Ooo! Shiny!
Speaking of treasure – this beautiful object has just gone on display in Scotland. It’s part of a hoard discovered in Galloway in 2014.
The body is rock crystal carved to look like a Corinthian column – so Roman. The gold filigree was added hundreds of years later, along with the inscription “Bishop Hyguald had me made” – so, Viking Christian? Holy water, maybe?
Do hit the link and look at the closeups – it’s made with amazingly intricate tiny ropes of gold. Barbarians, amirite?
Have a good weekend, everyone!
November 14, 2025 — 3:42 pm
Comments: 6
It’s a foot!
A novelty Roman lamp from an article about how treasure finds in the UK are at an all-time high. Because of detectorists.
I’m sure I’ve mentioned the Portable Antiquities Scheme before (do follow the link and have a pootle around in their database – it’s fun!). The UK government insures a high level of reporting and recording finds by authenticating all found objects and insuring the detectorist (and landowner) are fairly compensated.
If it’s treasure – more than 300 years old and a significant amount of silver or gold – it automatically belongs to the crown by law, but if the crown (usually through a museum) claims it, the finder has to be given market value.
If it’s not treasure, they can do what they like. Not much pirating goes on here.
November 13, 2025 — 6:05 pm
Comments: 4
This abomination
Copies of this kept coming up on an Ebay search I was doing for an author with a similar name. As luck would have it, it came out a couple of years after Frances Bavier died.
She hated playing Aunt Bee.
She was from New York, was classically trained and hated having the bloated corpse of this old bag hung around her neck. She also was a pain in the ass to work with, apparently. She died as a sort of recluse in rural North Carolina, surrounded by no-one.
Aunt Bee’s Kerosene Cucumbers was some kind of running gag in an episode about terrible pickles, but I don’t really get the joke and wasn’t motivated enough to work it out.
November 12, 2025 — 6:03 pm
Comments: 8
Just a glitch after all
This is the photo I was trying to post last night. Nothing too interesting – a display of old sewing machines in the window of a shop in Bexhill. Note the strip at the bottom of the display, which emulates a giant tape measure.
Whenever I think of sewing machines, I think of Betty Hutton – high as a kite and singing to a girl’s best friend.
November 11, 2025 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 4
Hmmm…
Well, shoot. I can’t upload images. It apparently gets done uploading then I get the message
“The server cannot process the image. This can happen if the server is busy or does not have enough resources to complete the task. Uploading a smaller image may help. Suggested maximum size is 2560 pixels.”
The image is 510 pixels wide (as are all my images). Early days of this blog, I did my damnedest to keep file sizes down as small as possible. That’s one reason I went with black and white.
This is a very, very old blog. These things mattered in them days.
I don’t know if this problem is part of the general enshittification of my software or a temporary server-side glitch. I’ll keep you posted.
November 10, 2025 — 7:16 pm
Comments: 3
Dead Pool 191: Well, that was quick
Thefritz wins it with Dick Cheney. Wasn’t that old, wasn’t that sick. Good call, thefritz.
I just realized I published the last Dead Pool without any commentary at the beginning – who won and with whom. I should fix that. Yes, I definitely need to get around to that.
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.
Note: I am woefully behind on dick deliveries. If I owe you one, you’ll know how long. I ain’t gived up, but I haven’t drawn much since lockdown. Some day, your heirs might hear from my heirs.
November 7, 2025 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 54
Who’s on the dark web?
Me. I am. I use a TOR browser to access Kiwi Farms, which periodically blocks Britain on the clearnet. Though I think he’s opened Britain up since the Ofcom lawsuit, out of spite.
If you don’t know what TOR, Kiwi Farms or Ofcom is, we need to talk.
The thing about the dark web is that it isn’t indexed. That’s what makes it the dark web: you have to know where you’re going. Kiwi Farms’ address is:
https://kiwifarmsaaf4t2h7gc3dfc5ojhmqruw2nit3uejrpiagrxeuxiyxcyd.onion/
Don’t try putting that in a regular browser, it’s a TOR-style address. So – stupid question – how does anyone ever find things on the dark web? And what are you doing there?
p.s. Technically, the 95% of the unindexed web is the deep web (accessible by regular browsers), only a tiny sliver of which is the dark web (accessible by TOR).
p.p.s. DEAD POOL TOMORROW!
November 6, 2025 — 7:03 pm
Comments: 3
Bend over, NYC!
The prompt was “commies under the bed.” As usual, it didn’t understand the brief, but this looks pretty communist-y.
This won’t be fun to watch.
November 5, 2025 — 5:26 pm
Comments: 7
little step, little step, little step, BIG STEP
Currently playing The Farmer Was Replaced to keep the brain springy. It’s a programming game that uses a cut down version of Python to program drones to plant and harvest various crops.
It starts out nice and simple: some crops need watering, some need the soil tilling first. Some can’t be planted next to each other. Simple, discrete, individual functions.
Then it asks you to plant a field of cacti and sort them from the smallest in the lower left to the biggest in the upper right. Erm, that’s…I can’t do that. I suspect the seasoned programmers among you would find that a breeze, but I was only ever a skin-of-my-teeth sort of coder.
So my current strategy is getting AI to write code for it that works. It’s harder than you might think, but much easier than writing my own code. I got them cacti sorted, anyway!
p.s. yes, thefritz takes the Dead Pool with Dick Cheney. He was only 84.
November 4, 2025 — 5:20 pm
Comments: 2
Even the robots do it
Photo credit this guy, I gather it was taken during a 1950 renovation.
“Bo Peep Tunnel is a 1,318-yard-long (1,205 m) railway tunnel located between Bopeep Junction and St Leonards Warrior Square station on the Hastings line in East Sussex, England. Constructed by the South Eastern Railway (SER) between 1849 and 1850, the tunnel was opened to traffic on 13 February 1851.” Thus spake Leo, the AI associated with Brave.
It’s a railway tunnel. I went through it today. The only thing interesting about it is the name.
It turns out “bo peep” is much older than the nursery rhyme. It’s the medieval name for peek-a-boo, where you put a child on your knee, cover your face and go “bo!” then uncover it and go “peep!”
Grok tells me “This game is mentioned as early as the 14th century in legal records — for instance, in 1364, an ale-wife named Alice Causton was punished for short measures by being forced to “play bo pepe thorowe a pillery” (peek through the pillory holes).”
The nursery rhyme first appeared in print in 1805.
The connection to Sussex is said to be smuggling – this area was a hotbed of smuggling in the 18th C – but sources were vague on the exact meaning. Either revenuers peeping on smugglers or smugglers peeping for revenuers or some kind of shootout at the local Bo Peep pub. There’s still a Bo Peep pub in St Leonard’s (where there was once a dragon).
In one multi-paragraph information dump from Grok, every single citation was from Wikipedia!
November 3, 2025 — 7:40 pm
Comments: 6