qotd, from the do-what-now? dept.
May 30, 2008
-- from Harper's Weekly Review. Apparently, they don't teach anatomy at Wesleyan.
[It means] “Celebration” or “Congratulation” something like that. We use this word when celebrating something like marriage, birth etc. We pronounce it “KOTOBUKI”
"A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a bush, but very, very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with."-- Douglas Adams, on towels.
FYI - Sunday is Towel Day. Plan accordingly.
I have finally figured out that Maddy's Blankie is her towel. Plus, she can suck on different corners for nutrition. Perhaps this means she'll be an intergalactic explorer?
-- My feelings about This American Life run hot and cold. Sometimes, I think it's the greatest radio show ever' sometimes, I think it's too plummy* and pompous to get through. My response have nothing to individual shows. It may have something to do with sunspots or the tides, which is to say that the problem is mine. Still, The Pie Goddess recently gushed over her love for it so I started listening again. Greatest. Show. Ever. Especially this bit (Act 4) with a mom interviewing her 15 year old boy and ruminating on the differences between boys and girls, which I totally relate to.
-- I always wind up just sticking my cable needle in my mouth** when I'm not using it on any given row. This ring thingy has the whiff of genius, however, and is much more sanitary than my current method.
-- Also stolen from the Craftzine blog: Make your own Adipose "Monster" and Thomas Doyle's Mixed Media Sculptures. I dearly want "The Reprisal," but suspect it's way out of my price range. Still.***
-- I feel Redneck Mother's pain. We can't have things either.
-- How gorgeous are these illustrations for Twelve Dancing Princesses?
-- Clue is my most favorite game ever. Now it's more awesome.
-- As if I needed another reason to read Meg Wolitzer's Ten Year Nap, this quote: "I knew it was not fashionable to write in a literary way about mothers and children. Right away, it was as though you were putting a hex sign on the cover of your novel, saying, in essence: Men, Stay Away! Read books by Cormac McCarthy instead! But it galled me that while both men and women would read about the lives of men, only women, it seemed, would read about the lives of women."
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* It is too a word. Shut up.
** Many, many times I have tried to teach myself to cable without a cable needles. I've yet to find a method that sticks.
*** Do these remind anyone else of Karen Joy Fowler's Wit's End?
My last knitting update included a picture of a project for my swap partner. It doesn't look like that anymore.
Before I ripped it all out, I don't think there was a row that satisfied me. Things weren't lining up just so. I'd tinked more than I care to admit. But rather than just give it up as a bad start in which Things Were Learned, I just kept trying to make it work. It won't work, as is, at least not as a gift to someone else, especially a someone else that I'd knitted the same set of rows twice. And so I did what needed to be done.
Fortunately, I have time -- it needs to be in the mail by June 20 -- to knit forward with courage and conviction. That first run was just for practice.