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The kind of utter lameness you just won’t get anywhere else

Oops! Got distracted tonight and didn’t put together a proper blogpost. Whenever that happens, I just mosey over to the Daily Mail and pick the first headline that catches my eye.

And here you go: grave-robbing badgers! Dug themselves a sett under three 100-year-old graves, scattering human remains everywhere.

It is illegal to screw with a badger sett during the breeding season (which is now), so council staff are quietly collecting bones and waiting for the badgers to quit making whoopie. Though what the farmers generally do is smack them over the head with a shovel and leave them on the side of the road.

See how easy that was? Next time I get jammed up, y’all can go to the Daily Mail for yourself.

Oh, wait. One more. It’s a shig! It’s a peep! Naw, it’s just a pig with a woolly coat. Have a good weekend, everyone! If you don’t see me around Monday, somebody come dig me out of the volcanic ash.

April 16, 2010 — 9:33 pm
Comments: 19

Brace yourself. Maybe.

I’m sure you’ve heard that a volcanic eruption in Iceland has halted all air travel in the UK and much of Northern Europe. They’ve just extended it to tomorrow afternoon. The problem is that bits of volcanic junk can screw up engines and electronics, and the planes’ radar is blind to it.

It’s spooky with all the air traffic halted. Not as edgy as the days after September 11 — for obvious reasons — but still odd. Not many places in the South of England don’t have something of a constant drone from Gatwick and Heathrow.

There’s a scrap of worry it could be the start of something much worse, though. If this signals the beginning of an active volcano season, it could have serious weather implications.

Volcanoes were thought to play a major role in the famously terrible Summer of 1816 (which is where the expression Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death comes from). And an early active period may have nearly extinctered our whole species 70,000 years ago. There may have been as few as 5,000 of us left afterwards, meaning we are all inbred hillbillies.

Yep. Lethal global cooling.

But let’s think happy thoughts. Here’s our Mrs Compton at today’s Tea Party protests. I think she’s the one with the hat and the sunglasses.

If not…may I say what a lovely glossy coat you have, ma’am?

 

 

April 15, 2010 — 10:21 pm
Comments: 21

I’m becoming my mother, part kzillionty

We stopped here to buy eggs today. Yup, it’s a thatched roof. There’s a fair number around.

The construction of this little cottage is unusual — the walls are made of small wooden logs set into the walls sideways — with the cut ends sticking out — and then mortared around.

I don’t know if it’s genuinely old or not. It can be hard to tell.

We’re thinking of getting a few chickens ourselves. I’ve mentioned it.

I hated our fucking chickens when I was a kid and swore I’d never own one, but…I dunno. I feel seriously under-animaled. And the cat won’t let me have a kitten.

Cons. We have a small garden, so there’s not much room. Chickens live for ten years but only lay for five — and we’re huge pussies about killing stuff. Particularly stuff we know by name. Also, we wake up to a garden full of fox poop every morning, so we can expect to hear a lot of beGAAKing in the middle of the night until Monsieur Reynard digs his way in and makes a savage end to the whole experiment.

Pros. Behbeh chickens!

April 14, 2010 — 10:17 pm
Comments: 38

Nothin’ but decaf

I won a poster contest when I was in High School. The theme was something like Keep Nashville Clean. When I was packing to move last year, I found the newspaper clipping that went with and was horrified to read what I had said to the interviewer. Man, I hit all the bullshit talking points: Children are the future. Adults are poisoning up the planet and we’re going to have to clean it up.

I didn’t say those things because I believed them or cared much. I said them because I knew what was expected of me. (Fuck yea, I’d just won an art contest — I wasn’t about to blow it by saying something the newspaper didn’t want to hear). We’re talking maybe 1975 and that shit was old already.

So let’s hope these mouth-breathing fluff-muffins are also unenthusiastically regurgitating today’s lesson. Click to watch, but my subtitles are pretty accurate. I counted 14 “likes” when the young ‘uns were talking, not counting those times when “like” was used correctly and not as an “ummm” substitute.

This is the latest from the Coffee Party — the liberal astroturfers trying desperately to challenge the Tea Party movement without anyone discovering they’re liberal. They do this by pretending to be passionate about bland non-issues.

Sifting through feedback from regional Coffee Party meetings, they’ve identified two issues their members are exercised about and want to tackle: the role of money in politics and making Wall Street accountable to Main Street.

Ha ha! Psych! If those are THE two issues that came boiling up from an engaged grassroots, I’m a polar bear.

The Dems have been trying to stir up anger over “Wall Street fat cats” from the get-go — they clearly think that’s a class warfare winner for them. And maybe it is, I dunno. It doesn’t seem to have caught fire as expected.

And the “money in politics” one comes from the unexpectedly wide unpopularity of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case — the one that grants First Amendment rights to corporations, including the right to unlimited spending before elections. They mention Citizens United by name at the end of the video.

Fake.

Oh, and listening to that young man babble about being the future, I couldn’t help thinking, “yeah, but by the time we get to that future, Sonny, you’re going to be more like me now than you are like you now.”

April 13, 2010 — 10:07 pm
Comments: 26

ZOMG, they’re dropping them all over the yard!!!1!

Whoa. They turned a couple hundred pregnant ewes into the field behind the house over the weekend and let ’em go for it. I guess the farmer figured it was warm enough not to bother with the lambing shed (though there’s a cutting wind out there, poor little bastards).

Lambs are plopping out all OVER the place. Periodically, the farmer rounds up the mamas and behbehs and leaves behind the unripe ones.

All last night, we heard brand new lambs bleating. I got the biggest kick out of that — born into darkness, can you imagine their little faces when the sun came up?

April 12, 2010 — 9:10 pm
Comments: 28

A question for the border-dwelling peeps

The whole of Olde England is about the size of New England, so weather broadcasts that take in the whole country are pretty practical. They have local forecasts, too, but they don’t tell you much more.

Weather forecasts here suck amazingly, on account of it’s a little island with a big cold ocean on one side and a continent on the other.

I get a kick out of the map, though. They report the weather for Northern Ireland, but nothing at all about the south. Slice it right off at the boundary. I pointed that out to Uncle B, and he said, “well, do your weather reports include Canada and Mexico?”

Ummm…hm. Do they?

The big national ones don’t, that I recall. Except to say things like, “there’s a mass of cold air coming down from Canada.” I don’t know about local forecasts, though.

How about it, people who live near the borders? Do your local forecasts include nearby cities outside the US?

And so lamely ends a week of blogging lameness. Hey, Spring finally made it to our little corner of paradise. I’ve been out playing in the sunnenshine!

Have a good weekend, everyone!

April 9, 2010 — 10:05 pm
Comments: 24

Went for a drive today…

Uncle B once suggested we look for a house here. I suspect his motives. I suggested Dead Man’s Lane instead.

Both are in Rye, a town we love and looked at houses in. But not Dumb Woman’s Lane or Dead Man’s Lane — we couldn’t afford it.

April 8, 2010 — 8:51 pm
Comments: 26

I fought the cat and the cat won…

The cat has fallen in love with my new seat cushion, so she nicks my chair every time I get up. I’ve taken to leaving Rubber Rat in my place to guard it — not because I thought she’d be afraid of him, of course. I thought he would be uncomfortable to snooze upon.

Ha! Foolish hu-man. Now she and RR are BFF’s.

(If you wonder why I don’t just pick up the damn cat, she’s the world’s stubbornest ornery shit-bag. She’d clamp that fluffy cushion tighter’n an alien face-hugger).

That’s a really splendid rat, isn’t it? Uncle B bought him for me in London. Which is weird, because somebody in the IT department at my old job in Rhode Island had one just like it. We reckon he must have been an advertisement for rat traps; he’s big, old and fierce.

Many, many years ago, when the internet still had that new car smell, I read on Usenet that 70% of all computer monitors had a rubber rat on top of them. It was surely just a silly sig line, but the thing is, at the moment I read it I totally had a rubber rat on top of my monitor.

And, until flat-screens, I made sure I had a rubber rat on my monitor forever after.

April 7, 2010 — 10:52 pm
Comments: 70

I don’t see what’s so…oh.

I stared at this one the longest time without spotting anything awkward about it. Maybe it’s a little easier in color.

Yeah. I’m reduced to browsing AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com. The kind of thing I amuse myself with while I’m waiting around for somebody famous to do something dumb and easily Photoshoppable.

Though I’m really more of an Ugliest Tattoos kind of gal. I simply cannot BELIEVE some of the ugly shit people have permanently etched onto their bodies. With apologies to any of my readers who sport ink, even the well-drawn ones won’t look good forever.

Some day, old folks’ homes all across the land will be full of wrinkly, billowing barbed wire and saggy, blurry kanji.

April 6, 2010 — 11:15 pm
Comments: 24

Stoaty loves ya, crusty old goobers…

I don’t know how Alexa comes up with this shit, but that’s what they say. Me, I’m thrilled. If you had any idea how hard I’ve word to attract the aging serial killer demographic…!

Yes, yes…that’s your lot today. Easter is a four-day public holiday here, centered around food. Like huge Cadbury eggs.

I’m not sure an industrial quantity of booze is part of the traditional celebrations, but it’s working just fine.

April 5, 2010 — 11:31 pm
Comments: 45