Tuesday - February 16, 2016

dad’s pub?

One of my father’s favorite jokes is a classic that goes by the name of The Golden Saloon:

A guy comes home completely drunk one night. He lurches through the
door and is met by his scowling wife, who is most definitely not happy.
“Where the hell have you been all night?” she demands.

“Is this the Golden Saloon?” she asks when the bartender answers the
phone.
“Yes it is,” bartender answers.
“Do you have huge golden doors?”
“Sure do.”
“Do you have golden floors?”
“Most certainly do.”
“What about golden urinals?”
There’s a long pause, then the woman hears the bartender yelling,
“Hey, Duke, I think I got a lead on the guy that pissed in your
saxophone last night!”



Well, I followed one of Vilmar’s links last night, and took one from where that sent me ... 

I like to think that the old man would have laughed himself soggy at this.

If you look very closely you can see that the walls are covered with musical scores. Which is pretty scary.




This kind of thing is so quirky it can only be in England. And it is. This is the Men’s Room at The Bell Inn in Ticehurst, East Sussex.

The Sunday Times - 50 Great Weekends list

“Sometimes all we want from a weekend is a night in a rural boozer where the ceiling is held up by a squirrel,
the lamps are made from bowler hats
and the gentlemen’s loo is a row of French horns …

“wonderfully the kind of place Lewis Carroll might have judged slightly too weird.”

Located on the High Weald, which means it’s a very pretty area. Officially. With a stamp and everything!

GET ME OUT OF HERE ...

Posted by Drew458     on 02/16/2016 at 11:35 PM   
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   Thursday - November 26, 2015

Warming Up Some Leftover Chicken

A mother-daughter team from a southwestern port city in Cornwall, U.K., are knitting mini-wool sweaters for rescued ex-battery hens.

Bird lovers Nicola Congdon, 25, and her mother, Ann Congdon, 58, have been providing homes for former battery hens, who were kept in tiny cages under poor conditions for the sole purpose of egg-laying.

“The chickens absolutely love them,” Nicola told UK newswire SWNS. She said the chickens have “no problem” putting the sweaters on and that they only wear them for short periods of time while outside.

Battery hens? Is that the kind that are extra crispy for deep frying? Flat beer, self-rising flour, lots of spices? No? Not that kind of batter-y?

Or do chickens now come in voltages? “Um, gimmee 4 of those AA Rhode Island Reds, and a Cornish Marauder in Lithium 9 volts.” No?

Artillery chickens? 105mm, 120mm, 155mm birds? “Sah, forward mount loaded with AP roosters, target bearing 120.3 mark, range 12,000!! Ready to fire, Sah!” What, not that kind of battery either? What’s left? Certain not chickens for beating. Everyone knows you beat eggs, not chickens.

Arrgh, some things are just so confusing. 

I’m getting loopy. Maybe I should have a bit of pie to eat ahead of time. Just to make sure they all came out properly.

Posted by Drew458     on 11/26/2015 at 10:41 AM   
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   Friday - November 20, 2015

why we win, sometimes

I was tagging along behind her at the Ocean State Job Lots discount store when I found it. Purely by chance, some previous customer had left this toy in the pet food section. It came in a brightly colored open box with “TRY ME” tags, batteries installed, and ready to go.

I’d never seen anything like it, but I admit, I do live under a rock. I picked the thing up, pressed the button, and was instantly 6 years old again. Horry Clap. This is the greatest, the MoFO GREATEST Christmas present you could give an active little fella with a bright imagination. 

It was a toy chainsaw.

This is what builds Americans.  Pure, concentrated AWESOME.

It came in a little kit with a cheeze-oid safety helmet that was so small it might fit a softball. Or a very small child. The toy itself was of medium detail; the brake bar neither moved nor did anything, the pull starter was cast on. The “blade” was a yellow rubber loop without teeth, instead having a row of tiny cups, like the polisher thing your dental hygienist uses, or like suckers from a really skinny octopus. There was no volume control, and there may not have been a hand grip safety. But when you pressed the start button, it made the right noises. Real ones. It sounded exactly like a little two stroke engine at idle. Exactly. And when you pulled the trigger, it let out a good loud rip, the proper sound of a chainsaw at work. And the rubber blade went around in the 9-10” bar at a pretty good clip. None of this slow motion BS. I didn’t get the brand, I didn’t get the price. But I couldn’t resist trying to saw down a couple of cat scratching posts and a wire dog cage. Women were starting to look at me funny. I didn’t care. I could have run around for an hour absolutely drooling mad with glee, cutting down everything in site. Wow. What a trip.

I spent a bit of time surfing them up, and found that toy chainsaws are actually fairly common. They range from the utter stupid blobs of plastic that don’t do anything, suitable for either very young children or very neurotic parents, through medium sized toys with varying degrees of realism and functionality, up to full sized repro movie props from the slasher flicks. The movie props “sound great but are built for adult laughs. Not kid’s toys.

I could not find the saw I saw at Ocean State, see? So I found the two best ones on the market instead. Beat Black Friday by a week, and supercharge your little tyke come Christmas. Warning ... may have to send the little snot-dripper outside to play, as the sounds will get on mommy’s one remaining nerve in no short order.



Pick Number One:

Made by Stihl, available at Amazon. $47.90. 15.75" long. This one is about as realistic as they get, right down to the owner’s manual and the included spare blades and wrenches. Pity the idle sounds like a toy. Comes with a blade cover, a working pull starter, a volume control, and functional grip safety. Seems a bit small by adult standards, but when you’re 5 this thing is an armful. No helmet included, but some kits come with pretend safety goggles. Imported from Germany, it seems there are two versions of this toy out there. One version is bigger and vastly superior; that’s the one you want. Check out your local chainsaw shop, because they’re sold there too.



Pick Number Two:

At 19.5” long and $27.99 at Amazon, this one is a bit more of a toy, but the sound is better. And you get the helmet and gloves. And the toy saw is pretty large, hardly any smaller than a real one with a short bar.  I couldn’t find any really detailed reviews on this model.

Posted by Drew458     on 11/20/2015 at 03:50 PM   
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   Sunday - November 15, 2015

gathering dust in the backroom

Hey, look what I found over in a dusty corner in the backroom on the server ...

Check out those cool cuff links and sideburns, daddy-O !!

Posted by Drew458     on 11/15/2015 at 02:27 PM   
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   Sunday - November 08, 2015

gonna need a bigger sky

Fwooosh. Fwoosh. Fwwoooshh. They got me again.

Remember that scene in Jaws where the Sheriff is ladling out the chum, grousing away, and the shark rises right up behind him, and in shock he backs into the cabin and tells Quint, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”? Seems like something similar happened to me this afternoon.

I was out on the deck enjoying the late crisp afternoon air, nursing a smallish glass of Jamison Black Barrel to soothe my tired arms after digging for several hours in the garden, when I heard that old familiar sound. Fwoosh. Fwoosh. The sound of hot air balloons. So I’m looking up, trying to see through the trees here in our little piece of “friggin’ jungle”, and finally I spot one. It’s a big yellow job, with some kind of Navajo-ish cubist graphic on the side. A thunderbird or similar. It’s at a decent altitude, up there in the bright and gleaming in the late afternoon sun, while I’m in the shadows beneath the trees. “Gosh” I’m thinking, “the sound of those burners really carries a long distance!”. And it does. And then I hear FWWOOOSH FWWWOOOOOSSSSSHH really loud, snap my head around, and there’s a giant multi-colored balloon right the heck in front of me. Not 30 feet away, it had sunk down almost to the roadway behind us here, just the other side of our little cliffy culvert of trees. We’re gonna need a bigger sky!!

“Ach, crivens!” I said (yes, I really did. One of the perils of being alone so much) and ran in to grab the camera. And then ran back to close the door so the kitten couldn’t escape. Then ran downstairs because the camera wasn’t where I’ve been leaving it. Right. Grab the snapper and run back out, and the gas bag has gained a small bounce of altitude and 50 yards of travel, and is landing in the front lawn of the house across the street.

That’s the view from my porch. It took me a few tries to get the balloon in the picture; not that it was so big, but that it was actually so hard to see. The sunlight lit the colorful panels so well that they were almost transparent, nearly invisible behind the high contrast clump of branches in the dimness. It was that perfect instant in the day when the sun is just high enough to light the sky but nothing lower than the very tree tops. So the chase van shows up, and I’m watching them bounce the basket around as people climb out, and they have to make several big fiery blasts on the heaters to keep the slowly deflating bag from sagging into the tree branches, and of course the camera is too slow to capture those awesome moments ... and then I hear the familiar sound from above again.

Fwoosh Fwooossssh! And we’ve got a third balloon coming down, this one aiming for the landing spot a couple streets away, behind the condo where we used to live (and where balloons have set down several times over the years)

And as that fellow floats down to earth, another observer comes by. Just over the treetops, flying hardly faster than a horse’s gallop, this obviously old-school, fabric covered, bigger than a typical Cessna, high-winger, who circled the situation a few times and then putt-putted away through the sky.

I have no idea what kind of airplane this is. Definitely neat looking, and like the second balloon, brilliant in the upper sunshine when seen from the gloaming on the ground. Who’s good with their planes? What is it?

Never a dull moment here in Clinton. Except I’m now out of Jamison. Waily waily waily!!

PS - all these pictures enlarge a bit when you click them.

Posted by Drew458     on 11/08/2015 at 05:46 PM   
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   Thursday - September 17, 2015

Is Pravda, Da?

At our condo park, you don’t watch the wildlife.

Wildlife watches you!

Posted by Drew458     on 09/17/2015 at 06:10 PM   
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   Monday - September 14, 2015

creepy find in Ireland

Oh finagle, there’s a great Irish ghost story waiting to be born from this one.  “… and every time they burned a log, the legless screaming man would grasp for them from out of the flames ...”

Forbidden romance, jealous murder, howling weather, an errant bolt of lighting, class warfare, justice from the grave generations later? Come on my authors, crank out a dozen fast pages from this News Muse To Use.

Archaeologists were stunned when the thousand-year-old skeleton of a young man was found among the roots of a tree ripped from the ground.

Storms blew over a 215-year old beech tree outside Collooney, Sligo, Ireland, unearthing a human skeleton.

The National Monuments Service commissioned Sligo-Leitrim archaeological consultancy Archaeological Services (SLAS) to excavate and retrieve the badly disturbed remains.

The burial was that of a young man (17-20 years old) and it id believed he suffered a violent death during the early medieval period.

Radiocarbon dating puts the man’s death at 1030-1200 AD.

Several injuries were visible to the ribs and hand, probably inflicted by a knife.

He had been given a formal Christian burial, however.

As the photos show, the lower leg bones remained in the grave; but the upper part of the body was entangled in the tree roots and raised up into the air.

Posted by Drew458     on 09/14/2015 at 09:21 PM   
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   Saturday - September 05, 2015

sundown confusion

"Come on out to the bar in the back.” he says. “We’ll have a drink and watch the sun go down over the bay. Who knows, there could be fireworks.”

Spelling never was his forte.

Posted by Drew458     on 09/05/2015 at 08:49 PM   
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Shear Crazy

A very naughty sheep from Canberra hid from the shearers for 6 years. When they finally got hold of him, his fleece was so huge he could hardly walk. A whole lot of work later, and nearly 90 pounds of wool came off.

It was the big story of the week locally, and radio call in folks named him Chris. While this will probably set the record for the biggest fleece ever, the wool itself is so matted, burred, and filthy that it isn’t really worth much.

That’s the thing about sheep. You’ve got to shave them naked on a regular basis. Sounds too much like politics for me.

The absurdly fluffy sheep who got a nation talking is completely unrecognisable this afternoon after losing a record-breaking 40kg of fleece in an epic shearing session.

At a media appearance on Thursday, the Canberra sheep - which was blinded by excess wool covering its eyes - appeared trim and comfortable in a green blanket.

An RSPCA spokeswoman told Daily Mail Australia vets said the sheep, known as Chris, appeared to be doing relatively well but will remain under observation for some time.

The animal welfare agency is hoping he will find a new home soon, suggesting a local farmer may open his paddock for the sheep. Not much is known about how exactly the sheep managed to balloon to its incredible size.

‘It looks like he was separated from his herd at some point and has been wandering around by himself for a couple of years,’ the spokeswoman said.

‘He’s a new man in many ways, he’s actually moving really well, he’s already eating, he actually came up to us for a cuddle,’ RSPCA ACT Chief Tammy Ven Dange told the ABC.

One wonders what will happen with this walking chunk of mutton now.

doner kebab!!

Posted by Drew458     on 09/05/2015 at 06:56 AM   
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   Monday - August 24, 2015

just fiddlin about

Mairead Nesbitt of the group Celtic Woman. Talent, beauty, incredibly high energy, and she just has so damn much fun out there. It’s infectious!

found it here, and then it followed me home

Posted by Drew458     on 08/24/2015 at 09:37 AM   
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   Monday - August 17, 2015

Almost Ready

Bugatti 100P almost ready to fly
Space Age 500mph racing airplane designed in 1937, hidden from the Nazis, almost forgotten about, never flown or finished
Only Bugatti airplane ever built
Meticulous Full Size Reproduction Built By Hand

Kitten Shark too frightened to be test pilot



Loads of links at every search engine. Backstory, construction story, videos, plans, even Ettore Bugatti’s original patents. Sweet.
Personally, I think it’s merely the most bad-ass looking airplane ever dreamed up. For that reason alone it has to fly.

h/t to Vilmar for posting on this last week. No first flight date yet released. 

Posted by Drew458     on 08/17/2015 at 12:12 PM   
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   Wednesday - August 12, 2015

Riddle Update

Completing today’s A & R Thursday (on a Wednesday) is an update to a silly childhood riddle.

Posted by Drew458     on 08/12/2015 at 03:04 PM   
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   Thursday - July 23, 2015

The Big Green Beast

I founded it. Finally! Everything is on the internet, but some stuff is just harder to find.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you ... the summers of my childhood:

We were campers, when camping wasn’t cool. Giant recreational vehicles? Phah, they didn’t even exist! Massive trailers with color TV, running water, and satellite hookups? Posh weekender crap for those spoiled city brats. We went camping. Intense. In tents! Ok, some softies did have those Coleman pop up trailers, the Apaches IIRC, and you did see the families out in the pickup truck camper insert. And they always seemed a bit cramped. Not us.

We had what was nearly a circus tent for the era. It certainly was the circus when we showed up: 2 adults and two kids, a dog, a fire engine red Coleman cooler, and a raffia picnic basket emerge from inside a 2 door 1967 VW Fastback. From high above the car’s roof, from a massive home made car top carrier comes down a heavy duty 18’ Grumman canoe, longer than the car itself, followed by this massive slab of folded canvas, followed by stoves, poles, paddles, sleeping bags, air mattresses, and whatnot. Food and cooking equipment came out of the front trunk onto the camp site’s picnic table, and in minutes was a functioning kitchen making a pot of coffee. Once the plastic ground cloth was out and the tent was loosely staked down, boxes, packs, and duffel bags of clothes came out of the back trunk and went into the rising tent. Main pole up and then the whole family goes fore and aft and raises the end poles at the same time. Hammer in the minor stakes, get the front tarp up. Set the tension in the back window. And we’re done. 15 minutes, tops. We were organized thank you. We could fully set up camp before people had figured out how our car worked. (tiny car, spacious interior, front trunk, rear trunk, no grill ... where’s the engine?? )

And our tent was huge, unlike anything anyone had ever seen. We had the best Hillary money could buy.

No, not her. Him. The real Hillary, Sir Edmund. By the time I was in 3rd grade or so, his name had become a brand name for the value line of outdoor products at Sears. In the same way, baseball great Ted Williams lent his name to the top of the line stuff there, because Sears wasn’t willing to slap a “Craftsman” label on everything.

So we had the big green beast. 8 feet wide, 15 feet long. But better than that, It was almost 6 feet tall at the end opening zipper door, and the roof pole sheath was over 8 feet off the ground. In other words, it was a tent adults could walk in to, and move around in, not squat and crawl.  The nearly vertical canvas walls maximized useful floorspace. It also had tons of room with that 8x15 footprint, giving plenty of room for 4 sleeping bags, packs, duffel bags, a laundry line, towels, and a place for the dog to sleep. Most of the time I think we also had a heavy plastic tarp, bright yellow, tied over the top. That helped when the rain came down in torrents ( to this day my ultimate degree of crazy downpour description is “it’s raining like we’re camping” ), but better than that it kept the acorns, leaves, and other grubby forest bits from making too big a mess.

The thing was awesome. And nearly unique. For whatever reason, I don’t think we ever saw anyone else in the same model tent. And this was at the height of the tent camping family vacation era. Maybe they didn’t advertise. Maybe Sears only pushed the little models. Hey, for all I know, the one pictured here is our tent. Keep it dry, give it a couple days of sunny airing every year, wax the zipper, and it ought to last nearly forever.




In the photo stream where I located this tent, the guy has his just standing in his yard. He hasn’t twigged that the flow thru ventilation window in the back is sleeved, which means you can adjust the poles to add some extra tension to the roof. You can see in the pictures that the happily striped window awnings are massively oversize and built to be reefed; you could tie them open, tie them closed, or tie them partly or even mostly open. Or attach light lines to pull them out to the side, thus ballooning out the side of the tent another foot and some, giving you even more interior volume. That way you got ventilation, protection from the elements, and privacy all at the same time. FTW !!  And the same thing goes for the front flap, a massive piece of canvas as big as the whole front panel of the tent. It was big enough to carefully cook under with the Coleman gas stove when it rained, and when we went out hiking or canoeing we could tie it down, which was kind of like locking your front door ... not that we ever needed to; in all the years of camping, from the blueberry barrens of northern Maine down the entire Atlantic seaboard, up and around into the Florida panhandle, we never once had any of our gear messed with. Well, not by people. Squirrels and raccoons, every night. Poisonous snakes, alligators, giant bears, and once wolves ... ah, I need a good scotch or three to tell those stories. Camping; it’s a adventure. Hey, have I mentioned the freakish rains?

The one and only online source, with more pictures. He has a replacement bag for the poles. The original one folded over on the end like a duffel bag, and had a carry strap. As if you’d take this thing deep in the woods on a 3 day hike. Riiiiight.

A Ted Williams tent from the same mid-60s era. It’s the same fabric, the same colors, and uses some of the same musically tuned aluminum poles*. But the cross poles aren’t sleeved so it isn’t as storm proof. And it’s a middle side entrance model with a lower ceiling, just like every other tent out there. Nice, but the only difference between this one and the Coleman was that the Coleman was blue.

* it’s true. The sound of a bag of aluminum poles being dumped on the ground carries for miles. Like the nearly explosive fwoooosh of the Coleman white gas stove lighting off, or the shrieking ghoulish double squeal, slam, Bumpbumpbum of an outhouse door slamming shut against rusty spring hinges, it is one of the sounds of camping etched into my soul.

Posted by Drew458     on 07/23/2015 at 09:35 PM   
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   Wednesday - July 08, 2015

Meanwhile In Belgium, 200 Years Later

No no silly. Not that one. This one:

The decisive battle of Waterloo, in which the Duke of Wellington finally put his boots on and put paid to the ambitions of the Little Emperor, was fought for a couple of days in the middle of June in 1815. It was one of the largest battles in human history, with nearly a quarter million participants. It was a terribly bloody affair, with casualties in the tens of thousands. 50,000 or so dead, and God alone knows how many wounded.

For the past bunch of years, reenactors have been getting together annually to restage the battle or parts thereof. They have a great time dressing up in period costume, camping out in the fields, shooting off their guns and yelling “Huzzah!” This year, being the 200th anniversary, they went all in. More than 5,000 soldiers, hundreds of horses, 130 cannons, and 4 full TONS of black powder. It was the event of the season in Belgium, and something like 65,000 spectators arrived to watch.

And Napoleon still lost.

The Bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo is marked Friday by more than 5,000 enthusiastic volunteers from 50 different countries, who are in full 19th century army uniform. This is the biggest historical reenactment ever staged in Europe.

In the interest of historical accuracy, the organizers have brought 360 horses, 100 cannons and 4 tonnes of gunpowder, etc, and arranged three bivouacs to accommodate the numerous groups of reenactors from all over the world in exactly the same conditions soldiers endured 200 years ago.
...
On June 18, 1815, Napoleon’s army clashed with allied troops led by the British commander, the Duke of Wellington. The allied army of British, Dutch and Prussian troops defeated Napoleon’s forces.

The battle of Waterloo that changed the course of European history, is recreated on exactly the same site in the south of Brussels.

h/t to Rodger

Posted by Drew458     on 07/08/2015 at 09:20 AM   
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