Happy spring equinox!
Or, as the Anglo Saxons called it, Ēosturmōnaþ (AY-oh-stoor-moh-nath) the festival to the goddess Ēostre. Nobody knows the nature of the festivities, but everyone has a spring festival of some kind. Everybody happy when spring come.
Or maybe he made all that shit up. The venerable Bede is the only one who named Ēostre as a goddess.
Who knew Chuck Norris could die? That must be one courageous heart attack that took him on. @smedleythebarbarian tripped over Rule Zero, but let us welcome him to the Dead Pool fold. I don’t recall seeing that handle before.
Good weekend. Go thou and drink to Ēosturmōnaþ!
March 20, 2026 — 7:30 pm
Comments: 4
Like dinner plates
Eye test went fine, but they gave me two different drops to dilate my pupils and – boy howdy! – did that dilate my pupils. I wasn’t in danger of losing my way home, but O my garden was soft and glowy when I got home.
My little leaking blood vessel is still leaking. She didn’t seem concerned – but she wouldn’t discharge me, either. I go back in three months.
That’s in direct sunlight, to give you an idea how paralyzed my poor irises were. Do you have any idea how hard it is to take a picture of your own pupil?
March 19, 2026 — 5:36 pm
Comments: 5
Creepy
China’s new micro spy drone. Grok says it real. Click the link to see it in flight.
It’s very good, but I question how long it can fly on a charge. And then take pictures and wifi them back to base.
Being an electric bike kinda gal, I’m always worried about battery issues.
Grok: “China’s National University of Defense Technology unveiled this mosquito-like micro-drone in June 2025, measuring 2 cm long and 0.3 grams, with flapping wings for silent, insect-mimicking flight suited to indoor espionage, as confirmed by reports in Newsweek and Euronews.”
Tomorrow, I have to hop on a train and do the ophthalmology thing again. It’s just a checkup, but I hate that they call me in last minute. From someone who used to do several trans-Atlantic flights a year, I have become an bad traveller.
March 18, 2026 — 5:50 pm
Comments: 5
He’s good on metaphors
I was reading a Victorian magazine today (as you do) and came upon the phrase “under a Upas tree.” So I axed my robot friend (as you do).
The Upas tree – Antiaris toxicaria – is a large tree native to Southeast Asia and parts of the Pacific. It produces a toxic latex that some Southeast Asian tribes used to tip arrows.
In the late 18th C, a dutchman wrote in a London magazine that the Upas, which grew in a remote valley in Java, was so deadly that it killed animals and plants for miles around it. This incorretoid made it into several guidebooks and travel books (and at least one poem). I mean, it’s poisonous, but it’s not that poisonous.
By the mid 19th C (the period of my magazine), they knew it wasn’t true, but it was firmly fixed as a metaphor for insidious and pervasive evil: bad political systems, immoral people, or destructive ideas.
The robot took pages to tell me all this. I’m’a start calling him ChattyGPT.
March 17, 2026 — 6:37 pm
Comments: 11
This one worries me
This was on a post about buying a new graphics card to play Black Myth Wukong (I didn’t, by the way). This one bothers me because it’s on topic and slightly amusing, making me wonder if some bright soul has figured a way to make spambots crawl and make undetectable slop comments.
It was for sure spam, though – two year old post and links in the address. When I went to look at the post, there were about six (inappropriate) spam links I had to take care of manually.
Yes, we are still being hammered with ass porn.
March 16, 2026 — 5:34 pm
Comments: 3
Dead Pool 196: Ready for the weekend
Carl takes it with Ian Huntley. Carl, you must tell me how you’d heard of him – you’re not a Brit, are you?
A lively discussion ensued about amending Rule Zero to exclude people on life support, but nothing was decided and so I’ve left it as it is.
IMPORTANT! I’m still getting hammered with spam, which has kicked Akismet into high gear. This means there’s a good chance you’ll land in spam. Don’t panic. I’ll empty the trap as often as I can, but meanwhile put a timestamp in the body of your post. An honest one, please.
If your curious, it’s most anal porn spam. Nice!
0. Rule Zero (AKA Steve’s Rule): your pick has to be living when picked. Also, nobody whose execution date is circled on the calendar. Also, please don’t kill anybody. Plus (Pupster’s Rule) no picking someone who’s only famous for being the oldest person alive.
1. Pick a celebrity. Any celebrity — though I reserve the right to nix picks I never heard of (I don’t generally follow the Dead Pool threads carefully, so if you’re unsure of your pick, call it to my attention).
2. We start from scratch every time. No matter who you had last time, or who you may have called between rounds, you have to turn up on this very thread and stake your claim.
3. Poaching and other dirty tricks positively encouraged.
4. Your first choice sticks. Don’t just blurt something out, m’kay? Also, make sure you have a correct spelling of your choice somewhere in your comment. These threads get longish and I use search to figure out if we have a winner.
5. It’s up to you to search the thread and make sure your choice is unique. I’m waayyyy too lazy to catch the dupes. Popular picks go fast.
6. The pool stays open until somebody on the list dies. Feel free to jump in any time. Noobs, strangers, drive-bys and one-comment-wonders — all are welcome.
7. If you want your fabulous prize, you have to entrust me with a mailing address. If you’ve won before, send me your address again. I don’t keep good records.
8. The new DeadPool will begin 6pm WBT (Weasel’s Blog Time) the Friday after the last round is concluded.
The winner, if the winner chooses to entrust me with a mailing address, will receive an Official Certificate of Dick Winning and a small original drawing on paper suffused with elephant shit particles. Because I’m fresh out of fairy shit particles.
Note: I am woefully behind on dick deliveries. If I owe you one, you’ll know how long. I ain’t gived up, but I haven’t drawn much since lockdown. Some day, your heirs might hear from my heirs.
March 13, 2026 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 62
That thing on the left is a weasel
Beginning around 1910, a man named Howard Garis (1873–1962) began writing a series of stories about a character called Uncle Wiggily Longears, a wise old gentleman rabbit, for newspaper serialization. Estimates are, he wrote five thousand of them. Every day but Sunday. They were hugely popular.
And they were a feature of my childhood. I suppose the books belonged to my father, or my auntie (who died earlier this year at a very respectable age). Back when bedtime stories were a thing.
As you might expect, they were highly formulaic. Uncle Wiggily went out on an errand, encountered a villain, villain was thwarted by pure chance, happy ending (the villains above are Pipsisewah the weasel and the Skeezicks, the whatever it is). Very rigid structure, tight word count.
And they always, always ended with a line like:
“And if the dish of ice cream doesn’t skate away with the spoon and hide behind the lemon pie, I’ll tell you next about Uncle Wiggily and the striped chipmunk.”
or
“And if the pancake doesn’t flip over the stove and tickle the coffee pot with a feather, I’ll tell you next about Uncle Wiggily and the hollow stump.”
It comes to mind because that’s what I think whenever ChatGPT ends an answer by saying, “if you like, I can tell you some more odd facts about Victorian underwear” or “there’s an interesting connection between the Bolivian nose flute and prostate cancer.”
Incidentally, Howard Garis also wrote the first 38 Tom Swift books (all authors for the series wrote under the pseudonym Victor Appleton).
March 12, 2026 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 11
The “buttered toast problem”
You’ve probably heard this one – I had. Why does toast always land butter side down? Physicist Robert Matthews analyzed this in the Nineties and it was published in the European Journal of Physics in 1995.
Toast sits on your plate butter up
When it falls, the table edge acts as a pivot, flipping it
It rotates as it falls (thanks gravity!)
From the height of the typical table, it has enough room to do a 180
There. Butter side down.
If the table were taller, it would have time to spin all the way around and it’s anyone’s guess which side would be up. Also, if the toast is tiny (like canapés) the math doesn’t work.
And yes, Matthews also formulated the question, “But what if the buttered toast was strapped to the back of a cat?” And yes, he also won the Ig Nobel Prize for it.
March 11, 2026 — 5:30 pm
Comments: 14
Is there no end to it?
When I asked ChatGPT to find me the scientific paper on banana peels, it told me other things I didn’t know (of course it did – ChatGPT always ends its answers with, “would you like to hear other mind-bendingly stupid facts about banana peels?” and then it humps your leg).
Turns out, banana peels really were a menace and people had been complaining about it long before it became a sight gag. In the late 19th C, bananas were suddenly cheap and plentiful, particularly in cities like New York (and London – the notice above is from New Scotland Yard). Vendors sold them on street corners and people ate the banana and tossed the peel in the street.
Newspapers were all over it, there were real accidents, it was especially dangerous for horses. Eventually, cities introduced littering fines, especially with banana peels in mind.
So when guys like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton came along, slipping on a banana peel was a natural gag because people were already concerned about them.
March 10, 2026 — 5:37 pm
Comments: 1
My neighbor is a chimpanzee
Or he’s trying to kill me. This is the fourth time there’s been a banana peel in my path in the past six weeks.
Banana peels are, in fact, significantly slipperier than other fruit peels. The journal Tribology (the study of friction) did the research in 2012. It’s titled “Frictional Coefficient under Banana Skin” and they won an Ig Nobel Prize for it.
I’m going to print the whole abstract, because it’s funny:
We measured the frictional coefficient under banana skin on floor material. Force transducer with six degrees of freedom was set under a flat panel of linoleum. Both frictional force and vertical force were simultaneously measured during a shoe sole was pushed and rubbed by a foot motion on the panel with banana skin. Measured frictional coefficient was about 0.07. This was much lower than the value on common materials and similar one on well lubricated surfaces. By the microscopic observation, it was estimated that polysaccharide follicular gel played the dominant role in lubricating effect of banana skin after the crush and the change to homogeneous sol.
Science! Is there nothing it can’t make boring?
Addendum: I am going to accept Carl’s win. But in future, I’m adding yet another clause to Rule Zero – nobody on life support. We’ll call it “Carl’s rule.”
March 9, 2026 — 5:37 pm
Comments: 7
