EHHHHH EHHHHHH HEH EHHHH
Pine marten, if you’re wondering. This lovely specimen went for £30 at auction, £10 less than the lower guide price. A travesty.
I wasn’t there for the taxidermy, though. I was there for a silly piece of furniture, which I won. I’ll show you after we pick it up.
Why do stuffed mustelids always look like this? EHHHHHH. EHHHHHH. Have a good weekend! May you finish your turkey before December come.
November 29, 2024 — 6:08 pm
Comments: 8
Happy T’day!
I checked the exchange rate – £94 to £124 is $119.25 to $157.31. For a turkey.
To be fair, this is from a very special local farm but, I mean, how special can a turkey be? We always get the smallest bird available, which is about ten pounds in weight, and last year (from this same poncy farm) it was around £60. And we felt ripped off.
I think we’re getting a supermarket bird in protest this year. Anyway, that’s Christmas – for tonight, we had the butcher make us a turkey roll. We do Thanksgiving as an evening meal, so we’ll be firing it all up shortly.
Honestly, I think Uncle B is a more enthusiastic keeper of Turkey Day than I am.
November 28, 2024 — 6:54 pm
Comments: 15
Back in City 17
In honor of its 20th birthday, Half Life 2 got a major overhaul last week. It’s mostly updates to the console version, I gather – so not much of interest to me – but they have put developers commentary on the main game. That’s the speech bubble up there.
I love developers commentary – especially from Valve. It’s clear that they take playtesting with utmost seriousness, which is why they make infinitely replayable games. It’s fun to hear how they agonized over the smallest maps. The tell you at the outset you can’t be killed while listening to commentary.
They lie.
I thought it was such a shame I couldn’t play games here in the library with my ten year old computer. And then it struck me – this is a twenty year old game! It runs just fine on my funky old laptop. There has to be a world of ancient games in my Steam backlog that I can play while I wait for the AAA studios to get collective their heads out of their collective butts.
p.s. Did you know the voice of the Combine Overwatch AI is Ellen McClain – who played GLaDOS seven years later? I honestly didn’t recognize her. Her husband is the voice of most of the male NPCs in Half Life 2. He’s a fan of the game and says playing it is a weird experience.
November 27, 2024 — 7:45 pm
Comments: 4
Wikipedia: ruining my fun since 2001
‘The Aztec skull whistle is a unique and unsettling instrument that has fascinated historians and archaeologists for centuries. These whistles, typically shaped like human skulls, produce a blood-curdling, high-pitched sound that has been described as a “scream of death.”’
So says Brave AI. Just listen to these recordings. Spooky, neh?
You can even buy one from Amazon.
Then along comes Wikipedia:
“The whistle was discovered after the 1999 excavation of an Aztec temple at the Tlatelolco site, in Mexico City by archaeologists, revealed the remains of a 20-year-old sacrificial victim clutching various musical instruments, among them a small ceramic skull-shaped whistle. This artifact, later dubbed the “Aztec death whistle,” gathered public interest.”
Wait, there’s only the one? And it was discovered 25 years ago?
“The whistle’s sounds, analyzed through its functioning mechanism, have been noted to resemble the sound of wind and fall within the human hearing sensitivity range.”
It was dug up in the temple of the wind god Ehecatl, so that makes sense. But, I mean, the screaming?
“A common misconception is that this whistle produced a sharp shriek-like sound. However, these sounds credited as the Aztec death whistle are actually produced by much larger reproductions of the whistle.”
Larger reproductions and, apparently, blown with some kind of intense hydraulic mechanisms. I mean, you could blow a giant whoopee cushion with a foghorn and it would probably sound pretty scary.
I got played :(
November 26, 2024 — 5:41 pm
Comments: 8
You can have it if you want
At auction: “oil on canvas by Muriel A Jackson, framed woodland cottage scene, with witch tentatively walking towards.” Muriel was a strange lass.
Today I bumped into someone I haven’t seen in a while. I asked him how it was going and he said his big brother died last week. He died alone.
“It’s his own fault,” he said, “he was a womanizer his whole life. We think he took up drinking toward the end. And, of course, he was a chain smoker.”
I’m like, “Wait! His life was filled with women and booze and cigarettes and he died at 81 in his own bed in his sleep? Your brother is MY HERO!”
November 25, 2024 — 5:15 pm
Comments: 3
You don’t look so good, Punkin’
Actually, it’s worse. I put him at the end of the drive, in the traditional post-Halloween position, and after our recent cold weather he’s about three inches tall. I don’t think he’s going to make it.
Tonight’s the last of the cold ones. After this, warm, wet and windy. Like 40+ mph alllll weekend long. It’s Storm Bert.
Who the hell names a storm Bert? And how is it late November and we’re only on B? This must be some newfangled storm naming regime.
Two days of howling wind! I shall go mad! You have a good weekend, though.
November 22, 2024 — 7:31 pm
Comments: 12
Uh-uh. Ain’t coming out.
We’re having our first cold snap of the season – three nights below freezing. That doesn’t sound much, but we’re ill prepared for it here. This is an ancient, damp house with sputtering central heating.
When I was a novice chicken keeper, I was puzzled to see my chickens hadn’t drunk up their water in three days. That’s when I realized it was frozen solid. Poor things – imagine them pecking at their rock hard water in amazement and distress.
Just a skim of ice on the chicken water today, but it’s cold enough in here that I’ve taken to my electric blanket and I ain’t coming out until he’s got a proper fire in the stove. I am typing this with one exposed finger.
I can hear it’s lit…
November 21, 2024 — 6:46 pm
Comments: 8
First, find your skull
In the Troo Crime thread below, Some Veg linked to a facial recreation of a Viking Shield-Maiden and said he was always fascinated by the reconstruction process. Me too.
In the early days, they would take the actual skull and cut bits of pencil eraser to the correct size for the average depth of skin at that part of the face, glue the bits to the skull and then slowly build a layer of clay until it just covers the erasers.
That gives the basic face. After that, it’s largely artistic license. It’s far from perfect. If you’ve got a completely de-fleshed head, you have no indication of full or thin lips or chubby cheeks. The result was often dead-eyed and creepy. Still, it did sometimes lead to a real life identification.
In the local art club I belong to, a very elderly man applied for membership a couple of years ago. I knew the name. I knew I knew it. I searched until I found a book in my collection from the Eighties which described this very man as the “foremost forensic facial reconstruction artist in the world.”
Well! Naturally, I buttonholed him about it and we had a high old time. He said he hasn’t been that – if he ever was – in a very long time. It’s all done with scanned skulls and 3D models now.
His work these days is rather nice écorché portrait sculptures.
I can never remember the word écorché, so I Google variations of “without flesh” and get some wild answers.
Like this free 3D facial reconstruction software. The catch is, you have to have a 3D scan of your skull first. If you happen to have a skull on hand, there are lots of free programs that will take a series of snapshots and turn them into a mesh model.
Just saying.
November 20, 2024 — 5:57 pm
Comments: 7
A famous one
A weird footnote has been added to the Buck Ruxton murder case. Ruxton, a doctor of French/Parsi heritage, was married to this lady, Isabella. They lived in Scotland. His patients loved him, but his relationship with Bella was fiery because – get this – he was sure she was having all kinds of affairs.
He snapped and killed her one day in 1935, and also the nanny (she probably saw things) and, being a doctor, he skillfully cut them both up into 70 individual packages, wrapped them in newspaper and threw them down a ravine. Where most were found two weeks later.
He had removed any identifying characteristics – he hoped – like front teeth and fingertips and thought he had been very clever.
But it wasn’t good enough. The newspapers he wrapped the bits in were from an edition only published in his narrow locality. For the first time ever, they brought in an entomologist who precisely identified the age of various insects on the bodies to establish a time of death.
My favorite forensic pathologist, Sir Sydney Smith, (we all have a favorite forensic pathologist, I feel sure) hit on the idea of superimposing the photo on the right over the photo on the left to prove that landmarks on the two matched. There were a lot of firsts for forensics – worth looking up if you’re interested.
He was convicted and hanged.
Edinburgh University has recently realized the bones are still in their archive. They would like to give them a decent burial, because that’s what we do with medical specimens in 2024, but they don’t know what happened to the Ruxton’s three children. They’re not even sure the kids know how they became orphans.
How would that go? “Hello! Your granddad was hanged for murdering your grandmom. This is her skull. Want it?”
November 19, 2024 — 7:12 pm
Comments: 7
It was too perfect to touch
It is a blancmange or ‘white eat’. Nobody at the party touched it. I think it was too intimidating.
Do we have that? I know we have jelly molds. My grandmother used to put peas and carrots in Jell-O. I have trust issues.
My grandmother was an early champion of vitamins. She latched onto them before anybody. If you sat next to her at the table, she would stare off in the middle distance and gently nudge healthy dishes in your direction while whistling tunelessly.
The weather is absolutely vile today and I’m sulking.
November 18, 2024 — 6:54 pm
Comments: 9