74-year-old mom of 50 expecting again…
They recorded her laying an egg in Hawaii in 1956. It takes five years for an albatross to reach sexual maturity, so she was at least that old. That makes her the oldest known wild bird today. Her name is Wisdom. Which isn’t really apt because her name was Wisdom when she was a five-year-old.
She’s laid 50 to 60 eggs since then, and maybe 30 of them have lived to fledge. That’s a lotta albatross.
They mate for life, so when her hubby stopped turning up some years ago, they assumed she was done. Nope. She recently began flirting with the boys and apparently snagged herself one.
Wisdom, you minx.
I’d promise to follow up, but the reporting account is on Instagram. I don’t do Instagram.
December 10, 2024 — 6:23 pm
Comments: 4
Oh. Ohhhhh.
I’m surprised we don’t see more of this, on reflection. I’m surprised social media isn’t clogged with mental illness. I guess most people this far gone have minders.
This was hidden at the end of an unrelated Xweet. She’s made 40K of these in four years. That’s about 40 a day. Some are cut and paste, but there are variations that reveal more elements of her delusion. It’s very sad.
There’s another (totally unrelated) thing on Xwitter that makes me crazy. Tucked behind a spam label at the foot of a thread, you’ll see something like,
Ever since I started following @Mary_Normalname, my investments have truly skyrocketed! Thanks so much Mary!-@pookie28374656
The @pookie28374656 will have 30 – 300 followers and the @Mary_Normalname one will have about 30,000. Every time.
I’ve seen a dozen of these. I assume it’s some kind of cryptocurrency spam. I report them both. Not that it does any good, but I’m spiteful like that.
December 9, 2024 — 5:29 pm
Comments: 2
They ate my hat!
And by they, I guess I mean moths. I went to retrieve it from the hatstand where it’s been all summer (and by hatstand I mean the bronze sculpture of a Spanish lady that I inherited from my grandfather), and huge chunks of fur fell out. It’s balding!
The hat is rabbit fur and the tail is raccoon. Didn’t touch the raccoon tail, only the rabbit. I guess I’ll rescue the tail and…sew it to something.
I’m open to suggestions, but one person in my friend circle is militantly anti-fur, so my other friends had to scream “here she comes!” so I could whip off my hat. It’s a bit of a palaver. I wouldn’t want to sew it onto something I couldn’t hide in a hurry.
The Canucks at Fur Hat World don’t really ‘get’ coonskin caps. Instead of a short Davy Crockett style coonskin cap, they make these tall ones in the style of a Russian fur hat. It had the advantage that I could tuck the tail inside and look almost elegant.
Check out the skunk. Who the hell would want a skunk-skin hat?
We’re expecting Storm Darragh all weekend. No, I don’t know how to pronounce it, I only know that it comes bearing 50 mile and hour winds. Y’all stay dry now!
December 6, 2024 — 5:50 pm
Comments: 11
Say a little prayer for my liver
I have a identified the nature of most of the clutter in the library: dozens of bottles of hooch. Half empty bottles, unwanted gifts, out-of-date wine. I see no alternative but to drink my way out of this.
Yes, I’m still making a disaster zone out of our home. We found a spot for the old bookcase and in so doing stirred up a turbulent sea of junk. Several old dead computers and an egg incubator. Bills going back decades. I’m inconsolable; I have broken several Victrola records. I can’t bear to see which ones.
I am at that stage of the process where I have made everything immeasurably worse. We bought our tree today and I somehow have to clear the space where it usually lives, by tomorrow night.
I know! I’ll drink!
December 5, 2024 — 7:10 pm
Comments: 11
We’ve made a mess of everything
Well, the bookcase is in place and looking very handsome. Unfortunately, getting it there, we’ve made a complete wreck of the rest of the house. Piles of books and magazines and CDs. Dust and cobwebs everywhere. It’s all got to go…somewhere.
If you’ll excuse us…shit to do.
December 4, 2024 — 7:19 pm
Comments: 4
Say hello to my new bookcase
Wait, no…don’t say hello. It just might say hello back.
We picked this up at the auction house this afternoon. They described it as a ‘green man’ but it’s more sort of a lion headed foliate humanoid…thing.
The Victorians. What were they on?
December 3, 2024 — 7:47 pm
Comments: 9
Like the Cheshire cat…
Well, it made me laugh. Also, the car needs washing.
We had something of a milk panic over the weekend. The Twitterati got hold of the news that Bovaer, a feed product that supposedly makes cows fart 27% less methane, has been introduced into dairy herds on 30 farms. People no likee.
Turns out, the FDA approved it earlier this year after “a multi-year” study, so you’re probably getting it too.
Arla, a Danish/Swedish dairy cooperative, provides a ginormous number of milk-based products in this country and is starting to introduce it. Like, the only sure defense is to buy from a known farm or go organic. I hate organic because I think it’s a rip, but you can’t label a milk product organic if you use feed additives.
There’s been a mad scramble to find local dairy farms (it’s legal to sell raw milk at the farm gate here). I’ve never tried it, but people say it tastes amazing. Also, I know someone who knows someone who got TB drinking raw milk. So whatever.
On the whole, I suspect Bovaer metabolizes into something harmless, like the FDA claimed when they approved it. The farmers who have to handle the stuff raw have a different risk profile, though, and I’m not sure it won’t eventually have an impact on the cows.
I mean, you’re shifting their microbiome. I believe in microbiome. I tend my microbiome like a beautiful garden.
Have you ever tried raw milk?
December 2, 2024 — 7:07 pm
Comments: 7
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: 5