Very Milonguera

"You're very milonguera, aren't you?"

I was fairly sure that this was intended as a compliment, or at any rate not a complaint, though I also got the impression he might have preferred something else - not in a critical way, but as though he felt he might not be able to give me the kind of dance I'd most appreciate.

On the way home, however, I noticed I had no idea what it actually means.

Even after reading this again I still have no idea what it means. At least, not in terms of how I dance, as opposed to how most of my favourite leaders dance, not that I think it applies to that either.

I just have no idea.

Two-Sheep Crochet Blanket

Sheep, like us, come in various colours, and the different natural colours of sheep hair make for beautiful works in wool without any need for elaborate design. Each colour has a speckled quality which gives it great visual life and interest. I like to combine them in geometric shapes, and I find the results very satisfying. Some companies achieve the same thing with non-natural colours by clever spinning and dyeing, and call it ‘tweed’ or ‘heather’ - it's worth looking out for these. But in the case of Garthenor's lovely range, it just comes like that straight off the animal. It's also interesting to touch, and very warm.

Materials:
Garthenor Organic Jacob Chunky, 4 skeins in Black and 4 in Grey (3 of each might be enough but I was working from stash with some left over from a previous project, and I'm not really sure how much I used, so 4 to be on the safe side). You can get this from iknitlondon, or online direct from Garthenor. 6mm crochet hook.

IMPORTANT NOTE: In the instructions below I am using the British/Irish terminology which I believe is also used in Australia and New Zealand, because it comes most naturally to me. American stitich names - which I freely admit are logically superior, they're just not what I'm used to - are off-by-one in relation to this. If you are used to the American system and you'd like to reproduce this object, you should simply cross out ‘dc’ and replace it with ‘sc’ throughout.

Execution:
With grey, make a crochet chain 48 sts long. Turn.
Ch 1 (counts as stitch into 1st st), 1dc into next ch, and so to end. (48 sts - this number will not change).
Turn. 1ch (counts as st into first st), 1dc into next st, continue to end, taking care not to miss the turning ch.
Continue till you have worked 12 rows of dc.
Break yarn and change colour by doing the last pull-through of the last st of the row with the new colour. Work 12 rows in black.
Repeat till you have 10 stripes.
Turn the work through 90 degrees and make 2ch to stand as first stitch down the side.
Work 1dc into the first, second, and fourth out of every four rows all the way down the side to the end. (Non-expert crocheters: be careful working into the turning chains, it's a bit fiddly. It doesn't matter much exactly what loop you work into as long as you're consistent. Rows that went one way will be trickier than rows that went the other way. I advise you to always pick up two threads, not more and not less. Depending on how you were taught to make your starting chain, you might have to do an extra stitch at the very end - this is fine - just do what has to happen to make the end straight.)
Turn and work back in the usual way, continue till you have worked 12 rows. Break wool.
Join in grey at the grey end, and work 12 rows on the other side in the same way.
Work in ends.

Very cosy.

Elegance

A dear friend gave me The Elegance of the Hedgehog for Christmas. I'd seen it before, and thought ‘nice title’, but not picked it up.

I liked it. It's extremely French, in a very distinctive and funny way, and one day I'd like to read it in the original and see how I got on. As far as I can tell, it's meant to be entertaining and satirical, and it is. If I'd never personally noticed that a sixteenth-century Dutch painting of lemons was absolutely nothing like a photograph, nor met someone who told me he was writing a Ph.D thesis on the semiotics of the World Bank, I suppose I might have laughed less. There were one or two words I should have looked up, towards the end, but I didn't because I was enjoying the story. And I agree with the author about how it had to end; I think it's rather the point. I agree with the reviewers that the whole Japanese thing is a bit contrived, but it does the job in context, probably better than anything else available.

I can't imagine that it will sell as well in English as it has in French.

An oddity - the translation is into American English, which is fine - but weights, measures, and even dress sizing have been changed as well. I thought this was a mistake, even supposing that this US edition was only meant to be sold in the USA. The book as a whole made enough demands on the reader's literacy that I don't really see the need to insult the intelligence of an American audience by converting a French television rugby commentator's instantly-recognisable description of Jonah Lomu from centimetres and kilos into feet, inches, and pounds. Why bother? Is the American reader seriously expected to imagine a French commentator saying this? And that the young protagonist recorded feet, inches, and pounds in her journal without further comment? And why should other readers be annoyed and distracted by the utter nonsense of having to deduce what system Renée's dress size is given in? Bizarre.

It is certainly about elegance, which is about self-invention. And stereotypes, and their usefulness for self-invention. I enjoyed that.

Thank you for the present. (x) (x) (x)

It is always summer somewhere

My Saturnalia light — for tangobaby:



For Johanna:



For V:

Everything stops when you open the lid

Have you ever seen that Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where Hobbes is in the washing machine? Hobbes — six-year-old Calvin's cuddly tiger - is being washed. Calvin opens the lid to check that Hobbes is OK. Hobbes tells him “fine — close the lid. Everything stops when you open it”. There's a sequel, in which Hobbes walks around for some time with little dizzy spirals above his head.

It puzzled me the first time I saw it, because it's one of those top-loading washing machines we don't have here, they only have them in America. The drum is a vertical cylinder, in which you put the washing and the soap, and there's a sort of pole standing up in the middle of it which I suppose is there to agitate the washing, because otherwise it would just nestle at the bottom. There's a steel lid on the top, which drops shut. It has some simple time and temperature controls, like a toaster, and you can open the lid while it's working to look inside.

I had never seen one of these; to me a washing machine is a much smaller, horizontal cylinder with a thick glass door, a seperate drawer for the soap, and automatic cycles based on the standard washing instructions, which you choose from using a dial. If you absolutely insist on opening the door halfway through the cycle, which you can't do accidentally because there's a timed lock to stop you doing anything so silly without switching off the machine first, you'll get water all over the floor.

Of course the cartoon wouldn't make any sense with a front-loading washing machine. Calvin might worry, but he wouldn't be able to open the door. Or, if he did manage to open the door, he would get doused in hot soapy water, and there'd be screams.

The way these machines work - quite different from the kind sold here - also explains the instructions for felting in many American craft books, which assume you have a top-loader, and if you've never even seen one, make no sense.

Anyway. I had a dance that made me feel like Hobbes being washed. Or, at least — agitated, if not very clean.

Moreover, he tried to rub his shoe on my tights (cheap ones, happily) as though he were a dog who'd found a nice, scratchy tree*, and as I withdrew my leg, tried to tell me that I should stand still because it was his turn to have some fun.

Now, that wasn't a lid I needed to have opened. Ew! Eww Ewww Ewwwwww! Eww!

* Some women like this, or so it is said; and I am thrilled to leave men who like it too, exclusively to them.

Growing Boy

When I first met my friend's son, I could pick him up by his hands and whirl him around off the ground at arm's length; to gales of laughter and cries of delight.



Mine are the little round feet - his the long ones.

He was still a lot shorter than me, and a little bit shorter than his mother, as you can see in the picture below, though not for much longer I suppose.



Pictures from Cannon Beach, Oregon, in August this year.

The Knitted Brain

The knitted object partially shown to the left is an accurate representation of the structure of a human brain, with the hemispheres joined by a zip, here shown unzipped. It was made by psychiatrist Karen Norberg, and if you click it you will visit the online Museum of Scientifically Accurate Fabric Brain Art, where there's a large, high-quality, zoomable image of the whole thing.

In an interview with Science, Norberg says that she found the process instructive in her studies: “Building a brain with yarn and knitting needles turns out to follow many of the same pathways as actual brain development.”

The works of psychologist Marjorie Taylor, also pictured in the museum, are quilted versions of MRI scans, and hang in offices around the University of Oregon. The cerebral cortex in blue velvet on silver is extremely beautiful - a detail is shown to the right.

Perhaps one day the works will be brought together for a show. Hat tip New Scientist (article behind the link, or issue 2687, page 51). In it, Taylor says: “There are plenty of rugs that show flowers and cats and lighthouses. Why not fMRI scans?”