Our long national nightmare…

November 8, 2006 //

…is nowhere near over; let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The Chimp-in-Chief still has two more years to wreak havoc on the republic and the world, after all. Still, things certainly look a little brighter, a little more hopeful, today. I was convinced that in spite of all the promising polls, the Repugs would manage to pull out all the big important wins anyway. I don’t think I’ve ever been quite so happy to be proven wrong.

And yeah, it’s at least a couple of years and many thousands of casualties too late for that evil bastard Rumsfeld to be gone, but at least he’s gone at last. It may not make an enormous difference in the long run, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still a very, very good thing. Good riddance, Rummy. Couldja take Cheney with you?

Categories Politics 'n' stuff

A small triumph, and books

October 20, 2006 //

An amazing thing happened the other night. Unfortunately, it won’t sound amazing to anyone who isn’t a knitter, because it was a knitting thing. And it probably won’t sound terribly amazing to most knitters, either, because in the greater knitting scheme of things, it’s not any kind of big deal.

But it was a big deal to me, boy howdy. Over on the LiveJournal knitting community that I belong to, there are a lot of knitters who express their fear of various non-beginner tools and techniques, like cabling (which I did on my very first knitting project, not knowing any better, and which I love), or double-pointed needles (which I haven’t tried yet), or even circular needles (which I find no more difficult to use than the straight kind). I dunno, I guess I’m just not a fearful knitter. I’m afraid of fire, and rats, and electricity; I am not afraid of knitting, as a general rule. (Although I freely admit that steeking—a technique used most often for Fair Isle knitting that involves actually cutting your knitting with a scissors—intimidates the hell out of me, mainly because I can’t cut straight. But I digress.) I like trying new things when I knit. I could maybe stand to like new things a little less, in fact, and spend more time on actually finishing something more challenging than a scarf, but that’s another matter.

But there was a particular technique that I was ready to embrace and just simply could not get the hang of: the Möbius cast-on invented by Cat Bordhi. I wanted to learn it so that I could make one of the adorable felted cat beds in Cat’s Second Treasury of Magical Knitting, and after I got the book, I knew that I also had to make one of her amazing Möbius scarves. So I bought the book, and its predecessor, way back in March or so, ordered some lovely and affordable wool from KnitPicks and a long Addi Turbo circular needle for the cat bed pattern, and sat down to knit.

And I couldn’t figure out the cast on to save my life, despite the clear, illustrated instructions. Which was going to make it pretty hard to knit anything from the book, if I couldn’t even get past the cast on.

It should be noted here that Möbius knitting is not entirely intuitive for many people; no less a knitting celebrity than Stephanie Pearl-McPhee was awestruck by it, though of course she mastered it a lot faster than I did. A recent Web search found oodles of posts on various lists and blogs from people who had trouble with it, including plenty who couldn’t get past the cast on either.

Which is comforting, but I was still stumped. I put the book and needle aside for a little while, but it bugged me that I couldn’t figure it out. I’m still only an advanced-beginner-to-intermediate knitter, but so far, I’ve been able to figure out most new techniques after a try or three. But not this. A month or two later, I found a Yahoo Group devoted to Cat’s Magical Knitting, joined right up, and asked for advice and tips. I got quite a bit of help, including two long offlist posts from a very generous person who explained the cast on to me in painstaking detail. I read the posts carefully, many times, and thought I’d seen the light, but no luck. Then Cat Bordhi herself posted to the list, expressing her sympathy to me and offering an alternate explanation, a metaphorical one that she says is what she now uses when she does her workshops. The metaphor made sense to me, and I thought I’d finally cracked it, but…no.

Summer came, and even in the best of times, I don’t knit as much in the summer—and this past summer was unquestionably not the best of times. So Möbius knitting fell by the wayside again. Meanwhile, the lone knitted cat bed in the house—the Princess Snowball one from Stitch ‘n’ Bitch, which was fun to knit and is quite lovely and should not be slighted just because I’m intrigued by the Möbius one—became Jasper‘s preferred place to sleep and got dusty and gray, which highlighted the desirability of making another cat bed so that the first one could go in the washing machine at some point. So when fall came around, I made another attempt at the cast on. I did some more searches and found still another alternate explanation—this one from the DIY Network, which (I learned belatedly, to my chagrin) had aired an episode featuring Cat Bordhi demonstrating the Möbius technique. (I even put a note in my work calendar to remind me to record the re-airing, in November, figuring that if all else failed, maybe I could master it then.) This third explanation had me thinking that I was doing it right for a whole hour or so, until I finally looked at the yarn on my needle and realized that there was no way it could be right. Argh.

Then on Wednesday night, while I was watching the ho-hum finale of a truly disappointing season of “Project Runway” (which had been my principal obsession earlier in the year, when the wonderful second season aired), I decided to look at Cat’s metaphor post again and try it out. And this time, something clicked. A single phrase in particular clicked, in fact, which seems ironic after the large number of words I’ve ingested on the topic. The phrase described the needle leaning on the yarn in one part of the cast on movement, and I suddenly understood what I’d been doing wrong on every other attempt, and lo and behold, I got the whole thing down. Hallelujah.

(It turns out that once you master it, it’s an extremely fast and easy cast on. Figures.)

Of course, my successful attempt was done using some scrap yarn that I had sitting around, and I don’t actually want to knit anything from that yarn, so I undid it before I could think to take a quick photo for posterity. So I have nothing to show for my efforts yet. But I will, I hope, soon.

My other cool discovery of the week is Shelfari. I don’t quite know why a social networking site based on books is of more value to me than all the other social networking sites out there (except for MySpace, which I love for the quick access to new music, not for the social networking, which I barely pay attention to), but it is. I’ve already learned about five or six books that I’d never heard of before, and I only joined a few days ago. Book clubs never appealed to me, because I don’t particularly enjoy analyzing books closely; it’s partly why I ended up not being an English major in college. But I do value recommendations from people with compatible tastes in books, and this appears to be a significantly more accurate and less intrusive way of getting them than, say, Amazon’s utterly useless recommendations.* It’s not a perfect system; I saw a big spike in the number of people who have some of the same books as I do when I added The Complete Calvin and Hobbes to my “shelf,” because it counts that as 11 books. But it seems pretty solid so far.

If this post has bored you to tears, just be grateful that I’m not posting about cat colons. Miss Maisy had hers removed—the whole thing, seriously—last week and is now in messy recovery mode, so I’m a little preoccupied with that topic at the moment.

*I could write volumes about Amazon’s pathetic recommender system, which is a bit of an obsession of mine. I have to concede that I do find some value, albeit just the tiniest bit, in Amazon’s recommendations for knitting books, because it means that I find out about forthcoming ones that I might not otherwise discover…though since I’m not really allowed to buy anything knitting-related until I use up some of the yarn in my stash, all the recommendations are really useful for is making my Amazon wishlist longer. And I still get recommendations for IA/user experience books, though that’s pretty useless since I tend to find out about those without Amazon’s help. But using Amazon recommendations for anything less easily categorized, like music (which I’m still convinced can be categorized, just not by the methods that Amazon uses) or fiction, yields comically terrible results, as I’m sure everyone knows by now. And even things that should be categorizable don’t work that well. For example, I recently bought a large, comprehensive book on bread-baking, something I’ve been wanting to try my hand at for a while now. So of course as soon as I put it in my shopping cart, I got recommendations for 10 more large, comprehensive books on bread-baking. Cookbooks do tend to breed more cookbooks, but I really don’t think I’m ever going to need that many books on bread…and certainly not two minutes after deciding to order just one. Needless to say, I unchecked “Use to make recommendations” for bread books as soon as I could, just as I do with nearly everything I buy from Amazon. And yet I can’t resist playing with the recommendations regularly, just so I can exclaim over their absurdity. It’s sort of like picking at a scab, I guess.

Categories Books, teevee, movies, Knitting

Vexed

October 4, 2006 //

This Mets-Dodgers series is really vexing me. I find it completely impossible to root for either team, which just doesn’t happen very often in baseball. I’m an American League girl for life, so my usual reaction to the first round of the NL playoffs is one of the following:

1. Root passionately for one team. (This only happens when the Cardinals are in the playoffs—i.e., frequently—because the Cards have long been the only NL team I care about. I love the Cardinals. Even this season, when they’ve been exceedingly hard to love.)

2. Root passionately against one team, and therefore root with temporary passion for whoever is playing them. (This has happened nearly every year in recent memory, because I consider it a solemn obligation to root against the Braves. So does God. That’s right, God hates the Braves. If He doesn’t, how do you explain their World Series record in the ’90s?)

3. Mostly ignore the games and root with mild indifference for whichever team will make an easier NLCS opponent for the Cards and/or World Series opponent for the AL team. (This usually involves the NL West. There are no teams in the NL West that I actually like.)

This time around, option 1 is going strong, option 2 isn’t applicable (because the Braves missed the playoffs for the first time in, what, 20,000 years? Okay, actually 16 years. I just checked). And option 3 is no longer an option, because I utterly friggin’ hate both teams. The Mets: pretenders, wannabes, and pathetic for a significant percentage of their forty or so years of existence. The Dodgers: betrayed Brooklyn (the place of my birth), kept Tommy Lasorda employed, have all the arrogance of the Yankees but little of the glory. It’s really, really difficult to decide who I hate more.

Further complicating matters, the Dodgers now have an edge: Nomar. I adore Nomar. If he hadn’t a) been injured so often and b) gone to the National League, he’d be my co-favorite player in baseball alongside Bernie Williams. As it is, he’s still in my top five favorite players. So I can’t in good conscience root against Nomar. Nonetheless, I can’t in good conscience root for the Dodgers either. But then again, I sure as hell can’t root for the Mets.

So I suppose the only choice is to just hold my nose and wait for the NLDS to be over (and quietly root for Nomar to have a really good series nonetheless). And after that, I fear I will find myself in the curious and unprecedented position of rooting for the Padres, a team whose very existence I routinely forget. But at least they aren’t the Mets or the Dodgers.

Categories Sports

Global Warming? What Global Warming? (part 2)

October 2, 2006 //

It’s 10:24 p.m.

It’s October 2.

It’s 80 degrees.

I really, really need not to live here anymore.

Categories Nothing in particular

In Memory of Ann Richards

September 14, 2006 //

A great voice has gone silent. Ann Richards was an inspiration as well as a comic genius, and I will miss her wisdom, energy, and unflappable common sense.

From Salon:

10 reasons we already miss Ann Richards
Ann Richards, the famously silver-tongued and silver-haired former governor of Texas, died Wednesday from complications of esophageal cancer. She was 73. Here’s just some of what we’ll remember and miss about her:

1. Richards used her wit not only disarm her political opponents, but to encourage other women to get into politics: “Let me tell you, sisters, seeing dried egg on a plate in the morning is a lot dirtier than anything I’ve had to deal with in politics,” she said.

2. As a homemaker raising four kids, Richards became politically involved by volunteering on campaigns, including helping elect Sarah Weddington, the 25-year-old lawyer who had successfully argued “Roe v. Wade” before the Supreme Court, to the Texas House. Richards called Weddington the first “out-and-out feminist activist” she’d ever met, according to the Washington Post.

3. Two years after undergoing rehab for alcoholism in 1982, Richards was elected state treasurer, making her the first woman elected to a statewide post in Texas in 50 years. Of her return from addiction, she said: “I believe in recovery, and I believe that as a role model I have the responsibility to let young people know that you can make a mistake and come back from it.”

4. When Richards gave the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 1988 — where she zinged the elder George Bush — “Poor George. He can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth” — she also reminded the audience that she was only the second woman to give the keynote address at the convention in 160 years. The first was Barbara Jordan.

5. Richards may have lost her re-election bid to George W. Bush in 1994, but she beat another rich Texas oilman in her first governor’s race: Clayton “Claytie” Williams, who during the campaign compared rape to the weather: “As long as it’s inevitable, you might as well lie back and enjoy it.” That race was dubbed a match between “Claytie and the Lady,” in which “the Lady” prevailed by a narrow margin. 61 percent of women voters supported her, and she became the second woman ever to be governor of Texas.

6. As a feminist, Richards championed ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment in Texas. She led workshops for women campaign managers and political candidates, before being elected to office herself. When she became the first woman in half a century to serve as governor, she celebrated by holding up a T-shirt that showed the state Capitol and read: “A woman’s place is in the dome.”

7. As governor, Richards made it a priority to appoint more women, African-Americans and Hispanics to state boards than any previous Texas governor. Before she left office in 1995, she said: “I did not want my tombstone to read, ‘She kept a really clean house.’ I think I’d like them to remember me by saying, ‘She opened government to everyone.’” According to KWTX TV she appointed “the first black University of Texas regent; the first crime victim to join the state Criminal Justice Board; the first disabled person to serve on the human services board; and the first teacher to lead the State Board of Education.”

8. For her 60th birthday, Richards got a license to ride a motorcycle.

9. Late in life, Richards continued her advocacy for reproductive freedom. Appearing at a pro-choice rally in Austin in 2003, she denounced the influence of “a small group of religious right-wingers” on the Bush administration’s policies, and Texas’ abstinence-only sex education programs. One of her daughters, Cecile Richards, is now president of Planned Parenthood.

10. In her later years, Richards established the Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders, which will open in 2007. Her family requests that memorial gifts be made to the school, through the Austin Community Foundation.

There’ll never be another Ann Richards, but here’s hoping her school graduates generations of her successors.

– Katharine Mieszkowski

Categories Politics 'n' stuff

It really is the economy, stupid

September 8, 2006 //

(Er, not that I’m calling anyone who’s reading this stupid, you understand.)

Paul Krugman, writing in today’s New York Times:

“More broadly, right-wing commentators would like you to believe that the economyâ??s winners are a large group, like college graduates or people with agreeable personalities. But the winnersâ?? circle is actually very small. Even households at the 95th percentile—that is, households richer than 19 out of 20 Americans—have seen their real income rise less than 1 percent a year since the late 1970â??s. But the income of the richest 1 percent has roughly doubled, and the income of the top 0.01 percent—people with incomes of more than $5 million in 2004 â?? has risen by a factor of 5.”

And again, I am forced to wonder why Americans aren’t rioting in the streets every single day.

Categories Politics 'n' stuff

It’s Friday, I’m in love

September 6, 2006 //

(Actually, it’s Wednesday. But I am in love with Fridays. To wit:)

One of the things I love about the company I work for is that from Memorial Day through Labor Day, we get Friday afternoons off. Now, I’ve worked at other places where we had “summer hours”; they’re the norm in the publishing world, and even my last job, at the happy factory, offered some version of them. They always involved a tradeoff, though—we had to work extra hours the rest of the week to earn those four free hours on Friday. At my publishing job in Mpls., we weren’t supposed to shorten our lunch hours as a way of extending our Monday-Thursday workday, so I’d drag myself in at some ungodly hour like 7 a.m. and then stumble home exhausted on Friday afternoons, unable to do anything with those free hours except nap. Eventually I decided I preferred working normal hours during the rest of the week, and I gave up on summer hours (and then I got promoted to editorial director, and was way too busy to take whole afternoons off anyway…but I digress).

Here, though, there are no strings attached; we simply get Friday afternoons off in the summer. Of course, if you’re wrapped up in some big project or your client calls a meeting on Friday afternoon, you stay and work, but the message from The Powers That Be is clear: if you can, go home at lunchtime on Friday. They lock the doors and switch the phones over to voicemail, and the office is officially closed. Last summer, I was only able to take every third Friday or so, which was okay; I appreciated the ones I could take. This year, though, I’ve been in between projects and picking up little fillers for most of the summer, so I was able to go home early nearly every Friday that I was in town.

So the news we got yesterday was fairly fabulous: TPTB have decided to extend summer Fridays through the end of the year (or rather, through Christmas, since we close between Christmas and New Year’s, which is also fabulous). In addition to being delighted by this news, I’m feeling a little bit chastened as a result of it, like I’m obligated to Do Something with my Fridays instead of just wasting them the way I usually do. I confess that—probably due to its having been a pretty blah summer—I have once again spent most of my summer Friday afternoons napping.

(I’ve been thinking a little bit lately about my fondness for being asleep and what it means, and it’s been bothering me for the first time ever. Usually, I treat naps as a necessary part of dealing with day-to-day life as a depressive: existence is tiring stuff for me, and so I’ve tended to let myself off the hook for taking frequent breaks from it. But I don’t know, I’ve started to think that I shouldn’t coddle myself so much. It can’t be a good thing that unconsciousness is my preferred state so much of the time. And on a practical level, my frequent inability/unwillingness to do much of anything except sleeping all day on Saturday has gotten to be sort of a pain, because it means that I have to cram a weekend’s worth of chores and errands into Sunday, which generally means that most of them don’t get done at all. But just thinking about all of this makes me tired.)

So I’m entertaining the idea that maybe, just maybe, I should plan some sort of structured activity for my fall Fridays. I’m considering using that time to actually read all the information architecture books that I bought when I was preparing for a career switch; I’ve read the polar bear book and JJG’s book cover to cover, but the rest of them I’ve either skimmed or, in one or two cases, just barely glanced at, almost as though merely owning them was enough to improve my qualifications as an IA. I can never find time or atmosphere or, really, justification for reading them at work, so going through them on Friday afternoons might be a good solution. On the other hand, reading can be done in bed, and that usually leads to naps, so maybe I need to find an activity that’s a little less passive. I could set the time aside for going to the gym at a nice uncrowded time of day, and it would be great if I could be sure that I would actually go, but that’s far from a safe bet. Or maybe I should use the time to knit, which is a) realistic and b) sufficiently relaxing and c) might mean that I’d actually finish a project sometime soon.

But maybe there’s some perfect Friday afternoon activity that I’m just not thinking of. Anyone got any ideas for me?

Categories Nothing in particular

Olbermann for President?

August 31, 2006 //

Like everyone else in the reality-based community, I’m in complete awe of Keith Olbermann’s response to Rumsfeld’s McCarthyesque speech yesterday comparing those of us who oppose the war—that is, a significant part of the US public—to Nazi appeasers. Read the transcript or watch the video here.

If only someone, anyone, from the Democratic Party would speak out with similar eloquence and purpose. A girl can dream, I guess.

Categories Politics 'n' stuff

A true story

August 17, 2006 //

I got a sales call at work today from Chase Manhattan, pushing a Southwest Airlines Visa card, because apparently the fact that I’ve ignored their almost weekly solicitations by mail led them to believe that I was just waiting for them to call me.

Sales calls at work are annoying, and of course I told the guy who called to put me on their no-call list forthwith…but that’s not the story. The story is that the guy, who had a very heavy Indian accent—when he went into the disclaimer spiel about their no-call procedure, I couldn’t understand everything he was saying, and I’m good with accents—and was almost certainly calling from India, began the call by saying, “My name is Jack Anderson.”

Um…no. No, it isn’t.

Seriously, what is the purpose of having offshore telemarketers use “all-American” names? Am I supposed to like the guy better because he doesn’t have some skeery furrin name, and therefore sign right up for the credit card that he’s shilling? Do they think that by having these employees use familiar-sounding names, they’ll get customers to overlook the heavy accents and incomplete grasp of English and think, “Oh, that Chase Manhattan is such a great company, they don’t outsource their entry-level jobs to India”?

The thing is, I wouldn’t have even noticed the name if he’d used his real one; telemarketers usually give their names, and I ignore them just like I ignore the rest of the spiel. Instead, I ended up thinking how creepy and really quite offensive it was that Chase won’t let its offshore employees use their own names. I truly cannot imagine what they were thinking when they came up with this policy.

Unless the explanation is simply that they’re idiots. That, I’ll buy.

Categories Nothing in particular

Another Meme

August 4, 2006 //

I love memes. They’re the lazy blogger’s salvation, because they give you the opportunity to post without actually having to think much. Which is exactly what my heat-numbed brain needs.

My A-Z. Meme courtesy of Lauree on MySpace.

[A is for age]
44

[B is for beer of choice]
I don’t drink beer anymore, but I love Schlafly’s coffee stout.

[C is for career?]
Information architect/non-practicing librarian

[D is for your dog's name]
Diane (RIP).

[E is for events coming up]
My birthday in two weeks; John and Marie’s wedding in a couple of months.

[F is for favorite song at the moment]
“Since K Got Over Me,” of course.

[G is for gender]
Female.

[H is for Hometown]
New York, NY

[I is for the instrument you play]
Mandolin, not very well but better than guitar, which I play badly, and piano, which I used to play well but don’t get much chance to play anymore.

[J is for favorite flavor of juice]
Tomato or grapefruit, but I don’t really drink juice very often.

[K is for kids]
None, but two wonderful nephews (who are teenagers, not really kids anymore)

[L is for last hug]
Bill, of course.

[M is for marriage]
I like it so much I’ve done it twice.

[N is for name of your crush]
Too many to list, but Edward Norton and David Thewlis are the ones of longest standing, I think.

[O is for overnight hospital stays]
None so far, I’m happy to say.

[P is for phobias]
Rats are my only real phobia. I’m terrified of fire, and I don’t love flying, but those aren’t phobias, exactly.

[Q is for quote]
“That’s nothing to what I could say if I chose.”—Alice

[R is for radio station]
KDHX, baby

[S is for status]
Married, employed, alive.

[T is for time you woke up]
Just before 6 a.m., and then just before 7 a.m.

[U is for underwear]
Cotton.

[V is for vegetables you love]
Asparagus, especially, but pretty much all of them except okra.

[W is for worst habit]
Too many to list.

[X is for x-rays you've had]
Chest, once. Teeth. No others that I can recall.

[Y is for yummy food YOU make]
I make the world’s best brownies.

[Z is for your Zodiac sign]
Leo, of course.

Categories Nothing in particular