It’s not just the wheat
Our cobnut tree is about ready to be harvested. Wikipedia uses cobnut, hazelnut and filbert interchangeably, but then says “according to species” – so they are three different things.
This site says “the cobnut is a cultivated variety of hazelnut introduced in the 19th century in Kent in southern England; hence, it is often commonly known as a Kentish cobnut.” Sold between mid-August and October, they say, so definitely early.
I like cobnuts, filberts and hazelnuts, so it’s all good.
As for the wheat harvest, it goes on. I haven’t had any more close encounters with combine harvesters, but I can hear them grinding away in the field. Sitting in the garden, I was covered in little bits of stuff and I didn’t put two and two together until Uncle B said, “that’s chaff.”
So it is.
July 17, 2023 — 6:40 pm
Comments: 4
Lived to weasel again
The combine harvester turned right, I continued straight ahead and the arrow marks the spot your beloved weasel nearly got harvested. Who knew he’d drop his reel right onto a bike path?
Yes, that thing on the front is called a reel. I looked it up.
But jiminy christmas, the harvest? On the 14th of July? That’s like six weeks early. What is going on?
Also, this year there are both square bales and cylindrical ones. Two different balers, I guess. It ain’t right.
Have a good weekend, y’all!
July 14, 2023 — 6:22 pm
Comments: 10
Nice one!
Up for auction, an especially fine Sussex pig. I’ve always wanted one.
This is a (traditionally brown glazed) pottery pig with a detachable head. It is believed (by whom? I don’t remember) that a rogue would bet a drinking companion that he (the rogue) could drink a hogshead (66 imperial gallons) of wine, and then he’d whip the head off a Sussex pig and pour himself a good swig.
Ha ha. Good way to get a poke in the snoot, if you ask me.
I won’t bid on this one, though – handsome though it be. For one thing, it’s had a repair to the head. I ordinarily wouldn’t care about such a thing, but if I’m going to pay £120 for a practical joke, I want it to be pristine.
And they usually have Wunt Be Druv incised along the neck. I can guess why it’s missing on this one: this pig is described as early 19th Century, and Wunt Be Druv didn’t appear in print until 1875 (though surely it was in use before then).
Big fan of Wunt Be Druv. I should make a t-shirt.
Today’s Tucker:
Episode 9 July 11 Topic: The Andrew Tate interview
Two and half hours long. I ain’t got time for that.
July 13, 2023 — 7:29 pm
Comments: 5
More moo
We went back to visit the moo cows today. You know, the farm shop with the milk vending machine.
Milk vending machines since have become something of a thing locally. Hippies!
Changing the subject – by a real lot – did you know they think they’ve found Sodom? An archeologist working on a site called Tall el-Hammam came upon a layer of weirdly burned roofs and melted stuff and said to himself say, this looks a whole lot like the wrath of God.
“The proposed airburst was larger than the 1908 explosion over Tunguska, Russia, where a 50-m-wide bolide” — a meteor that explodes in midair — “detonated with 1000× more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb.”
[…]
What was unlike destruction caused by earthquakes or warfare were pottery shards with their outer surfaces melted into glass, some bubbled as if boiled, “bubbled” and melted building brick and plaster, suggesting some unknown high-temperature event. Objects of daily life, carbonized pieces of wooden beams, charred grain, bones and limestone cobbles were burned to a chalklike consistency.
Other scientists have rubbished it, of course. They think he just dug up an ordinary smelter and flipped. The archeologist is from a Bible college, apparently.
When I went hiking in Exeter, Rhode Island, I often passed a residential road called Sodom Trail. I never dared go up it.
July 12, 2023 — 5:39 pm
Comments: 8
Public service
In the thread below, OldFert asks if there is any way to watch Tucker without a Twitter account. I didn’t know, so I made one. You can watch videos with a direct link.
Episode 1 June 6 Topic: Ukraine
Episode 2 June 8 Topic: Taboos
Episode 3 June 13 Topic: Trump’s arrest
Episode 4 June 15 Topic: Wannabe dictator
Episode 5 June 20 Topic: Hunter Biden
Episode 6 June 22 Topic: RFK’s campaign
Episode 7 June 28 Topic: War in Ukraine
Episode 8 June 30 Topic: Rachel Rick Levine and Mark Milley
I’ll try to remember to post a link when he resumes. He hasn’t done any in July; he’s on vacation. He also did an interview with Russel Brand that was supposed to be good, but Russel Brand makes my teeth itch so I haven’t watched it. I’ll find and post the link if desired.
You were allowed to explore hashtags without an account, if you could get past the login screen. Click a tweet to squeeze past and then click Explore in the upper left corner. I’m getting a 404 now, though, so it looks like he’s plugged that hole, too.
July 11, 2023 — 5:45 pm
Comments: 7
My needs are simple
My favorite podcast app is shutting down. They’re being absorbed into the subscription service of their parent company (SiriusXM). Because of course they are.
I hate monthly fees.
I’m bummed because I paid for it. Eh, it was a one-time fee and a long time ago – it doesn’t owe me anything – but I’d gotten used to it and I can’t find a substitute I like.
What I want from an app is simple: when I subscribe to a podcast, I want it to go all the way back to the first episode and play the lot, in order, remembering what I’ve already listened to. Download to listen offline is useful, too – my garden activities sometimes take me out of range of the wifi.
I’ve tried several that I shall not name because my phone is in the other room and I’m too lazy to go get it. One didn’t let me sort from oldest to newest, so I had to scroll past pages and pages manually. One gave me a free period after which it wanted to charge a modest annual fee – but give us your credit card information up front, luv. (I actually did give them my payment details, but my time anxiety was so grievous, I deleted the program almost immediately).
One – and I remember it was the Google one – would only play one episode of the thing I wanted to hear, after which it switched me to a podcast from the front page that it apparently really, really wanted me to listen to.
I’m sure I could learn to drive any of those apps eventually, but remember: lazy.
At the moment, I’m on the free version of Spotify. I get the feeling it would much rather I listened to Taylor Swift, but it’s doing okay with podcasts so far.
Do you have a favorite podcast app? Why do I anticipate most of you boogers telling me you don’t listen to ’em?
July 10, 2023 — 7:49 pm
Comments: 19
Dead Pool 157: Dog days edition
HottyTottyGirl takes it with Julian Sands. On balance, he probably died on the day he went missing (story at the link), but we’ll never know.
It was an extremely odd pick – she persisted with him for months, despite the fact his body would probably never be found or, if found, his date of death would never be established. I think I was overcome with awe.
Does everyone have a cool drink and a shady spot? Then we’ll begin.
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 7, 2023 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 75
Speechless
At 2 am on the morning of the 4th of July, Sussex police were called to a building site in the town of Barnham where a crane had been stolen. Presumably, the reporter watched it drive off.
A few yards up the road, Police heading to the scene found 43 year old Alfie Smith had used the crane to punch a hole in a Co-Op Market in hopes of stealing the ATM.
Which is kind of like the old saying about the dog who chases cars – what would he have done if he had managed it? Driven off at, like, 20 miles an hour in the hot crane? Used the crane to smash the ATM on the pavement in the hopes it would rain £20 notes?
Put it in the van and vamoose in hopes of opening it later? Oh, yes – there was a van. It got away. And a 37-year-old unnamed accomplice who was also arrested at the scene.
I’m going to go out on a limb and speculate that alcohol was involved.
Remember Dead Pool tomorrow. Bring out your dead!
July 6, 2023 — 6:26 pm
Comments: 6
Don’t wear shorts
Part of Alnwick Gardens, away up north. I didn’t find this one due to my local knowledge of the English countryside, I pinched it from Not the Bee.
They were very taken with the Australian Gympie Gympie plant. “Apparently the plant was first discovered when an Australian road surveyor’s horse was stung, went insane, and dropped dead in about two hours. This thing literally kills horses in less time than it would take you to watch Titanic.”
I was more taken by a post from the regular garden, a mutant foxglove. In addition to the bell flowers evenly space down the stem, there’s one monster carnation-looking spotty flower at the top.
I googled around to see how common it was and discovered it is an “anomaly peloric monstrous terminal flower mutation caused by a double recessive gene at a locus called ‘centroradialis'”. Double recessive sounds pretty rare.
I ask because someone in my circle recently came back from Hong Kong with pictures of a different sort of mutant foxglove. Instead of evenly placed individual bell flowers down the stem, it had multiple clusters of, like, eight or ten bellflowers. It was neat.
This is something like it – but a warning before you click the link, the blog post goes from talking about mutant foxgloves to talking about where to get Viagra and Cialis in the UK then back to foxgloves. Spam is afoot!
This one is close, too, and the link is to Mumsnet, so no funny business.
I have a bit of a thing about foxgloves. My grandmother had an old picture book of an enchanted garden with those creepy Victorian illustrations. I remember alllll the little fairy faces peering out of the bell flowers. No wonder foxgloves mutate.
July 5, 2023 — 7:17 pm
Comments: 3
Happy b’day Sam!
Not Uncle Sam, my cockerel Sam – hatched on this day in 2018. Making him kind of an oldie (my bantams live on average 3-5 years). Mo is three days older. The boys seem a lot more durable than the girls, though.
July 4th was never one of my favorite holidays. I mean, Stars ‘n’ Stripes forever and all that, but it’s always hot as hell on the 4th, and then add open fires and explosives? Take me to my fainting couch!
But happy Independence Day to all you 4th of July enjoyers!
Perhaps you can help us settle something. Uncle B and I have, our whole lives, believed the expression “salad days” meant happy days generally and referred to that brief season in summer and fall when fresh salad was available (pre-supermarket).
I’ve only recently read that it actually means your youth or heyday or glory days. And it was backed up with examples and Google searches.
What’s your notion? And if we got ite wrong, how did we manage that from 3,000 miles and two different education systems apart?
July 4, 2023 — 7:18 pm
Comments: 7