Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The real work of an opposition party is to oppose.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

If you voted for Trump, you don’t get to speak about ethics, morals, or rule of law.

Trump’s cabinet: like a magic 8 ball that only gives wrong answers.

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Come on, man.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

You are here: Home / John Cole Presents "This Fucking Old House" / What Has John Cole Been Doing?

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72Comments

  7. 7.

    Mary G

    Looks like a little slice of heaven. How are the birb condos doing on the front porch?

  8. 8.

    CaseyL

    OK, is that top photo what the back yard looks like now, versus earlier versions, when you first planted the trees?

    Or is the top photo what your back yard looked like after spending all spring going crazy with growing, and the photos below it are how things look now after you’ve pruned everything back?

    I hope the correct answer is the first, because otherwise I may offend you forever by saying I like the “jungle garden” more than the “neatly manicured yard.”

    But that’s just me – you do have an idyllic looking space.

  14. 14.

    piratedan

    in my best Marlon Brando as Col Kurtz……. The Willow… The Willow…. The Willow….

  21. 21.

    Ken

    @Major Major Major Major: Naw, John just has the realtor’s touch with the camera – the ability to find the one angle that makes a 300-square-foot apartment look like a luxury lodge in the Berkshires.  He’s used it here to make an attractive small willow look like an Ent. An Ent in full battle rage.

  25. 25.

    NotMax

    At first glance it looked as if you had installed a tetherball pole.

    Just got off a two hour call with Mom about something having to do with her computer. Finally got around to walking her through installing Teamviewer, so I can now see from here what her screen looks like rather than trying to best guess some stuff from her description and control her computer remotely if needs be. Once that was done, dilemma solved. In this case it wasn’t a real computer problem, it involved something to do with online borrowing from her local library.

    Her first comment, punctuated with a laugh, after I explained what Teamviewer is: “Does that mean you can look at my porn?” And people wonder whence I get my acerbic sense of humor.

  28. 28.

    wvng

    Nice. I think I bought the same arbor(s) you have. We’re training squash to grow up it. What are you doing there, John?

  29. 29.

    CaseyL

    @WaterGirl:  I think you’re right.  I took another look, and the new (?) tree in front of the red wheel barrow, which looks so tiny and nearly invisible in the first photo, gets its DeMille closeup in the second photo.

    So the “Jungle Fever” look is a matter of camera angle and position.

  30. 30.

    JoyceH

    When I first moved in here, I planted a willow. It looked nice for a few years, but then it died. I was talking to my lawn mowing guy and he said well of course it died. Once it got bigger there wasn’t enough water in that spot for it. So… huh.

  31. 31.

    Eljai

    The wildflowers look great!  Why is one of those cars parked facing the wrong direction?

  34. 34.

    joel hanes

    Seven nests of babby birbs the man has, and he shows us pictures of plants.

    Plants.

    A request from the peanut gallery :

    either at sunrise or sunset, Cole, please walk out on your front porch and make an audio recording of the birbs.

  35. 35.

    schrodingers_cat

    OT:

    RIP Sushant Singh Rajput, an upcoming actor who worked in the Hindi film industry passed away today. He killed himself, he was depressed. He was only 34.

    Here he is in Kaipo Che, 

    He is the cricket coach. (Kai Po Che = you have been cut in Gujarati, when cut some one’s kite with your manja, the sharp and abrasive String which you use to fly a kite)

  36. 36.

    Steeplejack

    New Grantchester starting in a few minutes (at least here in D.C.). I thought they lost the thread a bit last season, but I’m going to give it a go. Not sure about the new vicar.

  40. 40.

    trollhattan

    @Luciamia:

    I planted one (curly leaf willow) at the far back corner of our backyard. A cutting from wife’s cousin’s willow, which wasn’t scary big. Learned if you plant one over the sewer main, it will go bonkers, and ours is yuge, many times the size of the donor tree.

    The shade is welcome in summer but it’s kind of a giant weed, otherwise.

  41. 41.

    zhena gogolia

    @Steeplejack: 
    My husband can’t go up the stairs to where the TV is, so we’re going to try to stream it. I’m a little leery about the new vicar too, but it just means Robson gets more to do.

  42. 42.

    mrmoshpotato

    @jharp: You! Monster! The willow is part of the Cole compound (and will soon consume the Cole compound). ?

  45. 45.

    geg6

    @Baud:
    I can attest that WV is almost universally gorgeous.  From a distance, almost every square inch has spectacular scenery.  And Cole’s hometown is quite picturesque.  As long as you don’t look too closely in some places, you almost forget how much poverty and ignorance is there. I must, actually, admit that my part of Western PA is similar, except our mountains are not quite as high.

  46. 46.

    J R in WV

    Well, there are corners of W Va with lots of ignorance. Other places pretend they aren’t pits of ignorance, but…

    Most of it is beautiful, although the top of the Mud River watershed is one of the world’s largest mountain top removal strip mines. Friend is a hydrologist, does research, says the valley fills do hold water and release it more slowly, so flows downstream improve in dry spells. But the fills also release heavy metals, selenium, lead, etc, etc.

    So the bass have issues with sexual dimorphism, and the little flood control lake has signs about “Don’t eat the fish from this lake!”

    But it is really pretty, nearly everywhere away from the mines.

  48. 48.

    geg6

    @joel hanes:

    One of my best friends from high school has some nests with birbs nesting and peeps just starting to get all fuzzy.  She had been documenting them in FB for the last couple of weeks, from eggs to hatchlings.  She PMed me the other day asking if I was okay because I always comment on people’s animal pics, always a positive comment.  I had to tell her the bad news: birds are one of those animals I hate.  They are dirty and full of insects and they are fucking dinosaurs.  Once you see the dinosaur in them, you can never unsee it.  The only animals I find more creepy than birds are snakes.  I hate them both.

  49. 49.

    jame

    Nice! You have the food planted in back, and the ornamentals in front, as they should be.

  52. 52.

    TaMara (HFG)

    @zhena gogolia: My cousin somehow managed to break his shin, I think, just from a misstep. Had to have surgery and in a wheel chair and was celebrating being able to crawl upstairs to sleep in his own bed this week. It’s been a long 8+ weeks.

    Hope for a quick recovery for your husband.

  56. 56.

    captnkurt

    Inquiring minds are asking: What’s he building in there?  We have a right to know…

    What’s he building in there?
    What the hell is he building in there?
    He has subscriptions to those magazines
    He never waves when he goes by
    He’s hiding something from the rest of us
    He’s all to himself
    I think I know why

  57. 57.

    randal m sexton

    Did you manage the padrons ? I just ate my second little batch of them, but Im in a warmer clime.

  61. 61.

    Sure Lurkalot

    That willow is either scarily beautiful or just scary. I’m jealous of the veggie garden and Mr Cole’s prodigious preserving capabilities.

  63. 63.

    zhena gogolia

    @Steeplejack:

    I don’t know if you’ll see this, but I was pretty underwhelmed. I liked Will okay last season — the episode with his father (Nathaniel Parker) was great — but this one just felt really flat. The mystery was meh and there was a lot of pretty photography but not much else. I hope it picks up. I can’t blame it entirely on Will, but James Norton is a hard act to follow. He just infused the series with life.

  66. 66.

    joel hanes

    @geg6:

    I know what you mean about the dinosaur thing — I think one of the bits of genius in Jurassic Park was to study bird behavior and make the biped dinosaurs act like birds do — because birds are dinosaurs that survived.   And some bird behavior is genuinely creepy.

    And when I was in elementary school,   I used to gather eggs in my aunt’s chicken coop, and those old hens were everything you say: scraggly dirty evil-eyed demons.  And the barnyard geese could be really alarmingly aggressive.

    But a flight of pintails or mallards overhead gives me joy.  As does a string of merganser chicks on the river, paddling like fury in a line, trying to keep up with their mother.    And last winter, eight mute trumpeter swans wintered on the river near my Mom’s place, in a state where they’d once been extinct for half a century, and we often saw them flying — my god, they’re huge and graceful.

    And brown pelicans fishing always make me laugh.

    Mom has seven feeders up year round, and watching the orioles and cardinals and blue jays and chickadees and juncos and nuthatches and three kinds of woodpeckers and house finches and sparrows and grosbeaks and mourning doves and grackles and and goldfinches and catbirds and brown creepers and blackbirds is absorbing.   And the birdsong in her backyard early and late is good for the heart.

  67. 67.

    Anne Laurie

    Congratulations, Cole — so tidy and well-organized!

    (My thighs & shoulders hurt, just contemplating all the lifting you did to make it so.)

  70. 70.

    Steeplejack

    @zhena gogolia:

    I was a little underwhelmed too, but for different reasons. Will strikes me as okay, but you’re right, so far he’s not replacing Sidney as the heart of the show. Although the way they wrote Sidney’s exit kind of diminished him, in my opinion, and made me not sorry to see him go.

    And they have sort of painted themselves into a corner—or ended up there inevitably because of James Norton’s departure. So much of the series was based on Sidney and Geordie’s relationship, and just slotting Will into the same spot is pretty clumsy.

    My other complaint is the way they are putting an increasingly heavy-handed gloss on the ’50s through a “modern” lens. Really laid it on thick tonight with the “women’s issues” angle.

  71. 71.

    zhena gogolia

    @Steeplejack:

    I don’t think the phrase “the patriarchy” was used that way in the 1950s. Sidney agonized for several seasons about his love for Amanda conflicting with his love for his vocation, but after 15 minutes with this other woman it was all easy peasy and he just left. Geordie just involves Will in all the investigations for no particular reason — Sidney had some kind of super-intuition that was always signaled by certain chords on a piano, so we understood why Geordie used him. What does Will bring to the table? Why is it just assumed that the new vicar will also be a crime-solver? It’s a mess. I think they probably should have ended it when Norton decided he had to leave. Or at least they needed to do some clever writing to make it work. That hasn’t happened. Will’s mother is the most interesting character, though. Love me some Jemma Redgrave.

  72. 72.

    opiejeanne

    @Yutsano: Thanks. I looked it up too but was having trouble finding anything because autocorrect kept changing the word. I finally did find out about the time I couldn’t stay awake any longer.

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