If you tell enough stories, perhaps the moral will show up.

2010-01-14

It's a Dirty Job

Diane gets sex spam and she doesn't like it. She's sent up an offensive example.

Now I don't know why the filth heads toward her mailbox, but a quick look at her quarantine shows that there's plenty of raw ... offers ... being blocked. A closer look at the one that got through reveals the reason. There's not a single dirty or ambiguous word, it's barely even English:

If you are disappointed in its second half, bold, come in. I can do for you is - what can not no girl! enter here (a link).
Where's the harm in that? Well, it's obvious. Obvious to me and obvious to Diane too. But utterly undetectable to to the machine that's trying to keep solicitations out of her mailbox.

So I have to go down and tell the lady that her basic problem is her dirty, dirty mind.

2010-01-03

Unwired

Over the last few weekends -- say 20 hours work total -- I've laid over the first hedge I planted here -- about 50 yards of "native mix" with the hazel taken out and used elsewhere. It's gone well. I'll never be fast at that job -- I enjoy the looking much too well -- but it's a real eye opener to see how much easier it all goes when you don't have to spend time de-wiring. And it's interesting to see what other planting-time lessons there are to learn.

  • Rabbit guards are a must. The plants mostly survived, but I reckon they're a year or so back, and the ground-level damage makes them harder to split and bend over.
  • Ignore the supplier's sincere advice to plant these bare-rooted slips in a trench of tilled soil. Even six years on, the roots move when you strain the plants around the spiles. Slide them into the clay down the back of a spade and they'll be forced to set firm roots in the clay.
  • Another piece of gardening advice to avoid is to take the top of the slip off so that they bush out. A bush is useless -- you have to strip it all off when you lay. What you want is tall, spindly whips, so just leave them be.
  • Never plant blackthorn. Duh.
  • Don't plant briars with the rest of the hedge. Until it's laid over they just get in the way.
  • So the mix, if you don't fancy just hawthorn, would be five hawthorn, one spindle, one hazel and one fruiting tree depending on your taste -- mine would be beech. Then come back when you've laid it and put a dog briar in each of the gaps.