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Somewhere under there is a garage

rambler

It’s finally turned nice here. We had a record-breaking cold June (we put the heat on a few times), but nice here is…as nice as you can imagine. Hot sun, cool breeze and…holy shit look at this rose.

It only blooms once a season, but when it goes over, it strews white petals like snow all over the garden.

Yeah, there’s not a gardening bone in my body. My mother used to say I had a purple thumb — every plant I touch dies. But Uncle B is an awesome plantsman. He has a greenhouse and everything. And he’s slowly making all the borders around the house explode with flowers, like slomo fireworks.

Yeah. I been out in the garden eating barbecue and drinking wine. I’m too mellow for the blogosphere.

EDIT. As requested, the Rector large and in color. The straggly bit at the right is an elder tree, the ‘blank’ spot is a blackberry bramble.

June 30, 2015 — 9:07 pm
Comments: 9

Who pickles?

pickle

Image stolen from here. Looks like a useful site.

Pickles? Saurkraut? Kimchi? Chutney? Anyone make their own kefir? (Is it gross? I’ve never tried it). Any hints’n’tips?

I’m really susceptible to hippie trendy foodie crap. Gullible. Gullible is the word I’m looking for. I’m not ashamed. Sometimes stuff turns out to be a good idea, and sometimes it doesn’t. Meanwhile, I get to do Weasel Science.

Fermentation is the trendy thing at the moment. Though, to my mind, fermentation means yeast and sugar. Putting stuff in brine for ten days is pickling. But. Whatever.

Supposedly, brined food is stuffed full of natural probiotics. And if you haven’t been reading all the interesting stuff about probiotics and gut flora floating around t’internet lately, you haven’t been paying attention.

Lucky for me, I like my snackies sour/salty/savory rather than sweet, so I’m expecting to like the outcome regardless. Unless I culture something really horrific and explode at both ends.

Nobody say “elderberry cordial” please.

BRB. Going to cut up carrots.

June 29, 2015 — 9:27 pm
Comments: 18

This crazy ass bird

mapp

Oh, I’m sorry — I have let you down. I could’ve done a really gay Photoshop or something, but I got totally distracted reading news today. From the terrorist attack in Tunisia (who the hell would vacation in Tunisia these days?) to the beheading in France right through to our very gay Supreme Court. I think I’m in love with Antonin Scalia. No homo.

Seriously, that’s not homo. We’re the opposite secks.

Anyway, by way of apology, here’s a picture of my crazy-ass chicken Mapp. She’s my elderly hen, over five years old (I’ve read various accounts of how long a pekin bantam might live, and I think six is about it). I know why she’s lived this long — she never lays me any fucking eggs.

Every year, just as laying season starts (mine only lay in Summer), she goes broody. Sits on an empty nest, refuses to budge, tries to hatch thin air. Screams like a little girl when you pick her up. They don’t lay when they’re broody.

First year she did this I thought she was egg bound, which can be fatal. So I tried all sorts of folk remedies including floating her in a bucket of warm soapy water and lubricating her vent with olive oil, an afternoon both of us would surely like to but never shall forget.

I stopped trying to break her of it. I roust her off the nest a couple of times a day and make her eat something and otherwise leave her to it. When laying season is over, she’ll pick herself up, dust herself off and act like nothing happened.

Hm. Perhaps not such a cray bird after all.

Good weekend, and stay away from the gloating lefties! The worm will turn…

June 26, 2015 — 10:28 pm
Comments: 14

Oh, boo.

macnee

 

 

Ah. Patrick Macnee has died. He was 93.

And before you ask, no. No one had him in the Dead Pool.

His first acting role was in a school play with fellow pupil Christopher Lee.

My mother let me stay up super late to watch the Avengers when I were a lass. (In a bid for Mom of the Decade, she also let me stay up super late to watch Frankenstein and Psycho). To this day, the harpsichord makes me feel all tingly.

I bought several seasons on DVD a few years ago and made Uncle B watch them with me. They are even sillier than I remembered.

But a lot more realistic than I ever knew back then…

 

 

June 25, 2015 — 8:19 pm
Comments: 17

Bruce Jenner is bustin’ out all over

not hercules, omphale

 

 

Lion skin cloak? Check. Knobbly club? Check. Tits? Ohhhhh…wait a second.

We went to a stately home for a delphinium festival today (when you hook up with a gardener, marvelous things happen). This was on the grounds. It’s got all the usual accoutrements of a classical Hercules, but this is clearly a chick.

Well. Wikipedia tells me this is Omphale queen of Lydia and not quite a goddess. Hercules accidentally biffed someone and was sentenced by the Oracle to be her slave for a while, for some reason.

Unfortunately, none of the central texts survive in the original, so we are left piecing the story together from bits of art and literary allusion. The important thing is, this was a period of rich cross dressing for Hercules and Omphale.

*shrug*

 

 

In a perfectly unrecognizable form, the story of Hercules and Omphale was the subject of MST3K Experiment 502: Hercules. You can watch it in its entirety here.

Because I am all about the cultcha.

 

 

June 24, 2015 — 7:53 pm
Comments: 2

here they come…

calais

This is what our news looks like every night: drone shots of lorries being swarmed by migrants (they pry open the back doors and fling out any goods that get in their way). News shots of migrants pouring off of boats. Many head for Britain because our benefits system is sweet.

The thing today in Calais started as a strike by French transportation workers, who set huge tire fires across the road (they’re striking in part because they’re sick of dealing with migrants). That gave the migrants quite an easy opening.

The authorities in Calais are pissed that they’re getting stuck with this mess (they’ve proposed moving the border between France and England onto English soil!), so they don’t stay up nights worrying about how many get through. There’s a farmer in quite the middle of the country just rounding them up in handsful as the trucks drop them off.

Down where we are, on the South coast, folks are accustomed to hopping across the Channel casually and often. They’re used to goods and custom coming through the tunnel to us. This pinched today.

More to the point, these pictures are freaking everyone out.

June 23, 2015 — 9:03 pm
Comments: 9

Keeping our priorities straight

squirrel

June 22, 2015 — 10:12 pm
Comments: 16

Dead Pool Round 75: Already?

Round 74 ends in our first ever tie. Catnip bagged Kirk Kerkorian, multijillionaire casino mogul, while pupster went with Jeralean Talley, who was the oldest living person in the world right up until she wasn’t.

Problem is, it wasn’t clear exactly when who died. Clearly, they didn’t realize something as important as a dick was hanging on it.

Do you know, Jeralean was probably the last of our species born in the Nineteenth Century? At least among folks whose proper birthday is documented. Whoa, eh?

I think I shall declare Pupster’s Rule, a subset of Steve’s Rule: no more picking the oldest person alive if he or she isn’t famous for anything else. Not that I don’t admire Pupster’s sneak-to-the-victory — I do, I do — but it would be tedious in repetition.

Right! Ready?

0. Rule Zero (AKA Steve’s Rule): your pick has to be living when picked. Also, nobody whose execution date is circled on the calendar. Also, please don’t kill anybody. Plus (Pupster’s Rule) no picking someone who’s only famous for being the oldest person alive.

1. Pick a celebrity. Any celebrity — though I reserve the right to nix picks I never heard of (I don’t generally follow the Dead Pool threads carefully, so if you’re unsure of your pick, call it to my attention).

2. We start from scratch every time. No matter who you had last time, or who you may have called between rounds, you have to turn up on this very thread and stake your claim.

3. Poaching and other dirty tricks positively encouraged.

4. Your first choice sticks. Don’t just blurt something out, m’kay? Also, make sure you have a correct spelling of your choice somewhere in your comment. These threads get longish and I use search to figure out if we have a winner.

5. It’s up to you to search the thread and make sure your choice is unique. I’m waayyyy too lazy to catch the dupes. Popular picks go fast.

6. The pool stays open until somebody on the list dies. Feel free to jump in any time. Noobs, strangers, drive-bys and one-comment-wonders — all are welcome.

7. If you want your fabulous prize, you have to entrust me with a mailing address. If you’ve won before, send me your address again. I don’t keep good records.

8. The new DeadPool will begin 6pm WBT (Weasel’s Blog Time) the Friday after the last round is concluded.

The winner, if the winner chooses to entrust me with a mailing address, will receive an Official Certificate of Dick Winning and a small original drawing on paper suffused with elephant shit particles. Because I’m fresh out of fairy shit particles.

June 19, 2015 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 104

…cat pictures…cat pictures…

jack

Oh, no. Oh no no no. White boy shoots up black folks in historic black church…that’s not one for this blog. It was a monstrous atrocity, I hope justice is swift and complete (SC has the death penalty) and let’s move things back into my comfort zone.

Fart jokes and cat pictures.

Uncle B took this one. I was going to call it a cute cat picture, but Jack’s eyes aren’t really focused and he has that sinister smile. I don’t trust this look.

Today is the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. The French have their culottes in a twist; they were hoping everyone would just let it pass, but Britain is making plenty of WOOHOO! about it. Belgium has even made a commemorative coin, which isn’t going down so great.

And finally, catnip has won the Dead Pool with Kirk Kerkorian. She tried to take it back when it turned out the timestamps of her choosing and his becoming a good choice were awfully close, but I insisted.

But no good deed goes unpunished, and awarding catnip the dick shut out Pupster, whose pick — Jeralean Talley, world’s oldest living woman until Wednesday night — has now shuffled off. I may have to offer Pups a Consolation Dick over that one.

It’s like city buses. We go months without a dead celebrity…

Anyway. That means a short round and a new Dead Pool tomorrow. Be here. Six WBT. DEAD POOL ROUND 75.

June 18, 2015 — 10:38 pm
Comments: 19

Oh, now I get it

circassian beauties

These here ladies are Circassian Beauties, which are a flavor of sideshow freak and not actual ladies from a place called Circassia.

Step back. People from Circassia were believed to be the most beautiful and whitest of all the white people. The reputation starts in the late Middle Ages, when the women were prized in the slave markets of Russia and Turkey. They were regarded as ideals of feminine beauty. A Circassian slave bore Cosimo de Medici (the founder of the Medici dynasty) a son. By the 18th C, “Circassian” was a marketing slogan for beauty products.

In the whimsical Victorian proto-science of race, Circassians were regarded as the white race at its purest. Circassia is in the Caucasus Mountains. Yes, dear readers, this is when white people were first called Caucasian — even though, probably, very few of our grannies were from Circassia — and it stuck.

That ‘fro thing, though? That’s pure PT Barnum. By which I mean the actual Phineas Taylor Barnum, who incorporated fuzzy-headed white ladies into his freakshows. God knows why he thought that worked as an explar of white people nonpareil. I guess his prototypes didn’t look exotic enough with regular white people hair.

Anyhow — funny old world! — about the time the Circassian Beauty became a standard sideshow attraction across the US of A, the Russians were busily genociding the actual Circassians. Ha! Ha!

More about Circassian Beauties. Wikipedia. The blog I stole the picture from. A post from this interesting blog.

You reckon this is what Rachel Dolezal was going for? Because she got a lot closer to this than that other thing.

p.s. To anyone who thinks our Rachel really, truly thinks she’s black? Straight blonde hair doesn’t like to do that thing. Once a month or so, Rachel has to go into a beauty salon and request a root darkening and the kinkiest perm in town. What we used to call a bad perm.

p.p.s. You know, for less than a hundred bucks at 23andme, we could nail what her parents are made of. Come to think of it — considering what’s at stake with hiring quotas — shouldn’t we insist candidates for race-based jobs be routinely DNA tested for ancestry?

p.p.p.s. Nah. A DNA test would show Bruce Jenner is a man, so that’s out.

June 17, 2015 — 9:33 pm
Comments: 16