Kitti insurgency in its last throws

I couldn’t let another day pass without comment on the latest fish killings in our garden pond.

The deaths of Caspar Weinberger and Blaze have been recorded on this blog previously. But this weekend, we had not one, but two deaths. Darrell and Darrell are gone*. Most likely killed on Saturday. It must have been like shooting fish in a barrel.

Fishy native rejoicing in the sweet water of freedom before recent disappearance

I worry it’s my own cats doing the slaying. But the Vol-in-Law says that our cats are the loyal Kitti Garden Guard, there to protect the integrity of our pond and its piscine inhabitants. It is the foreign cats who are the back bone of the insurgency.

The increase in fish casualty rates of late is a sign that the Kitti insurgency is in its last throws.

Our remaining fish – Larry, Darrell and Smokey – are resilient. They are still grateful for our intervention. But our own Kitti militia has yet to stand up to the menace of foreign Kitti fighters.

We have not yet found the bodies of Darrell and Darrell. It remains a possibility that they may have been kidnapped by a feline group known or unknown in the region. I just hope we don’t have to witness their deboning on Al Cat-eera

As they stand up, we’ll stand down.

Granddad blogging: Hog money

Last week my grandfather described how they did a little hunting to raise a little extra money. This weeks he describes how they made their main income.

The only crop that we really had when I was little growing up was corn. We raised the corn and we took the hogs and turned the hogs in the corn and let them knock it down and eat the corn off the ground and get fat. Those that got big enough we’d have a truck come, I don’t know, I guess when the corn and stuff ran out, put ‘em on this truck and take ‘em to Nashville. The ones that weren’t big enough we’d run them over til next year. There was a joke told about a man who had a bunch of hogs and he said he had enough hogs to sell that fall and to kill and have enough meat to last him a year and said he had enough shoats coming on to take care of next year and he had enough pigs coming on to take care of next year and said after that he didn’t know what he was gonna do.

We’d take this hog check that we’d get once a year. My daddy had recently bought a little 70 acre farm and finally got it paid for and daddy bought about 50 acres in another place and he paid everything that he made on that place every year. The Depression was coming on then, and all of his year’s work would go to pay on the farm and the farm was worth about what was owed on it. And another year the same deal, it was going down, down, down. The hog price was going down, down, down.

We owed one of daddy’s cousins, I forget whether his name was Sy Jenkins or Sy Young. We’d go pay him once a year, and we’d pay him $700 and that was all the money we could get together. We milked cows and raised chickens to make enough to buy the groceries that we had to have. And all this hog money went to him. He wouldn’t take anything but cash, he wouldn’t take a check, though he and daddy were kin people and my daddy had as good a reputation as anybody did. But he had to go to Lebanon and get those hog checks converted into cash and then had to drive or ride up to see the old man and pay him that $700.

He had a great big old house and he had a dog in the house, and great big old bull dogs, and the doors chained. He had money, but he was ornery. I never did know why he was ornery and so hard until many years later. I knew he didn’t have any children, but I found out later that they had four children and they all died before they were ten days old. I often wondered if that hadn’t contributed to him being so hard and mean. I don’t know whether it did or didn’t.

Go to the granddad blogging main page for more including WWII oral history
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T-tags: oral history, Tennessee, Wilson+County, hogs, loans

Things I might have done today…

I’m not making the most of this 3 day weekend. But you see I have a good excuse. My car is not working. The battery seems to be dead for no discernable reason. That’s worrying, because if I had left the lights on or kept the radio running or something like that, then I could just curse my own stupidity, charge up the battery and move on.

We are charging up the battery, but it takes hours. So it’s the perfect excuse to just hang around the house and do nada.

Things I might have done today
1. I could have turned in my knives at the local police station as there is a nationwide knife amnesty. But I only have kitchen knives, and anyway they’d have to pry my knife out of my cold, dead hand if I were in the habit of carrying.
2. Potted up my remaining plants…I’m out of potting soil.
3. Driven down to Crystal Palace to see the really big dinosaurs. It’s been on our list of “fun things to do” for a while.
4. Gone to the grocery store for some much needed reprovisioning.

Things I could do without the car, but am not:
1. Cleaning and tidying
2. Laundry

Things I have done:
1. Messed with the cat til she bit me
2. Added some new links to my blog
3. Watched daytime tv.

Human trafficking

I just watched the first of a four parter called Human Trafficking. Now I feel dirty. Billed as non-exploitative, I felt it was all quite cheap and prurient.

It’s a 4 part series covering the victims of sex trafficking and one agent’s courageous mission to rescue them and bring their captors to justice. Maybe. I’ll not find out as I certainly won’t be watching it again.

Maybe this is not the kind of subject that can really be done on tv adequately sensitively.

_______

The Salvation Army does some really good work with victims of sex trafficking.

A sunny day…sorta

Not much doin today – did a little gardening – it was the first day without a ton of rain in a while… It was partly cloudy…with intermittent sun.

But more rain expected tomorrow.

my birthday gift

Today we went to the Wallace Collection museum and took a course on printmaking based on their arms and armor collection. This was my birthday present, as I could never get the Vol-in-Law to organise such a trip otherwise.

I spent too much time drawing one item…instead of getting a bunch of other ideas, but it was still good to mess around with the ink and use someone else’s art supplies.

It was a good day to do it, as it has been raining steadily since the morning.

On the way back, the Undergound seized up (as often seems to happen in wet weather) and we spent nearly an hour in packed bus full of damp Londoners.

Here’s what we made:

Me

The vol-in-law

One lucky voter…

As if voting wasn’t enough of a lottery… Via Newscoma

This is utterly amazing to me.

(AP) An Arizona political activist is placing his bets that a proposal
to pay one lucky voter $1 million will drive people to the polls.Dr. Mark
Osterloh, an ophthalmologist who has run unsuccessfully for governor and the
Legislature, filed paperwork Monday to put the idea before state voters on the
2006 ballot.”Who do you know that doesn’t want to be a millionaire? What’s the
worst thing that could happen? Everybody who’s eligible to vote could be
voting,” he said.

I need to think about this. I just see this not working ethically right out of the hatch or at least that’s my gut reaction to this news.

I don’t need to think about this. I had this idea years ago. But it wouldn’t require any kind of taxpayer money. No. When you go to vote, you can buy a special lottery poll ticket. A portion of the money would go to say… education in civics or for voter registration drives or get-out-the-vote campaigns or to translate all those ballots into Spanish or something – and the rest of the money would go to one lucky voter…

Just call me the public policy genius.

Just a little gift of sunshine

After what seems like weeks of rain (it’s actually about a week and half) we finally had a warm and sunny afternoon.

Other Cat enjoyed the brief sunshine in the garden – while I worked at home yesterday PM, taking my laptop out into the garden.

But now it’s raining again.

Tomorrow’s my birthday, and I would enjoy nothing more than a gift of sunshine this Bank Holiday weekend. But this being Britain and this being a Bank Holiday weekend then it will almost certainly rain.

Freaks

Un-freakin-believable

Illegal immigrants and porn

Fellow American expat London blogger Anglofille has a great post about the “tart cards” that fill London phone booths. She says:

The majority of these tart cards feature extremely graphic and vulgar images of women. In 2001 they were banned and anyone caught distributing them can be put in prison for up to 6 months or fined £5000, but it’s obviously not enforced. Nearly 40,000 of these cards are distributed throughout the city each day and you see them everywhere.

(BTW – she has photos over at her site)

To be honest I had forgotten about these, since I’ve had a mobile phone since 2000 – and so haven’t been in a phone booth in ages. But as I remember, if you walk into a central London phone booth you’ll be assualted by graphic business cards offering a variety of services. It’s not legal to post the cards – and some councils have had crackdowns intermittently. But I guess, since most people have mobile phones now, the booths’ main purpose is to serve the prostitution industry with a place for sex workers to sell the wares.

Prostitution is legal for a sole trader in a “residential” premise, but solicitation and advertising is not. Of course, many of these cards offer “massage*”.

Who risks the fines and jail time and puts these cards up? Well, I happen to know someone who used to be in that trade. He is an Oak Ridge native and a graduate (I think he graduated) of the University of Tennessee. I’ve known him since he was six years old. He came over here about 10 years ago, overstayed his tourist visa – and the only employment he could get was as a “tart-card” poster and DJ’ing once a week at the Blue Note. Who says illegals aren’t entrepreneurial? Illegals will do the jobs that native Britons just won’t do.

The Vol-tart-card-poster is getting married this summer to a rich girl from Indianapolis. Congratulations Mr VTCP, enjoy the day! Perhaps I should send a pack of tart cards for old time’s sake**.

_____
*When the Vol-in-Law’s back problems were at his most severe, he had a fantastic massage in Finland – from a one-eyed man with shamanistic skills. He walked straight and without pain for the first time in over a year. Didn’t last – (the shaman said it wouldn’t) – and so the ViL decided to search for massage in London. A search through the yellow pages didn’t offer much luck…after several misplaced phone calls to ladies of the night (his story) – he gave up. Now, he says real masseurs have wisened up and list their services under “therapeutic massage”.

**Don’t worry, VolMom, I won’t actually send them. Please don’t tell Mr VTCP’s mom that he used to do this. I don’t think she would approve.