Bryan, I've been waiting patiently and wearing out the Refresh icon for you to continue "Groucho & Co. meet Dickens and prepare to slay the EEvildoers."
Please? Please?
#354 Adrian
[re: Claire Shaeffer's Fabric Sewing Guide] ...looks wonderful. Is the rest of it as good as that test? When was it written?
My copy is a copy decades old, but it's still in print, check Amazon et. al. Yes, it's a treasure trove.
Does burning linen smell like burning rope, or like raw rope?
Burning rope. Also kind of like burning grass (hay). We used to do burn tests on unlabeled fabrics when I taught Theatrical Costuming. Our area dean was showing around a group of Big and Powerful People when we thus engaged, and they hovered in the doorway as she gave brief intros and asked what we were doing. She then asked what we were testing?
"Hemp."
"Oh, great!" and they all trooped in. There was a brief moment in there when my universe tilted sharply sideways and then realigned, and I realized (again) what a wonderful woman she was.
#361 TexAnne:
...You could probably find a needlework or heirloom sewing shop somewhere. There's usually at least one person obsessed with old things on the staff.
Quilt shop personnel are also up on this stuff.
"I'm A Moor"
Othello was a successful military guy, right? What are the chances this walking derangement was instead saying, "I'm Amor"? In the hope that love might indeed conquer all? Watch out for those STDs.
AAAAH! I just saw my copy of The Compass Rose! I remembered the story being in a chapbook which got separated from the main LeGuin body in multiple moves. About to trot right back and pull it out...
Many thanks!
Re: Antarctic Artists
Does anyone else remember a story by Ursula LeGuin (all details hazy) that involved a number of women having a retreat at a station in Antarctica? One of them was from Brazil, particularly wealthy so helped subsidize it? Published in the New Yorker some time in the 70's? One spent much of her time in a chamber making ice sculptures which would never be viewed unless there in person (ah, before the internet and Flickr et. al.).
The Denver Public Library has bound copies of tNY that certainly span the possible years, but I'd appreciate any help getting closer.
Through the ensuing decades, comparatively unrelated things will pull me back to this story. Is there a term for this time-machine-surprise element?
Re: Kathryn @ 327 -
Burn testing to distinguish cotton/linen
From Claire Schaeffer's Fabric Sewing Guide (it automatically falls open to the burn test page):
Cotton burns rapidly with yellow flame, continues burning, afterglow, smells like paper, resideue is brown-tinged end, light-colored, feathery ash.
Linen burns more slowly, smells like rope, ash maintains shape of swatch.
Xopher, I hope you're kidding about being swayed by the comments here. There are bits on PHC that I find myself liking quite a lot, though one is never sure when they're going to be. Enough among the dross to tune in on weekends.
#548 ::: Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)/
...The technique of putting pictures in the cross-section of a cylinder that you expose sequentially by slicing it was developed for film animation by Otto Fischinger back in the 1930s (he later fled from Germany to the United States to avoid the brown-shirted art critics, and worked for Disney most of his life)./
Fischinger would take colored clay and make it into various shapes, then put the shapes together lengthwise into a cylinder. He'd point his camera at the end of the cylinder, shoot 1 frame, then take a slice off the end of the cylinder and shoot another frame. Repeat a few thousand times and you have an animated film.
The technique has been around at least several hundred years longer, used by glass blowers and confectioners. Think paperweights with sprays of little flowers - cross-sections of carefully built-up rods five to seven inches across, which are then heated and pulled to miniaturize - and candy canes, also a core with red stripes down the sides, twisted. I've done all three. The great advantage of using clay is that, unlike the other two, it doesn't give a nasty burn if your attention lapses. Unfortunately, paperweights made of plasticine don't look particularly attractive, and tend to leave grease spots.
#543 ::: Debra Doyle
Dave Bell@#530: Given that Yojimbo was inspired, plot-wise, by the novels of Dashiell Hammett, and that Kurosawa found directorial inspiration in the Westerns of John Ford, the question of exactly where, if anyplace, original-source strength and purity can be found would seem to be a rather pointless one.
I'd argue that this reinforces Dave's point: that strong, original source material can survive several reinterpretations (particularly when transposed and augmented, as Kurosawa did), but that copies that simply reproduce what seem to be the major plot points eventually dilute the concepts to banality.
Another non-Buffy viewer here, sigh. I'm putting it in the Netflix queue, along with various others recommended in this thread.
Thena, after the ML Blue Moon post, which prompted reading through the Yarn Harlot archives, I got back into knitting and am on my second pair of socks. The deal with myself was,
1) ONLY socks, and
2) finish each pair before starting another, and
3) not to buy more sock yarn until finished.
The excellent yarn store in Boulder and ebay have blown #3. I do find myself regularly, absent-mindedly, adding "another set of Addi Turbo circs and DPNS" to my shopping list. I will go cross them off again.
#88 ::: Stefan Jones
"Mimsy" was indeed horrific, and not just for the parents. So the kids jaunt off to another dimension, presumably a one-way trip. They may be time-distant from anyone else that will be there, marooned alone.
It's bothered me for decades. Did anyone else have this reaction?
Our friend Lea grew up in northern Louisianna, where the older raccoons would deal with dogs by running out on a log in a stream. When the dogs tried to follow, they'd push their heads under and drown them.
#56:
My parents were married in 1946. Their (post-war impoverished) wedding party - groomsmen and bridesmaids (and in those days they were indeed maids) clubbed together and got them a Lifetime Subscription to Reader's Digest.
I grew up with it as a standard part of Living in Nebraska.
My mother still receives it, of course. It's a weird time machine to go visit and see the current copy on the end table.
Part of me wants to grab it and check out "Life in These United States" and "Humor in Uniform" WHAT??? opposed by the part that wants to run for the car.
Last sentence would have been more clear:
It was important that the palms be down. If the hands were rotated so that the thumbs were on top...
Lon Chaney's expressive acting style might well have come from both his parents being deaf.
We had a bright employee once who was - completely? profoundly? - deaf. He was relating a funny story about having worked on a construction site in Missouri where the noise levels made hiring deaf workers an asset. Someone moved a rock and uncovered [something] that freaked everyone out, as there was no way it could have been there. He painstakingly spelled out c,a,r,b and acted it out by linking his thumbs and making sideways twitching motions. A crab. He had never heard the word, and very likely never read it.
I got his caseworker to show me the signing for "very good work", for which "work" is lightly clenched fists, with the wrist of one hand tapping on the other. It was important that the palms be down, as if they are facing each other, it would mean masturbating.
Vote early and often.
(on a carton my sister received):
Lamp Oil - Non-flammable
Her comment: "oh, darn, we wanted the flammable kind."
Time travel:
Kage Baker's Company novels and stories. Most of the protagonists aren't Travellers, just folks recruited substantial distances in the past and made immortal. They are, due to a glitch in the processing, susceptible to Theobrome, their drug of choice, and resort to it in time of stress. One scene has an upset operative munching on the brown discs (think Ibarra) as if they were rice crackers.
Nebraska has the towns of Juniata, pronounced june-ee-ET-ah, and Waneeta, pronounced like most of us would say the first.
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|---|---|
| 2007 | 13 |
| 2006 | 10 |
| 2005 | 10 |
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