Archive for the ‘Urine’ Category

Ketchup.

Thursday, March 7th, 2024

Apologies for the silence the past two days. I have been busy assisting the police with their inquiries.

(more…)

The world is still a smaller, colder, lesser place…

Tuesday, October 19th, 2021

…and Sotheby’s is going to be auctioning off part of Ricky Jay‘s collection starting October 27th.

Link to the auction. Sotheby’s video.

NYT article tied to the auction. It’s worth reading, if for no other reason than the story about Siegfried and Roy’s tiger at the beginning. (Alternative link.)

Not that Jay was a hoarder. With the help of assistants, he photographed and cataloged every item in a digital database. His books were arranged by category — magic, circus, eccentric characters — and his file drawers were labeled, which made it easier, say, to find that handbill for “Prof. William Fricke’s Original Imperial Flea Circus.”
Under “flea bills,” of course.

There’s a punchline at the end that I won’t spoil for you, because Mr. Jay would haunt me in the afterlife.

I don’t think I’ll be placing any bids, as I expect anything from the Ricky Jay Collection will be way out of my price range.

TMQ Watch: August 22, 2017.

Tuesday, August 22nd, 2017

“The Year Without A Tuesday Morning Quarterback” was one of Rankin-Bass’s lesser holiday specials.

Then a year ago this time, I took a year off to complete my next book.

Oh. Is that what it was? (By the way, Gregg Easterbrook has a new book coming out.)

But now, he’s back. And so is the editorial “we”. Not to be confused with the editorial wee, though we plan to purchase one or more of those really nice Toto smart toilets when we win the lottery.

Welcome back to TMQ Watch. After the jump, this week’s TMQ

(more…)

Obit watch: August 30, 2016.

Tuesday, August 30th, 2016

Your Gene Wilder round-up: NYT. LAT. A/V Club.

In a statement, his nephew Jordan Walker-Pearlman said that the decision not to disclose his condition was not made out of vanity but so that the many children who loved Wilder from his role as the eccentric candy-maker Willy Wonka wouldn’t feel worried or confused. “He simply couldn’t bear the idea of one less smile in the world,” Walker-Pearlman said.

And:

In his first major role on Broadway, Mr. Wilder played the chaplain in a 1963 production of Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children.” The production ran for less than two months, and he came to believe that he had been miscast. The good news was that he met the boyfriend of the star, Anne Bancroft: Mel Brooks, who wore a pea coat the night he met Mr. Wilder backstage and told him, “You know, they used to call these urine jackets, but they didn’t sell.”

Random notes: July 16, 2015.

Thursday, July 16th, 2015

The Birdman of Altiplano.

“There is already a significant problem every single weekend with widespread, out-of-control peeing,” Mr. Johnson, who represents much of Manhattan’s West Side, said.

(I love the “Citations for public urination” graphic that goes along with this article.)

I’m a little surprised this one hasn’t made FARK yet: local police find an unresponsive man in a car. He had bite marks on his wrist, and there was a non-venomous snake (and other animals) in the car. Man dies.

And it seems like his venomous cobra snake may be on the loose. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

(Huh. I didn’t realize that Frederick Forsyth won an Edgar for “There Are No Snakes in Ireland”. That’s not a bad story, but I like “The Emperor” from the same collection a little better.)

Edited to add:

Austin Animal Services is not actively searching for a missing monocle cobra that may have killed an 18-year-old Temple man on Tuesday.

You know what this means, folks. If Animal Services isn’t actively searching for it, it’s up to the rest of us to be on the lookout. Get that Taurus Judge out of the gun safe and load it up with snake shot! Fun for the whole family! At least, until someone gets bitten…

The monocled cobra causes the highest fatality due to snake venom poisoning in Thailand. Envenomation usually presents predominantly with extensive local necrosis and systemic manifestations to a lesser degree. Drowsiness, neurological and neuromuscular symptoms will usually manifest earliest; hypotension, flushing of the face, warm skin, and pain around bite site typically manifest within one to four hours following the bite; paralysis, ventilatory failure or death could ensue rapidly, possibly as early as 60 minutes in very severe cases of envenomation. However, the presence of fang marks does not always imply that envenomation actually occurred.

Edited to add 2:

Oh, thank God. They’re going to start an organized search. I was afraid they’d be engaging in a disorganized search.

(Hattp: the Austin Cobra Twitter. Hattip on the Austin Cobra Twitter to the great and good Joe D. in the comments.)

The men who pee at goats.

Friday, July 8th, 2011

According to an AP report picked up by the Statesman (but originally from the Peninsula Daily News), hikers in Olympic National Park (upstate Washington, nearish to Bremerton) are being told not to urinate near trails.

Why? Apparently, hiker urine attracts “aggressive goats”. At least one person has been gored to death in the past year (which gives the Olympic goats a body count equal to the Yellowstone bears).

In addition, park staff plan to implement “adverse conditioning”

…such as setting off sirens and compressed air horns, and shooting rubber projectiles and bean bags.

Actually, I had three reasons for linking to this story:

  1. Slow news day.
  2. The use of the phrase “long, linear salt licks“.
  3. It gives me a chance to ask the question: what gun for goat?