The Lair of the Emerald Serpent

The Cat has finally tempted the serpent with this delicious meme. Lots of people have complained about how bland and boring it is but I found it quite fascinating to be frank.

It certainly had me thinking outside of the box. Even if I am a week later than everyone else with the can opener.



1. Do you buy and use canned food?

Not too often. They are handy to have for a quick fix or the zombie apocalypse.
But if cans also includes glass jars then my answer would be completely different. Because I am a peanut butter junkie. The 100% stuff with a smidgeon of salt. No emuslifiers, no palm oil and definitely no sugar.



2. What is your favourite canned food?

Baked beans and chickpeas. Tomatoes for a quick fix pasta sauce.
Stuff in glass jars or bottles - red wine, peanut butter, pickled gherkins, pickled onions and sun dried tomatoes.



3. Do you like some canned food better than the fresh or dried version of it?

Canned and fresh tomatoes are a totally different beast. The flavour is completely different. Canned tomatoes taste much better then fresh when making pasta sauce.

I don't prefer canned apricots to fresh but the apricot season is so short and the critters are so expensive outside of that season that the tinned stuff is an obvious substitute.
I have just planted an apricot tree so with a bit of luck a few years from now I will have an extra few weeks of harvest.


I have both dried and tinned chickpeas in the pantry but the tinned stuff is much more convenient so the packets of dried chickpeas don't get much of a look in.

Tinned beetroot is also nicer and not as messy as the fresh stuff.

If glass jars are included, I will add artichokes and asparagus to the list because they are just so expensive and fussy to prepare from scratch.



4. Do you have a can that just sits at the back of the cupboard? has anything weird happened to it? or do you still plan on using it in the future?

The odd tin of Rotkohl and Grunkohl that I brought with me from Germany way back in the 1990s. Also some glass jars of Pflaumenmus. They are not bulging at the seams or decorating the ceiling with their contents but at this stage I prefer to regard them as some inedible science experiment.


5. What is the weirdest thing you have seen canned?


Most of the strangest stuff is to be found in Asian specialty stores. Abalone, squid and silkworm larvae come to mind as well as some pretty peculiar peanut and gluten concoctions.

But thanks to the Russian sanctions, I won't be encountering this critter any time soon.



I found a whole pantry full of these monstrosities online

I so hope that the possum is FAKE. That would be like finding a kitten in a can.

Back to the books

Book meme stolen from Catness

( Part 2 )

Twitter is on fire with the most wicked memes. What did trump expect when he goes signing piles of blank pages with a Sharpie and thinks that the Twitterverse won't notice all the photo shopping?
If it turns out that trump turned up at Cleveland knowing that his test results had returned positive AND made a point of arriving too late for the venue virus tests but getting a free pass anyway, then all hell will break loose.
No test. No talk. That should have been the rule. Totally and absolutely non negotiable. The trumpets slinked in wearing their masks but then took them off and refused to put them back on again and no one enforced the rules. Especially now that there has been 11 cases reported linked directly to the 'debates'
Keeping fingers crossed that those folks recover quickly

Just 11 more items to add to the trump rap sheet


In the meantime, while Joe Biden has pressed the pause button on his negative campaign adverts, the trumpets are still sneering about 'Sleepy Joe"

One take, from the heart, no teleprompter.

Over to you, Sleepy Joe!


And then there is this
I genuinely don't know how to feel about the thought that Trump's final words as president might be, "I can't breathe."


There is a Tweet or a TAPE for EVERYTHING!

Hitler has a hissy fit as Downfall goes Saudi



The best way to annoy the hell out of tin pot dictators is to take the piss out of them
They are just like big bullying boggarts really.

Meanwhile, this sicko psycho is still sitting in the White House

(I cannot find the video on Youtube so resorted to posting the tweet with the video link)



So Don the Con is pissed off only because the Saudis broke the 11th Commandment

Thou shalt not get caught

If we ever doubted that trump is a cruel capricious sadistic transactional psychopath then this is proof beyond all possible doubt

This place is supposed to be a Trump free zone but some fan art pictures are just too amusing for this serpent to keep all to herself



A lying vulture sitting on his ass would be a more appropriate description for such a grand swords and sandals epic

And anyway, since when do real lions consort with sneaky foxes? The inner Slytherin is disgusted already

Izzie’s been a busy but flustered serpent of late. The stinking sizzling weather is gone and there’s even been lots of rain lately. But in spite of all this good stuff just cannot snap out of this present state of doomy gloomy awfulizing. Been so many dramas with the ant man, dodgy taps and the roof repairs that just seem to be dragging on and on and now we will soon be in the middle of the rainy season. All this shit should have been finished on their first visit in early February

So much gossip and so little squiggled. Been taking a peek in the old Pensieve from many moons ago and could not help but think that way back in 2003 and 2004 with two jobs and three subjects at uni and no computer or internet in the Lair, managed to squiggle far more stuff in Livejournal land than now with all the time in the world and a Big Mac with its very own Portkey to the magical world of Cyberia

Had so much fun back in 2005 putting bets on the new owner of the ‘Fisherman’s Shoes’ Almost as a joke and sign of utter evilness was hoping that a certain Joseph Ratzinger would get the top job. It’s up there with Barack Obama or Henry Kissinger getting the Nobel Peace Prize

This time had the old forked tongue crossed for George Pell for Pope and Tony Abbott for the Lodge (there’s a federal election in Oz this September. It’s already been nicknamed the Yom Kippur election due to the impeccable timing)

Lucky it was only Monopoly money as the silly bugger blew his chances by claiming that the Papal resignation was setting a bad precedent and was ‘just not cricket’
So we end up with some outsider who bears an uncanny resemblance to one Alberto Luciano. If it is more than skin deep he will definitely not last long in that job. Only got a proper peek at the papers today but it was the big story all yesterday.
The minute I heard he was going to take the name Francis was very impressed. Francis of Assisi must be the nearest thing that Christianity has to a Buddha.
Was ever so amused how the only local journalist who saw any significance in this was one Walid Ali - a card carrying Muslim! Turns out that he had thought of a second Francis. Had forgotten about the Xavier fellow. Must go googling Francis Xavier. Always getting him mixed up with Ignatius Loyola.
Here’s hoping that he will resurrect liberation theology and all the left wing stuff that his predecessors wanted dead, buried and cremated.
Bring it back from the dead. Zombie theology is just what the world needs right now. Maybe he will even restore Anthony De Mello to the pantheon of saints where he belongs. His predecessor said such awful things about him and that was how Ratzi first appeared on the Izzie radar

Anthony de Mello was the Peter Cundall of Catholicism

Not that it should matter to this agnostic serpent. The Roman Church has become rather known for all the wrong sort of stuff lately - the stuffy bureaucratic old boys club that considers looking after its own much more important than doing the right thing and the whole obsession with sex, suffering and virgin mothers. But one thing that they do brilliantly is smells and bells. Religion without rituals is just missing a certain something.

And of course it was these lovely folks who brought us the Inquisition which reminds this serpent of a recent request for questions from an online friend

An Inquisition Meme

Izzie doesn’t do many of these lately. There’s way too many other distractions. But now and again a nosy Inquisitor comes along with ways and means of persuading serpents to respond. It was even tempting to answer some of the questions she gave to her other victims

The Dinner party is always an interesting and revealing hypothetical

( Serpent Snippets )

Just been experimenting with a certain text toy doing the rounds of blogville

Stolen from "The Well Tempered Plot Device"

Leonard Nimoy, currently *** directing his own resurrection in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, is the author of two books of poems rightly considered too hot for bookshops to handle. They're distributed solely through Athena poster shops, in the same series of icky little volumes with tinted pages and silhouettes of weeds that has given the world the if anything even more deathless works of the legendary Susan Polis Schutz, the Colorado Sappho. (You must know the stuff: "Our relationship / is beautiful / because / it is ours / because / it relates / to us.")

All you have to do is read through the following (genuine) sample poem, and then use your skill and judgement to supply the missing lines from the ones that follow. (These include about 80% of the text of Nimoy's second book of poems, which by a novel inspiration consists almost entirely of excerpts from the first.) Then turn to the end of the article to find out how you scored. First, the specimen:

and tossed in the box

Out came





and then the poem itself

"Rocket ships / Are exciting / But so are roses / On a birthday

"Computers are exciting / But so is a sunset

"And logic / Will never replace / Love

"Sometimes I wonder / Where I belong / In the future / Or / In the past

"I guess I'm just / An old-fashioned / Space-man."


In the box it goes





Guess it's the space-man that does it

Then there's the puzzle

And now it's over to you:

(i) I love you not for what I want you to be ... (2 points for the missing line.)

(ii) I loved you then for what you were ... (3 points.)

(iii) I miss you / And not only you ... (3 points)

(iv) My love for you is not a gift to you ... (1 point.)

– and the hardest one: here you have two lines to guess of a three-line poem.

(v) I am me ... (2+4 points.)





So bad that it's good? What other explanation could there possibly be

Putting it all together we get





The whole is obviously less than the sum of its parts



And now a real writing analyzer



Can already see the creepy Fool in the Dark Grimoire Asylum

Stolen from Ozfille in LJ land.







If you take enough samples, you eventually get the results you want ;)

But as an interesting experiment - first tested this thing out on an old Izzie book review and tossed it to the Mac Monster

First test - the bit up to the quote from an Amazon book review gets rated as like James Joyce!

The second segment also obviously exluding the book review as it is written by some one else gets downgraded to Dan Brown
The quote comes from a quirky quill clone of H P Lovecraft
and the whole thing including quote and all is magically transformed to be similar to Ray Bradbury. Hardly surprising since it is partly about one of his books after all and has got a quotation from it. Interestingly - removing that quotation still resulted in another Ray Bradbury result


Other serpent snippets scored J K Rowling, more Dan Brown, Nabakov and Raymond Chandler.
Maybe it's time to abandon the serpentine incarnation and transform into a chameleon instead

With a bit more glitter and sparkles, maybe we can score a Stephanie Meyer.

(Got Mark Twain, Mario Puzo and Stephen King but still no Stephanie :( )

Snatched from The Cat

Your result for The Mega Harry Potter Character Test...

Mad Eye Moody

Don't fight it...it is who you are!

Since it's that time of year for taking stock and starting again with the best of intentions, could not resist this wicked list meme

I took the 43 Things Personality Quiz and found out I'm a Spiritual Self-Improving Tree Hugger