Chickens is weird, man
Down to my last two – this boy, Sam, and the last of the of the polands, Albert.
Whichever boy is in captivity, the other one keeps him company outside the chicken wire. They groom together and eat treats together and burble at each other.
The moment I open the door – and I have tried it, experimentally – they try to kill each other. To be more accurate, Sam tries to kill Albert.
Sam is about a quarter the size of Albert, but he’s little and quick and fierce and Albert is a big slow lummox with very poor eyesight due to his magnificent topknot. Sam once scared him so badly he flew over the hedge into the field next door, which was a joy to deal with.
I know what’s going to happen. Sam is a pekin and an elderly one for his breed. He’ll go first and I’ll be stuck with Albert, my least favorite chicken of all time. He’ll probably live forever.
p.s. Sam has been known to chase our pudding of a cat right up a tree.
October 2, 2025 — 5:34 pm
Comments: 4
Happy birthday, my old faux pas
Today is Julie Andrews’ 90th birthday. Woot!
I was four when Mary Poppins came out. I adored it. I made my mother take me to see it seven times.
One of those times we’d had a tropical downpour and we drove through an intersection where the water came up to our rocker panels. That doesn’t have anything at all to do with this story, it’s just one of those hyper vivid memories that sticks with you forever.
One day, I’m told I said thoughtfully to my mother, “Mother, if you died, do you think there’s a chance Papa would marry Julie Andrews?”
I don’t think she ever forgave me.
October 1, 2025 — 5:50 pm
Comments: 7
Moar hoarseradish
Not only Jerusalem artichokes – I got me a horseradish plantation! This is important because we went shopping today and I found a big pack of cooked and peeled shrimp on offer because the sell by is today.
I’ve got to make me a whole ton of cocktail sauce in a hurry!
p.s. Grok tells me you can freeze both horseradish and Jerusalem artichoke, crisis averted.
September 30, 2025 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 3
Google Lens correctly identified it
Our Jerusalem artichoke flowered! I thought sure it would stump Google Lens as it’s a perfectly ordinary looking yellow daisy, but its first solution was correct.
I have a metric shit ton of Jerusalem artichokes.
They don’t come from Jerusalem, of course. The name is probably derived from girasole, Italian for sunflower, and the artichoke part has to do with the flavor. (Somehow, WordPress has figured out I’m in England and has dinged me for not putting a u in flavor. Shoo, WordPress!).
Ooooo…Wikipedia says there’s soup!
September 29, 2025 — 4:56 pm
Comments: 4
I got a pot to piss in!
Not really – there’s a hole in the bottom. It’s a plant pot. A rusty iron one. It’s amazingly heavy. Another eccentric Ebay find.
Weasel hand for scale.
Have a good weekend!
September 26, 2025 — 6:09 pm
Comments: 9
Thank goodness I’m not Chinese
This call came in this afternoon and my phone advised me not to take it. So I didn’t. Then they left this message.
Bastards.
It gave me a turn for a moment, being an immigrant and all. But then I remembered I’m a citizen. And not Chinese.
Grok estimates there are 125,000 Chinese nationals in the UK, not counting those from Hong Kong, Macau, or Taiwan. It’s unclear whether that includes students. I wonder how many phones they had to ring before they scared some poor mook into answering?
September 25, 2025 — 5:41 pm
Comments: 1
Punkins!
Spotted on the way to a farm shop today. Well, of course it doesn’t look like anything – it’s a field of pumpkins. Here it is big and in color.
We had a nice long drive down country lanes today. I’m here to tell you – it’s fall!
September 24, 2025 — 5:33 pm
Comments: 7
Wooden computer goes for half a mil
Okay, it was the wooden-cased version of the Apple 1. They made fifty, they think nine are left, and this one is a very good example. It works. It’s got all its bits, including monitor and tape drive.
And they have the provenance: the first female graduate of Stanford Law School, a woman named June Blodgett Moore. I tried to find out more about her, but didn’t have much luck.
They estimated it would go for $300,000 but it finally sold for $475,000. I guess nostalgic geeks are all growed up and have money.
September 23, 2025 — 3:52 pm
Comments: 4
Oooh! New time sink!
Lookit the time waster Uncle B found! It’s called Every Noise at Once (URL everynoise.com). It’s a giant color-coded map of very musical genre on Spotify.
Every Noise at Once was a long-running attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 6,291 genre-shaped distinctions at Spotify through 2023-11-19. The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier.
Click anything to hear an example of what it sounds like.
Click the » on a genre to see a map of its artists.
It’s actually ten years old and is static now because the creator got laid off from Spotify. Click the name of a genre to hear a sample; click the right arrows after the genre to see a map of the artists associated with the genre (who can also be sampled).
Very cool.
September 22, 2025 — 4:35 pm
Comments: 5
Cheating!
This is Google Gemini‘s image creation mode, Nano Banana. I don’t know if it’s new or improved. I’m not sure how you normally invoke it; I followed a link from a promotional email.
I clicked the link and it had already filled out the prompt: First ask me to upload an image of myself. Then add a realistic looking alien doing a peace sign to my photo.
I mean, did it not trust me to come up with an idea on my own?
I gave it exactly the Miss Muffet prompt I gave MidJourney yesterday, and here is what it gave me back. It seems to have peace signs on the brain.
Good weekend, all!
September 19, 2025 — 6:21 pm
Comments: 4