web analytics

Gosh, is it Flying Ant Day again already?

One day only! Sexy flying ants!

No seriously, they can only fly one day a year. Then their wings drop off and they die. But, hey, first they get the biggest 24-hour orgy in all of insectitude!

I’ve posted about this before (photo: mine). Contrary to legend, it doesn’t happen on the same day all over Britain, but it tends to be a muggy day toward the end of July. Like what this is.

I haven’t seen any in East Sussex yet, but they’ve shown up in West Sussex. In fact, they’re showing up on radar in West Sussex. The Met Office thought it was rain at first, but they knew it was dry all along the South coast.

Do follow the link and see the radar (but be warned, it opens a Tweet).

July 18, 2019 — 8:32 pm
Comments: 5

Salad days

It ain’t all gooseberries: sometimes it’s garden produce without a deep personal vendetta.

Grown in a pot, these were. Already cut up, fermented and ready to eat now.

It’s a shame food looks so awful in black and white. Uncle B takes nice photos and grows nice carrots.

July 17, 2019 — 8:31 pm
Comments: 9

Nemesis

The gooseberry.

Not only is the gooseberry bush covered in wicked evil spikes, but every individual gooseberry then needs to be ‘topped and tailed’ — have its end bits snipped off before freezing. To add insult to injury, I don’t even like fruit.

Okay. Well. Uncle B’s gooseberry crumble is rather nice on a cold Winter afternoon, but that’s a long way off.

One of the gooseberry bushes died this year (I didn’t pee on it, I swear! Remember the wicked evil spikes?), so it was only three pounds. I think it was eight last year. So there’s that, I guess.

Also, there’s a lunar eclipse tonight, but it’s all clouded over.

Today has been a day of off-pissery. You?

July 16, 2019 — 9:28 pm
Comments: 8

Why does this picture make me so sad?

Wave goodbye, y’all.

Once Voyager 1’s primary mission was over and its camera was to be shuttered for good, Carl Sagan and a few other teammates requested one last image. On Valentine’s Day, 1990, Voyager did an about-face to look back toward Earth. Hidden within these colorful bands of sunlight is our planet. Look all the way to the right, you’ll see a tiny dot. That’s us.

(The picture is from NASA and NASA is cool about that sort of thing).

It’s from Wired’s Space Photos of the Week. Links being stoopit, clicking it probably won’t take you directly to this page, but all of them are worth looking at.

July 15, 2019 — 9:18 pm
Comments: 9

Let us end this week on a chicken

This lovely little bird is seven weeks old, and I’m going nuts trying to assume its gender. I’ve been looking at chicken baby pictures for days. The comb and wattles are bigger than my previous chickens that grew up to be hens, but smaller than the ones that grew up to be roosters.

Please send all your gendered thoughts at this little beast, as it is a very sweet chick and I would like to keep it.

I spent a lovely sunny afternoon in the garden with my flock and I’m as happy as I can be prior to Gin Hour. Which is nigh upon us.


Last night, Gebrauchshund noticed that Denise Nickerson, the actress who played Violet Beauregarde in “Willy Wonka” had been taken off life support but was not yet defunct. He decided to play the classic DP sneaky gambit and choose her. This morning, she died. I am inclined to take that as a win — who doesn’t remember Violet Beauregarde? It is, however, too late for this week. So NEXT FRIDAY, Dead Pool Round 123.

July 12, 2019 — 8:33 pm
Comments: 13

Happy birthday, big guy

It’s Big Ben’s 160th birthday today. Or, more accurately, the 160th anniversary of the first time it struck.

I nicked the picture from Wikipedia, so I’m assuming it’s safe. That’s actually from 2007, when he was having his face cleaned.

First time I heard it struck, Uncle B took me into London without telling me why, maneuvered me directly under it just as it bonged out the hour. Just like on the BBC news.

Ironically, it’s under scaffolding today being overhauled. Renovations are expected to last into 2021.

July 11, 2019 — 8:59 pm
Comments: 8

Welp, I don’t expect this one to generate much commentary

“No doctor can ever lose sight of the fact that the mind of woman is always threatened with danger from the reverberations of her physiological emergencies,” Wright wrote, referring to periods.

 

 

The lady is Mary Putnam Jacobi, one of the very few women practicing medicine in the 1870s. She argued that wammen brains wouldn’t explode if exercised during menstruation. This was a thing doctors believed.

I point you to this article about it in the Atlantic.

It isn’t so much that the topic is interesting, I just found it hilarious reading Aunt Flo described in the windy, pompous language of late 19th Century doctor science.

 

 

 

July 10, 2019 — 8:48 pm
Comments: 10

here’s another one

I swear to you, Uncle B invented this currency twenty years ago in a late-night ramble. He said what if there was a kind of point system — let’s call them nergs — that were worth a few pennies at most, and wherever you went on the internet, you could plunk down a few nergs on any content you liked. It wouldn’t cost you much, it wouldn’t give the creator much — except in the aggregate, if lots of people liked his content.

That’s what the Basic Attention Token is. It was invented in parallel to the Brave browser, but you can buy BAT independently.

I’ve started using Brave, both on my phone and my desktop(s). I like it a lot as a browser. And if you turn on the feature, it will reward you BAT for interacting with ads. Then you can poke the little BAT triangle symbol in the upper right corner and give a website a tip. Any website that is registered to receive BAT, that is.

No, this website is not registered to receive BAT. You cannot give me a nerg. Do not try.

I don’t think they’ve implemented the bit where you can straight convert BAT to dollars, but they promise it’s coming. I think you can convert BAT to some other cryptocurrency and thence to dollars. It blows me away, though, that they’ve given me BAT worth about $10 for doing nothing but looking at inoffensive ads. And then I can go I like the cut of your jib and make it rain nergs.

This one isn’t an investment, it’s a toy.

July 9, 2019 — 9:06 pm
Comments: 12

Huh. Lookit that.

So for a lark on my birthday, I bought £50 worth of bitcoin. Annnnd…that’s where it is today.

My original plan was to set it up to put something silly like £5 a month in the account every month, but it turns out the transaction fees would be stupid. So I plunked down my five Jane Austens (I just looked at one; that’s who’s on the £10 note) all at once and paid just under £2 in transaction fees.

Actually, that’s not all bitcoin. There’s about £7 worth of stellar lumens in there, too. Eh. I earned them by watching videos about them. There’s a lot of that sort of thing around. And, being the conscientious weasel what I are, I really paid attention to those videos, too.

This is fun.

Oh, I know. It will come crashing down at one point. THAT’S MY SIGNAL TO BUY!

July 8, 2019 — 8:02 pm
Comments: 11

Dead Pool Round 122: Patriotic Edition

TheFritz takes a fourth dick with Mrs Dog the Bounty Hunter. I’ve been away too long; this meant nothing to me. But the link goes to an article in The Sun, so that’s famous enough for the Dead Pool.

I thought we were going to have problems tonight; a BT engineer turned up and fiddled with our internet for a while. He says it’s working (duh) but he doesn’t know why it wasn’t before (uh-oh).

Never you mind, chilrun — I’d’ve found a way to post the Dead Pool from my phone.

Are you ready? What? NO YOU CANNOT ALL HAVE RUTH BADER GINSBERG!

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.

July 5, 2019 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 66