The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Beth Friedman:

Serge @ 88: Fascinating. I haven't read the Padgett story, but the first thing that came to my mind was Theodore Sturgeon's story "Need."

I suppose it's a common enough riff to have two stories (at least) based on similar ideas.

It's hard to believe that that's that same actor who plays the cranky American Dr. House.

The link posted in the main text is of better quality, but the intro is also available on YouTube, here.

I'm currently working on Bazaar Socks from Interweave Press. This is an insane project involving seven different colorways of socks, knit in Fair Isle style, requiring the purchase of 14 different balls of Brown Sheep Cotton Fine yarn.

I'm getting close to done with the first sock, and am having great fun with it, though I wish I could figure out why my Fair Isle knitting has a tendency to be lumpy -- I don't think I'm knitting it too tight, but that's the obvious culprit.

I'm also working on spinning my first ounce of silk on my Louet wheel, having graduated to that from a silk/merino blend. I think it may take roughly forever, and I have no idea what I'll do with the silk thread when it's done, but it feels lovely. And it hasn't broken yet, even though spinning so fine feels as if it really shouldn't work.

Fragano @63: My theory about calamine lotion is that painting it over what itches makes it so disgusting to scratch that it acts as a deterrent, which helps break the itch/scratch cycle. I agree that it has little function in and of itself in reducing itching. One of the great advances in my camp-attending life was non-calamine-based itch reducers for mosquito bites, that actually worked somewhat.

By the way, a recent episode of Private Practice dealt with this issue. A mother refuse to have her other children immunized after the older one developed autism shortly after his MMR -- and she was sure it was related.

The middle child developed measles (which took a while for the pediatrician to recognize, since I don't think he'd ever seen a real-life case before, and everyone in the clinic had been exposed by then), and everything went pear-shaped, with the child eventually dying. (PSA: Measles can kill.) The doctor on the show forciby vaccinated the youngest child over the mother's protests, just after the middle child died.

#32 is Bqlffrhf tehzcvat nobhg Ntnzzrzaba naq Zraryrhf, naq gurve ovpxrevat ng gur raq bs gur Gebwna Jne nobhg gur qvfcbfny bs (VVEP) Pnffnaqen.

It's not the inline ads that bug me so much as the popup ones. Someone one gave a link to a site that had links to kill most of the popups, plus IE's (yes, I still use that; Firefox irks me) own popup blocker.

Of all the silly things, the site that has the most annoying popups, because I go there frequently, is Snopes. I haven't figured out how to beat that one into submission yet. Every single time I go there, I get a popup, though it does have the grace to stay in the background.

Having lunch with a total stranger because she was a writer and I was a (nonpracticing) nurse, and she was writing a story that involved someone with leukemia, and she wanted to pick my brain. A friend who knew both of us made the connection.

I mentioned over the course of that lunch that I did freelance copyediting, and she hired me to edit a monthly newsletter for a nonprofit organization.

Which led, several months later, to her asking if I knew anyone looking for work as a technical writer, because her husband was looking to hire someone to subcontract for him. I told her that I didn't have any official qualifications, but that I'd done quite a bit of documentation in my current position, and it was exactly the career that I'd been hoping to break into and didn't know how to. After a couple of interviews, he and the person who actually needed the technical writer agreed that I had sufficient skill to learn what else I needed on the job.

Which gave me the courage to resign from a secure but dead-end job that I hated, and leap into the unknown world of independent consulting. (Not so secure, it turned out, since I'd been working for Arthur Andersen, but that was several years later.)

I was hired for a 6-month assignment that turned into 18 months of work to document software that I suspect never got implemented, but which made me a real technical writer, and eventually led to my working for Bruce Schneier, which I'm still doing today.

All because Caroline Stevermer suggested I have lunch with a friend of hers.

Ledsmom @130:

There is no such thing as leftover qiviut. Not at those prices. Trust me on this.

As for kitten fur, if you'd like to send it to me, I'd be happy to see if it's spinnable. I suspect it'd have to be mixed with something else because it has a short staple without much "cling" to it, but I could give it a try. I've had my spinning wheel for nine months now, and I'm starting to feel confident in my abilities, so this would be an interesting challenge.

I'm pretty sure I saw someone at Fourth Street (Mark Gritter?) wearing one of those.

I am currently making a large pile of broken threads and fluff. But that is merely byproduct -- the intended item is several ounces of finely spun merino and silk blend. When things are going right, it spins into something amazingly fine (in the thickness sense, though it's also a very fine thing), and when things aren't (most of the time), it breaks every several feet. If I'm lucky, it takes less roving to get it going again than the amount that broke off, but I'm not lucky often enough.

When I'm done spinning this stuff, it's going to look like a variegated sky blue (as in all the colors of the sky -- blue and white and purple) cloud, and I'm going to try to turn it into this shawl.

I just finished a pair of blue-and-purple socks, and am now working on these socks in forest green.

For Internet-based music, I'm also very fond of the folk station at music.aol.com (formerly Spinner.com). It's a subset of the country stations.

For a while, they were limiting listening to an hour a day except for AOL subscribers, but that seems to have gone by the wayside.

(o) Those you have read so many times that you don't need to read them again to experience them.

(Am I really first?)

A white unicorn from Dubai. Hey, if it's an imaginary animal, it can be a mythical one, too.

Brenda @9

I grew up with the "if one of those bottles should happen to fall" version also. I'm from Morton Grove, IL, one of the suburbs north of Chicago.

I also grew up with the "eensy-beensy spider," not the "itsy-bitsy spider" or some other variation. (Long ago, Parade Magazine did a "What did you call the spider?" poll, and there were dozens of versions, IIRC.)

The version I learned in nursing school was "On Old Olympus' Towering Top, A Finn And German Viewed Some Hops."

James P. @20:
I also heard that version, though yours is missing the last two words: "Such Happiness!" Which makes it work with the missing ones.

Unlike many of the things I memorized in nursing school (such as the origin, insertion, function, and innervation of all the human body's muscles), this set has stuck with me permanently.

I recently succumbed to the lure of GPS units and bought a Garmin Nuvi 250 when Costco had them at $300 ($100 off). But I'm about to return it, because Costco then offered the Garmin Nuvi 650 (slightly snazzier, with MP3 player) for the same price. (For any Costco members, the 650 is $300 at least until 10 December.)

I used it this week to find a place out in the boondocks (the wilds of Shorewood, MN), and it guided me perfectly, modulo one "reCALculating" when I wanted to take Highway 5 rather than Highway 7. The hardest part of any trip for me seems to be once I get off the main drag and have to find the actual location, and this worked very well for that.

I'm now in possession of an antique German spinning wheel that I think can be made functional with the repacement of the belt and the foot connector thingie. Oh, and it came with a hank of something ancient that I think might be flax.

Scott H. @ 1

I'm not sure about the dent just in the lip, but the dent that starts in the lip and continues up to the nose is called the "philtrum."

Thanks for doing this; I'm sure I'll use it.

ObCopyeditor: "Hoarding," not "Hording"

This is my favorite squirrel story, though it has the squirrel acting, well, like a normal squirrel.

Of course, so did the dog in the "Dog. Sweet potatoes. Argh" story.

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