Chatter Of The Squirrel

Engineered Obsolence

My microwave broke.

The door doesn’t close cos the plastic latch isn’t springy anymore. And if the door isn’t shut, it won’t turned on. Safety feature.

Took the door apart and looked at the latch.

One small piece of plastic snapped off! A small fragile, plasticky hook broke. Damn me if this wasn’t deliberately designed! Just cos they want to shorten the replacement cycle of the appliance!

That’ll work on many poor sods, but certainly not me!

A small drill in a pin-vise. A pair of pliers. A bit of paper-clip cut & bent into a small “L”.

Drill the plastic. Apply superglue. Insert paper-clip.

Industrial conspiracy defeated!

雞狼毫

While walking around Muar, killing time… I came across this big shop that specialises in Chinese calligraphy brushes. Hundreds upon hundreds of brushes, in many dozens of varieties. It was fun just looking and poking at everything. Except for the lady boss hovering behind me, making me feel like a tourist who’s aimlessly browsing and not really buying.

Which I was…

Rabbit hair brushes. Sheep hair. Goat hair. Pony hair. Etc.

Then I saw something called 雞狼毫. Literally, “chicken wolf hair”. That’s, interesting… Never heard of a .chicken wolf’. Asked the lady what animal hair is this? She says chicken wolf hair. I can read the words on the brush just fine, thank you very much. But there’s no such thing as a chicken wolf. Is there?

Could it be some kind of chinese fox? Or, dare I hope, a kind of sable ??

The most desired painting brushes are made from Siberian sable.

I have bought a pair of Winsor & Newton Series 7 brushes for my miniature painting. They were around RM50 each. For very very few hairs of Kolinsky sable hairs. Price of different size brushes increases rapidly proportionate to the amount of hairs used. For best quality, only the the hair from the winter coat of the tip of the tail of the male kolinsky sable is used. These are fantastic brushes, and well worth the price I think. The tip is sharp, and STAYS sharp for years. Nylon brushes will begin to hook within half a week of moderate painting. I’ve put these hairs under the microscope, and every hair is Sharp! It’s very springy and will snap back into shape every time. They’re wonderful.

And these 雞狼毫 were only about RM2 each? Might these be the same sable? Even found a series of smaller art series brushes that was pure 狼毫. So I bought like 3 of these brushes.

Did some Googling. Well no, for ‘Chinese’ knowledge, it’s better to use Baidu.com.

So it seems that there is no such thing as a ‘chicken wolf’. Those brushes are a combination of the neck hairs of a cock, and the 小黄鼠狼, ’small yellow mouse wolf’.

They’re quite adorable. And that reddish brown fur, is VERY familiar. More Googling. Found it’s genus name, Mustela sibtricus Palias. That’s the Siberian Weasel. Commonly known as the Kolinsky Sable, but the animal is not a sable.

This. Is. AWESOME!!

Sable brushes for PENNIES!! Relatively…

Then further research showed that there are TONS of fake 狼毫 on the market, which uses dyed pony hair instead of weasel hair. And the way to tell the fake, is that it’s many tens of times cheaper than the real thing.

D’oh!!

I tried out the brushes anyway, at the last Legio club meet. And the brush does not perform as well as a W&N. Softer, not as much snap. But the brush can hold a lot of paint and it’s pretty good for RM2. Until bits of hair starts frizzing, or breaking off and sticking to the model.

GAK!!

That’s chicken hair for you!

I wonder if I’m the first person to review using chicken hair brushes for miniature painting.

Wordpress & Chinese Encodings

My blog migrated a couple of times. Started from Blogspot, made its way to Blogsentral, before finally ending up here, in my own domain almost a year ago.

Had one problem ever since I migrated… I can’t put chinese characters in blogs anymore. Everything comes up ????.

I figured that it was the default encoding of the MySQL database. At that time, I let Fantastico set up the Wordpress for me. I didn’t have to do any configuration. It was just click and go. And if the outcome was a problem with chinese encoding, I just lived with it.

Heck, I didn’t even bother with changing my theme until just last month. The prospect of backing up the database, killing the old database, creating the new database with the correct options to enable chinese encoding, re-importing the backup into the new database. And crossing my fingers that I can do all this without shell access to my webhost. It is a lot of work. It is a lot of work figuring out how to do all this.

So I lived with it.

Until now, when I wanted to write 鸡狼毫.

Checked my webhost Control Panel. Looked at phpAdmin, and it seems that MySQL is already using the correct encoding. It should already be able to store Chinese characters.

Looked at the wp-config.php file for WordPress, and this was there,

define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);
define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);

Which…. makes sense… Right? MySQL is using UTF8 encoding. That’s what I need to store my chinese characters. So this is correct.

But no.

Apparently, according to this, I need to delete those two lines.

So I commented them out.

And now it works.

It’s just that simple…. Once someone else has figured it out.

And now I can explain what 鸡狼毫 is.

Movie: Speed Racer

I’ve never watched the cartoons. I watched tons of Wacky Races, but never a single episode of Speed Racer.

Wasn’t too crazy about this movie. But my housemate got free tickets. So why not.

And the Matrix brothers did this film. Also, there’s some positive buzz from reliable sources.

Found the movie to be extremely enjoyable.

There’s a lot of flashing lights, and very cartoony CG effects.

I couldn’t believe an anime to Hollywood production like this actually running 2hrs plus!

But it was a wonderful visual feast. At times adrenaline pumping, and at times kooky like Willy Wonka. The comic relief managed to be funny without being painful. And surprisingly, there’s pretty decent drama too.

Another successful Wachowski Bros. film in my book.

Squirrel Hentai ?

Every once in a while, I check into Statcounter, to get an understanding of how people are hitting my blog.

It seems that my blog comes up ranked #2 on Google when someone put in a search for “Squirrel Hentai”.

WHY?!?!?!?