SPOILER: Normans win
Friday was the 950th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, which was actually in Battle. (Maybe. No artefacts have ever turned up in the field next to Battle Abbey, where It supposedly took place).
And what was Battle called before the Battle? Senlac. It was called the Battle of Senlac Hill for a while. True story.
Is it my imagination, or have the Saxons chubbed up a bit in the last 950 years? Eh.
There were, of course, all sorts of celebrations ’round our area, all of which we successfully avoided. Uncle B and I once went looking for fish and chips in Battle on October the 14th without remembering our history and wondered why the town was stuffed full of Normans and Saxons and whether we’d slipped through a time gate or some shit. Once is enough.
I noticed in some of the FaceBook pictures there were ladies in chain mail on the battle field. Weasel does not approve. This is the re-enactment equivalent of breaking the fourth wall.
First person who says Boadicea, I shall gut thee with mine trusty seax. She was a one-off and that was a thousand years earlier.
Yes, there was plenty of handwringing about whether the Conquest was a good thing. These people can sure hold a grudge. A good old Anglo-Saxon value, that.
October 17, 2016 — 7:49 pm
Comments: 18
Round 89: ’tis the season of rapid turnover
Bhumibol Adulyadej, known as King Bhumibol the Great, was the ninth monarch of Thailand from the Chakri Dynasty, as Rama IX. That’s what Wikipedia says, anyhow. Also, he dead.
This is the fifth dick for the Carls (Carl and Mrs Carl). The Carls have an insatiable appetite for dick.
Google, are you listening?
Dick. The Carls can’t get enough of it.
Fancy a little dick your own self? Here we go!
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.
October 14, 2016 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 78
One thing leads to another
Tonight, we went to a lecture on vernacular architecture. That’s basically any architecture built from local materials — and local materials, back in the day, were things like bricks dug out of and fired in your back yard. In Sussex, this is all very cool, because there are narrow bands of everything from sandstone to flint to clay, meaning vernacular buildings are VERY localized and very different to each other.
First hit when I did a Google images search was this Pinterest board on vernacular architecture. It fun, a lot of silly hippie houses, but still. Fun.
And that led me to this marvelous place — the one in the picture. It’s called the Hall i’th’ Wood and it’s a for-real half-timbered Tudor manor house. Like our house, only (I hate to admit it) even cooler.
And with that CARL WINS THE DICK! The King of Thailand snuck in and died on me, leaving me another dick in debt. This ain’t Carl’s first trip to the rodeo. Between him and Mrs Carl, that’s…how many dicks? A whole heap o’ dicks. The Carl family is blessed with dicks.
No. Nope. Never gets old.
Back here. Tomorrow. 6WBT. DEAD POOL ROUND 89!
October 13, 2016 — 9:52 pm
Comments: 13
No, I did not buy a banjo on eBay this weekend…
I bought two banjos on eBay this weekend. This one – the first one arrived today.
Pretty little thing. Not much wrong with it. Mostly cleanup and a new head (yeah, I’m going goatskin shopping!).
I’m sure I’ve mentioned before — Britain is the Land of Goofy Banjos. Banjo was the first musical fad to cross the Atlantic and it caught on like wildfire here — first with minstrel shows (nobody likes to talk about these now, on either side of the Atlantic), morphing into a peculiarly British style known as Classic (not classical) Banjo. It was a black-tie-and-tails sort of thing and featured some of the weirdest banjo designs ever.
For the eighty or so years that ‘jo was all the rage, they were manufactured in attics and backroom workshops to some very peculiar designs. Many of them were not terribly well made, and many of the designs were impractical, so all kinds of wonderful instruments can be had for not much money. Many of them falling to bits.
This one is pretty orthodox, with a lovely (if thin) scrap of ebony fingerboard. A project for the approaching cold Winter nights.
Say, do any of you have any favorite site scraping software? I like to keep the original eBay listings for stuff I buy, and it’s a tedium downloading all the pictures and bits manually. I’d love to have a piece of kit that just sucked it all down for me in one go.
October 12, 2016 — 9:12 pm
Comments: 7
Infinite are the arguments of chicken keepers
It’s that time of year again: the time when hippie chicken keepers claim that pumpkin is a natural chicken de-wormer. According to this bomb thrown into the Keeping Poultry at Home forum, probably not. Though, having read the article, I think the most you can say is not proven. Still, everyone’s chickens love pumpkins, so why not?
Except mine. My flock has an irrational fear of large, frightening vegetables. I hung a cabbage in their run once (a thing you’re supposed to do to keep them amused) and they didn’t come out of the henhouse for three days. Until I made the horrible thing go away.
A big orange beachball puking seeds would probably give them avian PTSD.
October 11, 2016 — 6:42 pm
Comments: 8
Hey Bill – you better get some ice for that
Drudge put these two pictures together and I wanted to nail them to posterity. I had to look it up to confirm Broaddrick was the ice for that lady.
In interviews with the Washington Post, Broaddrick said Clinton encouraged her to call his campaign office when she was in Little Rock. She did that and set up a coffee meeting with Clinton at her hotel. According to Broaddrick, Clinton told her there were too many reporters in the lobby of the hotel so they should have coffee in her room.
She said she ordered coffee and let him in her room. This is what she told the Post back in 1999:
“As she tells the story, they spent only a few minutes chatting by the window — Clinton pointed to an old jail he wanted to renovate if he became governor — before he began kissing her. She resisted his advances, she said, but soon he pulled her back onto the bed and forcibly had sex with her. She said she did not scream because everything happened so quickly. Her upper lip was bruised and swollen after the encounter because, she said, he had grabbed onto it with his mouth.
” ‘The last thing he said to me was, “You better get some ice for that.” And he put on his sunglasses and walked out the door,’ she recalled.”
I’m not a general fan of feminist revenge porn, but that image of him putting on his sunglasses* and snarking at her has stuck with me. This picture is the perfect antidote.
*usually referred to as “Puts on Sunglasses”, is the ASCII-interpretation of the popular C.S.I. multipane comics featuring Lt. Horatio Caine (played by David Caruso), the protagonist character in the popular police procedural show Crime Scene Investigation: Miami.
(•_•)
( •_•)>⌐■-■
(⌐■_■)Origin
In 2002, CSI: Miami, an American police procedural television series on CBS first aired. In the show, The lead Crime Scene Investigator (who always wears sunglasses) usually makes some horrible pun at the beginning of the show on how the victim died, puts on his sunglasses, and then the theme song (which is Won’t Get Fooled Again by The Who) plays, always at the part where the singer goes “YYEEAAHH!”
No, I didn’t watch the debate. But then, I never do. I have too much personal stagefright – I’m terrified I’ll see somebody throw up or shit himself. I can always catch it in the replay, when everybody already knows what’s going to happen.
October 10, 2016 — 7:05 pm
Comments: 9
Round 88: but baby it’s cold outside…
Well, that was a short one. Catnip takes (another) dick with Neville Mariner. Can you hear ‘Neville Mariner’ without tacking ‘and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields’ onto the end? Because I can’t.
*Shakes fist in general direction of NPR*
Let us wish a long(er) life on Round 88’s crop of picks. Or, at least, the other guy’s pick.
Here we go!
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.
October 7, 2016 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 56
it’s all relative
My Sweet America is a Belgian shop that offers American delicacies (the picture is a capture of their FaceBook page header).
A new shop, My Sweet America, hopes to take away all of that angst by adding a new ingredient: American-style customer service.
“By living in the USA, I really learned what customer service means,” explained James, the shop owner, in a recent interview. A native of France, the owner and his (Belgian) wife have lived in New York City and Los Angeles for the past several years…
You got that? They learned the true meaning of customer service by living in Los Angeles and New York City. Oh, my sides! That gives you a glimpse what it’s like in France and Belgium.
Unfortunately, while the FaceBook link above works, their shop seems to be down, and the site I found it on doesn’t want to let me link directly to the article. Hell’s yes it matters — they do mail order! I’d kill for a proper PopTart (our local supermarket has them, but it only carries the gross flavors like Chocolate and S’Mores).
On a related note, I ordered some Benadryl off eBay this week. Did you know you can’t buy Benadryl as an antihistamine any more, just as a sleep aid? Fun fact. Anyways, I ordered some in bulk from a seller called uksleep expecting them to ship from the UK (duh), only to find they shipped from Texas.
Second class, three days, free shipping. I ordered Sunday, got the notice it had shipped on Monday and got my order today. The world of international shipping is a confusing but sometimes gratifying place these days.
October 6, 2016 — 8:01 pm
Comments: 15
Okay, *now* they’ve lost me
Well. So. They’ve spent the past year or so taking pictures of themselves with kittens to soften their image and attract new recruits(!). Now senior clerics have issued a fatwa against cats.
Raising cats indoors, anyhow. They’ve been going door to door in Mosul confiscating kittens.
“ISIS have issued a fatwa against cats because they say the animals are against a jihadist’s ‘vision, ideology and beliefs’.”
THEY’VE COME FOR THE KITTENS! ULULULULU!
October 5, 2016 — 8:07 pm
Comments: 11
The lean season is upon us
The old girls have stopped laying completely. The young ones have banked it down. Six chickens, one egg a day.
To be fair, head chicken is molting, headcase chicken never lays more than a dozen a year and I don’t know what’s wrong with Vita. I switched from pellets to crumb and that didn’t work out so good, so I’ve switched back.
The cold is upon us and there are feathers everywhere.
Here’s a nice little article from Modern Farmer on the Inner Lives of Chickens.
Do Chickens Have Feelings?
Yes, says British researcher Jo Edgar, who determined that hens, at least, experience empathy. He designed an experiment that simulated chick stress and found that the mother hens behaved as if they themselves were experiencing the pain—a classic sign of empathy. Chickens are also known to display mourning behavior when another chicken in the flock dies, and they will show signs of depression if they are removed from the flock and placed in solitary quarters.
Also hens are notoriously promiscuous, typically mating with several roosters at a time. They have the unique ability to eject the sperm of inferior roosters after copulation[!], however, ensuring that their genes will be coupled only with the most studly cock around.
And A surprising number of people suffer from fear of chickens, a condition known as alektorophobia. My mother-in-law is a chickenphobe. Also my nephew, which was fun — Mapp had a fine time chasing him all over the garden.
And
Recent research has shown that chickens can distinguish between more than 100 faces of their own species and of humans, so they know who you are and will remember you if you treat them badly. They’ve demonstrated complex problem-solving skills and have super-sensory powers, such as telescopic eyesight (like birds of prey) and nearly 360-degree vision (like owls). Chickens are the closest living relatives of the Tyrannosaurus rex (researchers determined this in 2007 by testing proteins from a particularly well-preserved T-rex leg bone), and they outnumber human beings on the planet 3 to 1.
So, you know. Watch yourself. The Time of Chooks may be at hand.
October 4, 2016 — 5:53 pm
Comments: 10