Gramarye

Mūlamadhyamikakārikāḥ Translation Project: Podcast 18:2

My sister has accused this of being, in fact, a knitting blog, and I have to say, I have yet more knitting stuff to report.

# This past Thursday, the campus closed for a staff development day, at which a workshop on, of all things, knitting, was held. I went, and although the class was meant for raw beginners (as opposed to advanced beginners or low-level intermediates, which is where I’m at, I think), I learned a whole new way of casting on (which was rather traumatic for me, as casting on is something I actually thought myself rather good at) and got some cheap, crappy, but free — and who doesn’t like free stuff — knitting schwag: specifically cheap acrylic yarn and shiny purple aluminum needles. (I gave the latter to Renee, as I can’t have metal in continuous contact with my skin.) There’s also talk of setting up a district knitting group, which might be fun.
# Using the yarn, I slapped together a quick iPod cozy — I already had an excellent leather case Renee bought for me last Christmas from one of the Telegraph avenue leather vendors, but I’ve had to start using a dock-connector-based remote with secondary headphone port because my primary headphone port has gone all “You don’t need to hear music in your right ear” on me. The cozy was done as a strip of stockinette that I mattress-stitched into a pouch and flap, with the added embellishments of a large buttonhole through which to connect the remote to the dock connector port on the iPod and a bit of cable on the flap. I may add on a closure mechanism at some point — possibly a cord or ribbon to tie the flap down. Buttons are lame.
# I made a quick Pract run with Rosie today. I snagged a couple new sets of double-pointed needles (little bry-flex 4’s for gloves and plastic clover 10’s for hats), a row counter (I had previously been using my double-deck of Piatknik playing cards with the Lempicka prints — attractive, and perfectly functional, but unstable for use on moving ubses), and some lovely green Blue Sky alpaca yarn (again for the gloves).
# I’m working on a scarf using the black Cascade Eco+ that uses ribbing with the added twist, as it were, that in every other row, each pair of stitches is knit out of order. The result is a sort of mini-cable. It’s nifty-looking, but maddening. Good practice, though, I thin.

In other news:

While we were in the Pract vicinity, we also stopped off at Bake Shop Bette (or whatever it’s called) for some old-school Americana dessert (really good strawberry shortcake, in this cake) and a little Mexican restaurant whose name escapes me, which Renee can’t stop raving about, not totally without justification.

For the rest of the weekend:

I’m planning on slapping together another enhanced MMKCast tomorrow. I’m also trying to reconstruct some of my notes on science fiction. I may also post something on some of the conversations I’ve been having with one of my coworkers regarding Fanon, Foucault, and Bachelard. (Not usually all three at once. Only Kevin’s mom can handle that many frenchmen simultaneously.)

(Note: While Fanon was from Martinique rather than France per se, he was Francophone and French-educated, so I feel comfortable assigning him to that nation for purposes of the joke. Also, while Foucault was gay, I don’t think Kevin’s mom would let that hold her back for long. As far as I know, there are no logistical problems with a joke about Kevin’s mom having sex with Gaston Bachelard.)

Hmm. I’m contemplating knitting a version of this scarf. Based on my calculations and the height of the character (6+feet; I checked with the creators), it’s about 10′ in length. I think if I want to replicate the smooth look, I would also need to felt it. Plus there’s the matter of the fringe.

If I do take this up, it would be a while; I’m currently working on a scarf in black, probably for myself, with a slightly insane stitch pattern (it’s basically a mini-cable achieved by knitting alternate stitches out of order — but without the use of a separate cable needle). I’ve also started to play around with picking up stitches, which means that my fingerless mittens may soon be fingerless gloves; this weekend I intend to buy some more DPNs and some less rigid yarn; I also think I’ll buy some bigger DPNs for a hat.

A Miracle of Science: Meet our friends from Mars.

_Note: As usual, apologies for the low image quality._

As Guido at “It’s a Purl, Man”:http://www.itsapurlman.com/ has pointed out, floral knitting accessories are not conducive to masculine knitting. I’ve been working on finding alternatives: a tote bag from a conference I went to last december (too small, too much velcro, tote bags suck), my gigantic trager messenger bag (which would be great, except that it’s soft-sided and worn against the body…which resulted in my bamboo needles _bending_), and a backpack (just didn’t seem right. Also, too many zippers for yarn to catch on).

On the way to mail “Dan’s scarf”:http://kukkurovaca.textdriven.com/gramarye/archives/dan-scarf off to him, I stopped at Elmwood Stationer’s, and happend to snag one of these suckers:

It’s apparently a “My Carry-All, Lime 18×24, Zipper, 4″ Fabric Gusset” from “FileExec”:http://www.filexec.com/, whatever that means.

Advantages:

* It’s semi-rigid and large, meaning my needles shouldn’t be danger of bending or breaking.
* It can comfortabley hold both long things and big round things. (I.e., long needles and large balls of yarn. Not like your mother, “Andrew”:http://earthtopus.blogspot.com. She holds entirely different long and large things.).
* Shockingly, it has the ability to stand on its own.
* It doesn’t have flowers all over it.
* It cost less than $20.
* It’s a lot more water-resistant than my conference tote bag.

Disadvantages:

* It’s freakin’ huge.
* I keep hitting people with it when I walk.
* It makes me look like an art student.
* Someday I will probably try to put too much in it and bust the bottom. (”Kevin’s”:http://kukkurovaca.textdriven.com/friendlytentaclemonster/kevin/ mom can tell us about the perils of this.)

Up next, we have my very ugly but pretty serviceable Clover needle case:

Advantages:

* It’s rigid, and provides a fair degree of safety for my needles
* It has an accessory thingie where I can keep my tape measure and yarn needles and folding scissors.
* It doesn’t have flowers all over it.

Disadvantages:

* It’s not quite as large as I would like. I need about twice the storage area in the accessory comparatment and about another two inches in the main compartment for my Lantern Moon 13’s. (The joke about someone’s mother is left as an exercise to the reader)
* It’s pretty ugly.

Last up, we have the Mead/TI dual-branded (oddly) calculator case that I use to hold my glove materials and miscellany.

You can’t see it very clearly, but there’s a pocket large enough for a small ball of yarn, some double-pointed needles, a few cable needles, my crochet hook, etc. It can also hold a pair of gloves in progress.

Ah, excellent. BlogZot remains a cool marketing practice, and SubEthaEdit is a pretty great progam. (One of my favorite text editors.)

macZOT!
1. SubEthaEdit from CodingMonkeys
2. BLOGZOT 2.0 on MacZOT.com
3. MacZOT and TheCodingMonkeys will award $105,000 in Mac software

Wow. This weekend was shockingly productive.

* I finished Dan’s scarf
* I installed “refeed”:http://www.lifehacker.com/software/feature/how-to-set-up-reblog-killer-server-side-feed-reader-160825.php
* I put together an “MMKCast”:http://kukkurovaca.textdriven.com/textpattern/mmkcast/18.1.m4a (AAC)
* I saw ??Brick??
* I wrote some stuff
* I figured out, more or less, how to pick up stitches for fingers on my fingerless mittens, opening the way for proper fingerless *gloves*. Woo!

Clearly I ate my wheaties. Or something.

??Brick?? was quite satisfying. Not as startlingly brilliant as ??Kiss Kiss Bang Bang?? (which is clearly my new standard for viewer satisfaction), but I came in to ??Brick?? with extremely high expectations.

??Brick?? is not an innovative film, at all — it’s pure, classic noir. (Note: I’m only interested in the writing here, and to a lesser extent, the acting; the directing and cinematography could be a totally new technique developed on mars and I wouldn’t notice); essentially, you combine ??The Maltese Falcon?? and ??Red Harvest??, and you get ??Brick??. But I don’t mean to suggest it was tedious — on the contrary, it was a faithful and authentic homage, and the cast did brilliantly. The dude from ??Third Rock?? was actually quite astonishing as the damaged hero with a supernatural ability to get the shit kicked out of him and keep moving, and Laynie from ??Everwood??, of all people, was creepy/appealing enough in her role. Creeppealing? Not to mention the supporting cast (Tug and the Pin in particular.)

(It occurs to me that there’s a certain — not innocence, maybe, but suspension of jadedness — necessary for the hard-boiled ethos to stand out, not to mention an atmosphere that tolerates high dramatics, and it may be that among contemporary settings, high school is a better than average candidate.)

I want to watch it again, or better yet get ahold of the script — the dialogue is written in an obscure patois (sp?), and it comes very fast; I’d like a chance to go over it line-by-line.