Waiting for The Chicken
Illustration is from the other day when I was trying to trick AI (in this case canva.com) into giving me a farting chicken. As a farting chicken, it’s a failure, but I kinda liked the image and wanted to preserve it.
But – whooeee! – look at those mangled toes! Why is AI so bad at digits?
Ten minutes ago, I finally managed to register my little flock. The site has been unreachable all day, but I kept trying. What an awful lot of drama for three roosters and an elderly hen who lays about six eggs a year.
Meanwhile, I have inherited a chicken. Or, rather, Uncle B has. His mum died during lockdown and some of her furniture has been stored away waiting for us to arrange delivery. We finally got it down to two arm chairs and The Chicken.
I have no memory of this object, but I’m told it’s a large and impressive papier mâché chicken that she somehow picked up in her travels. It should be here in an hour or so and then we’ll all find out.
October 2, 2024 — 6:38 pm
Comments: 7
I are a criminal
You may recollect me bitching and moaning about one of my main Gmail accounts running out of storage. Google keeps sending me nastygrams about it. I deleted and deleted and it didn’t seem to make a substantial difference. Tonight I discovered one video that was using up ten of my fifteen gigs.
It was a lecture by my boss. Saved to my hard drive.
I have now sent two different addresses to the chicken registry six different times and still haven’t got the confirmation email I need to start the registration process. That means as of today, me and my flock are officially outlaws. The speculation is that thousands of people are registering their supermarket chickens and it knocked the website out.
Very funny guys, but I’ll be pissed if I go to jail for poultry crime.
I don’t have any way to prove I tried to register. I’d ask you all to be my witnesses, but I’d have to send authorities to my blog. I don’t think that’s a very good idea.
If you know where I can get the best information about the flooding in Appalachia, I’d appreciate. East Tennessee and Western North Carolina is where I was born and mostly grew up and I’d like to see the damage. I’ve tried Facebook, but I’m not following anyone from the area any more. It’s been a long time!
October 1, 2024 — 5:33 pm
Comments: 5
Ohhhh…weasel no likee
The law used to be that you had to register flocks of fifty birds or more. Now if you own a single chicken and it’s a pet, you have to register.
You can imagine my first thought, but this is a criminal charge. There’s no talk of jail time, but a £5,000 fine and a criminal record.
You have to ask yourself, do any of my neighbors hate me enough to turn me in? Well, there’s this one guy…
The excuse is bird flu control – and if there’s an outbreak in the area, they’ll definitely come out and kill my birds – but it’s more broadly seen as the first steps of an attack on self-sufficiency. There have been articles lately on the surprisingly high carbon footprint of growing your own food and the dangers of wood fires.
p.s. well, that tears it. The first step to registration, they send you an email with a verification code. The email never came. No, it’s not in spam.
September 30, 2024 — 5:32 pm
Comments: 7
I’ll be takin’ yer order
Greeter at a local fish restaurant.
Arrr, I’ll be yer hostess fer tonight, ya scurvy dogs!
He’s life sized. I considered asking Uncle B to take my picture with him, then I remembered I don’t publish pictures of myself and that made me sad.
Then I remembered I hate pictures of myself and I was not sad any more.
This whole coast was heavily, heavily involved in smuggling in the 18th C. Which tells us commodities were overtaxed in Britain then, too. It was so pervasive in the population that sometimes even the churches were used to store contraband.
I once asked our best local historian why even the vicar was in on it and she said, “Oh but it was so much nicer than what they did before – piracy.”
Nobody had Maggie Smith in the Deadpool. Goodbye, ma’am. Watch some clips.
Have a good weekend!
September 27, 2024 — 5:56 pm
Comments: 7
Field Trip to Dungeness
The plaque reads:
This is one of four Wright/Cyclone engines and propeller from a WWII B17 Flying Fortress bomber (the same aircraft as the Memphis Belle). The artefact was accidentally snagged off Dungeness on the 18th of September 2017 by Joe Thomas and Tom Redshaw (local fishermen). The engine is almost certainly from a well documented B17 Flying Fortress that ditched off Dungeness in 1944.
The Sleepytime Girl was on a daytime bombing raid on an aircraft factory over Oberpfaffenhofen in Germany. The aircraft suffered heavy flak damage over Germany and all four engines stalled. The crew dived the B17 to 5,000 feet and managed to restart the damaged engines. The crew then had a vote and opted to strike back towards the safety of Britain, rather than trying to make it back to Switzerland, which was closer.
At 5,000 feet the B17 was a sitting duck was was repeatedly attacked over France, where two German ME-109s further damaged the aircraft, knocking out three of the four engines. Amazingly the remaining crew managed to limp the aircraft back over the Channel on a single engine, where they ditched it off Dungeness. Only four of the original crew of ten were left alive and were rescued by an Air Sea Rescue Walrus (an amphibious biplane). The co-pilot, William Nesen, received a posthumous Purple Heart.
It’s difficult to imagine how these incredibly brave men in their teens and early twenties could submit themselves to a virtual death sentence on a daily basis. Please take a few moments t reflect on the extraordinary sacrifices that were made for us, in order to free occupied and oppressed peoples and to ensure our own freedom and way of life.
September 26, 2024 — 6:03 pm
Comments: 4
She finally had enough
Shirley Curry, the Skyrim Grandma, has finally played enough Skyrim. Nine years, 1.5M subscribers and 2.3K videos later, she’s done.
I have to say, she’s lookin’ really good for 88. My friend group is in the 75 to 85 range, and everybody’s getting a little cyborg-y.
I didn’t watch a whole lot of her videos, but her interactions with the game and with her viewers were fun. When she played with an in-game companion, she chatted away to him like he was people. It was like watching a kid play with Barbies.
She also loved to read aloud from the books in the game, of which the Internet tells me there are 337. I always thought that was an outrageous waste of developer’s time, writing those books, as I assume most players opened and shut them without reading a word. (You have to open them all because a few of them gave you skill points on opening).
The Bethesda game studio has scanned her likeness so they can make her a character in the next game. I hope she lives to see it.
September 25, 2024 — 6:36 pm
Comments: 3
They never came back…
Beg pardon. Didn’t mean to leave you with a mystery yesterday.
The lady who was ambushed does more for the club than all the rest of us put together. She works it like a full time job. She needs the money she gets from selling artwork, but that can’t explain it. Absolutely nobody else would go at it this hard.
However, she does it while firehosing the rest of us with long, rambling emails. The other ladies wake up to a bulging inbox every morning and panic. We’ve lost committee members over it and are in danger of losing more. And she’s a bit of a loose cannon.
It’s a dilemma. I guarantee you, if they push her out, they won’t find volunteers to take over the work she does.
Which brings me to a question. Scheduling volunteers is my least favorite part of my current gig (see above snapshot of my Google calendar). After lockdown the volunteers didn’t come back.
Everyone’s complaining. The National Trust. The National Council of Voluntary Organisations. The Scouts.
I mean, some of them died. You have to hand it to those people. But an awful lot of people got a taste of idleness and decided they like it.
Same in the States?
September 24, 2024 — 5:43 pm
Comments: 8
Here we go!
Came today. I was starting to get worried. I mean, it’s not much use in deep red Tennessee, but you gotta do your part.
I just sat through a four and a half hour meeting of the steering committee of my art club. Oh, my friends, you haven’t lived until you’ve watched two elderly English women set an ambush for a third.
My bottom hurts. I have earned every drop of my G&T tonight.
September 23, 2024 — 6:42 pm
Comments: 7
bracing myself
A snapshot from my garden today. Which made me wonder – can bugs fart? The answer, apparently, is also yes.
Come to sweasel.com for all your burning science questions.
Tomorrow morning – early, if I know the workin’ man – they’re coming to put scaffolding up around the house. Our (500 year old) chimney needs repointing. We know this because if it rains hard enough, our (500 year old) house leaks badly. It doesn’t bear thinking about water that has filtered through 500 years worth of dust, dead bees and rat skeletons.
‘Unhygienic’ really doesn’t seem adequate.
Have a good weekend!
September 20, 2024 — 6:03 pm
Comments: 4
Oh! Oh! I know this one!
You can read the article if you want (graphic is theirs), but the answer is yes. The ‘official’ answer used to be no, but one of my chickens farted once so I knew better.
Then I got wondering whether that was an AI generated image. See how the thigh is in front but the foot lands behind the foot on the other leg? That’s a tell. I have now spent a stupid amount of time trying to get an illustration similar to that out of free AI art generators.
I can tell you “chicken farting” absolutely won’t do it. It resolutely gave me steaming chicken dinners. “Living chicken with feathers farting” was the first prompt that gave me a non-cooked chickens, but no farting. “Living chicken with feathers and smoke coming out of its bottom” got closer, but the smoke came out of everything BUT its bottom. Farting must be on the no-no list.
Nothing blew up today. I was so bummed about this – I’ll be honest with you, if I knew the password to my blog, I’d’ve posted a bored one-liner from my phone rather than bother to boot my computer. Unfortunately, I got paranoid one day and set my password to one of those crypto-approved things like ?~3lkjh4,+_qqola
September 19, 2024 — 7:02 pm
Comments: 11