Ooh, I knew that Kaffe Fassett (textile artist and knitwear designer extraordinaire) was also famous for his paintings, but I’d never seen them before! So pretty.
Five miles. Eight kilometers. My legs felt great, except for the persistent feeling that I was wearing 2kg ankle weights. Why do you feel really heavy some days and really light on others? So weird.
Another day, another picky eater question on MetaFilter. This time it’s somebody who’s looking for healthy recipes… but doesn’t like vegetables or meat. Man, that just makes me sad. What the hell are these people eating? (It reminds me of a chick I lived with in London, who refused to eat anything but pasta. She had it EVERY SINGLE NIGHT.) I remember being shocked while watching The Biggest Loser last week, when they had a “temptation” to see who’d eat various foods, and Rachel nearly gagged at the thought of eating bruschetta. Because it had fresh tomatoes on it. That’s the most pathetic thing about these people, in my opinion. They’re not eating good food. They’re just stuffing themselves with empty calories. Yeah, I’m still weighing in on the chunker side of the scale these days, but that’s because I can’t resist blue cheese and wine and risotto and steak. If you’re going to be fat, you should at least be fat from eating tasty stuff, not from stuffing your gob with the culinary equivalent of wallpaper paste.
Wow. My mom was reminiscing to me a few weeks ago about the Blizzard of ’78, and how we’d gotten snowed in and the Fire Department had rescued her and me (as a baby) on the back of a snowmobile. Turns out that other people were being more productive with the enforced down-time. Two guys in Chicago came up with the idea for the first online community!
Ha. Roger Clemens has an entry in the Dickipedia. I especially like that it mentions the particular game that made me dislike him, the one where he threw a chunk of shattered bat at Mike Piazza.
Here’s a belated “Happy Valentine’s Day!” to my Snookums. We kept it pretty low-key, meeting Fiona (and Matt) and Bex (and Fin) for dinner at Una’s. After some lovely food, we retired back to our place to introduce Fin to WarioWare. Too funny. I think it’s a lot more fun to celebrate the day with friends and laughter than to worry about conforming to some romantic ideal. Wii and box wine are just fine for me!
This book nearly killed me. And not in a good way. I bought it a few months ago on the basis of this AskMeFi thread, which compared it to Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I thought, hey, I liked that book! And people gave this one some rave reviews. So I dived in.
Ugh. I HATED IT. It started off okay, and I actually liked how Eco introduced William with a nod to classic Sherlock Holmes stories. (Specifically, the bit about the runaway horse.) The murder mystery was compelling, but it makes up only about 10% of the book. I’m serious. For every tiny scrap of a clue you got, there’d be twenty pages of random discourse on medieval monks, philosophy, the Inquisition, Papal succession, and heretical sects. I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to recognize all these groups’ names (like, maybe in Italy this stuff is all well known?), or whether the point was to completely overwhelm and disorient the reader (which is what happened). The only, ONLY reason I forced myself to finish it was just so I could find out who the killer was. Oh, and I was mildly curious to find out what the title referred to, which is – SPOILER ALERT – nothing. IT SUCKED.
So basically, if you’re looking for a mildly compelling murder mystery with lots of priestly sex, torture, and poison, but that’s somehow also COMPLETELY BORING at the same time, this is your book.
Has anyone seen the movie with Sean Connery? Is it any good?
This morning Prime Minister Rudd made history by apologising to the Aborigines for their mistreatment at the hands of the government. It’s been a long, long time coming, and for the past few weeks (once it was confirmed he was actually going to do it) there’s been a sense of excitement and happiness at the gesture. Over on Ravelry, someone suggested that we all change our avatars to say “sorry” for the occasion. I admitted in the thread that while I’m totally on board with the apology, I worried that people would resent my participation since I’m such a new arrival myself. I know people can get very defensive when they think they’re being criticized or judged by “outsiders.” The girls over there were great, and they pointed out that we’re all immigrants here and it shouldn’t matter whether your family in Australia goes back seven years or seventy. I’m a citizen here now, and as a citizen I think it’s right that my government should apologise for what was done in the past.
So there I was, feeling all proud of my government and happy to be here for such a historic occasion… when I made the mistake of mentioning the Sorry Day speech in front of the wrong person. In retrospect I should have known better; this person (while lovely in a lot of ways) has shown herself to be ultra-conservative in the past. She made it clear that she completely disagreed with the apology. “Don’t even talk to me about that,” she spat out. “It’s just going to lead to liability and lawsuits–” I countered with the facts I’d read here. “Actually, the apology doesn’t have any legal impact. They could sue before. Even Tony Abbott didn’t claim that in his editorial in support of the apology this morning…” She didn’t want to hear it. Then she launched into a story about how an Aboriginal group had petitioned the council where she lives (“… and where I pay council rates!”) for the return of a piece of land (“… because some sacred somebody took a piss there once”), and then when they were granted it, sold the property to a developer for millions. “Hey, I’m not going to begrudge somebody with HALF MY LIFE EXPECTANCY the chance to sell out,” I half-joked. She wasn’t amused. And then came the kicker, of course. “Well, for those of us that have lived their whole lives here…” blah blah blah. It was exactly the “You’re not a REAL Australian” argument I’d been dreading. Rather than say something I’d regret, I turned and left.
I’d almost forgotten there were people like that around. Disappointing.
I put RSS feeds on the Tapestry Craft website today, so now you can see whenever I upload new products. There are even category-specific feeds, so you can subscribe to just knitting yarns or cross stitch kits or whatever. Huge thanks go out to the Snook, who helped me with some decidedly non-trivial coding issues. He rocks.
My name is Kris. I’ve been blogging since the 90’s. I live in Sydney, Australia, and I spent most of my career in the tech industry.
No AI used in writing this blog, ever. 100% human-generated.
Woot, my knee-jerk don’t-overthink-it pub-quiz answer was Iran which seems to be [✓]. I ‘knew’ it was more populous than…
Congrats and to many more 🙌🏽
My home economics teacher taught us to use “J cloths” as press cloths. (Cellulose cleaning cloths). The upside of using…
Special thanks to Matt Hinrichs for the site logo!
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