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[Oct. 15th, 2012|10:36 am]
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Do I have a Livejournal account under my Facebook name, "Susan Cactuswren"? I don't recall ever starting one. |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 17th, 2010|12:23 am]
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There are books you can gulp down at a sitting, or at most in a day or two: tasty, delicious even, but not difficult to get through. There are books that take more labor: books you have to nibble at for some time. And there's another category.
I've finally finished John Crowley's Little, Big; or, the Fairies' Parliament. It's in that third category, because it's a book I have loved for some time now without having finished it. It's so dense, so complex, like a truly fine and enormous meal: I devoured about the first quarter of it, up through Smoky's marriage to Daily Alice, and even as I was loving every word I stopped -- it was as if I could not digest another bite. I picked it up months later, got as far as Auberon's moving into the Folding Bedroom at Old Law Farm ... and stopped again. Really it was very much like thinking, "Every bite, every word, of this is delicious beyond comprehension but OH my GOD I'm FULL." I've finally finished it, but my brain is still buzzing a little.
Next: my fourth try at finishing another book I love every word of, Greer Gilman's Moonwise. I know I've made at least four separate attempts at it. This one is even slower, because it's so textually dense that I have to start over again at the beginning every time. And Gilman has written another book which I'm afraid even to try before I've finished Moonwise.
If Greer Gilman had never had a word published I would still love her for her four-word description of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford: look at the end of the paragraph beginning "Oxford, for all his privileges of birth". |
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| Pizza? |
[Apr. 27th, 2009|05:22 am]
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For years I wondered where my mother, one of the great non-cooks of all time, got the idea that Wonder Bread topped with ketchup and Velveeta, warmed under the broiler until the Velveeta was barely softened, could possibly be classified as "pizza".
Now I know.
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| JREF debanned! |
[Apr. 4th, 2009|04:51 pm]
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Nothing could please me more. But I tend to agree with PZ Myers at Pharyngula: "Responding to a violation by automatically yanking the whole account is not appropriate and civilized behavior, especially when it can be resolved by an amicable communication. How about communicating first, and then yanking if someone is intransigent?" |
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| Just a shameless LAM |
[Mar. 21st, 2009|10:50 am]
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Socks. I made socks.
For the longest time I'd had the idea that socks were hard -- I knew people knitted them, but I thought they must surely be difficult or at least in some way very tricky. (The odd thing is that I've heard other knitters say the same thing about fairly simple knitting techniques: "Oh, it's a lovely pattern, but I couldn't possibly do it -- it has cables! I don't know how to do cables!")
Finally I sat down with a ball of worsted weight yarn in a shade of purple that looked nice in the store -- acrylic yarn, which your yarn-snob correspondent normally would not touch -- five double-pointed needles and a copy of Ann Budd's Getting Started Knitting Socks, and I started casting on.
And I knitted, and I followed the instructions. And I knitted, and counted stitches, and counted rounds, and flipped pages in the book. And I knitted, and tinked, and knitted again, and swore and clicked my row-counter, and kept finding the wrong number of stitches on my needles, and had to tink back and knit again, and I stared in wonder as the heel shaping produced something actually shaped like a heel, and I did the toe shaping absolutely perfectly until I reached the very tip where I expended a very great many very bad words indeed on Kitchner stitch which I know there's no devil but if there was he invented it.
Then I started over again, and did the whole thing a second time.
And now I have socks. They are fat and ugly and clumsy and far too big around, they're in an appalling color, but my housemate can wear them around the house and they will keep her feet warm.
Look:
Real socks. Which I made. Myself.
Next: one of those extremely cool self-patterning yarns. Schachenmyer Regia, perhaps, or Plymouth Sockotta.
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| Knowing when to apologize |
[Mar. 20th, 2009|12:55 pm]
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| [ | Tags | | | obama, politics | ] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | Living room | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  pleased | ] |
| [ | music |
| | There's a mockingbird in the back yard singing its head off! | ] |
One thing I greatly admired Barack Obama for during his campaign was his adamant refusal to apologize for things he hadn't said.
The Republican campaign, in standard Republican form, would come up with some strained deliberate misinterpretation of something he had said, and claim that their wild spin on it was what he'd meant. Perhaps the most memorable was when he compared John McCain's policies to "putting lipstick on a pig"; the McCain/Palin campaign tried to draw some nonexistent connection to Sarah Palin's line about a hockey mom being "a pitbull in lipstick", and were immediately up in arms: "Oh horrors, Obama just called Sarah Palin a pig!"
He had done nothing of the sort, of course, and he did not apologize for saying something he had not said. It would have been easy to issue a vaguely-worded apology there, on the order of, "I didn't mean to be offensive, and if anyone was offended I'm sorry". But he didn't, because he hadn't said anything to apologize for, and he wasn't about to apologize for what the Republicans said he'd said, or what they said he "really meant".
I admired him then, for refusing to apologize for things he hadn't said. And now I admire him more, for his willingness to acknowledge when he has said something stupid, and to apologize for it.
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| PETA and the AKC |
[Feb. 12th, 2009|04:09 pm]
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It is an undeniable, irrefutable fact that the AKC’s breeding practices have led to many dog breeds being dreadfully inbred, perpetuating and spreading health conditions such as hip dysplasia.
It is also a fact that many dog breeds have been over-bred to conform to increasingly preposterous “breed standards”. This has resulted in tiny, fragile, unhealthy “toy” breeds; large breeds prone to heart problems and bloat; and short-faced breeds which are unable to give natural birth.
However:
It is an equally undeniable and irrefutable fact that the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’s recent campaign outside the Westminster Dog Showis an enormous noisome reeking heap of fail-flavored fail topped with failsauce and garnished with freshly crumbled fail.
Anybody care to join me at the next PETA rally for a big bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken?
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