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[Frumple]

Playing with cat, accidentally kicked toy little bit under couch. Cat chased it, then got close enough and very energetically pounced on it.

Pounced on it face first into the side of the couch and fell over.

Physics 1, cat foresight 0.

[Great Order]

Did they do the "No nothing happened I was just cleaning myself" thing that cats often do?

[Starver]

Meant to post this earlier, but it's sort-of-still-today, even though nearly 13 o'clock PM, so...


Out for a walk, today, saw whar I thought was a small round mushroom on the edge of path. Puffball-like, but black. Glossy black. Shiny. Hairy?

I stare at it for a few moments. It then moves. The 'mushroom', it becomes clear, is the arse-end of a mole. It back out so that the front half is visble, gives me a 'look' and then scurries/shimmies/scuttles into the long grass and no doubt a 'green tunnel' to wherever its actual local tunnels are.

Spoiler: You want my concise appraisal of the hole? You've *got* a concise appraisal of the hole! Well, definitely /an/ appraisal of the hole. Maybe not so concise. (click to show/hide)

The hole it leaves is, pretty much, half a mole-length deep (and pretty much one-mole-width in diameter) in the mostly dry and dusty path-side soil that's mostly vegetation free. No sign of soil-spoil around it, but anything recent would have been dry and dusty and might not have heaped up. No obvious thing at the bottom of the hole, but solid ground, who knows whether it held (or still holds) a worm that the mole was after, or was heading down to act as an entrance to a new/alternate tunnel system, yet to be seen. I only gave it a quick glance. Went on my way, meaning to check it out more thoroughly (and maybe any sign of completion) a few hours later when I passed back that way again. But could not find it (and wasn't going to spend too long looking at that stretch of path; I was both a bit late, but five minutes from home, and there was a dog-walker (and dog!) following me on the narrow path (not a well-used one, but enough footfall, and I didn't feel like looking like 'a mad person' by stopping and thoroughly scanning back and forth for a hole that might not even still be identifiable) between long grass/shrubs/trees-in-places either side), or even any obvious sign of an ex-hole that might have been collapsed by accidental/deliberate placement of walking feet.

I'm not even sure when the last time was I saw a mole. And certainly not at roughly mid-day, so I don't even know why it was (at least) poking its head into a half-a-mole hole, in broad daylight, on a (sort-of-)well-trodden human path. But the round, furry, featureless backside definitely looked funny (funny-peculiar, at the very least, if not funny-haha), but was nothing to the (perhaps "erm... me? no... nothing... I'm doing nothing... why're you bothing me..? bye then!", if you're up to anthropomorphising it to a cartoonish degree) 'look' I got. It brightened my walk up a bit (on top of the general brightening of the choice to have the walk in the first place).

Spoiler: And now further branching out into philosophical asides, starting with a more inclusive perspective of the situations I put myself in... (click to show/hide)

I feel a bit guilty of disrupting the mole's day, doing what (for a mole) was probably a very important hole-digging (and/or inspecting) job. You'd think it'd be sensitive to the sub-seismic effects of my approaching footsteps, though, and not waited until I was stopped and staring at it, or risked being caught by my passing had I not have spotted it. A bit later, I noticed a bee fly in and land on a flower directly in my path on a grassier stretch of path. Unconsiously, but with self-conscious hindsight, I kept walking but strode 'over' it with one feet landing on one side and the other foot swinging forward past the other side, and as much of the glance. I'm no buddhist, to not even disturb ants (near my back door, I'd definitely deploy the kind of might that the appropriate chemical industries might trust this humble consumer to use against them), but I'm fairly glad that at least this unappreciating (perhaps entirely oblivious[1] insect didn't become a victim (like doubtless many invertibrates have, and possibly some of the smaller vertibrates if they weren't careful enough) of my size-9-or-10[2] clodhoppers.

[1] I mean, if you're into flowers, you're probably into flowers, and ...if I'd have stopped to look... I'd probably again be faced mostly with the backside view of a creature with its head overwhelmingly concentrating upon its main preoccupation in life. Which I can't complain about, I've been obsessively documenting this microdetailed perspective of (initially!) one barely-five-second incident for... slightly over 45 minutes, apparently. Including several web-searches for increasingly less connected things that I may or may not have mentioned here, let alone copypasted the links for. Don't ask me if any feet wooshed by me, and especially what shoe size they were. All I know for sure is that I never noticed any!

[2] I'm perhaps ideally a size 9˝ (UK measure; that's 10˝ US and 42/43-ish for EUR measurement, apparently), and I can generally squeeeeze into a size 9 (wide-fit, preferably), or work with the looseness of a size 10 (unless narrow-fit). My current size-9s were terribly pinchy a year ago when I bought them (maybe too used to the size-10 predecessors; but they felt ok in the shop, when I needed to replace the prior falling-apart-10s and was faced with a limited availability of currently-in-stock shoes that I liked the look of for Walking purposes) and didn't really fit my feet/my feet didn't fit them for maybe a month of occasional use. Now, a year later, they're the most comfortable shoe I've got (discounting some older shoes with completely worn-through heals but are still ok with thick socks and not over gravel, that I've still not thrown/given away) I've almost walked them to death and I might be looking for their successors, before sleet- and snow-cover makes their worn soles less than ideal, though their uppers (as always) remain definitely good enough to continue in dry/indoor circumstances, assuming I don't mind possibly slippy/squeaky walking surfaces. I maybe could have bought a more expensive pair of 'walking-trainers', if I'd wanted to, but that would have meant a bit more retail-angst as I made sure I was buying an expensive pair of justifiably sufficient quality, rather than just paying more for a pair just as likely to only last a year as my workhorse-footwear for pretty much all non-suitwearing occasions.

So, yeah. "A mole's glance." If you just TL;DR;ed on everything but this bottom line. It did indeed make me laugh today/technically-yesterday.

[Frumple]

I'm not even sure when the last time was I saw a mole.

I don't think I've ever seen a live one (at absolute minimum, not in the wild)... but the outside cats I feed* do leave a dead one outside my door occasionally! Not super often, but there's been two this year. It's usually closer to 1 a year to year and a half, ish.

They don't eat it or anything, tho'. They apparently just drag fully intact dead moles just under the overhang thing. And leave it.

Pretty much never anything else. If there's squirrels or birds or whatever, they leave it out in the yard and actually eat it. Just moles.

*Or, well, something does. Maybe my carport thing is some kind of mole graveyard and they're dragging themselves there to die, I'unno.

[MCreeper]

Found another silly song - Ballad of the Mari Lwyd. Example:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

There were jumping sausages, roasting pies,
And long loaves in the bin,
And a stump of Caerphilly to rest our eyes,
And a barrel rolling in.
But dry as the grave from Gruffydd Bryn
We are come without one rest;
And now you must let our Mari in:
She must inspire your feast.’

Midnight. Midnight. Midnight. Midnight.
Hark at the hands of the clock.

‘For She knows all from the birth of the Flood
To this moment where we stand
In a terrible frost that binds the blood
In a cramp that claws the hand.
Give us rhyme for rhyme through the wood of the door
Then open the door if you fail.
Our wit is come from the seawave’s roar,
The stars, and the stinging hail.’

Midnight. Midnight. Midnight. Midnight.
Hark at the hands of the clock.

Go back. We have heard of dead men’s bones
That hunger out in the air.
Jealous they break through their burial-stones,
Their white hands joined in a prayer.
They rip the seams of their proper white clothes
And with red throats parched for gin,
With buckled knuckles and bottle-necked oaths
They hammer the door of an inn.

Sinner and saint, sinner and saint:
A horse’s head in the frost.

[Great Order]

Got an Amazon echo, my mum originally got it for my gran while she was at home so my mum could keep tabs on her in case she wandered off or something.

Anyways, I just found out the thing pronounces midday as m'day like a neckbeard trying to seduce the morning itself.

[pisskop]

If we're talking about AI voices I like, I prefer australian SIRI to American SIRI

[Great Order]

Discovered Time and Eternity, specifically Vinny's segment of playing it on his haunted PS3 and not only is it a crap game, it's fantastic listening to his commentary. Especially when Drake calls the main character he future wife and Vinny yelps, followed by making grouse noises.

[martinuzz]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_5jTOFX5Wc

13:50, Lubach, national TV comedian in the Netherlands, asked AI to make a 5 years later video of Coca Cola's AI-made Christmas ad (which you can also view at 13:36).

[Starver]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_5jTOFX5Wc

13:50, Lubach, national TV comedian in the Netherlands, asked AI to make a 5 years later video of Coca Cola's AI-made Christmas ad (which you can also view at 13:36).

I do like Dutch. It's almost as if I can understand it even without the subtitles! Well, sometimes.

(Also, it uses the right word for 1x10⁹, not the inflated American one.)

In fact, I like the whole tone of this guy's educational humour.

(And, SPACE FACT!!!: You ought to see these guys' plans for those datacentres in space... Their home page is a basically a CGI video, so possibly not suitable to anyone with particularly tight bandwidth/quota limits.)

[Kagus]

Dutch is like if an Arabic muppet tried to speak German.