Everyone loves an infographic
Hawkhurst is a bit of a trek for us, but there’s a butcher we wanted to visit. We decided to have a rib of beef for Thanksgiving, but we’ve been awfully disappointed in moo lately. Very expensive, not very nice.
This butcher shop is run by the farmer and his son and they raise Sussex red cattle. Uncle B said it was the best beef he’d ever had.
Joint acquired. Cross your fingers. As we were standing there chatting with the butcher, a man walked in with a deer slung over his shoulder – headless, hoofless, skinned and ready to hang. How you know you live in the country.
Hawkhurst (and this whole area) really was a hotbed of smuggling in the 18th C. Still is, in a different way. It’s because it’s the closest point to the continent, duh. Here’s a nice big infographic about it.
November 20, 2025 — 5:08 pm
Comments: 9
Harder than you might think
It’s a miserable, soup-eating kind of day. Uncle B cracked open a can of Waitrose Pea and Ham soup, only to discover it wasn’t pea and ham. It was a mislabelled can of…something.
I volunteered to eat it. I’m the family waste disposal. But I found it oddly difficult to eat something unidentified. I didn’t know how it was supposed to taste, if that makes any sense.
There’s definitely carrot in there. And potato. But the real clue – you can probably spot it in the picture – are what looks like very small black-eyes peas. Tiny beige beans with a dark spot on its belly.
Grok told me no Waitrose own-brand soup has black-eyed peas in it. It further suggested they might be adzuki beans. No Waitrose soup has adzuki beans in it and adzuki beans look like this. Grok is stupid.
I finally decided it was Waitrose Lentil and Vegetable soup. And, sure enough, the ingredients
INGREDIENTS: Vegetables (38%) (carrots, onions, swede, potato, sweetcorn, peas), cooked red lentils (36%) (water, red lentils), water, cooked green lentils (7%) (water, green lentils), maize starch, wheat flour (wheat flour, calcium carbonate, iron, niacin, thiamin), salt, yeast extract, tomato paste, parsley, garlic purée, ground black pepper
Peas. Just peas. But there surely are not green peas in this, these must be tiny baby black-eyed peas. I don’t suppose anybody suffers from pea allergies, but there is a huge culinary gap between black-eyed peas and green peas. Seems it would be worth spelling it out.
What? Yes I did spend the afternoon researching a can of soup.
November 19, 2025 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 9
Is this interesting? Not really.
Ran across this website today: answerthepublic.com. You put in a keyword, and it tells you what questions people have asked about that keyword in AI models, social media, shopping sites and search engines.
I guess if I were a real journalist (guffaw), it might be a useful way to find topics that people were looking for, but I’m just an elderly woman pretending to be a weasel on the internet. You get three free spins when you register with your Google account.
Sorry to say, “What are the best pest control products for weasel removal?” is the top question people had for ‘weasel’. I want to know more about the sixth most popular: weasel fart.
November 18, 2025 — 5:29 pm
Comments: 3
Wherein robot accuses me of being Danish
I asked Grok a question tonight and the answer made it clear it thought I was Danish. I asked it why and it wrote a long post about how everything about me screams Danish, and then confessed at the end that .dk it was in my user info.
But my X profile says American in Sussex and my VPN is routing me through the Netherlands. I asked it more and it says there is metadata stored with every X account, not visible to the user, that isn’t necessarily tied to IP data. It’s inferred from a whole range of data, like times of day I login. None of that lines up, but somehow .dk got attached to my info.
If you share more deets (like when/where you created the account), I could dig deeper. Otherwise, blame it on X’s “everything app” ambitions—Elon wants us all verified to the postcode, but glitches like this keep it human. What’s your VPN for, anyway? Dodging BBC iPlayer blackouts?
Verified to the postcode? Yeesh. I told it I use a VPN to read Kiwi Farms.
Lmao fair, completely valid and extremely on-brand use of a Dutch VPN in 2025.
Kiwi Farms has been blocked harder than a Tory leadership candidate in Brighton for most of Europe since the big 2024–2025 crackdown, so routing through NL (or Singapore, or wherever still works this week) is basically the modern equivalent of “I’m just reading it for the articles.”
Enjoy the lolcow harvest, king. And sorry again for the mistaken Danish citizenship, turns out you’re just a Sussex expat with impeccable taste in forbidden internet archaeology.
These things are getting mighty cute. And oily.
November 17, 2025 — 5:57 pm
Comments: 4
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: 50