Guess who!
Recognize this monster? No? This is a statue of Lucille Ball in her birth town of Celoron, N.Y. A thing to frighten naughty children with.
See, this is what happens when you stop giving art students years of rigorous drawing instruction and then demand realism from them.
Easter is a major holiday here; four day weekend and everything. So it’s back to loafing for me!
Good weekend and happy Easter!
April 3, 2015 — 7:49 pm
Comments: 19
Well, the SS would take me
And there it is. It’s a color-coded pie chart showing the different components of my ancestry. The charts come in three flavors: conservative (90% confidence, but boringly generic), standard (75% confidence and a little more detail) and speculative (51% confidence but breaks it out by country as best it can).
This bit is wobbly science at the moment. They have to decide at the outset the time period they’re trying to tweeze out of the data. 23andme concentrates on what of your DNA dates from the last 500 years. Other services (and, yes, you can submit your raw data to many other services, some free) looks at ancient DNA, or specifically European DNA, or…well, lots of things. These filters are evolving (and, one hopes, improving constantly).
Anyway, I am (more or less) 99.7% European, of which 46.5% British. A little less Brit than I thought, but I did have a German great grandfather and a French one. Also, apparently, their specific model for British/Irish and French/German is not very good (hence the way all four are lumped together).
What’s that? The other 3%? Those little strips of different color at noon? Um, one each of Ashkenazi, North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. That’s, um, not necessarily what it looks like. It may mean 3% of the DNA was too old to slot into a European framework and so pointed to older DNA from nearer the human diaspora. Or it could mean my great-great-great grandmother slept with a mixed race field hand.
You choose!
April 2, 2015 — 9:46 pm
Comments: 11
adorbs
That there is a rescue badger being raised by a retired farmer. She’s raising three on milk and custard creams. Custard creams are a kind of vanilla cookie — when you get ‘tea and biscuits’ here, the biscuit is likely to be a custard cream (or a digestive).
I knew an old man in the mountains many years ago. He was very nearly pure Cherokee Indian, and he surely looked it. He found a baby groundhog once and raised it as a pet.
He fed it nothing but Little Debbie’s Oatmeal Creme Pies. Nothing. But. Because the groundhog loved them so. After two years, it had a seizure and died.
Like, no shit. I think about this whenever confronted with the numinous red man, the archetypal Indian with his spiritual connection to nature and the land. Even a Neanderthal like me knows a groundhog needs to eat a fucking vegetable now and then.
There were more interesting stories in the news, but it’s April 1, so I didn’t trust any of them to be true.
April 1, 2015 — 8:47 pm
Comments: 18