feel sorry for Harry Reid
Almost. He’s a dimwitted old man, and for most of his life, “negro” was the nice word.
Then I think about the health care bill and it becomes imperative that I Photoshop him with his finger up his nose.
By the way, my grandfather wrote and self-published a whole book of anecdotes in hillbilly dialect. You can still turn up copies on rare book sites. I have a nephew who’s made it his life’s work to buy up all the copies he can find.
God knows why. It’s one of the most painful reads in the history of vanity publishing.
January 11, 2010 — 7:28 pm
Comments: 29
Thank goodness she has a woolly jumper
We keep missing the big falls that the villages all around have gotten. Weather can be squally and like that here.
Still, even a little bit is pretty. And it’s nice to see they’ve turned sheep back into the field behind (and in front). Things go better with sheep.
Good weekend, everyone!
January 8, 2010 — 7:55 pm
Comments: 47
Sexually confused Christmas cards
I found this in my camera today; I meant to post it before Christmas. I’m pretty sure that’s not supposed to be “Season’s greetings to my favorite incestuous relationship.” More like “Merry Christmas to my butch sister and her thang.”
Hope the blurry shot doesn’t make you feel urpy. I had to take it by stealth. Shopkeepers really don’t like to see you taking snapshots of their wares.
And that’s all I got in me today. We’re huddled over a coal fire tonight trying not to freeze our little weasels off.
January 7, 2010 — 7:09 pm
Comments: 21
You might be a RINO
Here we go! It’s the run-up to the 2010 election — time for the foamy political ideologues and squishy middle-of-the-roaders in both parties to go after each other like hungover weasels in a rabbit hutch.
Fuck it. Civility is for afternoon tea with the Queen. Politics is a blood sport. Here goes:
If you’d rather be in power and actively steering the country in the wrong direction than out of power and pointing in the right direction you might be a RINO.
If you think Sarah Palin is — come on now, honestly — just a bit de trop you might be a RINO.
If you think the Tea Partiers are a muddled, ignorant rabble likely to flare out of control or give the party a bad name you might be a RINO.
If you think defining conservative principles and insisting candidates agree with them is a “purity test” — and a bad thing — you might be a RINO.
If you think it’s okay if the “Big Tent” is big enough to hold two people who agree on practically nothing at all, you might be a RINO.
If you think consensus and comity between members of opposing parties is an important political principle you might be a RINO.
If you think the Constitution is over two hundred years old and a lot has changed in that time you might be a RINO.
Come on, sock an elephant — it’s fun! Got any more? Say, isn’t that David Brooks over there, smirking at your alma mater?
January 6, 2010 — 6:53 pm
Comments: 34
Honey, I didn’t know you invited Al Gore to tea
We’re expecting sixteen inches of global warmening tonight. Okay, that’s the Mail. They are <ahem> somewhat prone to exaggeration — but we’ve just watched the evening news, and it looks pretty dire out there. It’s been snowing on Scotland for two weeks, and now it’s moving across the sunny South.
It’s a lot for here, I’m telling you. And worse than the snow is the deep cold that looks to hang on afterwards, turning us into a slippery Britcicle.
The Met Office has so much egg on their faces, they could make face omelets. They — for the third year in a row — promised us a record warm Winter, as temperatures have gone down and down to levels not seen in decades.
How can £200 million a year buy weather forecasts so consistently wrong? Because the Met Office is the throbbing heart of British warmist propaganda.
The current chairman of the Met Office, Robert Napier, was previously chief executive of WWF-UK, the UK arm of the World Wide Fund for Nature. In other words, a long-standing, committed environmental activist bugfuck looney-tune.
And, in the chattering teeth of this latest embarrassment, management has given itself nice, fat raises.
The question is, how long will Britons pay stupid money for short-range forecasts substantially less helpful than just sticking your head out the damn window, and long-range forecasts that amount to hysterical international suicide pacts?
January 5, 2010 — 7:47 pm
Comments: 43