I was struck by Taiichi Ohno's description in The Toyota Production System of how Sakichi Toyoda designed his automatic loom by watching his grandmother weave, and how at one time every house had a loom and made money by the sale of fabric. The experience informed his idea of autonomous automation -- autonomation -- automation with a human touch -- that a machine should stop itself when a problem occurs and allow a human to fix it, rather than continuing to mindlessly produce weak and unsalable cloth after one of the threads has broken.

Last year I had a chance to learn to use a drop spindle. The wool was already shorn, cleaned, carded, and dyed, mind you.

After an hour of frustrating, painstaking (albeit eventually surprisingly gratifying) work, I had a small quantity of very lumpy, rather coarse yarn. And all I could think was, they made fine thread this way! Miles of it! (My google-fu let me down, but I found one site that mentions that 840 yards of one-ply cotton thread weighs one pound, and I figure a dress or shirt or tunic weighs at least that, if not rather more....)

One of the many things I liked about the novel Hild was all the work of producing fiber, thread, fabric, and finished goods.

I am reminded of the song in the musical 1776 where John and Abigail Adams are corresponding. He is concerned that the women spend time making saltpeter for the war effort; she is more concerned that the women are desperately short of straight pins.

We take so much for granted.

Thought-provoking, abi.

I often wonder what things we carry now the way that medieval women carried their distaffs... What will our descendants look back on and say, “they spent so much time doing that. Thank goodness we don’t have to”?

Ooh! I know! I know!

Struggling with, fixing, customizing, and replacing our computers, smartphones, and software of one kind and another.

Migrated any WordPress websites recently? Transferred a domain? Upgraded your computer's OS, or replaced a hard drive? What a colossal headache, even for a so-called expert! For the first couple decades of personal computing in business settings and then in home use, it was a truism that computers ate up even more time than they liberated. We've gradually gotten to where they eat up less time to fiddle with, but still they create a ridiculous volume of extra tasks to take care of, in one form or another.

(Reposting to try to unwedge the dread Internal Server Error.)

A lot of people were weavers, men included. I think at least as many must have been spinning thread for them.
The paperwork after one of my fourth-great-grandfathers died (1825) mentions hackles - that's one of the tools used in making threads (linen, AIUI).
On farms, everyone over about the age of four or five was going to be doing some kind of work, starting usually with feeding the chickens.

It's not just the spinning and weaving, which was a huge development and may partly explain the industrial dominance of Britain. There was a whole series of interlinked inventions, just as, in the 1850s, the inventions came together to make a reliable sewing machine.

Maybe the key difference between Waterloo and Gettysburg isn't the rifled musket, it's the uniforms sewn with machines. The time needed to sew a shirt went from 15 hours to 1 hour, and principle of Adam Smith's pin makers could be applied.

Hence, one of the great rants:

And I will give children to be their princes, and babes shall rule over them.

And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour: the child shall behave himself proudly against the ancient, and the base against the honourable.

When a man shall take hold of his brother of the house of his father, saying, Thou hast clothing, be thou our ruler, and let this ruin be under thy hand:

...
What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor? saith the Lord God of hosts.

In that day the Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling ornaments about their feet, and their cauls, and their round tires like the moon, the chains, and the bracelets, and the mufflers, the bonnets, and the ornaments of the legs, and the headbands, and the tablets, and the earrings, the rings, and nose jewels,

The changeable suits of apparel, and the mantles, and the wimples, and the crisping pins, the glasses, and the fine linen, and the hoods, and the vails.

And it shall come to pass, that instead of sweet smell there shall be stink; and instead of a girdle a rent; and instead of well set hair baldness; and instead of a stomacher a girding of sackcloth; and burning instead of beauty.

Thy men shall fall by the sword, and thy mighty in the war.

And her gates shall lament and mourn; and she being desolate shall sit upon the ground.

That's because most people don't grasp just how close to the margin of survival the vast majority of people lived in the premodern era. The idea of abundance is so locked in our minds that it's difficult to imagine life without the cushions technology and infrastructure give us. After a lifetime reading history, it's only in recent years that I've truly begun to understand that.

A big part of that is that our study of history naturally gravitates towards the rich-the ones most active, most literate, most attractive. That's deceptive. It makes a tiny upper crust stand in for civilizations, an upper crust was much further from that margin of civilization than the vast majority of the population.

Survivalists make a lot of errors in their planning. I remember there was a Peak Oil site that was selling survival equipment for the dark days to come. Many of the items-water purifiers, for example-depended on spare parts and refills. Did the customers not think this through? And then there's the basic fact that if society really implodes, those smart enough to have a little will have it taken from by the starving masses that don't. You can't possibly stockpile enough ammunition to counter being outnumbered 100-1.

It's one of my frustrations in much fantasy that cloth is not expensive enough.

Hodges prices give these comparisons:

4 yards of "Best Wool cloth" would rent a merchants' house for a year.

A weaver would earn enough in two days to buy 1 yard of the cheapest cloth.

I have casebooks from a couple of Edinburgh detectives in the early 1800's (one nonfictional, one fictional based on him). A crime that comes up repeatedly is "child-stripping"', which is to say, stealing the clothing from a child that one comes across in the street. The clothing would then be re-sold; apparently there was enough money in so doing to make it a Thing.

Kids died of exposure from it. I find this intensely sad.

I spend a lot of my evening time teaching myself various pre-modern crafts, hand sewing clothing, etc, because I pretend to be a viking on the weekends. I've been doing it for 20 years. In that time, I've helped build a couple of warp weighted looms, and we've managed to weave just enough cloth on them at various displays to make 1 over shoulder bag. One of the women in a group I was in in Canberra managed the stirling task of weaving enough cloth to make 1 woollen tunic for herself, which was many tens of hours of work, after which the time to sew the tunic by hand was negligible. She's now trying to spin enough wool by hand to have enough to weave another one entirely from handspun wool.

Until recently in South America, you would notice in the high andes that the local women were constantly spinning with drop spindles. All the time, whenever you were not doing some other crucial task, you picked up your spindle and used it.

My non-reenactor friends think I'm crazy for blacksmithing, hand sewing clothing and shoes or smelting my own iron, or doing calligraphy with ink I've made myself, but that stuff is _easy_ compared to the time investment of making a couple of yards of good cloth.

If you ever look at the lists that people published of what you're going to need to take the Oregon Trail (often riddled with errors or suppositions), you get a grasp of what it really took to make that sort of trip (which is probably the closest in time to really understanding what it is like to be on your own.) And even then, settlers had to bargain for food along the way, hunt their own, and abandon precious or necessary items along the journey. (I keep thinking that some entrepreneurs could have made some money by having fresh horses from the destination, going back along the trail for a couple of weeks to scavenge items.)

After all, how long did it take someone to get a full-sized anvil to the Oregon Territory? Or all of the rest of the blacksmithing tools? You can make a lot, but you have to have some basics first...

According to a book of classical Greek history I have, a woolen cloak ran the average Periclean Athenian the modern equivalent of US$500-$2000, a pair of shoes $600-$800.

A table, by contrast, was $400-$600.

All subject to the vagaries of historical estimation, of course.

The huge bottleneck in cloth production was getting the fiber into yarn, much less thread, so it could be woven (or knit). Every woman was a spinster until the burden of kiddies supplanted that job, and there were no moments free of spindle or knitting needles after that, either. Weavers were commonly men, which may have been practical - how much upper-body strength did it take to raise the heddles, throw the shuttle, and beat the weave on those heavy floor looms early on?

The spinning jenny was a technological advancement greeted with great dismay, though its quality of yarn was not good to begin with. One person could replace eight spinsters with the original.

I've recommended this here before, but to take it back to the dawn of civilization, Elizabeth Wayland Barber's Women's work : the first 20,000 years : women, cloth, and society in early times.

(It delights me that one of her names is Wayland. I imagine her saying Well, on my fathers' side, this-and-such; But my *mothers* told me...!)

The Wikipedia article on khadi is enlightening. Part of the British colonial system in India was to produce cotton, export it to British factories, and then sell the cloth or clothing back to the colonies.

(The classic Indian accent is mostly Welsh.)

(Paisley cloth is a Persian design that became the noted export of Paisley, Scotland.)

They still do a lot of spinning in some parts of the Andes, due to some work by indigenous people who value textiles highly. (Probably an understatement.)

There's a woman named Abby Franquemont who was partly raised in that culture, and teaches spinning in the US and elsewhere in the English-speaking world. She writes a lot about this kind of thing. (All those ships' sails that were handspun with spindles and handwoven before the Industrial Revolution. I never thought of that before she ranted about how we undervalue textiles.)

Anyway, I found a blog post of hers that seems like a good summary of growing up in such a society.

Note: it is well worth reading through the Peru tag on her blog. Her most recent post is a heartbreaking and thought-provoking post about how she had to suddenly go to Peru to bury her mother, who was there for the last Tinkuy de Tejedores. (Like a conference for indigenous weavers.)

But this is the important quote for people who don't want to read that whole post:

"I tell people it’s like a fidget that’s productive; but it’s much more than only that. But it’s also… nothing at all, and totally ordinary. Yes, I spin (and ply) while I’m walking places, or standing around, or on the phone, or in meetings, or riding in the car, or in a waiting room. I hate dead times when I can’t do it; I will always try to find a way to spin, and I’m certain this is because of the Andean upbringing. So this is part, in my opinion, of why Andean techniques work the way they do — every spinner is like that, and every spinner finds ways to be able to spin during all the possible moments one might do so. So imagine if you spun with the time you might spend biting your nails, doodling on a notepad, waiting to stir the soup, waiting to pick up your kid from school, waiting for the bus… you would be surprised what you get done, and how easy it would become!"

Another time-consuming task that will probably get a lot more effortless, is getting from place to place. We're at the dawn of the self-driving car era, and we're also starting to see more and more situations where you Just Don't Need To Go There. I work from home -- no commute. If I want to see what's on a particular street corner, I usually can see it from Google street view. If I want entertainment, there's an awful lot I can do without leaving home. If I want to see entertainment with friends, I do need to go somewhere (or convince them to come to me). Lots of things are delivered, increasingly including groceries and anything else at all that I want to buy. Technologies are emerging that will let me print up whatever object I want at home. Then people are finally starting to figure out things about urban and suburban design that mean that the things I'd probably want to go to are much more likely to be within easy walking distance.

I've done handspinning demonstrations on and off for years. I mostly use a spinning wheel, but occasionally someone watching wonders aloud what they did before the spinning wheel was invented. Then I pull out my spindle and stand up and show them how to walk around a spin, and talk about spinning while heading to market or watching the sheep. The appropriate people are impressed. The others just wander off.

I once thought of spinning enough wool to weave a cloak. I got about 600 yards into it and decided that with the time I had, I wouldn't live long enough to finish the SPINNING, much less the weaving and sewing. And that I lacked the patience to try. I saved the yarn and later dyed it and knitted it into a sweater.

I did once spin a mile of wool in a day during a challenge. It took me 10 hours of pretty continuous spinning. I'm a competent spinner, but not super fast. I tried to do the same thing with cotton, but only managed a kilometer. Cotton takes much more twist and time to spin decently.

It's all given me a right fair appreciation of the effort needed to produce clothing before the industrial revolution.

In yesterday's Washington Post, the "Day in Photos" feature included a couple of snaps of people participating in a Stone Age re-enactment camp experience in Germany. Here is one of them: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BtuZ3A5CAAA5Wtt.jpg:large

The caption noted that the woman was working on a "primitive boat", but what I noticed was that the dress she's wearing is almost certainly machine sewn, and also glasses. (To say nothing of the next picture, which shows some of her colleagues shopping in a supermarket.)

Dave*:

Surely it matters what breakdown or disaster or whatever you're imagining. I mean, if you're imagining a complete collapse of civilization, there's *nothing* that will prepare you for coming through that very well. Modern technology requires a lot of knowledge and capital and social arrangements that you simply can't replicate on your own, or even in a small community. You're not going to be fabbing your own microprocessors or synthesizing your own recombinant insulin in your little survivalist enclave, for example. Those are things that really only work in pretty large societies, where you can afford a fair bit of specialization. Survivors after some horrible civilization-ending disaster will inevitably be living off their capital for a long time to come. Part of that capital will be knowledge--a community of a few hundred survivors probably can't sustain advanced education, which means that the town doctor and engineer and pharmacist represent a huge amount of capital which depreciates as they age. Eventually, their apprentices will learn from them, but probably not nearly as well as they would have from specialist university programs with genuine experts in everything from solid-state physics to virology to organic chemistry available to teach them.

And getting back to abi's starting point with this post, it's interesting to think about the materials and skills that are all but invisible to us. What happens when your clothing wears out? Or when you run out of paper?

One of my favorite thoughts along these lines involve all the stuff that's done by all first world countries as a matter of course, but that is very seldom noticed. Think of flood and fire control projects, or public health regs that regulate what you can do with your sewage, or the fact that stray dogs in the US are rounded up and almost all dogs and cats are vaccinated for rabies (and we even distribute baits with rabies vaccine in them for wild animals!). Think about what it looks like when all that stuff stops because of social breakdown of some sort.

#23: Definitely. The problem with any post-apocalyptic analysis is that tends to assume a complete implosion of society. If you look at history, this is practically unprecedented. I'm reading an economic history of the 17th century right now that blithely recounts immense population decreases-40% in Germany, 20-30% in Italy and Spain-yet civil authority remained firm. Most PA thinking in our society grows out of the idea of nuclear annihilation, which is, naturally, unprecedented, but I think that ignores the inertia of human society in all, but the worst, circumstances. If there's a major disaster, people will do their damnedest to keep the lights on. Smaller functions (like animal control) will go by the wayside, and they'll be missed. But I think the Peak Oil doomers and other of a similar vein may be surprised by the resilience of modern society.

I don't think we disagree here; I think we're just approaching the issue from two different directions.

Very worst case I die inarguably, fast or slow. Something like "neighborhood star goes supernova" or "massive exchange of nuclear warheads."

Most cases, enough people are resilient enough that we could reconstruct a chunk of society and build back up. I mean, if we lose Japan's industry AND China's AND Germany's AND the US's ... that's pretty global and pretty impressive. Although some things don't work well without extreme precision. The amount of iron impurity that ruins a solar cell is parts per trillion, I discovered the other day.

Anyway, the percentage of "Amish rule" disasters seems pretty low to me.

albatross @23: I was learning about "ways your pasta wheat can kill you" at work last week, and all I could think was "thank goodness for the USDA," because cadmium and blight happen whether you have a big farm or a small one. (The joke then goes, "this is why the anarchists should organize the communities and the socialists should organize the infrastructure, so I can have my little utopic egalitarian community AND not get food poisoning." [Yes, I am aware; hence 'utopic'])

Today I once again ran across "rich person decides their life is superficial and unsatisfying, decides to live like peasant" and it occurred to me, for the most part you have to choose, don't you, between "superficial" and precarious (minding that plenty of people living both romanticizeable-but-harder and prosaic-but-easier kinds of lives find them good)

Of course, the best case is also that "Everybody dies." It's just at different times, in the best case.

I am inordinately fond of a T-shirt from Threadless which says on a carnivalesque banner, under a dapper skeleton, "Enjoy the Wonders of Life! Limited time offer."

I have a friend who weaves wraps (and does other crafts) to sell. One of these days I'm going to have enough money to buy something of her making.

I had Clifton @5's thought, basically--fiddling with technology/devices.

More potentially dystopic answers could include "eating" (if Soylent or its progeny take off), "sleeping" (that can cut a bunch of ways, good or bad), or "traveling" (OK, that one probably isn't dystopic if it means transporter beams).

Fascinating book on overromanticizing preindustrial living: "Back from the Land," by Eleanor Agnew. She and her husband were two of many in the 70s who thought the nuclear/environmental/economic collapse of American society was imminent, and decided to retreat to the woods to avoid it. Her description of their first days in the Maine wilderness, living in a tent and her son getting blood poisoning from an infection, were quite unnerving.

When the disasters they expected failed to arrive after five years, she returned to the developed economy. Her ex-husband stayed in the log cabin they built-although he added electricity and central heating. An interesting work about survivalism from a repentant point of view.

http://www.amazon.com/Back-Land-Young-Americans-Nature/dp/1566636647/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1406768294&sr=1-1&keywords=back+from+the+land

I apologize for being all trivial when everyone else is talking about apocalypse and the gendered nature of work and important things, but, as it is an open thread...

Am I the only one who saw the title and thought "oh my God, almost at open thread 200! squee!!"?

"oh my God, almost at open thread 200!"

Well after the "Making Light" apocalypse of the 2040s, those who lived before it and managed not to perish still recall the disaster.

"We once had these things called Open Threads," a gray-haired veteran of the old days said. "We knew that weird things started to happen once we had 1000 posts in a thread. No problem, the thinking went-- we can always simply start a new one. It was even a reason for celebration-- a renewal of creativity and conversation. Some writers even started anticipating what theme best went with the next increment."

"What we didn't know then," he went on, shaking his head, "is that the weirdness increased exponentially as we approached 1000 open *threads*. And that we'd reach a critical mass at reaching that milestone. If we'd only known, we'd not have wasted the threads so blithely."

What exactly happened at Open Thread 1000 is still something no one's managed to completely explain. "The words all went crazy," the old
man explains. "When the flowersphere-- or whatever we called it then, I still don't remember-- went hypercritical, all the vowels were
instantly vaporized, worldwide. And even the consonants that weren't lost were thrown into chaos. Of the folks who lived, no one was
able to comprehend anyone else's speech or writing for weeks. We've painstakingly recovered coherent sentences since then. Still, the expressive range we've recovered is only a shadow of what it once was."

The man waved his hand. "We still haven't managed to reclaim all the vowels we had in the days before the Event," he sighed. "I've heard stories there was once a fifth one, after T, they say. I hope we'll recover it someday."

John Mark Ockerbloom @32

<applawse!>

I'm personally hoping that there's no Open Thread 200. No, I'm not hoping for disaster: I'm hoping for Open Thread CC. If you want to know why I think that's such a cool idea, have a look at Open Thread C.

Of course, this is a Chutney, so I don't expect it. I only hope.

I'm almost 40, and my overflowing closets still have garments from my high school years, which I still wear and which have still not gotten threadbare.

While textile work is certain to become important in a shit-hits-the-fan scenario, the lag between disaster striking and us needing to start weaving and spinning and sewing is pretty long.

I am told that my great-grandfather, an immigrant from Norway, was sending material assistance to his relatives as Norway was getting back on its feet after World War II. One of the things he sent was fabric.

In case of apocalypse, I am looting JoAnn's. Not just for the bolts of fleece and sewing supplies, but because sometime after things settle down, there's going to be a kid who wants a princess dress or a cape or a special birthday outfit.

I've struggled a bit with my no-products-right-now Etsy shop and pricing wedding handkerchiefs. On the one hand, my time and expertise are worth something. On the other hand, people are not aware of this.

(State Fair results come in soonish I think. I hope. Eee.)

Some doomer (great word) acquaintances of mine did a TEOTWAKI* scenario campout. With their smart phones and laptops. *headdesk*

*The End Of The World As We Know It.

One of these characters was totally shocked when I said that if the entire world goes apocalyptic, I will die. I'm dependent on modern medicine to survive. He kept saying, "but what about...?" I said to every suggestion that if the world has gone as apocalyptic as he thinks it will, there will be no transportation to bring raw ingredients to a manufacturer, no transport to get it to me if it was manufactured. What about herbal? Again, we have the transport problem because those herbs do not grow here. What about...? Transport. Rinse. Repeat.

I have gotten the distinct feeling that a lot of these... characters have no clue. I'm going to send this marvelous but of info to them. And wait to see how long it takes them to dismiss the issue because "someone will figure it out." The contradictions inherent in their preparations is amusing. TEOTWKI, but we'll still have cellphones, laptops and the internet,** transportation and the necessary fuel, and antibiotics and anesthesia will always be available. And now clothing availability can be added to the list of things that will "always be there".

**And not one of them has a ham license.

John Mark Ockerbloom @32: Wasn't that fifth vowel Y? And don't we still have it?

Erik Nelson @36: Material assistance indeed!

Omri, #35: Nice for you. A lot of people don't make it to 40 without either outgrowing or wearing out their clothes from high school. And "outgrowing" shouldn't be taken as a synonym for "getting fat", either -- a lot of both men and women have significant figure changes as they move from late adolescence into full adulthood. I went from rangy to curvy; I've known a number of men who got quite a bit broader in the shoulders and chest.

(You can see the same thing happen in both cats and dogs during their second year. The body proportions and head shape of a 3-year-old cat are quite different from those of the same cat at 1 year.)

#14: The Oregon Trail museum out near the Idaho border has a great section about packing your wagon. One activity lets kids put blocks representing items (family china, wood stove, barrel of flour) into a model wagon. A panel nearby has doors for each item, which you could open for a bit of advice.

And yes, the trail is littered with wood stoves, anvils, the family china, and grandmas' graves.

* * *
A long-ago issue of Whole Earth Quarterly had an essay by J. Baldwin. He attended a presentation by a family that decided to cut their ties with civilization. When the triumphalism became to think he asked: "Where did you get your axe?" (The title of the essay.) He pointed out that they hadn't cut their umbilical to industrial civilization, they just made it longer.

RE clothes-reareness:

I wrote a solitaire RPG adventure where your fortune-seeking character arrives at the gates of the Big City wearing a barrel. He or she can't enter unless properly dressed. This means farm work, theft, washing corpses, and the like in the scruffy outcast settlement outside of the city walls.

There are several grades of clothing in game, ranging from peasant's tunic to "flash" clothing that a swell might wear. You can't get certain jobs, or even shop in certain parts of the city, if you have peasant or laborer's clothing.

42
That reminds of the story I heard of my grandfather moving from rural northeastern Kentucky to southeastern Kansas, and discovering that clothing wasn't sold in 'hardware stores'.

Omri @ 35: Clothes last pretty well if you do a clean sedentary job. A hard, physical, dirty job, not so much. Agriculture, forestry, building, etc are all very hard on clothes, which are partially protection.

I like this thread. Not that I like making thread, I've not learnt to use the drop spindle.

One thing the survivalists don't really get is how a level of living standard is related to how many humans you have and the interactions between them. Living in cabins scattered across a mountain means it takes longer to get anywhere, communicate or do anything collective. And cloth manufacture is a good example. In Tudor England, specifically the broadcloth areas of Suffolk, the thread was spun by women at home, from wool given to them by the clothier. They might make up to a pound or so of thread a day, and it would be collected every 5 days or so by a man of business whose job it was to travel around collecting it. Much easier to do in rural Suffolk with dwellings every few hundred yards of concentrated in villages. Not so much on a mountain.

It took something like the output of 5 or 6 spinners to feed one weaver, who could make a 26yard by 5ft or so cloth in, IIRC, 3 or 4 days.

Which leads me to another point that people forget about - the finish. Broadcloth was fulled (done by a machine in a mill or by foot in a trough) had a nap raised (i.e. all the loose fibres and less loose ones were pulled out of the plane of the cloth by teazels, which I still can't find any of) and then it was shorn off, to give a losely packed, water repellent and smooth surface finish.

Something that is part of the fabric when made nowadays took a lot of work by individual craftsmen. There's a reason a bolt of cloth was at least as expensive as the yearly wage of such a craftsman. So, in the survivalist paradise, who is going to do all this hard work, and who will own the water mills which make a lot of it easier?

I'd like to be able to wear stuff from the end of my highschool period, but my shoulders and arms have changed since then, I filled out properly around 22 or 23. Although I did find a pair of M&S pants it has taken 16 years of wear to wear out!
I've been doing some volunteer work at a charity shop, and what amazes me is how much in the way of clothing comes through the shop. Some hasn't been worn at all, perhaps bought by mistake. A lot has a little wear on it, and the owner is getting rid of it because they fancy a change, or bought too much clothing and hardly wore it. An appreciable percentage of folk in the UK can just buy new clothes as often as they feel like it and clear their wardrobe out when they want to, and it goes to charity shops who sort it out and sell the better clothing to people who want or can only afford cheaper clothing.

And with such a cycle, the fact that much clothing is made using thinner fabric more cheaply just isn't noticed, because it isn't getting the level of wear it would have had 30 years ago.

guthrie @ #45,You could always grow your own teasel, although I probably can't--apparently it's a noxious weed in the US.

We might be able to make do with scavenged Velcro hooks, which were, after all, basically designed to mimic teasel.

Emma in Sydney @44, even some jobs you wouldn't think of are hard on clothes When I worked retail, I was forever blowing out my jeans at the knees, from the constant bending (lift with your back!) and kneeling on hard tile floors.

I was also pretty broke at the time, and, since it was a hippie grocery store, my solution was to grab sturdy upholstery-brocade scraps out of my fabric stash (SCA remnants, of course) and sew them on, adding a decorative feather-stitch around the edges. That way I could pretend it was a Style Thing and not "I don't have room in the budget to replace these jeans, not even at Goodwill."

If there's an apocalypse, I'm dead too. Me without my mood stabilizers...not good.

Just prepping fiber is a huge amount of work, and fairly specific to what kind of fiber it is.

Wool needs to be sheared -- so you need sheep on the hoof -- scoured, picked, carded or combed. Linen needs to be retted, broken, scutched, and hackled. Cotton needs to be picked or ginned, and then carded or combed, though you could bow if if you don't have cards or combs.

And all of these assume you have the seed or the animals, the land for them, and sufficient water.

If you've ever seen a sheep-to-shawl competition, yes, you can weave a shawl in 3 hours, if you have a team of 4 to 6 spinners with wheels (which implies wheelwrights, somewhere), a shearer, a sheep, and a weaver with a loom that already has the warp on it.

In Victorian and earlier novels, when anyone mentions women's "work", they always mean sewing, apart from that rhyme about a woman's work never being done.

Another interesting bit of linguistic trivia - Old English occupational surnames (Smith, Carter, Baker etc.) are almost all in the masculine form, but two appear as both masculine (Brewer and Webber) and feminine (Brewster and Webster) forms, which suggests to me that brewing and weaving were two occupations commonly done by women as well as men. Spinster is feminine, and doesn't appear as a surname, presumably because us spinsters tend not to leave any descendents, while Spinner does appear as a surname, but is pretty uncommon.

In Xenophon's Memorabilia, there's an anecdote about Socrates advising a friend, whose house was full of family members turned into refugees during the invasion of Attica, to set the female family members to work spinning and weaving for sale; he considered this the simplest way to deal with the cost of housing them, as the value of what they produced would more than cover the start-up costs as well as their living expenses.

For those close enough, the Textile Museum of Canada has a current exhibit called The Eternity Code: Archaeology, Textiles and Preservation which includes a number of remarkably lovely new world textiles.

The museum isn't large, but the weaving is amazing.

There is an almost impossible-to-get-around problem here--a functioning society has all kinds of complexities that are more or less invisible. That means thinking clearly about what it would look like for society to collapse is hard. Along with that, *any* preparation for disaster is limited. There isn't really any way to survive, say, another dinosaur killer hitting the earth by individual prepping (diverting it might work, but that's not individual prepping). And yet, there are still ways you can be more or less prepared for survivable stuff, ranging from a fire in your house to an icestorm that leaves power off for a week to economic collapse to civil war. (Though I think the main survival tactic for a civil war is to GTFO as quickly as possible, in some way that doesn't leave you and your family stuck in some dismal relocation camp at the border.). I think it's way too easy to recognize the existence of disasters that can't be survived, and use them as an excuse not to prepare for the survivable stuff that's not even all that hard to get through. (From experience: having lots of flashlights and spare batteries around is a really big win if you're stuck without power for a few days, for example. Car chargers for your cellphone come in handy, too. This is something most people can prepare for, even if they're not ready to prepare for a zombie apocalypse.)

"What will our descendants look back on and say, 'they spent so much time doing that. Thank goodness we don’t have to'?"

My guess is writing. Once we have the technology to cheaply record, store, and search video, I expect a lot of routine writing will be replaced by recorded video. We're almost there already, but we still need to figure out the searching part.

One of the side-effects will be that English class will be less about reading and writing and more about public speaking, dramatic presentation, and skills that are typically only taught in film school these days.

It is possible to spin directly from a washed fleece without further processing, but you have to have more skill as a spinner to do it because there's more management as you go. I have not done this, but I have spoken with people who have.

It is also possible to spin directly from the seed (there are videos online) with certain varieties of cotton. Think of the cotton equivalent of cling-free peaches! I have done this, and found that it made for a more even and finer thread than what I've been able to spin otherwise. I actually had to set that aside because it didn't match what I've been spinning for a different project. And cotton needs to be boiled after spinning to get the natural waxy stuff off it.

But I agree that linen and hemp and other plant fibers are always more labor intensive before you can even start to spin the fiber. (Though I've read that milkweed stems don't need to be retted to get the fiber from them. Scutching still required.)

Things I usually have with me: spinning or knitting, smartphone, tablet, book (often on the table), keys, wallet, minor first aid things (ibuprofen, bandaids), and a multitool if I'm not going anywhere that security will kick up a fuss. It's hard to know what would seem strange in 200 years. Some of that already seems strange to the people around me. Whip out a sock-in-progress while at the grocery store and the comments range from awed ("You can do that without looking?") to perplexed ("You can buy socks at Walmart, you know."). Pull out a spindle, and people really don't know what to make of me. ("Are you weaving?")

And I also probably wouldn't make it very well in a post-apocalyptic world without my medication.

Guthrie @ #45 wrote:

...Broadcloth was fulled (done by a machine in a mill or by foot in a trough) had a nap raised (i.e. all the loose fibres and less loose ones were pulled out of the plane of the cloth by teazels, which I still can't find any of)...

Are you going to Loncon 3? There are teazels growing at the roadside near this moose and if they haven't been cut down I can always bring a few along.

albatross@52, we have a "decorative" oil lantern that serves as a centerpiece on the dining room table... which we make sure to keep topped up with lamp oil. ("Lamp oil" is kerosene with some scent added. Kerosene from the kerosene heater would work just fine in a pinch.) During our non-as-infrequent-as-we'd-like power outages, an oil lantern puts out enough light to read by, and the fuel lasts for quite some time.

As it's an open thread, I thought I'd share this from Balloon Juice about the Goathouse Refuge.

My aim is not to get people stirred up about the awfulness involved, but to get out the word that donations would be much appreciated. So before you give into the urge to vent, consider expressing your dismay by either helping to spread the word, or dropping a little bit of cash.

If everyone spins, nobody uses it for a surname.

I have a friend who carries a portable wheel to most get-togethers, and just keeps producing thread upon thread (Much faster than drop spindle, if less plausible to do while, say, waiting for the cooking.) But, as you say, even her fleece has mostly been cleaned and carded and all.

For survivalists, one of the biggest questions I always have is, where do they think they'll go to find all the "pristine" and resource-rich wilderness they're supposedly looking for? Even most cabins have neighbours relatively close by; the few that don't have them within shouting distance are likely seasonal cabins, and not places you'd wish to be in winter. Most of the *arable* wild land is no longer wild. If they're striking out and want to actually, y'know, survive, they're almost certainly going to have to take over some farming complex, not some cabin in the woods. (Also, farms are one of the few placfes you can get a civilized sort of house *and* no immediate neighbours, if the farming property is big enough.) And yes, use the equipment present until the gas runs out, or the motor breaks down, *while* they're setting up their more primitive tools.

(And, more to the point, have to fight whomever owns the farm before you escape there, which means starting your utopia over bodies of humans).

Just as they'll almost certainly pack as much as they can from the remains of civilization (the lack of new cloth may even go unnoticed for a while, as there's a lot to find and work and wear through) instead of going out without tools and supplies.

But then, these aren't necessarily people trying to go Galt. These are people imagining the cities will be full of zombies or some other ebil thing, but navigable by the brave, that the army* will try to keep some semblance of civilization together. But they'll still try to flee to a defensible cabin in the woods, as the first bet. (Because there are no defensible locations or places to hide in a city, and there are no places with useful and necessary supplies. Never.)

And somehow things like, oh, toddlers in diapers, never seem to come up as thoughts. Everyone is supposed to be a competent adult. Because in the movies they are.

But nobody in these scenarios should ever really dream they're not going to be carrying on on the corpse of civilization, and using the tools and supplies produced by a massive industrial and transport complex, for a very long time. And they'll STILL miss/forget things, and even their most intrepid people may well die for what they miss.

Which is why personally I don't want to live in that world.

* Ditto, one hopes, the government as a whole, and definitely ditto all the people who will naturally cluster into communities, but that's not how they think.

albatross @52:

Given that, one of the more important things to do about the collapse of civilization is to prevent it.

Speaking as another kid of the 1970's civilization-is-doomed-lets-flee-it culture (my parents bought the land and built the cabin, but then did not move up there), I have my own views on survivalism and dropping out. And one of those views is that the seeming viability of pseudo-survivalism takes pressure off of the drive to keep things working and fix our problems.

Then there’s the effort put into caring for garments when they can’t be easily replaced. I remember reading something once about sewing as a chore on 19th-century Japanese farms – not only were items, mended, turned, patched and resized; but when they could no longer be used on their own and had to be taken apart for use as patches on newer garments or as quilt batten, the *thread from the seams* was saved for re-use.

The final stage was when the very soft, worn fabric was turned into diapers.

#32: Applause.

#34: Co-sign.

Just appeared in my Twitter stream and relevant to our interests: Thermos overnighted hot coffee to various recipients in the US. The whole article is a fascinating look at the complex logistical network that supports not just the last leg of the journey, but all of the stages that the coffee went through from bean to cup.

AlyxL @49

Also Baxter, originally the feminine form of baker.

Naomi Parkhurst @54

I've spun from locks, but yeah, it's not easy, and you usually need a flicker to open the locks up.

I've never spun cotton off the seed, but I suspect you need the long-staple varieties for that. And ideally, a charkha wheel for the speed.

On spinning from the source - I'm sure I'm not the only person who's watched demos where someone is spinning straight off the angora rabbit.
It's pretty surreal to stand around having a conversation with someone who's working a wheel or spindle with a bunny in their lap and periodically plucks a chunk of fluff off the entirely undisturbed rabbit to keep spinning.

49
There's a feminine for 'baker' also: 'baxter'.

Oooh! A thread thread! I'm another one of those historical-hobbyists who likes to do pre-industrial textile production. For those of you who describe learning to spin with a spindle and marveling at how anyone managed to do production-level work -- be comforted that like any other tast dependent on manual dexterity, it gets easier and you get better the more you do it. And -- as Naomi notes @19 -- working with a drop spindle means you can spin "casually" while doing all sorts of other tasks. (There are medieval illustrations of shepherdesses spinning while watching the sheep.) I'm certainly not at professional production levels of skill, but just to give a gauge:

I've been working on an on-and-off spinning and weaving project because I wanted to experiment with the "spin-directional check" effect. (This type of weaving effect gets mentioned casually in Nichola Griffith's Hild, which is lovely for textile descriptions.) Basically, you're weaving a checked cloth but rather than alternating two different colors of thread, you're alternating thread spun clockwise and anti-clockwise ("S" and "Z" in technical terminology). My goal is to make a 6ft by 6ft square cloak.

As I say, I'm a casual spinner, not professional level. By my very rough estimate, I can make about 50 yards of thread in an hour. I've already completed the warp and have most of the thread spun for the weft. At a very gross estimate, let's say a total of 5000 yards (probably more, but that's a nice round number). So that's 100 hours of spinning time alone before I start weaving. On the other hand, none of that spinning was done in isolation when I was doing nothing else. Usually I spin at SCA events while I'm talking to people, walking around looking at things, watching court, sitting in meetings, etc. At the typical SCA event I'll fill one spindle's-worth which is about 200 yards (again, very roughly - and I'm not spinning all the time I'm at the event). So that's 25 events which -- if I were more active and spinning more consistently at the events -- could easily be just a couple of years. BUT ... if I were spinning, say 8 hours a day (and if I were doing that, I'd get faster and better)I could finish all the yarn for that cloak in a couple of weeks.

The weaving will be harder, in one sense, because it's not a portable task and it will be much harder to multi-task while I'm doing it. (I expect to run through a bunch of audio-books in the process.) I have a blog entry showing a display I put together of the project-in-process and discussing some of the technical aspects.

Another overlooked aspect of pre-industrial clothing is how much more durable and re-usable it was. There was a massive trade in secondhand clothing and clothing was picked apart so the fabric could be re-purposed. My favorite tribute to the early medieval attitude toward clothing longevity is the Bernuthsfeld tunic which is almost more patches than original fabric.

Yeah, I was using a takhli spindle for the cotton, and had to add a lot of extra twist in before I could spin the next bit. Normally it's not so long (spindles can be faster than many people think), but I don't ordinarily spin quite that finely. Though I plan to in future - I hope to make myself a handspun, handwoven summer shirt at some point. Still, I might have more luck finishing with a spindle than a charkha, simply because I do a lot of my spinning when I'm out and about, and spindles are far more portable.

abi @59:Except inherent in many survivalist ideas is the theme that society doesn't deserve to survive, that its fate is the proper consequence of its corruption/decadence/greed/foulness, etc. Those who go into the wilderness generally consider themselves smarter and/or purer than those who will be consumed in the coming catastrophe. Dismay at the scale of death tends to be tempered with joy that everyone will finally see they were right.

I spent a lot of time reading Peak Oil sites and boards 'round about 2008. Many of the posters in those circles enjoyed thinking themselves the smartest people in the room, and looked forward to their coming validation.

Per Sarah @60--

The Japanese term for futon covers and quilts made from patches is "boro". You can see in the examples I've linked to here how very basic these items are in their re-use of scraps of fabric.

The South Asian tradition of kanthas and rallis are a similar re-use of old fabric (generally old saris), and the pieces that are too badly worn to go on the outside of these quilts are used for the batting.

The patchwork quilt tradition began as a use of scraps of fabric as well, although cheap and plentiful textiles have obliterated that tradition in modern patchwork.

I've seen old quilts made in the US covered with new patchwork tops, as well, although the usual progression there (reflecting typical wear patterns) is 1) rebinding 2)insertion of applied patched to cover small areas of damage 3)putting on a new top, ov even a complete cover, when the necessary repairs become too extensive. The recovered item is usually tied to hold the layers together instead of requilted.

When I was learning about the likelihood of a magnitude 9 earthquake in the Pacific Northwest, I could cope with the challenge getting my house bolted to the foundation, keeping water and food on hand, and so on. What I couldn't handle was the prospect of pulling someone out of wreckage, and watching them die from untreated injuries. Or watching someone who wasn't injured die from lack of access to insulin.

The logistics of getting people out, and supplies in, after an event like that, in that geography, is going to be challenging, to say the least.

Also, commenting on the drop-spinning as multi-tasking: Not only was it possible to spin while doing other tasks, but spinning, as a light job requiring mostly patience and basic manual dexterity, could be done by people who weren't up to other tasks: children, the visually-impaired, invalids, the elderly. So could carding, for that matter, although that requires more a little more strength.

In subsistence economies, just about everyone out of diapers is doing something productive, and the basic economic unit is not the individual but the household--and the household is not the same as a nuclear family.

A good, readable compendium of pre-industrial English rural life was written by Dorothy Hartley: Lost Country Life. It's a good starting-point for learning about all the things that had to be done to get through the year and keep everyone fed, clothed, and housed. Spoiler: The work never ends.

How/why, did the term "spinster" come to denote an unmarried woman?

Naomi Parkhurst @54
The reply to "you can buy socks..." is "but not ones that look like this."

With regard to an apocalyptic situation, those who are currently living in/on "survival land and buildings" are more likely to survive. The currently city-based survivalists will probably be among the first to die, shot by the residents of the property the city kids are trying to move in on.

Dave* Twiddy @68
Spot on. The rest of us will be in the damaged but survivable cities and towns, *making* them work again because we have to.

Lenore Rose @58
Toddlers oh yes. Babies and diapers, ditto. I also find it amusing that the needs of fertile women aren't covered, either.

The problem with teazels is that there are two types, the fullers teasel with barbs on the end, and the one that hasn't. Naturally, all the ones I've seen in the countryside are the normal useless sort, and I've tried two different packets of seed for fullers teasel and neither have grown at all. Given also that Mad Jack hasn't any either due to the really wet summer a couple of years ago and the internet isnt' helping, I'd be really grateful if anyone actually has any fullers teasels around (Offer avlid in UK or EU only due to postage costs) or sees any anywhere, because I want some to be a cloth shearer at Kentwell at some point in the future.

It's an indication of how many step changes there have been in technology since teasels were used that I just can't find any at all. Dyestuffs yes, but not teasels.

But I'm with Abi, better not to let civilisation fall at all, your chances of survival are much higher in a large group. Unfortunately the market and greedy people drive atomisation of society is driving along nicely and that'll have a similar effect.

Lin Daniel: yep, that's pretty much what I say. I suspect people say that sort of thing because they remember when it used to be less expensive to buy the materials to make a garment than to buy the garment, which is no longer the case.

janetl @72--It was a near-universal female skill, so it was an available legal (or respectable) means of self-support for an unmarried woman*. Here's am overview.

*I have no idea whether the term was ever comparable to Pratchett's use of the "Seamstresses' Guild" as a cover for women pursuing other means of self-support. However, there is Mistress Quickly's complaint about having her boarding house for hard-working needlewomen mistaken for a bawdy-house (you may decide for yourselves if she has a reasonable ground for complaint, based on Shakespeare's depiction of her domestic arrangements).

This is a tangent, but I wish I knew how to pick clothes so they last. I've purchased shirts that lasted for ten years, and shirts that shredded in two or even one. I can tell a little bit by the thickness of the fabric, but that still leaves me at a loss because I don't know where to go to find the good stuff at an affordable rate. Or which of the expensive places will deliver endurance, not just brand names. Shopping isn't a hobby of mine; I just want to go out and buy what I need. If anyone has any tips, I'd love to hear them.

CJO @77, a non-trivial part of the problem is modern detergents. Almost all of them now have enzymes, which on the one hand makes them clean more effectively, but on the other hand eats the fabric slowly away.

On a related note, does anyone (in the US) know a good national brand of laundry detergent that does NOT have enzymes in it? Woolite used to be good, but I can't find the little "for delicate" bottles on my department store shelves any more, only the big jugs. Now With Enzymes. <wry>

The ingredients lists on the laundry detergent jugs are no help at all....

My only thought is that if you’re willing and able to pick through the racks at thrift stores, the fact that the product is no longer brand new allows you to see what’s already starting to fall apart and what isn’t.

abi:

I guess there is a built-in tension between:

a. Let's pull together and make (whatever community thing) work better.

and

b. Let's bail the hell out of (whatever broken community thing) that seems impossible to fix.

I don't know if this tension is especially American, though I kind-of suspect it is--you can see it really strongly in Heinlein's books, which kind-of alternate between the hero washing his hands of his broken civilization and trying to move on, or dedicating his life, fortune, and sacred honor to fighting for his civilization. Lazarus Long/Woodrow does both things at different points in his story.

If your neighborhood is kind-of going downhill, do you stay and try to make it better? Probably for awhile, but eventually, you may decide that the decline is beyond your power to fix, and decide to leave if you can. If your workplace has become a really unpleasant place to work, you may try to get things to improve, but again, at some point, you'll probably decide it's time to look for a better job.

I don't think there's a generic answer to the question of "should I stay and work on things or give up and start over somewhere else?" But I do suspect that American culture has a lot of the assumption that abandoning a failing community is a valid option, probably because so much of our culture was built by people who did just that, often several times since the great majority of Americans are descendants of immigrants, and since the US was basically a sequence of frontiers until the late 1800s.

Heather Rose Jones @66, thank you for showing me an ancient precursor of my beloved sweater or rather, The Sweater: http://the-sweater.tumblr.com/

78
Quilt soap - the big name is Orvus. Which is also available in animal-supply places as 'Orvus WA', for considerably less money.
It's also used for things like embroidery and fine knitting.

Pretty much all my Lands' End clothing is on the order of ten years old, so I don't know if they've suffered loss of quality since being acquired by Sears in 2002. I've heard people say so, but that may be Good Old Days syndrome.

It used to last a long time and be inexpensive; part of the reason it was stereotypical preppy clothing.

PJ Evans @82, thanks; I'll see if I can find it. What do you mean by "animal supply places"? Surely not pet shops. Farm & Fleet, and that sort of farm-based department store?

cjo @ 77

If durability is your sole concern, I have two (tongue-in-cheek) words: polyester double-knit. The stuff wears amazingly (one of my friends has a 40-year-old tangerine orange dress, which has been worn by 3 or 4 people and is still in nearly-perfect shape.)

My rule of thumb for shirts is that thicker thread is stronger (oxford lasts better than pinpoint).

On survivalism/civilization collapsing, I tend to think of it in "what buys time" terms. It's sort of like keeping a shovel, a coat, and a flashlight in my car. It won't keep me alive all winter, but it ups the chance of being fine four hours later if something goes wrong. Similarly, having basic tools, some first aid supplies, an idea of how to get safe drinking water, stored food to last a few months, a bike--those make a lot of disasters more survivable.

Those things aren't just personal; they are part of the social infrastructure[2]. There may be some lone survivalists, but the ones I know are very much tied into larger networks of survivalists.

I don't tend to think of survivalism in wilderness terms, but I very much doubt big cities will be survivable for long if a major crash hits; the infrastructure is just too demanding[1]. The average suburb, on the other hand, is great-plenty of space to grow food, and you can walk to a few hundred houses.

1) Cities had horrendously-high death rates until a couple centuries ago; it takes a lot of infrastructure to manage sewage and water supply, and to get food into a city in good condition.

2) Social infrastructure is a term I use to describe the stuff that "people have"--not everyone, but enough that it's generally available. I noticed it in moving to Massachusetts; people have snow shovels, and snow blades for their pickups and Jeeps. That makes snow vastly less disruptive.

janetl, #70: One of the early scenes in S.M. Stirling's Changed World books is the discovery of the protagonist's elderly neighbors, both of whom were diabetic and who died within days of the Change when their insulin ran out. There are a lot of treatable conditions that would become irrevocable death sentences in a post-apocalyptic world -- things that rely on regular medication are only the most obvious. Severe myopia is one that's less obvious; right now I have my glasses, but my eyes get worse every year and sooner or later that wouldn't be enough without the ability to get new lenses. Or I'd get cataracts.

And @72: World Wide Words (one of the best etymology sites I know of) suggests that it's because So many women were described in marriage records as having the occupation of spinster that by the sixteenth century it began automatically to be used for all unmarried women and became the legal description, as Thomas Blount wrote in his Dictionary in 1656, “for all unmarried women, from the Viscounts Daughter downward”.

cjo, #77: Personal experience suggests that Land's End consistently provides well-made clothing that lasts for a long time. They're not cheap, but they're not designer-price either, and you do get what you pay for. Including non-knit pants hemmed to order for no extra charge.

84
Some pet shops, but it's more likely to be in larger-animal places.

77/86
LL Bean has reasonably good quality clothing. They do have stuff at sale prices - that's when I bought shirts.

Cassy B. @78 - alternatively, you could make your own. This website gives detailed directions, and they're easy to follow: http://www.thefamilyhomestead.com/laundrysoap.htm. (I am not a chemist, but I don't think any of the three ingredients qualify as enzymes.) All of the ingredients are shelf-stable. The only issue I've had with using this formula for more than a year now is the whites tend to slowly go grey.

My experience with Lands End (I've bought my work shirts from them for almost 15 years.)

The quality hasn't gone down much on stuff they sold 10 years ago. HOWEVER, many of the new additions are lower-quality than the older product lines.

Clarentine @89--DO you ever dry your whites outdoors, in strong sunshine? It's the traditional method for making sure whites stay white, along with bluing.

The worldwide increase in the price of cotton probably has something to do with the lowered durability of clothes.

Manufacturers are making cotton garments thinner to maintain their costs -- witness how whisper-thin t-shirts came into style a few years ago -- and that means they don't hold up as well. I've really noticed it with jeans, where my favorite store is pushing lighter weight material with more spandex compared to the jeans I bought 5 years ago.

Fidelio @91 - yep, I dry my clothes outdoors when weather and work hours permit. Last year, with record rainfall, I think I dried outdoors once. Outdoor clothes-drying also makes for a great fabric-softening system. :-) And the smell of sun-dried sheets cannot be topped, IMO.

All our washing is sun dried, and we notice that clothes sourced from American stores online fade incredibly fast, in a few weeks or months. Where once fabric dyes were rated for 100s of hours of sunshine, they are now only required to withstand tens.

AlyxL@ #49, Margery Kempe owned a brewery in King's Lynn, Norfolk, ca. 1400.

Re durable clothes, I not infrequently buy stuff made by L.L. Bean and Land's End from the thrift store. If you're not into thrift stores, it's worth buying new from them; one of the ways you can tell that Bean and Land's End make durable clothing is that if it doesn't last, they'll replace it at any time (yes, I have tested that claim).

fidelio @ 76: *I have no idea whether the term was ever comparable to Pratchett's use of the "Seamstresses' Guild" as a cover for women pursuing other means of self-support.

That does seems to be a common use of seamstress. Tax records for old Seattle back during the logging days show a lot of unmarried men working in logging, shipping etc, and a whole lot of unmarried women working as seamstresses. Far more than seemed required for garments.

Hyperlocal news: Area woman announces that she has found a job. "It's about 2 miles from my house, so none of this city's dreaded bridges, tunnels, or parkways will bedevil my commute," she said. "I'm excited to be doing software QA again, especially because it's at small company blissfully free of any and all Test Case Management tools."

Janet1 @96, congratulations

Orvus is primarily a wetting agent, so that the dirt loosens and floats away.

Originally found at tack and other large-animal shops. As long as we have horses and cattle, it will be available there comparatively inexpensively.

Most homemade soaps use a fat and lye. Lye is not a gentle cleaner.

Anent cloth: We had sheep, and my father whittled my mother a spindle on which she spun coarse wool yarn. Enough to make caps, sweaters, and rugs. All honest, undyed homespun.

So all we hear today is cannons’ boom
their echo forms our terrible surround,
for this whole century the world’s a tomb;

it isn’t that we just ran out of room
for good intentions, our shots will redound
so all we hear today is cannons’ boom

from shore to shore and the explosives’ bloom
accompanied by their pervading sound
for this whole century. The world’s a tomb

though skies are sunny, we are cast in gloom
parents and children thrown into the mound
so all we hear today is cannons’ boom.

Perhaps in time some scholar will exhume
the reason why we all now lie in ground;
for this whole century the world’s a tomb

and every hope has fallen down to doom
while goodness trust and honesty are bound
so all we hear today is cannons’ boom;
for this whole century the world’s a tomb.

I'll be darned. Milk fiber is a thing. Who knew? (Found while looking up milkweed fiber.)

Jacque @101

All kinds of things can be turned into spinning fiber. Whether it's a good idea (*cough*Ingeo*cough*) is another matter.

Here's a list that includes all the bio-synthetic fibers I've ever heard of, though it doesn't really cover the bamboo problem well. (There's two bamboo fibers made into fabric - one is the fibers from the stem: not synthetic. The other is cellulose.)

Cassy B. wrote @#78:
CJO @77, a non-trivial part of the problem is modern detergents. Almost all of them now have enzymes, which on the one hand makes them clean more effectively, but on the other hand eats the fabric slowly away.

And never, ever use products like "Vanish"[TM] which are effectively a modern version of bleaching powder (the old one was Calcium Hypochlorite, CaOCl2, the new ones tend to be Sodium Percarbonate, apparently) and destroy organic fabrics extremely quickly. The first you will know about this is white powder "lint" all over your dark coloured T-shirts, followed by by lots of ripped shirts, bedlinen, etc., where only moderate stress is involved.

Some of those T-shirts are irreplaceable, damn it!

This moose has switched to using Fairy (Snow? - it used to be called that) or other non-enzyme, non-bleaching powder, detergent. I have no idea if "Dreft" is still manufactured, and Lux soap flakes are fundamentally incompatible with a drum type washing machine unless you want the whole place filled with foam on washdays.

I'm afraid all I know about bleaching things is that if you use lye solution on your unbleached linens and put them in the sun they go whitemuch quicker than otherwise.

But wait, the enzymes eat away at the fabric? Dammit, I'm going to have to change washing powder then aren't I.

There is a reason that most larp kit is machine sewn and unembroidered, and the reason is that we just don't care enough to take the time to hand sew our clothes. There are exceptions, and those people essentially have a whole second hobby of dressmaking. Just sewing an outfit or two a year is more than the great majority of us are willing to do. Spinning and weaving? Keeping the sheep to get the wool to make the thread to weave the cloth to stitch the cloak? Who has time for that nowadays?

Heather Rose Jones @66

One of the things which seems pretty obvious from clothing history is how the how the shape of clothing changed for the lower classes. As spinning and weaving technology improved, reducing the cost of the cloth, the shapes of the pieces of cloth used to make a garment became more subtle. And then along came machine-sewing which made the actual assembly cheaper. I look at the descriptions of ancient and medieval clothing, and see far more simple rectangles of fabric as the base of a pattern.

106
It's a lot easier to reuse the pieces if they're not cut in funny shapes beforehand. (It's also easier to sew: you can use the weave to guide your stitches.)

One thing the sewing machine brought was the ability to do tucks and a lot of other ornamentation that was extremely time-consuming to do by hand.

I got a couple of phone calls today that I think must be the latest thing in scams: phonebot (it's entirely recorded, and not voice activated) claims to be from IRS and tells you that a suit has been filed against you/your name, and you should call number (202) whatever.

(I figure scam because the IRS doesn't start with phone calls, they start with letters, and every suit I've ever heard of involves written notice first. That the phone number is officially in DC doesn't mean anything.)

CassyB @78: I'm not sure if you'd be able to get the stuff, but the Nature Clean line of cleaning products advertises as enzyme free. And I've been really impressed with how well they clean, too. (a stain remover that gets out bike chain grease! truly!)

I've directed a couple of friends who do plant fiber spinning (i.e. hemp) to this thread. :) Figured they'd be interested. One works with fiber hemp professionally (geneticist), and what she wants for weaving is conveniently the stuff that's not good for analysis (i.e. the scraps). :)

You also waste a lot less fabric if your garments are constructed from rectangles. Some of the older Folkwear patterns, which are based on traditional designs, are entirely made of rectangles. OTOH, cutting out a modern blouse with curves at the shoulder and armpit, and with all the pieces cut in the same direction on the straight grain of the fabric, you end up with a lot of scraps.

Oops - wrong link (I posted the "where to buy" link). This is where they talk about the laundry cleaning liquid.

I've been getting mountains of random calls, mostly "surveys." Five, last Sunday. "ThankyouIdon'trespondtosurveysorphonesolicitationofanykind,thankyougoodbye." It's gotten to where I hate answering the phone, it's so rare that it's someone I actually want to talk to.

Getting back into jobhunting. Apparently I'm easily discouraged. I made two separate mistakes today applying for a single job. I keep thinking, what if I AM putting my best foot forward?

The ancient Greeks described the three fates, Lachesis, Atropos, and Clotho, as spinning out the days of our lives. What this thread has shown me is that the goddesses have to work very hard to make history happen.

I was thinking about this thread as I made my way home this afternoon, and it occurred to me that one of the places you can really see the difference that modern clothing production makes is in infants' and children's clothes. When buying new clothes each year for individual children is not only possible but (because of the low resilience) necessary, kids' clothes follow adult fashions more closely. People sometimes notice this with girls' clothing and gripe about how "sexualized" they are, but I've never heard anyone point out that putting young boys, even toddlers, in full-length trousers is just as big a change from earlier generations of kids' wear; and the reason is, with cheap clothing plus washing machines, you don't need to worry that the lower legs of the trousers will get dirty, or that it will become obvious right away when the kid starts to get too tall for them. It's in infants' clothing though, that things are really obvious: highly gendered, miniaturized adult clothing, the outfits for male infants often sporting pockets; the other factor here, I think, is disposable diapers -- earlier clothing for toddlers either involved split-crotch trousers, or dresses for both sexes, because it just made changing (and later, toilet-training) that much easier.

I'd pay $10 extra month if my landline included a service where I could punch a code on my phone and the spambot calling me would explode, or the live scam-caller would hear the Brown Note and suffer an attack of explosive bowel incontinence.

I have tried spinning with a drop spindle and found it hard to maintain a consistent thickness to the resultant yarn. I also took a workshop at a yarn store that aimed at spinning a complex combo of yarns into a specialty yarn. I found this easier. The teacher was able to work with me as a individual and explain the direction of the feeds of the yarns I was combining. It makes a very luxurious yarn but may not be practical for large scale needs.

Ken Follett wrote extensively about textile production in his novel Pillars of the Earth, although novel's main story is about the building of a cathedral. I found it fascinating.

I appreciate the tips!

Cassy B@78, huh, I never knew that. I checked my detergent, and it does list "enzymes." My main concern in picking a detergent was making sure it was fragrance-free due to skin sensitivity issues.

@Claire@109, thanks for mentioning this, it sounds interesting. Changing detergent is stressful due to previously mentioned skin sensitivity, but this might be worth trying out.

Sarah @79, I love thrift stores! It turns shopping into a fun treasure hunt instead of a stressful experience where I feel like I'm entering a world I ought to know how to navigate, but don't. Plus if I make a mistake, I don't feel as bad because I spent less in the first place, and I can just give the item back to the store as a donation. I do find the results erratic, though.

SamChevre@85, cool! I didn't think to mention a strong bias toward cotton, again due to skin sensitivity. (Our respective doctors both steered us toward cotton.) I never realized polyester could be so durable though.

Lee@86, PJ Evans@88, Lila@95, cool, I'll try LL Bean and Lands End.

Thena @ #64

Yes, I've seen that and spent some time watching and talking with the lady with the rabbit in her lap. I don't think she was at the last NYS Sheep and Wool Festival I went to (2011 or 2012). But she was a staple there for years.

Sarah @ #60: I have a friend who complained when I mentioned buying silk T-shirts that it was too expensive to dry clean them all the time. I told her you dry clean it once and then wash it in cold water. She complained that was too time consuming and would ruin the silk. My comment back to her was along the lines of "Do you think the Japanese, Chinese, or Koreans had dry cleaning a thousand or so years ago?"

PurpleGirl @117

It takes a lot of practice to hand spin even yarn. It takes weeks of fifteen minutes a day for most people to reach a basic level of proficiency. Except for the outliers: I've helped teach a couple of people to spin who caught on like *that*. We joked about remembering a past life or having really good spinners as ancestors.

Once you've reached that basic level of proficiency, you might be surprised by how much the remaining level of unevenness isn't obvious when you actually use the yarn for its intended purpose.

It's also worth deconstructing commercial yarn: most commercial yarn is not spun as evenly* as yarn spun by good hand spinners. The thing about industrialization is that it usually makes it possible for relatively unskilled people to supervise a machine making a lot of whatever-it-is quickly and cheaply; it doesn't necessarily mean you end up with high quality whatever-it-is. And that goes for supplies like yarn as well as end results.

*when the yarn in question is meant to be even, that is.

moose @ #103: Dreft laundry soap is still made, they also now have a liquid stain remover. I couldn't find what is in Dreft on the stain remover bottle and I no longer have the box from the soap powder. My Key Food carries it, some supermarkets don't.

Lila, #95: FYI, my understanding is that Land's End is a "blue" company while L.L. Bean is a "red" one. (Measured by how they treat their employees and what kinds of causes they donate money to support.) Since they sell very similar types of clothing, I've simply stopped shopping with Bean.

Jacque, #101: That's a good informational article, but it sure seems to be talking down to its audience, or assuming that they are completely scientifically illiterate, and perhaps lack linguistic ability as well. There was nothing in the quoted paragraph which was referred to as "in case your eyes just glazed over" which was in any way difficult to understand.

I think this is bugging me because I really dislike popular-science writing which is done from a "Science is HARD and SCARY!" viewpoint. The idea is to assume that your audience is capable of understanding it, and to encourage them to do so -- not to act like a Messenger From On High, sent to soothe the ignorant masses. And the latter definitely the vibe I got from the article.

Stefan, #116: We use PhoneTray Pro and have had good results with it. They maintain their own list of blocked numbers that never even get thru to you, and to which you can make your own reports to consider for addition. The downside is that it ties your landline into your computer, but since ours are in the same place anyhow, that's no big deal.

On our smartphones, we use the Advanced Call Blocker app, which also works very well. No spammer gets to call my cellphone more than once!

123
I was looking at Phonetray, and for me the problem is that they need your phone hooked up to a dial-up modem, as well as whatever your computer is connected to.

In Courtesans and Fishcakes (1997), a book about food, drink and sex in classical Athens, James Davidson recounts a common motif on the city's ceramics: a woman spinning or winding wool is approached by a young man carrying gifts or a money-bag. It's generally accepted that the men are paying for sex, but classicists have been confused by the women's seemingly domestic activity of spinning; as Davidson tells it, some have argued that they represent decent young ladies being seduced away from their household labour, while a more common analysis holds that they are prostitutes employing the spindle as a prop catering to their clients' supposed fetish for wifely virtue.

Davidson, however, points out that prostitutes were usually either slaves (whose owners would wish to exploit their labour as efficiently as possible) or poor free women (who could ill-afford to pass up any extra income). They are unlikely to have spent their time between clients lounging around unproductively: that is to say, prostitutes are probably depicted spinning wool because that's how most Athenian prostitutes spent much of their time when not directly engaged in sex work. A brothel could easily double as a textile factory. Excavations of such a building in the Ceramicus, the red light district of ancient Athens, found over a hundred loom weights.

Re "Spinster as a last name" (@58 etc.): There are people with the last name Farmer. This site suggests that it's about as common as Potter. So that might be a strike against "too common for a last name."

cjo @118, I found this out the hard way a few years ago when one of my cotton skirts tore under no stress to speak of, not at a seam... and then I looked and it was actually near-translucent in places. Since then, I found out that detergent makers found that if they had enzymes that ate tiny dangling threadlets that clothes "looked newer" (because no fuzz) even though it also ate very slightly at the rest of the fabric every time you wash it. I had to throw out several skirts I liked to wear to work, and do interior reinforcement on others that just had small weak spots (iron-on patches on the inside worked fine). I switched to Woolite and haven't noticed a problem since, but recently I can't find the Woolite labeled for delicate fabrics, only the big-jug Woolite that says it'll keep your clothes looking new longer.... which is code for "enzymes inside!".

*sigh*

Sandy B @126, ah, but "Spinsters" marry out of the name. (Of course, you'd think "Baxters" and "Brewsters" would marry out of the name, too, so perhaps my hypothesis is flawed.)

Sandy @ 126: Maybe this is too obvious, but I would think in an emerging patronymic system Spinster - as a female role name - could never become a common family name. If a woman was known locally as Jane (the) Spinster, presumably if she married Jack (the) Farmer their children would be Farmers (or Jack's sons) until they got trades of their own. So only spinsters (in the modern sense) would remain Spinsters by name, and few would have children.

(And I see Cassy just answered the same, more concisely.)

BTW, please all go read the latest in the Velma and Scraps thread. Things sound bad. Good wishes and prayers needed.

Orvus, according to the MSDS by P&G is sodium lauryl Sulphate. Dawn dish soap, according to the MDSD by P&G, is sodium lauryl sulphate, sodium laureth sulphate, ethanol (booze), and various amine oxides. And water, in both. None of these ingredients are enzymes, and all are readily substituted for each other.

Woolite is one of those products that I was told to avoid, years ago, because it's Not Good For Fine Fabrics. Or: why I use Orvus WA on the really good stuff.

'Kiss My Face' is, or was last I heard, supposed to be okay for silk.

You can now be fired in Utah for talking about homophones:

Homophones

Rob, #133: Somebody over there just won this week's Internet for the comment, "Is this some kind of a which hunt?"

(Never mind that the joke slightly misfires for me, because W and WH are not pronounced identically in my dialect. It's still priceless.)

Stefan Jones@116, I work for a phone company, and I'll see if I can convince product management to implement your suggestion. Finding employees willing to work on it will not be difficult.

In the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, I think I'd be wearing a lot of leather. Tanning leather sounds a lot easier than spinning. It would also be better protection against the thorny brush and sharp rocks in this country, not to mention providing some protection against the bites of those pesky zombies.

Terry Pratchett's book Dodger is set in early-Victorian London, and the clothing re-use of the time is a minor plot point.

With Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew making appearances, I find myself thinking that I learned more about the period from reading one Pratchett book than from all my teachers, English lit and history, tried to do.

We use Charlie's Soap for our laundry because of skin sensitivities. (Too many "free and clear" products still make at least two of us end up with itchy rashes.) It has no enzymes. Unfortunately, it's expensive and not necessarily easy to get without mail order, from what family elsewhere have said.

I've been using Ecover products for years. They have a fragrance-free range (Zero) as well as Non-bio - yes, the Zero range is also non-bio, as far as I know. (I think they -do- offer Bio versions, so check before you buy). See
Where to Buy for where to buy in the USA.

Before we found Ecover, my family used Persil non-bio due to my father's allergies.

From info. above, this* might explain why I'm still wearing T-shirts and other clothes which I've had since my teens or early 20s (I'm now mid-40s) and they haven't worn out.

* Along with my body shape staying pretty much the same. Although recently that's changed due to long-distance running, so some lower-body garments are now too small.

Open threadiness, Medical Division:

I had minor dental work yesterday afternoon; specifically, a small cavity filled in a lower rear molar. This involved the use of a local anaesthetic, naturally.

When I started to get up from the dental chair, the room spun briefly. I wasn't nauseous or even dizzy per se; it's just that the room jumped around and I had to grab the wall to keep my balance. This happened multiple times (although less severely) over the course of the evening; I posit a problem with my inner ear. Is this a thing that can happen with anaesthesia to the jaw?

I thought I was completely recovered by the time I went to bed, but when I turned off the bedroom lights and tried to cross the room in the dark, I realized I had little sense of balance at all; apparently I'd been using my eyes as feedback to keep me balanced.

The whole experience was very odd.

janetl @96:
Yay job! I know the pleasure of being able to actually break things rather than just think about breaking things...

Lila @110:
I've been costuming for Worldcon, and Fiona's going as Merida from Brave. I made her overdress in the proper medieval style, with a straight tabard front and triangles on the sides for fullness. The resultant dress uses the fabric very efficiently (which is good, because dyeing the coarse linen was a complex process and I'll never get that shade again), and moves in a way that pings my "medieval" bell.

SandyB @113:
I made two separate mistakes today applying for a single job. I keep thinking, what if I AM putting my best foot forward?

Sounds like Tapes to me. It's a tense and difficult thing, looking for a job. Of course you're going to be nervous and a little extra error-prone. Good luck and good heart.

Allan Beatty @114:
*snrk*

Cassy B.

Lidocaine can have that sort of side effects if it gets into the bloodstream.

P.J. Evans @108: yes, that is definitely a scam; the IRS has a page on their website warning people about it. Apparently comes in a bunch of varieties and was especially aggressive this year.

SamChevre @142, good to know. Hope it clears my system soon; I'm mostly all right now but I did have one episode of loss-of-balance this morning. Very disconcerting...

P. J. Evans #108, Zack #143:

By a curious coincidence, no sooner than I had finished reading P. J.'s plaint than the phone rang--with one of those messages, highly garbled. I believe they've called several times now, but this is the first message they've left.

(coming in late, unfortunately)

This is a subject that is near and dear to my heart. I started spinning about six years ago, and took to it so much that it has taken over a good portion of my life and living room. (Just acquired my fifth wheel, a Lendrum.)

I used to think that in a Lucifer's Hammer-type scenario, the enclave would let me in because I trained as a nurse, though my actual practice is years out of date. These days, I assume my chances would more be based on the fact that I have the knowledge and experience to take fleece raw off a sheep and turn it into clothing.

And yes, it takes a lot of time. Ravelry has an event called Tour de Fleece (TdF), where spinners set themselves goals for during the time of Tour de France. This year, my goal was to hand-card several pounds of washed Suffolk fleece and spin them up.

The washing had been done in small (8 oz. or so) batches over several days in my kitchen. There are other techniques -- faster ones that I've tried that gave me results I didn't like as well, and slower ones more suitable for fine fleece and laceweight spinning -- but this is the one that gives me the best trade-off of time versus results.

Hand-carding a bag of spinnable rolags (the output of a set of hand cards) took about six hours. Spinning those rolags long-draw style (which goes faster than other techniques) and plying the singles into two-ply skeins took about the same amount of time.

At the end of TdF (about 20 days), during which I devoted all the free time I had available to the Suffolk project, I ended up with 15 skeins of worsted-weight 2-ply yarn -- about 3 pounds in weight. That's enough yarn to knit one sweater, probably with some left over.

A weaver could weave that yarn into plain cloth in a day or two. But it's not that simple. First, the yarn I spun is woolen rather than worsted (i.e., soft and airy rather than compacted and smooth) because of both the preparation method (carding) and the spinning method (long draw) that I chose. That means it's probably not suitable for warp. Second, the yarn is a creamy white. A weaver would probably want to have either the warp or weft (or both) dyed to add interest to the cloth.

My interest is primarily in wheel spinning. I'm competent on a spindle, but I don't enjoy it as much. But from a historical point of view, spindles are where it's at. The treadle wheel as we know it, with a bobbin and flyer, was only state of the art for 250 years at most (earlier, there was a period of 200 to 300 years of more primitive wheels). After that, the spinning jenny put spinning as a profession out of business. Before that, it was all spindles, all the time. There are big spindles, small spindles, supported spindles, and drop spindles -- all tools to add twist to fiber and provide a matrix for holding spun fiber. Different cultures mostly settled on the spindle style that was appropriate for the fiber available to it. The spindle (and distaff) you use for spinning linen is much different from the one that's best for spinning cotton.

@Naomi Parkhurst -- I see we're familiar with many of the same sources, especially Abby Franquemont. Are you on Ravelry? I'm carbonel there.

Bits and pieces (scraps and patches?)--

When Adam delved and Eva span,
Who was then the gentleman?

And even the queen--think Penelope.

(And a thread on threads. Whooda thunkit.)

Beth Friedman @146

Yes, I'm on Ravelry - gannet's my username there.

I've been spinning for a few years, though it's not my main fiber focus. But I am surprised both by how quickly weaving goes when I actually sit down and do it and by how much I can spin in a week with just a spindle if I pick it up at every convenient moment. Knitting is much slower than weaving (though again, picking it up at every available moment helps on that front.)

What's that saying - it takes seven knitters to keep up with one spinner, but seven spinners to keep up with one weaver. (In terms of amount of yarn produced or used in the same amount of time.)

abi, #141: Fiona's going as Merida from Brave.

I hope there will be pictures! Your description of the dress sounds very interesting.

My primary crafting skill is bead weaving. I use a small hand loom, which is nothing more than a metal frame with a comb and a turnable dowel (with a nail in it) at each end. Tension is applied by turning the dowels and both warp and work can be wrapped around the dowels several times, increasing the maximum length to around thirty inches.

It produces beautiful work, especially when using silver-lined beads to give a shimmering quality to the output. When weaving size eleven beads at an inch wide, I can produce two inches an hour. I am blessed with an unusual degree of precision in following patterns - or at least my own - and rarely place my beads wrong. Errors significantly slow down the overall rate, as they can only be corrected by undoing everything that came after them. Two inches an hour is probably a good speed. At any rate, it hasn't increased since my first couple of feet.

It takes me eight hours of labour to produce a finished choker. This contains, assuming my usual habits, something less than five pounds worth of materials. The labour, at minimum wage, is worth fifty pounds.

In practice, I sell them for thirty, and not very many of them. And weaving on a loom is unusually quick for bead work. The technique nearest to equivalent in output is square stitch. I've used square stitch, and a one inch square took me about four hours.

I like the idea of hand made objects, but I can't afford to pay what they're really worth. I suspect few of us can.

SamChevre:

I like the term "social infrastructure." It's related to Jim's often-repeated advice that in any disaster, your first job is not to add to the number of people needing to be rescued. (Thus, don't jump into the pool to rescue the drowning child if you can't actually swim--the strong swimmer who happens along next will find *two* people drowning instead of one!) If everyone is prepared for a two-foot snowfall, say, then only a few very unlucky people will need rescue from it, and their neighbors or the EMS types will be able to handle the load. If nobody is prepared, then there will be huge numbers of people needing rescue, and the minority of neighbors who are prepared, along with the police/fire/ambulance people, will be completely swamped.

ISTM that preparing for disasters at some level is a pretty positive thing to do for this reason. When TSHTF, the more people were prepared for something like what happpened, the fewer people end up in a Red Cross shelter or something.

There's a flavor in much of the discussion of preparing for disasters that's sort-of gleeful in an Old-Testnament-Prophet sort of way--you b-stards have been Doin It Rong for too long, and now you're going to get what's coming to you. I guess that's just human nature, both in terms of ascribing all bad things to your pet hates, and also in terms of dividing the world into the virtuous (us) and the non-virtuous (them), for some value of us and them.

duckbunny:

Yeah, I think the other part of that is that human labor is just a lot more valuable than it was in the past, thanks to our greater capital and general wealth. A big part of that wealth is the availability of cheap manufactured goods. Handmade clothes, furniture, jewelry, etc. can't compete on cost with mass-produced materials except either at the very low end (when you don't have any job prospects even at minimum wage, so spending ten hours of skilled labor to get a dress for your kid makes sense) and at the very high end (when you care about quality and uniqueness and not about price).

Well, okay, not going to do that again.

I've got a comfy chair that is an old hand-made thing that I bought second-hand thirty years ago. Being basically wood frame, there's not a lot to wear out, aside from the cushions. When a couple of the springs inevitably blew, I took it to a local upholstery shop to get the lot replaced.

The first bad sign was that, even when I called them, their whole attitude seemed to be, "Well, okay, we'll do it if you insist."

Gave me a projection of a week or two to finish it. (Really? Well, okay, I've worked in service bureaus. I know it's not how long that particular task will take, but rather how long the queue ahead of it is.)

This was four weeks ago. Didn't hear, didn't hear. I finally called them this morning. "Oh, yeah, we're just starting on that now. It'll be ready tomorrow." Trans.: "Uh, okay, we can do that for you if you insist."

::sigh::

I should have taken their first response as diagnostic. I'm a little afraid of what I'm going to be picking up.

Duckbunny, #150: There's a bead-weaver here in Houston who reproduced the ApolloCon logo (without the year at the end) on a black background. The entire piece is about 2" x 18". NFS, of course; I don't even want to think about how long it took him to do that! First he had to chart the pattern, which would have been tricky enough given the sun, Earth, and moon making the Os, and then he had to weave it. And I don't think I ever got a picture of it, sorry.

rikibeth (followup to 198::702): do you know when the Reform key-change happened? (i.e., was it always characteristic?) I've speculated that Marty Balin's Jewish background was one of the interesting influences in Jefferson Airplane; even before he formed JA, he was recording upbeat songs in minor keys -- which was not common IIRC in the early 1960's. (No, I don't know what denomination he was, or how much temple he attended.)

abi @ 198::910: fascinating story. Was it more remediable than the English/metric screwup that killed a (IIRC) Mars explorer?

Dave Bell @ 198::859: I add to the chorus of "Brilliant!"s -- you may have actually slowed down entropy a bit with that move. We've gotten several of those calls, but the best we've come up with on the fly is "which computer?". (we have multiple cheap laptops, partly for business reasons.)

Dave* @ 24: how much \central/ civil authority was there in those days? AFAICT, the law (e.g.) was mostly a local affair -- slow communications (cf guthrie@45) made centralized power a sometime thing. With more-centralized power comes more potential for breakdown when power is decapitated. I have read that the UK was so certain this was true that they arranged not just to shelter the high-and-mighty but to provide Regional Seats of Government to provide authority everywhere after a nuclear exchange. I also wonder whether those large die-offs affected the rulers as much as the peasants; the well-fed and under-crowded would have been at least somewhat less likely to fall to disease. Also, skills were more widely diffused; if you lose your smith, the neighboring villages' smiths might be able to make up part of his output.

John Mark Ockerbloom @32: <echoes applause>

Johan Larson @ 53: while video is now almost as random-access as writing, it is \slow/ by comparison in both consumption (100-200 wpm speaking vs 400-800 wpm reading) and creation. There are so many things not needing pictures that I don't see print ever giving way to video. There are SF authors who disagree with me; e.g., Charles Harness ("The Rose") thought we'd evolve beyond needing to read -- but he was a bit of a crank. It does paint an interesting picture of reversion to pre-literate societies in which verbal skills were paramount. (Note that "pre-literate" doesn't mean barbaric; from what I've read, Athenian Greece and established Rome had literate upper classes but even those levels worked by conversation and oratory more than by writing.)

abi @ 59 / Dave* @ 68: definitely agree (even if Brin overdrew these effects in The Postman).

guthrie @ 74: The Cloisters has fuller's teazel in its garden; maybe they can tell you where to find seed.

Cassy B @ 78: clothes dryers may be as much at fault as detergents. Clothes drying on a line don't generate lint -- or didn't when I was young; would air-dried clothes washed in detergents gradually turn to fuzz?

albatross @ 80: there's a difference between walking away from daily high-stress, and refusing to pay for programs-for-the-general-good; notice the idiocy that just barely continued funding for road repair (and alternatives -- a local mass-transit project was in danger).

Allan Beatty @ 144: ISTM that the discussion shows that the Fates have it easy; all they're doing is the part that most women used to do in every spare bit of time, rather than the many other tasks requiring less well-known training.

albatross @ 152: you omit a third category: people wanting clothing that isn't commercially available. SCA garb is clothing (not costume), but it's not found in stores and it's mostly not high-end; I also suspect there are still middle-class sewers who want mundane clothes in their own choice of materials. And I wonder how many people make their own high-end clothing; I hear that the people who make and fit clothing for the big couturiers are \very/ skilled, so the ability to match their work would be rare.

CHip (155): I also suspect there are still middle-class sewers who want mundane clothes in their own choice of materials.

Yep. I'm one of them. And not just materials. When my favorite--completely unreplaceable--skirt got too shabby to wear to work*, I got a book on making patterns from finished clothes and copied it. Now I have a bunch of that skirt in different colors. Note that I am by no means an expert seamstress, but I can handle the basics and follow directions.

*I still wear it for weekends, when it doesn't matter how faded it is.

The book that Mary Aileen linked to is the best among a few good ones. It's the one I wave at interested people.

Intuitively you would think that to copy a favorite garment, you should first disassemble it. That's a lot of needless fuss, and distorts the pieces.*

Part of my business is creating patterns, mock-ups, prototypes and floor models from ideas brought by those wishing to start clothing lines. It's been hard sustaining this trade with the plummeting quality of (even wholesale) yard goods we've had for some years. I regard with utmost horror anything that might strangle the supply.

*The rag trade term is a rub-off (as opposed to a knock-off, which is pirating). A one-off is recreating a favorite for one client, which invariably has a few changes.

Mary Aileen @156: When my favorite--completely unreplaceable--skirt got too shabby to wear to work*, I got a book on making patterns from finished clothes and copied it. Now I have a bunch of that skirt in different colors. Note that I am by no means an expert seamstress, but I can handle the basics and follow directions.

Ooooh. Having just learned some basics of sewing this year, finally, I might have just found the "use case" for getting a sewing machine and continuing to sew as a hobby. I have problems finding pants I really like, and last week the dog chewed up one of my favorite pairs.

Add me to the last few posters who sew because it's hard to find quite what we want in stores. I like slightly-retro clothes that are neither skin-tight nor ill-fitting; I've found a couple of vintage patterns that fit me well and some online tutorials on drafting simple patterns from your own measurements, and I've made multiple versions in different fabrics.

(OK, that's not the whole truth -- the artist/designer in me also likes to turn patterns around in my head and decide how to vary the construction *this* time.)

John Larson @53, I hope not!

My hearing (as in ability to perceive sound) is fine (at 44, I can still hear the "teenager" ringtones), but my auditory processing is rubbish. I really /need/ text in order to be able to process and retain information. Oral instructions are useless to me. Likewise a series of spolen driving directions - I can only handle one directive at a time, so BLESS the map-function voice instructions that don't tell me three steps ahead and only confuse me - and even with those, I really do best if I read the overview first, so that the voice navigation is jogging my memory.

Today I found myself explaining to a friend how to track a tag on tumblr. I was so tired that I couldn't even GIVE verbal instructions. I grabbed a notebook and a pen out of my pocketbook and wrote the steps down. In a very conversational style...but I literally could not organize myself to explain it unless I mediated it through writing.

If text goes away entirely in favor of video, I will be damned near useless.

Like anything else that supposes the *complete* death of a completely common facet of our culture, I am intensely skeptical of anyone who thinks audio/video will wholly replace text for information processing. It sounds like the "There will be nothing left but e-books" fear-mongering to me. In both cases, the real answer is that X is an increasing percentage of the total, and may continue that way for some time.

Those who predict its whole takeover mostly seem to be extrapolating the current increase in usage as if the graph will continue on the same line forever, which is true of very few things at all.

Those who predict its eventual plateau and the continued, if lessened, existence of the original medium seem to instead be arguing from observations of irreplaceable or at least superior usages.

Re Putin's latest publicity thing:

I would rather have a poodle as president, thanks. Leopards eat people.

Does anyone have solid evidence on the idea that enzymes eat cotton?

It's my impression that Tide wrecked a number of my favorite t-shirts, but when (challenged by a friend) I poked around online, I found rather little verification for the idea enzymes affect cotton (as distinct from wool and silk).

I got back into sewing when I lived in the UK, gained weight, and the difference between my heavy body shape (pear) and the local heavy body shape (apple) meant that I couldn't buy clothes that fit.

And then I got to like making my own skirts and dresses, in the styles I like, when I like. I lost the weight again, but didn't quit sewing. I do find that things are less expensive when I make them myself, mostly because my fabric content choices (natural fibers only, please) don't appear in low-end clothes.

It's also a time-saver for me, since I don't end up dragging through multiple shops looking for things that I like.

I have a number of basic patterns (a flared skirt, a darted skirt, a princess-line dress, a dress with darted bodice), which I vary to get the sorts of clothes that I like to wear. Indeed, my Worldcon costume (Éowyn's Shieldmaiden Dress) uses the darted bodice block for two of its elements. (I did have to learn to make a corset for that. Now I have all kinds of corsetry ideas...)

And yes, there will be Worldcon costume photos.

Johan Larson @53:I can read and absorb faster than i can listen and absorb. Much faster. No way is video/audio an improvement for many things - e.g. reading a book (unless doing something which makes physically holding and reading from a book impossible) and certainly not for reading anything scientific.

If there's a video of something plus a transcript below, it's much faster and more informative for me to read the transcript.

I continue to work on drafting a wide variety of patterns, some with better success than others; the trouser horror continues unabated, unfortunately.

It's ever so much easier to draft earlier styles of clothing (including corsets) -- many of them are either more forgiving, or better at rearranging the body to suit.

Mary Aileen @ 156 & Carol Kimball @ 157
I recently had the astoundingly obvious epiphany that using tailors chalk to rub off improved the results exponentially. Apparently it's formatted just that much better than any other sort of pencil or chalk (never mind crayons, tailors chalk that's actually wax, or any number of other things that I've tried and had meh results with, in the past)

CHip #155: albatross @ 152: you omit a third category: people wanting clothing that isn't commercially available. ...

People with non-standard body shapes (notably transsexuals).

And I wonder how many people make their own high-end clothing; I hear that the people who make and fit clothing for the big couturiers are \very/ skilled, so the ability to match their work would be rare.

Well, I'm sure they'd say so! ;-) Bluntly much of high-end fashion is high-end tribalism, with Artistic Statements mixed in. But the thing is, talent is a drag on the market these days, and plenty of people are capable of clothing design on that level. There are certainly skills to be learned in working with exotic materials, but consider also that many of those couture designs are "exhibition pieces", effectively unwashable. Very limited market there....

Rikibeth, #160: I'm not as badly off as you, but I do have 2 issues with audio processing. First, I have really low-end sound filtering software in my head, so in a noisy environment it's often hard for me to parse speech (and no, I'm not losing my hearing; this has been a problem since college). Second, my brain privileges text over audio, so that I can't read and listen at the same time. For that matter, my brain seems to privilege thinking over audio -- it's easy for me to lose the thread of a conversation, or not hear music that I'm listening to, if I'm thinking about something else.

I don't have your problem with GPS oral prompting, though -- at least, not now that I've gotten used to it. At first, it was very disconcerting to have an unfamiliar voice start speaking to me out of thin air!

abi, #164: my fabric content choices (natural fibers only, please) don't appear in low-end clothes

I don't find this to be true at all. Even at Wal-Mart and Target, there is at least all-cotton clothing -- mostly cotton knits, to be sure, but it's there. The mid-range is where I see this happening; in my Roaman's catalogs, all the pretty fancy dresses are polyester. Maybe there's a regional difference?

my Worldcon costume (Éowyn's Shieldmaiden Dress)

Oh, I DO hope there will be pictures!

Me #168: And in the ohnosecond, I realize I noted transexuals, but not the even more obvious case of transvestites!

#169, Lee: I have the same two issues with my hearing. I've had my hearing tested and it's very good! In a noisy restaurant I can't follow conversations and end up feeling isolated, but in the same noisy restaurant I once pointed at a person sitting across from me and a couple of chairs down — who I couldn't have possibly had a conversation with — and said "your phone is ringing". He pulled his phone out of his shirt pocket and it was. He hadn't heard it.

I can only focus on audiobooks or podcasts if I'm doing something that completely occupies my hands, eyes, and very little of my brain (specifically not anything that needs language). Cooking, driving, painting walls, for example. My brain also privileges thinking over audio, but if I'm doing something manual, *then* it can focus on audio. I don't know if I could sew and listen to a podcast at the same time. Maybe once I get better at it so I don't have to think so hard about what I'm doing...

Clifton (158): A word of caution: pants can be tricky to fit. Not exactly a beginner project.
----------
I'm another who finds text much superior to audio/video. Not only can I read far faster than I can listen, but my mental processing is strongly oriented toward visual information (by which I mean text, not images--graphic novels just don't work for me at all). For example, when someone reads me a phone number or spells their name, I have a hard time writing it down without missing or reversing digits/letters. Poor auditory processing runs in the family; my sister had trouble in school because of it, and my father's has gotten so bad that he's officially hard of hearing*. A bit odd, considering all the muscians we have in the family, but brains are odd.

*Hearing aids don't help much, because the problem is in his brain, not his ears.

I am reminded of a section from an archaic Latin text explaining how a man of the city, having purchased a country estate, should go about running it. After listing the thousand and one things that the slaves ought to be doing on any given day, and what they ought to be doing if the overseer claims there are reasons not to work on those specific projects, it finally comes to the issue of weather so bad that no one can work outside. In that case, the writer concludes, all of the slaves should be busy inside making caps out of the old rags.

The translation I did is a little dubious at this point, but it was eventually resolved in class that they were expected to be doing some sort of garment-creation work out of the remains of older garments or scraps of cloth. This, at least, was a gender-neutral activity; everything the female slaves did was dealt with roughly as "and make sure your villica keeps all the female slaves doing their work, and takes care of the sick slaves once she makes sure they're really sick and not just slacking."

Abi @ 164... Yes, pictures are expected.

*gibber* *gibber* *gibber*

I don't even know where to start, here! *happy grin*

My whole life, I've approached the whole fiber/textile thing from a personal angle, of connection to the world around me. "How does THAT work?" and "What happens if I do THIS?" Plus a deep sense of satisfaction when I could wear one of my projects.

I taught myself how to spin, using wool found on the land around Hadrian's Wall. Cackling like a fiend when I realized I was woolgathering, for real and true. (Acquiring the wheel is an whole 'nuther story.) I thought that the materials more or less taught me, so I get a bit intimidated when I hear about people spinning "from the fold" or whatever. After having learned how to spin on the wheel (pre-internet days, so no "quick, let's go consult some handy site written by a loving enthusiast"), I also learned how to spin on a drop spindle. Cotton, too. Somewhere in the house there is silk roving, and even angora straight from a bunny... as well as a number of wools in differing colors: meant for felting, but I quite happily card colors together in heathers...

And then "ooh! shiny!" took over, and I learned how to weave. I also wanted to weave something I could wear: my teacher made me very sad by telling me she didn't think most handspun fibers could stand up to the stresses endured by warp-threads, with the constant lifting (and rubbing) they'd undergo from lifting the harnesses and heddles. Still, I embarked on a couple of projects: learning the basics over a series of lesson hours that amounted to 40, then another 40 devoted to weaving my prize, a wrap/poncho.

I love weaving: you, the weaver, are present at the very edge of creating-from-nothing: warp threads that are under tension, that you know would just turn into a spaghetti-mess if you released that tension, but weft-by-weft pinned into their parallel order, creating this... stuff. Fabric that bends in all 3 dimensions and doesn't disintegrate, but can hold things, or become clothing for one's cold body. Heady stuff, that: I felt almost like a goddess, the first time I saw that transition.

It's no wonder to encounter weaving as a theme in the old mythological tales; cloth-making is truly an art of civilization, and of peace. You can run away with your knitting needles or your crochet hook, but weaving makes you a sitting duck. (Even if you're using a belt-loom, which I have... bought at a church bazaar; that evening, dear hubby trundled down the stairs to apologize for having let himself get distracted by some new software he'd bought, and I was all like, "Huh? What?" bent over that new toy.)

So, yeah, abi, very well articulated, about the survivalists and that lacuna regarding fabric, and later on, about how talking about "when" society collapses diverts our attention from trying to make that an "if", instead. (A riff on your answer to albatross in #59)

Crazy(and trying to re-spoon before Worldcon, so she can remember to bring some of this fun stuff...)Soph

Crazysoph @175

I am still a baby weaver and have yet to use a handspun warp, but I have known people who spin and weave who say they have less trouble with warp thread breakage with their handspun than with commercial yarn. It all depends on the quality of the handspun, of course, and it's apparently a good idea to use an appropriate sizing on the warp thread. Still! Consider all the cloth woven from handspun before the spinning jenny.

And I've read that the weaving industry in England was suspicious about the quality of yarn handspun on newly-introduced spinning wheels to the point of requiring that warp be spindle-spun.

Do give it a try! If you're on Ravelry, there's a discussion group dedicated to weaving with handspun. It's fairly quiet, but the archives are useful.

CHip "how much \central/ civil authority was there in those days?"

Let's look at some real-world examples. Central civil authority dissolved in China at the end of the Zhou and Han dynasties, in Japan at the end of the Muromachi shogunate, in Western Europe during the 5th century. What all of these had in common was military disruption. Plague and economic disruption had weakened all these regimes, but they didn't really collapse until open warfare, either internal or external, began.
So there was central authority, even in a premodern context, and its failure had an effect.

The interesting thing is, most modern post-apocalyptic scenarios begin with either plague or environmental catastrophe/resource depletion. But if you look at West Africa now, the main effect of plague appears to be to strengthen central authority. When central authority dissolved, as it did in Liberia and Sierra Leone, it was due to military disruption. When plague hits, people don't try to take authority into their own hands, they group together in fear. From what I've heard, people in the affected areas are doing whatever the government tells them to, in hopes they will be spared. I think there's a similar effect for natural disasters. After hurricanes and earthquakes the number of people who take to looting are far outnumbered by those who hunker down and wait for instructions.

The granddaddy of modern PA scenarios is the nuclear exchange, and it's hard to judge how realistic those scenarios are since nuclear conflict is unprecedented in human history. Nuclear devastation would be like a manmade natural disaster, but even worse in terms in terms of death, trauma, and infrastructure destruction. It might have the ability to disrupt society in ways nothing else could.

(When I say 'nuclear conflict,' I mean fullscale nuclear exchange. Use of nuclear weapons has a precedent, of course)

I have read of Central Asian camel herders in the ?1910s, walking alongside their camels, spinning as they did so, and every few paces reaching out to grab a handful of camel hair to add to their spinning.

And people wonder why camels are so ill-tempered ...

SamChevre @142, I sometimes use ointments containing lidocaine at ... the other end of my body from Cassy B. Do I need to worry about similar effects?

This discussion had been generally skeptical of survivalism, including my posts, and for good reason. But yesterday I was reminded sharply of the reason for the phenomena. Someone has theorized that the recent sinkholes in Siberia are evidence that the long-dreaded methane outgassing from permafrost melt has begun in earnest. This might accelerate climate change from the catastrophic to the annihilationist. When I read this, the fear hit--the fear I remember so well from the Peak Oil Spring of '08, the fear for my children. For them, it seems like I should be doing something, no matter how futile it might be. And it would be probably futile, as has been discussed, and that's why I'm not going to try to buy a plot of land in central Maine and live off the grid and (fail to) make our own clothes. We wouldn't last five minutes. But I understand the urge.

Dave* @180, I am in very much the same position as you. Except that, being on the right side of the pond, the plot of land I won't be buying is not in Maine. But it might be in Shetland.

Abi pointed me at this, because she knows I'd be interested, and also that I'm dreadfully behind on even fun things like reading Making Light.

I'm a professional botanist and agroecologist, and professional fiber artist, and semi-professional textile historian. I'd be a great person to have on your team post-apocalypse, if it weren't for the whole "modern medicine required for continued life" problem. (And apologies for any typos I miss: my fingers are numb from aforementioned modern medicine, and it's making typing a bit challenging.)

If we had a major apocalypse interfering with trade and industry (not, scarily, all that unlikely), I don't see fabric as all that much problem, really. We all, by historical standards/em>, have a lifetime supply of clothing in our closets, and an abundance of household linens. Sewing would be a useful skill, but we could get by without manufacture for quite some time. Decades, probably (long enough to lose the necessary skills completely?).

There's also a lot of infrastructure around: people who have spinning wheels or looms stashed away in an attic, etc. We wouldn't have to go back to spinning everything on a drop spindle and weaving it on a warp-weighted loom. I live in Amish country: there are also plenty of treadle sewing machines and other such tools around. I realize that in cities the situation is different, but cities have much bigger problems if long-distance transport or other infrastructure goes away. (Water? Food?)

My favorite aspect of this is how it plays out in world building. Where does stuff come from? What do people wear? How is it grown/extruded/whatever? How is it processed, and who does that? What powers that processing: people, water, electricity? How is class expressed in clothing?

Same for food: where is it grown (or produced in some other way)? What is traded long-distance, vs being local? In a low-tech society, food and fiber both illuminate the intersection between climate, technology, and trade.

I got to run a panel discussion on that topic at Confluence (Pittsburgh) this past weekend: such fun! This is a topic I could go on at great length about.

Well thanks everyone here for encouraging me to get out my spindle again. It really does help for the fidgets. I'm terrible, but it's the process rather than the product that's the point for me.

Speaking of textile care - I was recently given a fluffy, super-heavy, cotton towel with "The Heavyweight" on the tag. Also on the tag - care instructions stating "Machine wash delicate, tumble dry low." !!!! Since when did we have to handle cotton terry towels with kid gloves? Is this a sort of "we know this is shoddy merchandise" CYA move by textile and garment manufacturers?

It would probably take 2-3 hours on low with nothing else in the dryer for this bath towel to actually get dry. Since I have to use communal pay washing facilities, this is deeply impractical. I checked with the person who gifted me the towel and she confirmed that she just washes them on perm-press and tumbles on broil and has had no problems with them.

IIRC it was a member of the SCA who worked out a plausible practical explanation for the tendency of medieval European garments to be variations on a T-tunic for all classes, several centuries, and thousands of square miles. It's possible to draw a pattern to fit an average human body right on the unwound bolt without wasting more than a scrap or two; most pattern pieces will share at least one edge with another piece.

Lee@169, Janra@171 - I've always had trouble hearing conversation with noisy backgrounds, and restaurants are unfortunately usually the worst. Got my hearing tested in college and it was fine. But that was decades ago, and a year or two ago my wife bugged me to go get it tested again and try some hearing aids. I do have the pretty typical age-related upper-frequency losses, and test-drove one hearing aid and then a pair of them for a week or two. Wearing one seemed to help (didn't matter which ear), wearing two drove me bonkers, like they're echoing inside my head because they're not perfectly in sync. There was a perfect place to try the things out - there's a local Middle Eastern restaurant that's the best of its genre and has the worst and most echoey acoustics of anywhere in the area.

Digital signal processing and circuit miniaturization have progressed radically over the years, but at least given the way such things are paid for in the US, this has meant that big clunky analog hearing aids that used to cost an inflation-adjusted $6000/pair have been superseded by very small in-ear digital $6000/pair hearing aids (or $20 as-seen-on-TV analog ones, about the size of a Bluetooth headset, which aren't very good.) It ought to be possible to fit high-quality signal processing into a headset for a few hundred dollars, considering that Bose does that with noise-cancellers, or a double-microphone pair of earbuds driven by an iPhone, and there are enough boomers getting into hearing aid age ranges there should be a market.

A couple of years ago I was visiting some friends up in the city, walked into their flat, walked around the little robots charging in the hallway (because that's what kinds of friends I have), and peripherally noticed an upright piano in the living room corner, covered in cloth, and then looked again, because it wasn't a piano, it was a loom :-) She also has a closet full of various boxes of fiber, ranging from raw wool to spun to fabric. I don't think he has taught the robots to do anything with fabric except maybe precise color identification or sweeping up bits on the floor (some of them started out as Roombas.)

Dave* @177

I've seen conflicting views of the nuclear conflict problem.

The radiation effects are not going to be good but, ugly though some of the effects are, it's a life expectancy and public health problem.

The more immediate effects, such as the blast and the thermal flash, may have been exaggerated. Flat desert land and ocean islands are differently affected to at least some city sites. And then there is a perception that treats a mile of total destruction as being half of a two-mile badly damaged area.

They didn't know about the nuclear winter effect in the 1950s, and they didn't have the long range ballistic missiles, and for a while there was the feeling, bad though it would be, that a country could survive. British planning set up nuclear shelters from which the survivors could be organised. And there would be few enough survivors that they could be fed and clothed, and enough to pass on the knowledge and rebuild and, in effect man a battered island that was a colony ship for Western Civilisation.

You could build some interesting story-telling on that, and I suppose John Wyndham depicted the hopeful end of the apocalypse scale. But my memories of old movies (Hollywood) and American SF seem to be biased towards a later period. Oh, there was On the Beach, but when missiles came into the equation, the hope died.

I knew something about stats, and could even see why Reagan's Star Wars didn't need to be close to be 100% effective to be useful. It just had to restore the unreliable targeting of missiles that made shooting first crazy.

There was more to it than that, but sometimes a nuclear war seemed to be more about bad dreams, panic, and Mad Max. Alternate History asks the what-if question, but there's always the real history. Nuclear was was there to set if a dramatic SF story, possibly involving mutated creatures in an empty desert that was only a camera angle away from Las Vegas.

It was, for much of my life, a Schrodinger's War, lurking catlike in the shadows. And what we have instead is almost as much a product of wild imagination. but quite real death and destruction. But since we don't have to keep our armies safe for the Big One, we can send them off in dribs and drabs and actually kill people.

Dave Harmon, #168: you seem to be answering praise of the people who make and fit couture clothing but what you write is condemnation of the designers. Not the same people.

A couple weeks ago I attended (via webcast) the National Disaster Life Support conference. One of the sessions was about planning disaster response for a small (~10 kiloton) nuclear explosion in a city, say downtown Washington DC. It's, frankly, the stuff of nightmares, but it is being treated as "this is going to happen sooner or later, and we're going to have to deal with it when it does."

And of course, as soon as it happens once, it will keep happening, and it will become part of the new normal. Like hurricanes hitting NYC (also part of the conference).

One such event isn't a civilzation-ender. Several per decade, or several per year, year after year and decade after decade?

188
It's a lot of fun to look at the designer patterns i the Vogue pattern catalog, particularly the evening dress section. (Some designers are much better at flattering the figure than others.)

Dave Bell @187/Lila @189

Once on an anime forum I saw someone post in honest confusion how animes could depict Hiroshima as a living city.
Wasn't it a wasteland for all time? In the same vein, you often see people discussing the effects of suitcase nuke like they were multimegaton hydrogen bombs.

In the decades since Hiroshima/Nagasaki, an image has grown of nuclear conflict. As Dave Bell pointed out,
it started out low, "survivable," but accumulated over time, from "On the Beach" to "Dr Strangelove" to "The Day After",
to Whitley Striber's "Warday," and then to "When the Wind Blows," until the idea has been fastened in the public
mind that any use of nuclear weapons==general nuclear exchange==the extinction of our species. In the absence of actual data,
the fear has become a taboo.

Which I completely support. I am 100% behind an irrational misunderstanding of the reasonably foreseeable effects
of nuclear weapons. It's the primary force behind the fact that no one's used them in anger since 1945.

What worries me, like Lila, is the effect of actual experience on that taboo. I think the first actors to use a nuclear
weapon will exile themselves from humanity. They will be hunted down and destroyed by all parties, like Osama Bin Laden times
ten. But then the precedent will be set. Subsequent users will not face such reaction. And while
it's hard to foresee nuclear action ever being routine, the idea that it might even slightly acceptable...

May it be many years before we need to find out.

Dave, the "nightmare" isn't so much the long-term effects on the strike zone (with a 10-kiloton bomb, not that huge) but the immediate short-term effects as the entire region's medical response capability is completely overwhelmed. Not so much by all the casualties (a few with serious radiation sickness, a lot of burns, a shit-ton of broken-glass injuries; more subtle radiation damage shows up later) but by the 100x as many people who AREN'T seriously hurt but rush themselves to the nearest hospital (this will go on for days to weeks after the blast). This happened after Aum Shinrikyo's gas attack on the Tokyo subway; in a nuclear strike it would be much, much, much worse.

As far as I know, nobody has yet made much progress in fending off the so-called "worried well". I think it was last year that some hospitals in Pennsylvania had to set up triage tents on their lawns to keep people with the flu (or who thought they might have, or might get, the flu) from swamping the ER.

(The other thing Aum Shinrikyo demonstrated is what a bad idea it is to bring contaminated patients into the ER; they contaminate the docs, nurses, other patients, etc. etc. Unfortunately, although ambulance drivers know this, helpful bystanders don't.)

Dave* Twiddy@191: The first actors to use a nuclear weapon were not drummed out of humanity, or hunted down and destroyed. That would be us in the US.

The first non-state-level actors: you're probably right. But I don't think that much (in a historic sense) would happen to a state-level actor. Terrorists: you're probably right. I still worry more about state-level actors (though not much more).

Jenny Islander @ #184: It's possible to draw a pattern to fit an average human body right on the unwound bolt without wasting more than a scrap or two; most pattern pieces will share at least one edge with another piece.

The Textile Museum of Canada, mentioned upthread, held an exhibit a few years back on clothing of Imperial China (iirc it tended to focus on the last three or four centuries, understandably enough).

They suggested that many of the differences between Manchu and Han clothing could be traced to the fact that the former originally made most of their clothing from animal skins; and retained design elements (raglan sleeves and diagonal closures) based on cutting from the shape of a hide, even when they switched to woven fabrics.

@194/Sarah: there's a book called "cut my cote" by... some canadian museum, can't remembe published many years ago that is largely about how weaving technology [backstrap vs pit looms] shapes clothing style: backstrap looms get you long narrow cloth and kimono, pit looms get you wide cloth and togas. It also mentioned the deer/manchu garment thing, I think: well worth a look at if you have access and an interest.

An interesting thing I realised, for the worldbuilders: if cloth is handspun and handwoven, embroidering it is a much smaller additional investment of labour than you're probably used to.

Personal note: for some years I had a huge bolt of black cotton [1600mm by... hundreds of metres, it was like 200mm thick] shoved under my bed, called it my end-of-the-world resources. Shoes would be better, of course.

Louis Patterson @ 195 ...
@194/Sarah: there's a book called "cut my cote" by... some canadian museum, can't remembe published many years ago that is largely about how weaving technology [backstrap vs pit looms] shapes clothing style: backstrap looms get you long narrow cloth and kimono, pit looms get you wide cloth and togas. It also mentioned the deer/manchu garment thing, I think: well worth a look at if you have access and an interest.

I have the book, actually. It's from the Royal Ontario Museum, and doesn't have a whole lot to say about weaving, beyond the effect of fabric width on cut of shirts, from what I recall (it's downstairs, and I'm upstairs).

It's a very thin book, all of 36 pages (making it spectacularly easy to lose), but it's a nice reference for folks interested in various ways that cultures have made shirts.

I do love my pseudo-mediaeval shirts, made with keyhole necklines and gussets in the armpits. But I confess, I cheat - I cut the sleeves as trapeziums, tapering toward the cuffs, rather than rectangles. It's more wasteful of fabric, but it makes the width of sleeve more comfortable. I also cut very crude, straight armscyes, because my shoulders need much less width than my hips, and cutting rectangular fronts wide enough to pull down past my waist makes the shoulders sag halfway to my elbows. I try to avoid curved seams, and darts, and modern close-fitted lines, but my body does not work well worth strict rectangles.

It's a very good point about embroidery as a comparatively labour-cheap addition before industrialisation. I'll make more of an effort to include it, with that in mind.

clew #188: Dave Harmon, #168: you seem to be answering praise of the people who make and fit couture clothing but what you write is condemnation of the designers. Not the same people.

My understanding is that for couture especially, those people are at least "in the same outfit", with the crafters working under close and strict direction from the designer. In any case, my basic point stands: The couture designers who are well-known are those who made and cultivated contacts and relationships in the industry... and then "won a lottery" for actual success. The level of design does require a lot of artistic skill, but not world-class artistic genius.¹ So there are any number of other folks who could do as well at the actual design, without being able to sell them.

The matter of couture producing unmaintainable clothes for the super-rich is really another issue entirely. Now, there's nothing wrong with making a one-shot (or few-shot) costume for display, and celebrities are welcome to sink some of their wealth into those -- after all, display is much of their "job" as a celebrity. But IMHO, presenting such as examples to be followed in public fashion, is tacky if not sleazy, and very much an arrogance of the wealthy class.

¹ Greater population, access to education, and communication have also increased the number of "world-class" talents around. Consider the case of science: Einstein was likely the last person to be hailed as "the great scientific genius of his generation". Even within his lifetime, the next "scientific generation" didn't have only one person on that level, but a whole crowd, enough that even hyperbole couldn't pick one to anoint. The difference was made by both more people to pick from, and the 20th century developments in education and communications.

What surprises me is that there isn't a parallel institution of common couture-- people who specialize is inventing and displaying fashion changes that make sense for most people.

Or does this exist and I haven't noticed it?

SIXTEEN minutes, Of commercials. Every hour.

Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey #200: "And now, a brief interruption for the news..."

And of course in the UK we had the classic 1984 docu-drama Threads (warning, spider visible from 0:01 if you don't like that sort of thing) which used the textile metaphor to depict the effects of a general nuclear exchange on Sheffield; mostly featuring unknown actors but narrated crisply by Paul (The future's bright, the future's Orange) Vaughan, it scared the crap out of a generation. It is the most depressing thing ever shown on British television.

True fact: the portion on a print newspaper that is not occupied by ads is known as the "news hole".

Ohnosecond: portion OF. Sorry about that.

WRT spam/robocalls and caller ID, if I don't recognize the number, or it's just a city-state combo, or really descriptive names like "merchant serv" or "credit banking", I pick up and hang up in quick sequence.

I have found that if I answer the phone by saying "hello" and get a spam/robocall (I really need to get a phone with caller ID upstairs), the number of such calls will increase to as many as five or six a day. And within less than two days. If I do the "pick up hang up" routine, or "on off" button pushing, the number of calls dwindle to two or three per week, within less than a week.

205
I tend to pick up without saying anything, because most of the ones I get are robocalls looking for a voice response to trigger them. (A surprising number are actual people who need a voice response to start their spiel. I can hear the background noises that tell me they're in a boiler room.) Then I hang up.

P J Evans (206): My understanding is that the "actual people who need a voice response to start their spiel" are using an autodialer thingy that doesn't connect the human being until there's evidence (such as a voice response) that they have someone on the line. My experience is no sound at all until I've said Hello--usually twice, there's always a delay--then a person comes on, with background boiler room noises.

A few times it's been actual, genuine, companies-that-I-do-business-with using that kind of autodialer system. I do stay on the line with them--at least long enough to confirm that it's nothing I'm interested in--but that system guarantees that I start the call already pissed off. If they're going to interrupt my life by calling me, the least they can do is Be There when I pick up the phone.

(Caller ID doesn't help me; I am constitutionally unable to ignore a ringing phone.)

@205/206: We just let the answering machine screen all calls. ALL calls. Anyone who needs to get through knows to leave a message.

I have seen Guardians of the Galaxy and I have to say that it contains TNH bait in the form of the line 'I'm taking orders from a hamster!'

Lila at 203, 204: ("newshole")

I used to work at a newspaper.

There was a postal regulation that it could only be a certain percentage ads, so we ran the numbers for the total ad sales through a spreadsheet to find out how many pages to make it.

This process can be very automatic if you do it all in the specialty program that ties the ad sales people's database records to the page-dummying program (i e I could put an ad on the page in the layout program and a report would be automatically generated saying what page it's on) and if you are working for one of those megaglomerates that own many newspapers, the sales people can "cross-sell" the same ad into many papers if that's what the customer wants.

Ad with is "standard advertising units", i e all columns are equally wide, and if different publications have different page size, they have different number of columns per page accordingly.

Then there is a script that pulls the ad images into the page when you are done building the page in Quark Xpress (or maybe they switched to InDesign after I was laid off.)

207
That might be - but I'm hearing background noises, before I hear person speaking on my line. And if it's someone I do business with, no problem. Usually it isn't. (Actually, I'll do stuff like tap on the mike end of the handset, or blow into it, or whistle into it, to see if there's a response.) Live people calling are usually good with saying something when the receiver gets picked up.

Robodiallers, we hates them forever, we do. Likewise the <noun deleted> scammers that play tricks with caller-id, e,g: an allegedly "local" (to UK) call that lit up the "international" text on the Magic Box.

It almost tempts me to install Asterisk on a suitable box and add a few special features such as blacklisting, whitelisting, boiling oil listing, and especially for "Curved air market research": an endless loop of Darryl Way playing Vivaldi (all three versions).

Also I have a Racal SS291 "JAMCAT" - JAMming Communications ATtachment - that is in desperate need of an acoustic coupler so I can treat the next faux market research scammer to random morse, random tones, or simply white noise at high volume.

Grrr!

I wonder if the SIT tones as an outgoing message still trigger removal from the robodialler target list. Might also be worth a try.

I especially hate the telemarketers whose calls don't end when I hang up.

I am so glad that we're mature enough as a society to have things like hospice and DNRs.

My father has a few weeks or months left. Really, it is utterly astonishing he's made it this long, and after so many close calls over decades this seems utterly anti-climactic.

It pisses me off that GOP cranks want to turn honest advice about advance directives into "death panels." Really, to hell with them. My parents are experienced enough about this sort of thing to know what questions to ask, but less educated and savvy people could doom loved ones to being life support zombies.

I'm considering sneaking my father a pound box assortment of See's Chocolates as a way of blowing up his systems if he wants a quick exit. That WOULD be the way to go.

janra @171: I don't know if I could sew and listen to a podcast at the same time.

I'm very confident I couldn't. I do a lot of handwork while watching TV (or listening to audio), and as long as the process is pretty straightforward, I'm good. But if I have to figure something out and/or make a decision, I have to turn the noisemaker off. I don't think I have any particular audio processing issues (aside from limited bandwidth—visual-spatial is my power processor). But there are some things that chew up enough cycles that it'll soak up even my relatively weak and unrelated audio circuitry.

text/video: My issue with is that text is so much more scannable. Text with diagrams is my optimal learning mode. I find video tedious, because I have to sit through all the (often not useful) contextual crap to get the nut of what I'm after, and few videos are constructed to have strong, searchable imagery to flick past. That said, I love the thumbnail feature in some video programs, such as Netflix and Youtube. It annoys the crap out of me that my DVD software doesn't do that.

There are a very few topics where video is superior, where the process being discusssed is analog enough that video is more effective. Bob Ross's painting videos are one example. I can't imagine trying to do that in text, even with diagrams.

fidelio: "I've seen old quilts made in the US covered with new patchwork tops, as well, although the usual progression there (reflecting typical wear patterns) is 1) rebinding 2)insertion of applied patched to cover small areas of damage 3)putting on a new top, ov even a complete cover, when the necessary repairs become too extensive. The recovered item is usually tied to hold the layers together instead of requilted."

Heh. My four-year-old has a Blanket that was getting adored to death. Somewhat unusually, the binding was far more durable than the quilt itself, so the process was patching, more patching, then an appeal to the original quilt maker to just do an entirely new top. As these are the days of sewing machines, it was quilted through. You can see the process starting here (the daisy fabric is the patching that was no longer adequate—and click the LEFT button to advance). And here is a pretty good pic of when it was new. Note the satin ruffle—the only part of the original quilt to show in the "new" version, and of course the most important part.

#215: I depend on on-line articles to learn about various technical matters. The use of GUIs and configuring rather deep-fried things like virtual machines and software containers.

I *hate* it when a promising-looking article turns out to be a video, for much the same things you mention.

Bonus for text articles: Cutting and pasting command lines.

CHip @ 155, I have no clue about when the musical differences emerged in Reform Judaism - I know very little about the history, though I vaguely remember that even from the beginning the liturgy slanted towards piano/organ accompaniment and official choirs, where such things weren't a part of Orthodox practice. I just know what I observed in the 1970s and 1980s. It was especially funny when a friend and I were listening to WERS one time and a Hebrew song we both knew came on, and I was all "where did THAT melody come from? It's all CHEERFUL and major-key!" and she said "well, it's a slightly weird arrangement in terms of phrasing, but I can hear its basis in what I learned," and sang a few bars, and then asked me what I'd learned, and I sang a bit of MY version, all minor-key, and then I said, "Wait, you went to a Reform temple, didn't you?" and she said "Yup. Let me guess - Conservative?" and we had a good laugh, because it was SO TRUE.

Lee @169, maybe I wasn't clear enough on GPS oral prompting. I actually like it because the oral version only gives me one instruction at a time, rather than a human speaking who'll frequently try to say all the steps at once or tell me three ahead.

I AM a bit fussy about how it delivers the instructions. The TomTom protocol seems to like to prompt you three times for every turn, and is bossy about lane changes - and doesn't listen when I say "There's a CAR there, Mandy, I'll do it as soon as I can," but repeats itself until I do it. Same for stoplights. When my only experience was with TomTom, I HATED GPS, and used to say I'd only be able to tolerate it if they could have had Majel Barrett provide the voice, because I would implicitly trust the Enterprise. If Paul Bettany ever does a TomTom or other GPS voice recording, I'll happily pay for it, because I'll also trust Jarvis.

However, the way the iPhone has Siri deliver the instructions is much less like nagging. One prompt a quarter mile or the available distance in feet before the turn, and one prompt directly at the turn, and if you happen to be at a stoplight, she doesn't nag as often as Mandy TomTom did. And Siri says "Stay left for" instead of "get in the left lane," which means I spend a lot less time saying "there's a CAR there, have some patience" or "I already DID, Mandy."

I like Siri. Not as much as I'd like the Enterprise or Jarvis, but she feels like a friend.

Getting back to spindles, distaffs, and women's use of same -- at least one of the survivors of the Beast (possibly beasts) of Gevaudan was a young woman who fought the creature off with a spindle. I'm wondering if spindles, together with hatpins and parasols, fall into the category of "things that are unlikely to be confiscated as weapons, but which can be used in a pinch against an attacker."

The not answering thing just saved me hearing the start of another robotic telesales call on my mobile, so thanks!

Dave* Twiddy @177 (I keep looking for the footnote associated with your asterisk): I seem to remember hearing speculation that the event that kicked off the Dark Ages was a 535 eruption of Krakatoa. That would (did) certainly do the job, at least to a degree. (Anybody know when Yellowstone is due?)

Dave* @180: And it would be probably futile

I've heard those predictions, and it's important to take them seriously. But OTOH, don't underestimate the power of Vested Interest. Scare the right people badly enough, and Stuff Will Happen. It'll probably still be a thorough-going clusterf*ck, but the human race is remarkably ingenious, given sufficient motivation.

Lila @189: One such event isn't a civilzation-ender. Several per decade, or several per year, year after year and decade after decade?

Kill or seriously impair agricultural output a couple years in a row; that'd probably do the job. How do things go if even the Mormons run out of stored food?

Lin Daniel @205: "pick up hang up"

That's a really good tip. I've been plagued with those damn things lately, to the point where I'm reluctant to answer my phone at all. (Now I just need to get a phone with caller ID. Getting one that also has an alert for voicemail would be good, too.)

Nancy Lebovitz @213: I especially hate the telemarketers whose calls don't end when I hang up.

AIUI, that's actually an aspect of the phone PBX; any incoming call doesn't disconnect until they hang up. Combine that with telemarketers not hanging up when you do...well. Nevertheless: hateful, yes.

Sarah @220: "things that are unlikely to be confiscated as weapons, but which can be used in a pinch against an attacker."

Nunchucks: rice flail. Sai: wagon wheel axle. Tonfa: millstone handle. I'm sure there are others. "A weapon, sir? No sir! Just a good, sturdy farm tool. Essential, really."

Jacque #223: Nunchucks: rice flail. Sai: wagon wheel axle. Tonfa: millstone handle. I'm sure there are others. "A weapon, sir? No sir! Just a good, sturdy farm tool. Essential, really."

And of course in the West: Pitchfork, scythe, mallet, threshing-flails; q.v. "pole-arms". Anything can be used as a weapon, even if it's not specialized for such use. Or to put it another way, "weapon" isn't an essential quality, it's how you use the tool in question.

Jacque @ #223 wrote:

Lin Daniel @205: "pick up hang up"

That's a really good tip. I've been plagued with those damn things lately, to the point where I'm reluctant to answer my phone at all. (Now I just need to get a phone with caller ID. Getting one that also has an alert for voicemail would be good, too.)

As Tanuki once said on a certain newsgroup: "What I really want is a phone with Caller IQ".

Nancy Lebovitz @213: I especially hate the telemarketers whose calls don't end when I hang up.

AIUI, that's actually an aspect of the phone PBX; any incoming call doesn't disconnect until they hang up.

Known as "Caller held". The old manual (corded, usually) switchboards were effectively "recipient held", as seen in detective films where someone gets the phone put down on them and jiggles the receiver rest (causing a light to flash at the switchboard for their line) to attract the operator.

Combine that with telemarketers not hanging up when you do...well. Nevertheless: hateful, yes.

Positively the worst is random dialling from a mobile phone in someone's pocket (usually in the pub, though other options happen). They don't know they've called anyone and shouting down the phone will not get their attention. The solution to that if you have caller-id and a (or another) mobile phone is to send them a text message which should get their attention. A friend did this to interrupt the accidental self-bugging of a legal conference about a rather messy divorce!

This moose prefers mobiles where the keyboard is physically covered (flip or slide phone) for exactly this reason. PIN locking is not effective since accidentally hitting 91 (in .US), 99 (in .UK) or 11 (just about anywhere) will unlock the keypad on the assumption that it's an emergency call - a subsequent pause may cause this to expire but leave the keypad live, from where random bumping by keys or pocket change can find your contact list or recent call history and then dial something.

Technology! (Bah!)

The "Emergency number bypasses everything" is part of the specification - it should even work with out of contract (and possibly even stolen/disabled) phones, BTW.

Hyper-local news: hyper-local author, scrambling to finish first draft of a trilogy before this time next week (in order to ship it to an editor before worldcon) wails in anguish as HLA's muse springs not one, but two plot recomplications on him less than 5000 words before the target word-count limit.

Does anyone know a hyper-local stockist of Muse-B-Gone?

Open threadiness:

It would appear that the CIA can get away with spying on congress with no consequences.

My bet:

a. Nobody will go to jail over this, and at most some low-level person will resign. At the really extreme end, some high level person will resign.

b. Sooner or later, someone will leak the unredacted report on CIA torture. That whistleblower will go to jail, because the administration and the justice department (who had zero interest in pursuing people involved in torture or other war crimes, nor those who spied on Congress to influence the contents of the report) will fall on them like a ton of bricks, using every surveillance and intelligence tool to root them out.

We have apparently joined the set of countries where the intelligence services are just too dangerous to take on. Neither the president nor the congressional leadership has any stomach at all for a fight with the CIA or NSA. Presumably because they don't think they'd come out of it too well.

This isn't going to end well for us.

225
jiggles the receiver rest (causing a light to flash at the switchboard for their line)

This could still be done with some phone systems (like Centrex). Now there's generally a button to do it.

Charlie: Thinly gloss them over, and then pocket them to sell as the fourth book, when you've finished this set...?

HLN: Local Man goes for periodic cancer checkup, receives clean bill of health. In addition, doctor says LM needn't come back for SIX MONTHS, lengthening the previous interval. "It shows his increased confidence that the cancer won't come back, or at least won't come back suddenly," Local Man says.

Sarah @ 229

Wool combs. Used to comb wool in preparation for spinning worsted yarn and thread. Quite capable of going through a human ribcage if swung with malice or carelessness.

230
Yay!

Re wool combs, 231. There's a Saint Blaise who was martyred with wool combs. There are some suitably gruesome medieval stained glass windows.

He is, of course, the patron saint of wool combers.

Xopher: Io! Eia!

Lila @ 234: My brain immediately wants to parse that as "Ia! Ia!" Can I ask for an actual explanation, because I'm pretty sure the intention wasn't to evoke unspellable Lovecraftian chants.

Lenora Rose #235: IIUC, it's basically ancient Greek cheering, which survives in various religious rites including some Neo-Pagan practices. The older Greek rites, (or an imagined survival of them), was probably what Lovecraft was trying to evoke with his version....

And, Xopher #230, congratulations!

Lenora Rose: both those words mean roughly "hooray!" in Latin. Cf. "Io Saturnalia!" and

Stetit puella
rufa tunica;
si quis eam tetigit,
tunica crepuit.
Eia.

Wasn't defense with combs a... classical Roman woman's approach? If she wasn't holding her fibula pin, maybe?

Clew @ 239

Wool combs bear only a passing similarity to hair combs.

Think of at least one row of metal claws on a handle, and you'll have a more accurate picture.

Now, if classical Roman women were combing wool, then sure. I don't know much about that part.

...aha! Googling gives me the information that the Romans used wool combs, though the book in question is talking about men employed to do it in the wool trade. Doesn't mean women didn't use the tools, though.

Wool combs are fearsome objects, heavy and effective, and if some woman comes at you wielding them, you'd be better off running. I'm pretty sure that women used them in Tudor times; yet another example of women doing heavy physical labour that nowadays goes unappreciated.

Local woman comes back from Alpha exhausted and exhilarated. I have read so many good stories in the past week and a half.

Thanks everyone!

I understand that the bang/exclamation point was originally a ligature or shorthand way of writing "Io." Which in turn implies that in spoken Latin, an emphatic sentence would end in "io." This practice continues to this day!

Huh; in the same way that &: is shorthand for "et". Cool.

Yes, that one is a ligature undeniably. I was hesitating to call ! one because it's not connected to a single line like & and æ.

The other example is ?, which is a [whatever] for "quo."

Xopher: logogram?

Lila: glyph?

(Just lost a minute trying to lisp 'io!'.)

Whoa, the wool combs are terrifying; one wouldn't want to get someone's hackles up while those were around.

All the pictures of Roman matrons working wool I've seen were of pretty seated spinning and weaving (doesn't mean some of them didn't do the heavy work too), and the combs for the hair were *mostly* of delicate bone or wood. If no-one else remembers it, I bet I'm imagining it, or it was a reference to something like a mantilla comb.

How long was the gap between ending sentences with `io' as emphasis and ending sentences with `yo', likewise?

To be clear, I was actually speculating that Latin speakers ended sentences with "Io." As for the modern usage, a young friend just this afternoon texted me about California auto insurance, and commented "That shit is expensive, yo." From what I've heard (not much) it's pronounced almost like a suffix on the last other word in the sentence.

clew #249:

In the font I see for this page, "I" and "l" are indistinguishable, so I have a tendency to read "Io!" as if it were "Lo!". I do believe it's pronounced "Yo!", though.

Of course you don't want to get someones heckles up around wool combs. Combs are for wool, heckles are for flax.

Meanwhile, in HLN:
We in Hawai'i now have not one but two hurricanes bearing down on us in near-perfect alignment with the entire island chain. Hurricane Iselle is currently Category 3 but it is projected (and hoped) she will weaken to a tropical storm before hitting the Big Island sometime Thursday night and proceeding onward to whack the remaining islands. Meanwhile Julio, following the same track a few days behind, is only a tropical storm but is projected to strengthen to a Category 1 hurricane by tomorrow and reach the Big Island by Sunday. Stores are all sold out of bottled water. Wheee fun.

HLN: Local woman is eating fresh blackberries she picked herself within the hour. Yum. I ate some of the sun-warmed fruit as I gathered, then dropped some into a plastic bag.

(I've got other fruit in the house, from either the farmer's market or the supermarket. Good, but not the same thing.)

HLN: Local woman is eating fresh blackberries she picked herself within the hour. Yum. I ate some of the sun-warmed fruit as I gathered, then dropped some into a plastic bag.

I've got other fruit in the house, from either the farmer's market or the supermarket. Good, but not the same thing.

[Reposting to try to dislodge the internal server error.]

@Vicki: I've been doing that a LOT lately. On week weekend-day I walk to a shopping center, about 3.2 miles round trip; on the way out and the way back there are two outcroppings of blackberry "bushes." I generally end up eating a dozen or more as I walk, and gather more in a spare dog-poop bag for the following morning's cereal.

now you're teaseling me, Buddha Buck.

(OED says heckle and hackle are just variants of each other. My vanity is comforted.)

Clifton, #253: Good luck! Since our up-close-and-personal encounter with Ike, I'm a bit more antsy about hurricanes than I used to be.

On heckels/hackles - in Dutch, the term for this tool is a cognate: hekel ("HAY-kəl"), and is part of an idiomatic expression. Ik heb een hekel aan iemand, or "I have a heckle about someone," means that you really, REALLY hate that person.

Uhm, did I tell that story already? It's a fun one, but not so fun that I couldn't restrain myself from retelling if I could just instead point to a comment...

Crazy(and trying to remember or get Google to cough up evidence of having told this one already)Soph

guthrie @242

Yeah, when I first got my wool combs, I was intimidated by them. There's a number of amateur how-to videos in which people pretend to have massive claws.

If I were traveling by plane to a fiber conference, I'd either ship the combs separately or check them. Wouldn't be able to get away with carry-on.

And for years I only used them when my son was asleep. I'm enough of a klutz that I didn't want to have to worry about sudden little kid movements.

I live near Philadelphia. We've been using "Yo!" as an attention-getter, etc. since long before I was born. Always wondered where it came from.

Now I'm wondering if "Io" is one syllable or two, and if it was pronounced "yo", "eye-oh", "ee-oh", or something entirely different.

When it first came up in the discussion here, I mentally pronounced it "eye-oh" like the moon, but it looks like most people commenting read it as "yo".

janra, the Latinists on here would know more than I would, but I believe it's one syllable with two moræ, and that both vowels are pronounced. (In Romance languages you can have more than one vowel in a single syllable, which confuses the heck out of English speakers.) The reason I'm not so sure is that I and J were not distinguished from each other until IIRC the early 19th Century, and I'm not sure Latin didn't have ANY glides; also, it was probably pronounced differently in Classical Latin than in Medieval Latin, and so on.

It's definitely not "eye-oh," though. "Ee-oh" or "Yo."

The Latin of Adeste Fideles, in its original form, has Cantet nunc io chorus angelorum, ('now let the angelic choir sing io') where the scansion requires two syllables. Mind you, that's eighteenth century.

Yeah, not everyone who wrote Latin poetry was...much of a Latinist.

Clifton @253: not one but two hurricanes bearing down on us

Too much to hope that they just cancel each other out...?

Vicki @254: Local woman is eating fresh blackberries she picked herself within the hour.

Last week I discovered that a house on one of my routes home from work has raspberry bushes. I confess I poached a few. But, hey! The bushes are, like, hanging out over the sidewalk. Clearly public domain, right?

Also, if one looks closely, a lot of city-maintained landscaping features strawberry vines as low ground cover. Many of those also have wee fruits, hidden down underneath.

And then there's the elderberry tree on my corner, which, with the help of the birds, spreads a glorious purple mess around the nearby sidewalk and street.

Naomi Parkhurst @261: There's a number of amateur how-to videos in which people pretend to have massive claws.

Wolverine's secretly a spinner.

#264, Xopher Halftongue:

In Romance languages you can have more than one vowel in a single syllable, which confuses the heck out of English speakers.

Now I'm curious. Can you tell me some french words that have this feature? I speak french, but only know a handful of words in a couple of other romance languages.

(Thinking a bit... is "lui" the sort of sound you're thinking of? I hear two distinct vowel sounds but it's one syllable.)

I'm afraid I don't speak French, and I'm not sure of the pronunciation of that word. I think so, but one or the other of those might be a glide. If the u doesn't sound to you like a w and the i doesn't sound like a y, then yes.

I ran up against this when I was trying to learn Spanish. The question "¿Dónde está el hotel?" would have 7 syllables if counted as English counts syllables; in Spanish, it has 5, because the second syllable of 'Dónde' and the first syllable of 'está' are one, and similarly with 'está' and 'el'. It really is pronounced entirely differently too; in my rhotic dialect of English, I would put glottal stops between those words, but that's very poorly pronounced Spanish.

HL pre- hurricane/tropical storm update: The flashlights and battery lanterns have been conspiring together with the batteries to drive us insane, by keeping us from figuring out which is working and which is not. (OK, this flashlight seems to be working, so we can put these D batteries in it to see which is OK... OK it lights up so these batteries are good, wait now it's off, no it's flashing on and off randomly when I move it. Wut.) But I just found where the battery tester had been randomly hidden so now we should be good.

Someday when I have money, I want to lay in a couple of hand-crank flashlights and shortwave radio. (We hates batteries, we does. Cookie-power is so much more reliable.)

Open-threadiness: Guardians of the Galaxy is a fun flick, with an actual valid reason for the cheesy soundtrack. Also, it passes the Bechtel Test.

I too have been wondering how "Io" is pronounced, but feel some revulsion towards pronouncing it "yo" probably due to the cultural connotations of that word.

In re "io", Wikipedia's entry on Saturnalia suggests it may be pronounced either way, and cites this with a reference to the Oxford Latin Dictionary.

Perhaps it's an off-glide. Lowered, the same as the front off-glides ai->ae.

[eeew.]

Dave Harmon @ 168: what clew@188 said. The more unusual ("fashionable") the designs are, the more unusual solutions the fabricators may need to know. I expect this is even more true if even an averagely-shaped person wants to copy something designed to be worn by an apparently anorexic model.
      Answering your #198: would the wealthy consumers who we're speculating about wear something displaying their own artistry? ISTM that carrying that off would take both artistry and nerve, since much of the point is wearing something with a Name behind it. I have my doubts about "close supervision" of fabricators by designers -- I suspect it's more hassling about the results than saying what stitch to use where -- but I certainly don't know enough detail to argue it.

Dave* @ 177: in your estimate, how much of the collapse was due to needed input not coming from the center, and how much was failed morale checks in all of the not-center? (e.g., how much support did the edges expect from the center in case of local trouble?) I would guess that the Japanese and Chinese cases involved limited initiative in the hinterlands, but I don't know how much biased ]history[ I've absorbed concerning Oriental bureaucracy vs the relative lack in Rome.

Xopher @ 230: excellent news! (This seems to be a week for good medical news; Valma is recovering, Devra Langsam is doing better, and a friend whose lungs were turning to stone just got a double transplant.)

Clifton @ 253: around here it would be bread, milk, and eggs that the stores are out of; a friend calls it the French Toast index of disaster nerves. Do the islands depend on heavily-processed water?

in re "io" pronunciation: there's also "Ding Dong! Merrily on High", in which each "io" ("And io, io, io, by priest and people sungen") is 2 distinct syllables with the accent on the second.

Xopher @ 269: some Italian can be just as bad. One of my grievances against Verdi operas (besides a shortage of good choruses) is the jawbreaking elision: "Gloria al' Egitto, al' Iside" (opening of the triumphal procession in Aida, already missing 2 syllables if I'm recalling the apostrophes correctly) crams 11 syllables into 8, including a 3fer: "ria al" goes all on \one/ sixteenth note.

Now I'm wondering if the chant sung by the guards of the Wicked Witch of the West in the film version of The Wizard of Oz traces back to the Latin "io".

You know what I'm talking about. "Yo-ee-oh, eeyo-oh", while pacing and turning.

CHip #276: I expect this is even more true if even an averagely-shaped person wants to copy something designed to be worn by an apparently anorexic model.

I know I'd be more impressed by managing that sort of functional change, while preserving the aesthetics of an existing design, than by many original designs from people who can tell their staff "just make it work on this model". I am biased towards hands-on folks and more practical clothing; I come from a family of artists, but my own temperament is "engineer".

would the wealthy consumers who we're speculating about wear something displaying their own artistry?

At that point they're not just consumers, they're artists or crafters too. Wearing your own work is at least "putting your money where your mouth is"!

CHip:
Hurricane ?= 90 mph winds ?= downed lines = electricity outages = no power at pumping stations = no water coming out of the taps. I suspect that equation applies most places that don't have buried lines.

CHip @276, Dave Harmon @278:

I had a practical demonstration of this effect when I discovered that a friend of mine and I owned the same black-and-red cheongsam in the same size. I'm 5"4" and weighed about 125 at the time; said friend was a trans woman, about six feet tall and rail-thin. I looked at the dress on Vanessa and suddenly understood why I was never completely satisfied with how mine looked on me. My response was "Hey, Vanessa, can I borrow about eight inches of leg bone?"

It's also why I'm so impressed with the way Christian Siriano (a Project Runway winner) designs red-carpet gowns for Christina Hendricks. A lot of designers won't even lend her dresses to wear on the red carpet, because they "don't design dresses for people her size." Where by size they really mean "shape" - just in case you've forgotten "Our Mrs. Reynolds" or haven't watched Mad Men, she's not fat by any stretch of the imagination, but she's got bombshell curves, bosom and hips and all the rest. A thing I noticed over multiple seasons of Project Runway is that most of the designers seem happiest when they're fitting a model who's pretty flat-chested and doesn't have a significant booty; they appear to want to design in two dimensions, not three. Christian Siriano is happy to design things for Christina Hendricks that fit her in all dimensions and make her curves look fabulous, not like she's a sausage stuffed into a too-tight casing. The geometry involved must be more complex, but the imagination involved is the key part.

Rikibeth #280: Yeah. Occasionally I've seen fashion students doing sketches of their ideas while out and about... and they always seem to be drawing the clothes onto runway-model bodies. I've seen this in three cities now: NYC, Cambridge, and Charlottesville. Their professors ought to be assigning projects to the effect of "dress celebrity X for event Y", where X is someone like Christina Hendricks, or Oprah, or Whoopi Goldberg. Bonus points for picking someone like, say, Roseanne.

Clifton @279, I'm from the Midwest US, where watertowers dot the landscape like Tripods in The City of Gold & Lead. Certainly lack of power will mean the watertowers will eventually empty, but until they do the water in my area is (I'm fairly certain) gravity-fed.

(I welcome correction, but I've never in my life encountered a power-related water interruption. And that's with several-day-long power interruptions on a regular basis from bad thunderstorms.)

I've never had a power-related water interruption either, including during a several-day-long outage following the derecho here two years ago. I see from Wikipedia that there were water restrictions due to pumping stations losing water, but I never heard about it at the time. (I was out of the country for the actual event and the first couple of days afterward, and only had about a day without power.) So while eventually a lack of power would cause a lack of water in many areas, absent a total disruption that's not going to be universal, and if there's any infrastructure left I'd imagine pumping stations will be high on the "get power back up here first" list.

re: different body types

This is why I designed a sketch pad system with templates for widely varying body types. There are free ones here.

They sell primarily to sewing and design professionals. My original market research said there wouldn't be enough demand, but they were wrong.

People ARE working on designs beyond the 6' anorexic model. Just not many of us, and not publicized.

Christina Hendricks! Yes!!!

279/282/283: Much of Long Island lost power for upwards of two weeks after Sandy, but the water was running. Long Beach didn't have potable water for the better part of a week, but that was because the local sewage treatment plant got ~6 feet of seawater in it during the height of the storm. The next sewage treatment plant over got ~9 feet, so there were water use restrictions in the area for months, but clean water was available. (I'm fairly sure that the other treatment plants in the area were able to divert some of their capacity.)

I was inspired to do a Google search on tornadoes and municipal water towers, and was much surprised to hear that there are very few cases indeed of tornadoes taking them down. Surface damage, yes, but structural? Not so much. Apparently all that open space under them, plus the streamlined shape, lets the tornado just whoosh by. Not to minimize the fact that they're built with materials designed to hold up ten million pounds or so of water.

I was surprised when I was looking them up to discover that water towers were characterized as being features of rural and northern landscapes; do they not have them in the south? If not, how do they provide pressurized water? Or is that just my flatlander ignorance talking, since other places have hills or mountains they can put reservoirs on?

Carol @ #284: Your tips on sewing for frail patients in wheelchairs are very well thought out. Have passed those along to some of my colleagues for patients and their families.

I assumed the puzzlement over buying water in advance of hurricanes in Hawaii wasn't about whether you'd need water, but about why you'd buy flats of plastic bottles of the stuff instead of filling all the pots in the kitchen and any bathtubs you might have. (At least one news article has also talked about Spam being sold out, but it's Hawaii where they eat that, and it's certainly a sensible earthquake food if you're carnivorous.)

Rikibeth, #280: *googles Christina Hendricks* OMG, she is GORGEOUS! That hair, that figure -- she's got the true 1940s pinup-calendar look. I'm glad she's found a designer who's willing to work with her.

Mary Aileen, #285: There are apparently a lot of short-term water issues that we don't hear much about. Toledo made the national news, but I wasn't familiar with any of the other examples in that story.

Not-fiber combs.

Cally @ #286, we very much have water towers here in Georgia. The technical college I got my PTA degree from even had parking stickers with their water tower on them one year.

Glad to have helped, Lila.

Sadly, I've had to prune good links re: wheelchair accommodations as their sites have gone 404.

Would anyone who knows other ones please contact me (click on my name)?

Ogallala, Nebraska has a water tower mimicking an alien spaceship.

The first time I noticed it was at night. It has "running lights".

293
No longer in use, but still present (because the locals insisted): the giant can of fruit cocktail. It hasn't always looked like the original version of the can, but it's been a local landmark - as a can of fruit cocktail - for a long, long time.

re 279 et al.: The biggest weak spot in water systems isn't pumping; it's distribution. It's why when there is a really big earthquake, everything burns down: even when the pumps run, the water doesn't make it through the (ruptured) pipes.

"watertowers dot the landscape like Tripods in The City of Gold & Lead": on my list of "things I would do if I were hugely foolhardy and a lot younger," I put climbing the the big many-legged watertower near my father's house and painting a couple of huge angry eyes looking down on the traffic.

There was a water tower in the rural county I grew up in, in east Tennessee.

There are water towers in Virginia; here are two notable ones (for their paint schemes).

The Apple Basket

The balloon (This one was a huge favorite of the children; we passed it whenever we went home to see my family, and there were ALWAYS questions when we planned a trip if we would pass it in daylight.)

Oh, darn, I was just driving through Ogallala last week. (And the week before, in the other direction.) Had I But Known, I'd have looked for the UFO water tower.

And thanks, Lila. I wonder why my web search results implied so strongly that water towers weren't a Southern thing? Never having been to any of the Southern states (unless a couple of very brief visits to Ft. Lauderdale Fl. count), I have no knowledge of my own on the subject.

I'm getting a little confused here. The washing powder discussion above has made me examine my washing powder.
I now find that the stuff I use in my washing machine is 15-30% oxygen based bleaching agents.

Eh? Oxygen based bleaching agents in both enzyme based and nonbiological powders? Has that always been the case? The internet suggests yes, but that % in the past were much lower.

But I have no idea when they started containing such a massive amount of bleach. To my mind you don't need so much of it, and it might also explain why some of my clothes are starting to look a bit odd. Also a big "contains bleach" might be a help given I just washed my golite outdoor polyester based shirt in the normal wash!

And, thanks to the wonders of modern profit drive corporations, none of the supermarkets are selling the colour preserving type of washing powder anymore. Odd that.

If I were of a conspiratorial turn of mind I'd say the washing powder companies are conspiring with the clothing companies to make our clothes last for shorter times.

Water supply interrupted by power failure = anyone in a rural area with above ground power lines and an electric pump on the well.

My Mom has a couple of horrendous stories involving the above plus family members ill with the flu...

Lori @299

Oh dear, that WOULD be awful.

I'm so used to water tower water that I was gobsmacked when the power went out at my former office and we couldn't flush the toilets. Even though it was in a firmly suburban area, it still had well water, with attendant electrical pump. I suppose it's a case of privilege; those of us with gravity-fed water don't really viscerally "get" how bad it can be when the power goes out for those with pump-fed water.

I recently posted on the book of face "Lace knitting is hard, yo."

(For the non-knitters among you: lace knitting tends to include a lot of yarnovers, abbreviated "yo" in the patterns.)

You can flush a toilet without a working water input by adding enough liquid to the bowl to get above the siphon. Adding non-personal water periodically gets old fast.

For winter vacations we didn't hook up the well to my family's cabin. We picked up drinking water down the road and sledded it in. My version of "to school barefoot seven miles in the snow" was ferrying hand-washing/flushing water up a considerable slope from the spring-fed river by using two buckets' bails over a crowbar. The water froze as it sloshed out (sometimes into my boots), and my younger sister was even more unwilling than I.

To avoid revisiting that aspect of my childhood, for short-term, limited water outages I stock several 3-gallon plastic cans. The contents are months-stale, but drinking water is otherwise covered.

CHip@276: some Italian can be just as bad. One of my grievances against Verdi operas (besides a shortage of good choruses) is the jawbreaking elision: "Gloria al' Egitto, al' Iside"...

Back when I was working in speech recognition someone pointed out to me that in Italian you could easily get the word "i" between a word ending in "i" and a word beginning in "i", with that word "i" having absolutely no acoustic representation. (That is, even though native speakers would be sure they had "said" the word, there wasn't any difference in the actual sound produced when they did say the word and when they didn't.) It was a good workout for our modeling of linguistic context.

In Portsmouth, Ohio we don't have a water tower per se. We have a large tank on top of the highest hill in town, and an underground reservoir built into the hill a bit lower down. My house is on the north side of that hill, maybe 2/3 of the way down. During short power outages I don't worry about the water supply. However, after the 2003 ice storm, the power was out long enough that there were water use restrictions citywide. I actually filled up a couple of buckets with ice and snow and brought them in to melt for flushing water. I had no heat in the house but it never got below freezing indoors, and I only had to do this once before they got the pumps up and water pressure started coming back.

Hawaii has almost no water towers; I'm not sure why. We used to have one memorable water tower in Honolulu, the giant pineapple over by Dole Cannery, but that was torn down years ago, despite vocal opposition and disappointment.

I hadn't even thought about water towers or the effect their lack might have on distribution. We do have big big storage tanks up on many of the hillsides in Honolulu, serving the same purpose, but I'm not sure how long they'd supply a busy city. In any case, stockpiling water has become deeply ingrained in my habits as A Thing You Do for hurricanes, along with batteries and non-perishable staple foods. (No Spam for us; instead, cans of lentil soup and garbanzos, and a lot of bulgur, which can be prepared just by soaking it.)

Why people buy cases of little bottles of water, that I don't know. In the past we've bought 5 gallon "jugs" but this year I bought 3 big Coleman picnic coolers on wheels; altogether they would hold over 40 gallons if we fill them all tonight, which is overkill for 4 people + pets, beyond our reasonable worst case.

Despite what I said above, the hurricane-preparation flyers distributed to Long Islanders do advise having sufficient water on hand for 3-4 days, specified as a gallon of water per person per day.

A short article on the great Dole Pineapple:
The Largest Pineapple in the World.
I can't believe it's been gone for 20 years now.

Water towers: And then there's the FLORENCE Y'ALL water tower. I'm not sure the story there is entirely correct, though; the version I've heard is that because the tower is part of the city water system, the city said that it wasn't legit for a private entity to advertise on it. But in any case, the solution was the same -- change what it said with a minimum of repainting.

Southern water towers -- I've seen a number of them around TN and northern AL emblazoned with the name and mascot of the local high-school sports team.

Going back to fabric and its relative inexpensive nature, I just took our dining room chairs, which had white fitted covers that had gotten extremely nasty due to Small Children (and which resisted being cleaned on-site), and put new fabric covers on them, stapled down. (The fitted covers are now being throughly soaked and will go through as many cleaning cycles as necessary.) Fabric cost for four chairs: $25 including Scotchguard. Admittedly, the fabric in question was on sale, but it was still in the "home decorating" cost line.

Not bad to make a room look less like a haven for slobs.

Auckland NZ is blessed (for water supply purposes) with dozens of extinct-ish volcanic cones. Water is sourced via dams in the nearby Waitakere Ranges and the Waikato river to the south. Local pressure mainly comes from reseviors built in to (not on) various of the cones.

Lee @ #308, here too. (And also in the movie Thor, where the little NM town is proclaimed "Home of the Vikings!")

Pre-disemvoweled spam -- a sample line from something that showed up in my spam filter:

YCur r h qu l f d fCr n w Cl r rCgr m th t m r duc Cur Cw r B ll B much 80%. YCu mu t B hCm Cwn r nd h v f r cr d t tC qu l f .

I am amused.

From the "The more you know, the more jokes you get" department:

In the announcement of the latest squillion passwords stolen by evil doers, the name CyberVor was given to the group, where Vor is Russian for theif.

Which brings a whole new potential understanding of the Vor class, their relationship to tax collectors, and that they may have been named by the ethnic Russian settlers, but perhaps not comprised of them.

IIRC, the "vor"="thief" thing is explicitly mentioned in one of Bujold's books.

Eric #313: One notes that the Cyrillic letters for 'Vor' look to a non-Russian speaking Anglophone like, say, myself like 'Bop'. This leads to many, very interesting, thoughts about exactly what the 'Bop' class does.

Possibly related question:

Who put the bop
In the bop shoo bop shoo bop?
Who put the dip
In the dip da dip da dip?

#280 &c:

It's completely understandable that clothing manufacturers want to make clothing for basically tubular people: the seams are easier to sew and there's less waste cloth. Tubes can be covered with rectangles, which fit onto bolts of cloth; cones covered with triangles; but hyperboloids can only be neatly fitted with complicated pieces, usually requiring bias-to-bias seams, which can only be reliably sewn by skilled labor.

And consumers turn out to be happy enough with (basically) slightly stretchy pajamas. Much as I admire tailoring and dressmaking, knit pajamas for everyone might be a hedonic maximum. _Star Trek_ uniforms, after all...

Christina Hendricks. There was a mock women's magazine cover which featured the phrase "Gaze upon the prow of Christina Hendricks", that comes to mind every time I see her name in print. It may be replaced with "Gloriously 3-dimensional."

There used to be a large set of illustrators who could draw realistic bodies in all sorts of clothes, shapes and poses, from all sorts of angles, and that trade is -if not dying- much pruned down. Comic books have suffered, and I realized that, but I hadn't thought that it might have damaged fashion as well.

clew @317: knit pajamas for everyone

I'm down with that. Jammies tend to be more comfy than "tailored" clothes, IME, as well. See also: karate gis or scrubs.

Indian styles have it nailed, though, for fashion. Saris are one of the few styles that make plus-size women look chic and feminine (by today's "standards"). And they're "loom-shaped."

Jacque @ 319

That's the difference between draped clothes and sewn/tailored clothes. If your culture does draped clothes -- traditional India, ancient Greece, etc -- most clothes are loom-shaped and the look is all in how good you personally are at draping your garment in the correct and fashionable arrangement.

Ooh, going back to "loom-shaped" and Cut My Cote, I don't find that book useful only for historical interest; I've found it a very practical guide for making medieval through 19th-century European shirts and shifts, and just recommended it to my ex-husband who was talking about wanting to make something styled after a yukata. He was saying something about "patterns" and I said "what, it's all rectangles!" "But the shaping around the shoulders?" "What shaping? RECTANGLES. Loom widths. Not to be cutting the nice fabric. Oh, and the one I have has openings on the underarm seams, I assume for ease of movement. Look, just order the book, it's $10 well spent." He is not an inexperienced clothing constructor, but most of his practical experience is in doublets.

#319, Jacque: Jammies tend to be more comfy than "tailored" clothes, IME, as well.

I wonder how much of that is due to the "tailored" clothing being "tailored" to a body shape and size that is not the same as the person wearing it? Actual tailored clothing should fit perfectly.

HLN: Area woman's daughter (10) has started coming into Amsterdam to have lunch with her during the summer vacation. It's a fairly trivial trip: walk 7 minutes to the bus stop, take the bus to Amsterdam Centraal Station, walk about 5 minutes to area woman's office. But it's also represented her First Time Solo on public transit and out and about in Amsterdam.

Area woman is enjoying this practice, and will be sorry when summer ends.

In further news, said Daughter called Area Woman before the most recent lunch and asked to borrow AW's jean jacket. AW consented and, seeing a future of clothes-borrowing on the horizon, began to consider what Embarrassing Things she might leave in the pockets of her most borrowable garments.

(*wicked cackle*)

Area Woman is a meanmeanmean woman.

Clifton @253, any update to that HyperLocal News Report? One hopes that there is power and minimal flooding in your area....

janra @#322, even when tailored clothes fit well, they don't always move well. Martial arts uniforms are cut the way they are for a reason! And when I'm doing my job, which includes demonstrating exercises, getting up and down from the floor, etc., I have to wear clothes that are either stretchy or somewhat loose-fitting if I don't want to rip seams.

Cassy, thanks for asking! I should have thought of posting an update here; I've just been sending email updates to my daughter, and to the friend who's flying out here in a week for a long-planned vacation.

The quick version is: "So far, so good."

Iselle had dropped to a tropical storm before it made landfall on the Big Island, and it doesn't seem as though it did much damage beyond closed roads and power outages due to fallen trees and debris. We'll probably hear more by later in the day. Here in Honolulu, we're having heavy wind and rain since around 5 or 6am, but no worse than we've had earlier this year. It may get a little worse later in the day when Iselle passes at its closest to the south, but it shouldn't be too bad.

Julio is currently projected to weaken to a tropical storm and entirely miss the islands to the north, but we'll see come Sunday.

abi: Very cool for Area Woman's daughter; it's a good transition. My son started taking the public bus system home from school this past year, and then gradually generalized it to "Hey, I can go places on my own now if I really want to!" (There's a half mile walk to/from the nearest bus stop, but he's in good shape.)

Sigh.

Until a few days back I was hoping my father would at least make it to his 80th b'day in a couple of weeks, but I'm no longer sure there'd be anything to celebrate in him lasting that long.

I'm going to deliberately tempt fate and see if I still have a suit suitable for a funeral.

Stefan Jones @328, condolences. That's hard.

@Cassy: Thanks . . . my mother is now ill too, from working and worrying keeping the old guy going entirely on her own. I really want . . . a conclusion, so she can heal up and move on.

Stefan Jones (328/330): Sympathies. Death can be a release for all concerned--but that doesn't make it easy.

Supernatural collective nouns. Available as a poster.

Stefan Jones @328, sympathies and good thoughts toward all your family. It is hard.

janra @322: I wonder how much of that is due to the "tailored" clothing being "tailored" to a body shape and size that is not the same as the person wearing it? Actual tailored clothing should fit perfectly.

Quite a lot, I should imagine, but even so: unless the clothing precisely fits the body and has the same stretch and elasticity of skin, it's going to constrain movement. See also: uncomfortable.

Stefan Jones @328: Yes, the waiting is the hardest part. Good thoughts.

Stefan: My sympathies. It's not easy, and it's hard to be honest about the situation and the thoughts around it.

Stefan Jones, my condolences.

Rikibeth, have you seen _Make Your Own Japanese Clothes_? Algorithms for traditional garments, which are cut from loom widths -- though, a) this works best if you're the size the looms were designed for and b) they are cut up -- serious laundering involved completely taking the garment apart, reassembling the cloth as it had been on the loom, and washing it that way so ?the strain would be even?. Also, the author has some nice ideas on playing around with the traditional patterns.

clew @ 336 ...
The patterns in that book are decidedly westernized -- they're certainly generally interesting, but shouldn't be represented as classic.

Stefan Jones @ 328 ...
My empathies. The uncertainty about an eventual certainty is wearing, at best.

Thanks, xeger -- can you recommend something more traditional?

HLN: Local author -- still new enough to the trade to squee over such things -- has spotted entry for Book 2 on monopolistic book distribution site. Sources were able to confirm the presence of The Mystic Marriage in forthcoming listings.

(This is the sequel to Daughter of Mystery that involves alchemy.)

I suppose I could post this HLN bulletin:
In the month of June, Man, 39 hooks up with Woman, 38. Woman (Polish, came to Norway six years ago with then-infant Son) works as teacher. Everybody gets along well.

Then in July disaster strikes. Woman will not be keeping teaching job next year, can't afford to be unemployed, may be forced to move back to Poland. Man says Woman and her Son (now 6) should move in with him. There is much rejoicing, but some work has to be done on the house, Man admits. The home of this slovenly bachelor isn't quite fit for a whole family, so a good deal of clutter goes out and that loft room finally gets fixed up as a bedroom.

In mid-August Woman gets her job back, thanks to circumstances beyond her control. Disaster averted, but the process of moving into Man's house is past the point of no return. Man reports being happy with the whole state of affairs, but it's been too bloody much of a roller coaster ride and he hopes things settle down now.

Stefan Jones @328: The waiting is hard. I learned very specific and different things from each of my parents dying. Sounds as if you're well on the way to that as well. My sympathies.

clew @336, I haven't seen it, but I did know that about unstitching kimono for cleaning! My goodness, the work involved...though on the one hand, it would all be straight seams and no curves, on the other hand, HAND STITCHING long straight seams!

Rikibeth @342

I think I've read that kimono were sewn with a very long running stitch, since the seams weren't meant to last a long time. But I can't give a citation.

Stefan Jones, my thoughts are with you - it's got to be rough.

Roy G. Ovrebo, I hope the move goes happily, and certainly improving a home from Slovenly Bachelor to Family-Friendly has got to be a good thing in any circumstance!

342/343
I disassembled a cheap kimono (bought used). Long stitches, done in a heavy thread (something like buttonhole twist), so it was fairly easy to do.
The pieces were donated to the local quilters.

Stefan Jones, I wish you luck and strength in the days to come, and peace and healing after the conclusion.

clew @ 338 ...
Thanks, xeger -- can you recommend something more traditional?

The first one that comes to hand is Vol 4 of the Home Encyclopedia -- but I can't seem to track down a useful reference, probably because it's from the 1960s, and is entirely in Japanese.

Off the top of my head, things that are off -- the fabric layout is done for western fabrics, rather than the typical japanese fabric width of 14" to 17", the neck space is formed by cutting ~3 3/4" perpendicular to the selvage around the shoulder, and then folded into the collar ( see also fabric reuse), pieces should be rectangular, and folded to form other shapes, to avoid wasting fabric (see also fabric reuse), a lot of the fussy detail's been glossed over, since it doesn't suit the attention span of large parts of the western world (eg: only ironing the outside curve of the sleeve, not the gathers, and always using two sets of stitching for the gathers)

Also, there's no mention of minor details like "flutter sleeves" (furisode) being strictly the domain of young, unmarried women (and looking like mutton dressed up as lamb on older women), and other similar things that one might care to know about.

Hrm... I could have sworn that he had a note saying to always wear kimono (et al) with the left side on top of right, but I can't seem to find that one, at all (only corpses would have the right side on top of the left).

This piece from Hanami Web is a decent survey of some of that sort of thing.

Depending on how traditional you're thinking of, the Kyoto Costume Museum is more historical than current, but is exceedingly well researched and put together.

clew @ 338 ...
Thanks, xeger -- can you recommend something more traditional?

The first one that comes to hand is Vol 4 of the Home Encyclopedia -- but I can't seem to track down a useful reference, probably because it's from the 1960s, and is entirely in Japanese.

Off the top of my head, things that are off -- the fabric layout is done for western fabrics, rather than the typical japanese fabric width of 14" to 17", the neck space is formed by cutting ~3 3/4" perpendicular to the selvage around the shoulder, and then folded into the collar ( see also fabric reuse), pieces should be rectangular, and folded to form other shapes, to avoid wasting fabric (see also fabric reuse), a lot of the fussy detail's been glossed over, since it doesn't suit the attention span of large parts of the western world (eg: only ironing the outside curve of the sleeve, not the gathers, and always using two sets of stitching for the gathers)

Also, there's no mention of minor details like "flutter sleeves" (furisode) being strictly the domain of young, unmarried women (and looking like mutton dressed up as lamb on older women), and other similar things that one might care to know about.

Hrm... I could have sworn that he had a note saying to always wear kimono (et al) with the left side on top of right, but I can't seem to find that one, at all (only corpses would have the right side on top of the left).

This piece from Hanami Web is a decent survey of some of that sort of thing.

Depending on how traditional you're thinking of, the Kyoto Costume Museum is more historical than current, but is exceedingly well researched and put together.

Hrm, apologies for the double post -- makinglight said:

Your comment submission failed for the following reasons:

Publish failed: Renaming tempfile '/home/pnh/public_html/makinglight/archives/015938.html.new' failed: Renaming '/home/pnh/public_html/makinglight/archives/015938.html.new' to '/home/pnh/public_html/makinglight/archives/015938.html' failed: No such file or directory
Please correct the error in the form below, then press POST to post your comment.

Name:

abi @323: Sounds like a good way to get her started on independent travel.

Stefan Jones @328: Sympathies. Waiting like that is not easy.

Heather Rose Jones @339: Great!

Roy G. Ovrebo @340: Good luck for a quieter, more settled time.

Stefan Jones #328: Sympathies.

Thanks all for kind thoughts.

It is so tough dealing with incomplete and filtered-by-emotion information! I suspect that life expectancy in this case is a slumped to the left bell curve. My father could expire today, or make it to Christmas. My mother and sisters have arranged visits from friends and relatives while my mother -- utterly burned out by trying to be an in-home caregiver -- gets back on her feet. Being 2,800 miles away I'm doing things like recommending an mp3 player a half-blind technophobe might be able to handle (audiobooks).

In lighter news:

Guardians of the Galaxy is great fun. Somewhere while watching it I had a thought along the lines of "this could be this generation's Star Wars." Which would be dandy because while it doesn't have the telenovela gravitas of "Star Wars," it is a much more humane and ferociously imaginative flick.

It seems that while my mother was visiting my sister up in Massachusetts, she fell and hurt herself. Broken arm, and possible spinal fracture. She's under treatment there, and expected to return home soon.

Okay, now that's what I'm talking about. Just got a ping on OKCupid. A couple of choice quotes from the profile:

Carbon monoxide: sorry Earthers but you know what they say " one man's emission is another mans atmosphere".

Vasaline: "the other clear meat"

Everything in "Men in Black" was true ;) Except of course, the parts that weren't.

Dave Harmon @354, oof. Hope she has a smooth recovery.

not really back here yet (computer collapse about two weeks ago, new system (wheee!) this last Sunday, still getting things reinstalled, yadda yadda, fibrofog)

ob Io pronunciation:

https://www.facebook.com/grammarly/photos/a.158139670871698.33824.139729956046003/837926856226306/?type=1

*snicker*

I saw "Guardians of the Galaxy" today and found it delightful. While the raccoon is great, my first love is Groot.

It is remarkably free of physics.

Groot is wonderful. Mercilessly when needed, but also compassionate. (Growing a flower for that urchin in Nowhere, when everyone else was worried about getting their pockets picked.)

Rocket was heroic and a team player when needed. There's a graphic going around twitter of the little beast, with the text "Risked his life to save more strangers than Superman in 'Man of Steel.'"

Groot doesn't HAVE pockets.

I got that "They put two and a half movies' worth of stuff into one movie" feeling from Guardians of the Galaxy. It was fun, fast and there was a lot of it. And OH so quotable.

Agree on Guardians of the Galaxy. It didn't take itself too seriously, it had a ton of laughs, and a fair measure of heart.

How many Groots will we see at Halloween this year?

I kept wanting to substitute classic Star Wars lines into bits of Guardians of the Galaxy. Especially when they were talking about the prospective return on the MacGuffin - I kept hearing "The reward would be..well, more than you can imagine?" "I dunno, I can imagine- quite a bit!"

I am of two minds about the initial fridging - some folks I know have decried it as yet another instance of the laziest way to provide a source of manpain for the protagonist, but looked at from another angle, the Dead Mother trope goes all the way back to fairy tales, and the mixtape seems to function very much as a Magic Ring or Invisibility Cloak or other mythic talisman, so I'm inclined to give the movie a pass on it.

It was cute. It was a fun couple of hours. If they make a music-reactive Dancing Groot toy, I will probably buy THREE.

But I don't think it'll ever supplant Star Wars.

HLN: After over a decade of either not having a website at all for my business, or having one that was impossible for me to maintain by myself, I now have a website that's actually functional! Click on the link from my name if you want to take a look. Note: This is still very much a work in progress -- I'll be adding things for the next month or more, at the rate I'm going right now -- but there's certainly a representative sampling currently available.

Well we just got back from seeing Guardians of the Galaxy and had a great time. I did an honest-to-god spit-take at the question "Who put the sticks up their butts?" in the "legend" explanation.

I'm not sure it'll be a generation-defining film, but I am sure there will be a lot of "I am Groot" uttered around our household for a while, with maybe a few side orders of "Don't call me a thesaurus!"

We did our "dress rehearsal" of the Worldcon costumes this weekend (I'm still finishing details, but the substance of the costumes is done.)

Photos here on Flickr, if anyone is interested in having a peek.

A few notes:
* Alex's armor is made from an old motorcycle jacket that I got off of a "we can't even sell this" rack by a secondhand store. All the stitching was rotten, so I did a lot of resewing and reassembling into new forms.
* The metallic trim on his armor is actually spiral steel corset boning, which I started working with for my costume, but then thought it would do well as a decorative element.
* Fiona's outfit, unlike most Merida costumes, is actually a chemise and overdress. (Most costumers just put white fabric into the gaps of the green overdress, but the whole thing hangs better with a chemise.)
* I think her dress looks as good without the wig as with it. But she's only Merida with the wig, of course.
* If you're looking for a good, affordable coarse linen that dyes beautifully and looks good in costuming, IKEA is the place to go. Ditto undyed cotton.
* If I ever decide to machine-embroider in metallic thread on suede again, shoot me. That corset was...not easy.

HLN: Local woman, frazzled by the seemingly-endless packing for her move to Boston in a couple of weeks, notices yet another cache of books. "I think that there will always be more books to pack," the woman exclaimed in frustration. "I did a lot of purging, though, I swear!"

When asked for a statement, her husband decided that it was wiser not to comment.

abi @365, wonderful costumes, and what great pictures.

abi #365: Awww! And those costumes are awesome. Your comment about Fiona's dress makes me think of "deep value".

Abi, the costumes are gorgeous!!

abi, #365: Wow! Those outfits are fabulous.

Are you planning to damp-braid your hair to get the Eowyn ripples? If so, I recommend dry-running that as well; different textures of hair require different thicknesses of braid for the look to work. Two thick braids give me a nice set of waves; six thinner ones (which I tried once) went triangular-Afro on me.

I totally agree about Merida's outfit needing a chemise. "Filling in the gaps with white fabric" would say cheap Halloween costume to me. But that outfit isn't a costume, it's garb. And I also agree that it looks just as good on her minus the wig -- the color flatters her natural hair and skin tone.

abi, those are TERRIFIC costumes! Hats off to you!

And, Carol Witt, *squee*! I'm just recently moved to Boston myself - as of August 1, though there's still mop-up packing to do in CT. Drop me a line - email is my name at gmail - if you want to get together. We could even have a mini Gathering of Light if we wanted to try to assemble one. I'm in Dorchester, right on the Red Line. Where in the Boston area will you be, if you don't mind specifying? (Or by email.)

I did a lot of book purging in my last two moves, and REALLY I only had two and a half bookcases' worth plus the cookbooks, and I STILL wound up with ten or so banker's boxes of books and three of cookbooks (to be fair, one of the cookbook boxes is looseleaf binders filled with plastic-sleeved recipes and back issues of Cook's Illustrated).

abi @ 365... Awesome!

abi @ 365... Delightful!

Particularly fine is that they carry well from a distance and also repay attention up close.

abi @365: Wow. GORGEOUS.

I think her dress looks as good without the wig as with it. But she's only Merida with the wig, of course.

I think the dress looks better without the wig. Not least because she looks more, um, herself.

On the topic of clothing, and in particular that which fits but doesn't handle movement well: it has occurred to me that I have always been far more likely to destroy seams (and have gotten fairly decent at re-sewing them) than wear through the cloth — and especially so if it "fits well" instead of being a little oversized (my usual workaround). I don't know what kind of movement they plan for, if any, but it's certainly not that of someone who has the motor control/proprioception/balance add-on neurofail package.

(Speaking of which, I should probably put a sewing machine on my shopping list, since I'll probably need it within the next few months.)

375
If you have a local sewing-machine store, check there. Your best bet, new or used, is one that isn't computerized: they're very reliable and not really expensive. (Singer is iffy these days. They're pushing the high-end computerized models, anyway.)

Sewing machines: you have to go back a seriously long way to find something that can't do zig-zag stitches and buttonholes, and that certainly doesn't need a computer. There are also good reasons to have those features. I am not sure that computer-based machines add anything useful.

Sewing machines: When I participated in rec.crafts.textiles.quilting in the late '90s, people would periodically ask for advice on what machine to buy. If they didn't want to spend a thousand or two on a fancy computerized one with all the bells and whistles, the answer was to get an old (pre-1970*) Singer from a tag sale for fifty bucks and have it refurbished as needed. Following that advice, when my old sewing machine broke a few years ago, I bought a Singer 99K off eBay. Straight-stitch only, though.

*The Singer family sold the company in 1970; newer Singers aren't nearly as good.

(We had a similar discussion in Open Thread 156. Looks like the relevant bit starts here.)

I've posted a time or two on my own adventures with my late mother's sewing machine, a Singer 99K. and I shall likely be wearing clothes I adjusted with it at the Worldcon. My legs are a bit short, or my waist a bit long. Straight stitch does a lot of useful sewing.

The "Featherweight" name applies to the old Singer 221 model, and there was apparently a Chinese duplicate, and to several recent machines which maybe won't endure but which are still mechanical rather than computerised. The 221 type seems to be one of the best straight-stitch machines ever, and while ancient people will pay serious money for them.

Be careful about old electric motors.

I totally agree about Merida's outfit needing a chemise. "Filling in the gaps with white fabric" would say cheap Halloween costume to me.

So you all have seen the Renaissance-era dresses that have the upper and lower sleeves held together by ribbons? (Like this lady) There was an early episode of "The Tudors" that had Anne B. in such a dress...but she had no chemise under it. Just her bare elbows hangin' out for the world to see. That was not the most egregious of the costume errors on that show (though it falls under the general complaint of "these people aren't wearing enough underwear"), but it was one I particularly noticed.

"You can do that without looking?"

At Pennsic this past week I had someone express incredulity that I could knit stockinette while reading. Having recently past the point where I can truthfully say that I have formed the knit stitch literally a million times, I just kind of shrugged. Especially since this was Pennsic, where a woman knitting is rather more common than, say, pine trees.

Dave Bell (379): Straight stitch does a lot of useful sewing.

Yes, indeed. I don't miss zigzag stitch much, although it would be nice to have it available if I want it.

For those who are interested, there was a slide show with video clip at Frank Robinson's memorial service, now up on YouTube. Some early fannish photos, and a nice one of Frank holding an issue of Le Zombie for which he did the cover very near the end. Some amazing bits of gay history, as well. Seven minutes long.

So through one of my small-f fandoms, I found this lovely poem.

"Harry went to Agincourt, ankle deep
in mud, and wistful, weary, thought of sleep;
thought of crowns and souls, and old life-goals told
to empty rooms when he was young and brash."

The author's LJ name is "B. Farrar", and it's noted in the sidebar that "Despite the name, I am neither English nor a former cowboy."

I will be at LonCon (in Brighton now). Arriving in London on the evening of today/tomorrow. Taking in a play at the Globe on Tues.

I do have a mobile phone number in the UK, and will be on a panel at the con. Other meetings are more flexible.

Great costumes, abi! I actually think Fiona's costume looks slightly better without the wig, but I take your point about it not being Merida.

Olcer 196: It's the ACT Total Care Dry Mouth. It lasts long enough to let me get to sleep, but not all night. I used to use the Biotene Dry Mouth gum (for during the day), and found it very effective, but they discontinued it. I have these lozenges now, but I'm not terribly happy with them.

The active ingredient is usually xylitol, which is a sweetener, so they tend to be too sweet. The Salese soft tabs last an hour, but you do taste them the entire time. The ones I tried were wintergreen, and they stupidly flavored them with actual wintergreen oil, which burns my scar tissue. The other ones were peppermint, a flavor I detest.

re the OP: I spin. I spin pretty finely (I do what is referred to as "chasing cobwebs). I can spin 300 yds out of two oz of wool (which netted about 110 yards of 3-ply; about buttonhole twist weight thread).

So I can spin about 2400 yards per pound.

I spun that in my spare time, mostly riding on the subway. I don't spin full time. I tuck it in when we are watching Dr. Who (or Once Upon A Time... which is amusing). I take ten minutes here, or there. I've not been as attentive as I might be this year, so I've only spun about three lbs since Jan.

But to warp a loom, that's a lot of yarn: and yarn which takes more time to make (it wants to be worsted [though some fabrics, like tweed, use a woolen spin for both warp and weft] and that takes longer). Sock wools take more time too, because they want to be three ply (most "spinner's yarn" is two-ply).

Even at that, two ply means at least three sets of spinning (one for each single, and one to ply them up). Add fiber prep (washing the wool, carding [or combing] it) and the setting when one is done, and cloth is a huge investment in time/effort.

If you want an interesting take on it, find Defoe's report of a day in a wool-market.

I will have some skeins with me at LonCon, and will be doing incidental demonstrations (because I travel with a couple of drop-spindles, and a passel of penny-whistles).

Terry Karney @387: I tuck it in when we are watching Dr. Who (or Once Upon A Time... which is amusing)

I saw Robert Carlyle comment in an interview that he's becoming quite taken with spinning.

Terry Karney: I just watched the "Secrets of the Dead: Bugging Hitler's Soldiers," and immediately thought of your comment about getting someone to talk with nothing more than milk and cookies.

It seems the British set up this very comfortable estate with all the amenities to house their German officer POWs. And just let them...chat. Of course, they'd bugged all the rooms.

Abi @365:
I had never considered IKEA as a fabric store - I assumed that their textiles were all in pre-cut lengths, but it appears I was wrong. Thanks for the tip!

For people interested in other sources of linen and/or dyeable fabric, I recommend Fabrics-store.com (linen) and Dharma Trading Co (dyeables, and also dye).

I can also speak well of Fabrics-store.com. Wonderful linen, and when I ordered a lot for making shirts and shifts, they threw in what has become my favorite dishtowel ever.

Mary Aileen @ 381 ...
Yes, indeed. I don't miss zigzag stitch much, although it would be nice to have it available if I want it.

You can get a zig-zag attachment for the old Singer machines (just make sure that you get a low shank vs a slant [yes, there's a reason I mention this...] )

Terry Karney @387, I was at a small crafting-con a few weeks ago (MuseCon), and learned (sorta) how to use a drop-spindle. The lady who taught the class kindly provided an extra length of roving for me when I tentatively mentioned it might be nice to, oh, actually ply it and knit or crochet something small like a dice-bag. (I almost kinda-sorta know how to knit, too....)

So I have most of the first spindle of roving spun; it's kinda uneven but mostly twisted down to about kite-string thickness. She gave me a second spindle (made cleverly from an unsharpened pencil and a big fender-washer) for my second ply. But when I get the second spindle done, um.... I don't remember exactly how she said to ply it. Do I need a third spindle?

xeger (392): Thanks for the information. I vaguely knew that zig-zag attachments might be available but had never investigated. (I think you're the one who clued me in a few years ago to the existence of buttonhole attachments. If so, I never adequately thanked you. I loves me my buttonholer!)

Cassy: What you need is some way to remove the yarn from the spindles, or a third spindle.

I don't ply to spindle, I ply to wheel. There are tips/tricks online (such as using a beam with eyebolts to guide the yarns, and give you room to work without the energy trying to kink and tangle).

Right now I am off to Brighton Pavilion and a music shop. Then we head to London. I may have time to be more elaborate in a few hours.

Terry Karney @395, no rush; based on how long it did to do the first spindle, I anticipate at least a week to fill the second one...

And thanks! (It just strikes me as a Cool Thing to have something that I actually use on a regular basis, like a dice bag (I'm a gamer) that I Made Myself from... well, not quite the sheep, but as close as I'm likely to get.

Cassy B.: Do you or your neighbors have any longhair cats or dogs? :-)

Jacque, #397: I've seen people spinning dog fur, but not cat fur; my understanding is that cat fur is too smooth (or something) to spin well, and is better used for felting. If it could be spun, I could provide a local spinner a very steady supply just from our Spot, one of whose nicknames is "Shedder". She's a shorthair, but she's fluffy and sheds more than all the others put together.

I have a zig-zag attachment for my Singer. I splurged a bit on this stuff last year.

Jacque @397, alas, my two cats are shorthairs, and the Akita that was owned by a friend of mine passed away a few years ago. (He shed a full garbage bag of fur every spring. Tight-packed.)

Xopher, thank you! I don't remember if I have tried it and forgotten the name or not tried it, but I will look for it and find out.

I tried several brands of xylitol chewing gum, prescription and non-prescription, but found that they work only as long as I am chewing them and this doesn't help me get to sleep (for instance). Not to mention how much gum I would need. I'm not really a gum-chewer, so I'd chew, and spit it out, sort of reflexively, and need to take another piece.

Brought up "oil and solar" in the Toni Weisskopf thread, am now bringing it over here in case of interest. Math in footnotes.

Oil and solar. To first order, solar energy doesn't replace oil in any way. [US-centric oversimplifications abound; more complexity available upon request.] [1] Gasoline and diesel are excellent ways of storing an enormous amount of energy in a small space, such that you can recharge in a short time. [2]

"Transportation energy" is a different problem from "electricity generation" and that's a different problem from "storage and peak matching." We can do "sustainable electricity generation", that's in process and I don't see a problem until we get over 75% sun/wind in any given area.

Here endeth the monologue.

Solar is good for the world in a variety of ways. [3] But it's not a replacement for gasoline. Might it be, eventually, a replacement for gasoline in some way? Not soon [4] and probably not directly [5].

[1]We generate less than 2% of our electricity from refined oil products, and use less than 2% of our refined oil products to make electricity. In contrast, we generate less than 0.5% of our electricity from PV, but use pretty much 100% of our PV to make electricity.
[2] 10 gallons of gasoline is 330 kWh and if you can fill a 10-gallon tank in 5.5 minutes [330 seconds] that makes the recharge "power" 3.6 MW .
[3]Solar generates 10-20% of the CO2 of coal, uses no water and generates no pollution at point of installation, has really low operation & maintenance cost, etc. The places in the world with lots of poor people all tend to have very good insolation, so it's good for poverty alleviation. And so forth.
[4] Tesla sold less than 50 kilocars last year and the US has around 100,000 kilocars on the road. How fast can they double, and how many times?
[5] There are some interesting, not-yet-scaled-up, projects involving synfuel. The Navy. for one, has a project making fuel from seawater + electricity. The Navy also pays a lot more for their fuel because it has to be shipped out to the middle of the ocean, so "cost effective" has a different meaning for them.

Cassy B.: I would be happy to help you learn plying face to face if we can find a point of common availability. :-)

HLN: I am somewhat pleased at getting somewhere with a seriously backlogged task whose deadline approacheth perilous fast. Also I will have friends over tomorrow providing enough company to possibly bootstrap me into more, yay!

Sandy, #402: Also, most of our plastics are made from petrochemical feedstock, and solar won't do a thing about that. I don't think plastics recycling has even made a dent in that stream yet, and we're not likely to give up plastic any time soon either.

Elliot Mason @403, I may take you up on that; worst case, Windycon is in only a few months...

(And I may need help and advice on exactly to go about knitting a dice bag. I pretty much can do a rectangle, right now. With only a knit stitch. Ideally, I'd want something like a really wide sock with no heel....)

ElliotT Mason, I know you have two Ts in your name... <headdesk>

Oh, and I found a piece of roving from a very aborted try at learning to spin at last year's Musecon; I'm dividing it in half and adding it (half each) to the end of each spindle-of-half-twist. It's dark blue (as opposed to the burgundy/brown of the other wool) so my hypothetical eventual dice bag should (if I manage this right) not only be large enough to hold a reasonable amount of dice, but also have a burgundy/brown body with a wide dark-blue rim. I'm feeling tolerably clever right now....

Sandy B. @ 402 -

Interesting points.

I think it's possible that electric vehicles could alter the second car dynamic of family car buying. One electric car for the person who commutes regularly (and can recharge nightly) and a second gas-powered vehicle when long-distance travel is needed. So electric cars can be a significant part of the mix without becoming predominant.

Haven Publishing, a scam.

Mary Aileen @ 394 ...
xeger (392): Thanks for the information. I vaguely knew that zig-zag attachments might be available but had never investigated. (I think you're the one who clued me in a few years ago to the existence of buttonhole attachments. If so, I never adequately thanked you. I loves me my buttonholer!)

It's very likely :D I'm generally enthusiastic about my ancient and not at all decrepit sewing (and other, tbh) machines.

My most recent acquisition of that sort is a hemstitcher and picot edger, which makes a truly frightening set of noises until you get used to it -- and does, indeed, work as advertised.

It also comes with a screwdriver that's bent in exactly the right place to fit under the head end easily, and making removing that (@#$&@(*# back screw on the throat plate comparatively easy (which, as you might guess, made me quite cheery!)

It's been reported that Robin Williams has died.

http://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/celebrity/comedian-robin-williams-found-dead-63-n178176

Steve C @410: I only met him twice, and the second time he recognized me in a very crowded setting (and correctly identified the time we'd met before). He was an amazing comedian, and we're poorer for his leaving us.

Horrible storyabout the rendition of a family to Libya when we were trying to get Gadafi to be on our side in the WOT. This was under W.

There is just no way to spin this as anything but monstrous. And it's absolutely certain that nobody will suffer any consequences for doing it. Probably, even the details of who decided to do this and who was ultimately responsible will be redacted from the report. Terrorizing 12 year old girls to make nice with a dictator is an important part of US foreign policy which must be protected. whereas revealing the names of the people responsible for it would be needlessly cruel and heartless toward those hardworking, honest public servants.

abi, those are beautiful costumes. I'm good friends with a costumer who believes in doing things The Right Way whenever possible (she does not eschew modern tricks or fastenings, but wants proper cuts and layers. And she wants corsets for corset periods, because people move differently when wearing them.) She would approve highly of what you've done there.

Mostly I've been feeling angry about the unfairness of William's fate.

Then I saw this, and started feeling so freaking sad:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BuzMmryIYAAAnh6.jpg

Sandy B @402 et al:
I have a 50 mile roundtrip commute, and my paid-for car gets a bit over 30mpg. It almost never has more than me in it. We have a minivan for family drives. The lease on a new Smart ForTwo Electric is about the same as my monthly gasoline bill. If we were not trying to move, I'd get 240V pulled to the garage and switch.

With the Nissan Leaf, the upcoming Chevy Spark EV, and others, we are very close to an electric car being the more affordable choice for the commuter car in two car households that buy new.

The challenge to move off coal for baseload and natural gas for peaking for electricity production is multifaceted. We need better bulk energy storage - or PV so cheap an inefficient bulk storage (hydrogen via electrolysis plus fuel cells, etc.) is economical, an economical way to cool thermal cycle power plants (nuclear, solar thermal, geothermal, etc.) without using up freshwater we need for other uses, and upgrades to the grid to handle diverse sources and availability. Economical can come via engineering/manufacturing breakthrough, carbon taxes, or other means.

Battery tech and EV efficiency is already "good enough" for most commuters, if chargepoints were available at work and in rental housing. Then again, for cities, electric trolleybuses would be far more efficient per person-mile. @cstross is quite fond of mentioning the French nuclear powered trains, too. (electric trains, baseload nuclear power electric grid).

Nuclear fission is our best bet for a "bolt in" baseload powerplant to replace coal with current available tech, but solar thermal with thermal storage (hot rock, molten salt, other) is feasible. Add synfuel generation to soak up "excess" generation capacity and it can in a pinch be used to run existing natural gas peaker plants when there is extended lack of sunlight.

The politics of it all are a nightmare, of course. One scenario that I don't see get much play would be for the oil-rich and desert-rich countries that currently export lots of oil to go all-in for PV/other powered synthetic hydrocarbon (synfuel) production. They have the infrastructure and market connections/business relationships to sell it, for sure, and it would be seamless for current purchasers. Coal plants can be converted to synthetic oil (heck, synthetic coal...) or gas without a huge cost (been done for fossil gas many places...). That scenario has the advantage of being easy for the current oil/gas oligarchs to stomach, as they keep their current stature. Not as nice for the rest of us, but seems less impossible than cutting them out.

Plastic can be made from syngas - hydrocarbons are totally fungible at that level, and that natgas and oil are current feedstocks are largely due to their current low market price.

My next car, one way or another, will be electric, barring some really odd conditions. I want to convert an old FJ-40, but it is rather inefficient, so range and performance as a commuter will likely be poorer than a used Leaf for the same cash input - or the aforementioned Smart EV lease.

I can geek out about this stuff at length, but am limited by phone touchscreen keyboard away from work and an odd bug in HTTPS Everywhere on Chrome while at work.

Apologies for rambling/stiltedness/etc. This is one of my "comfortable" topics. Recent news (shooting, Gaza, ISIS, Robin Williams' depression/suicide, etc.) has me scrambling to keep brain on safe ground as breaking down won't help kid get to sleep... Kid nearly asleep now. Can go up to wife soon, not alone here by any means, so no need to worry for me.

Thanks for making such an inclusive space, y'all.

415
Additional data: in California, the existing power grid is fueled by natural gas, hydro, wind, nuclear (right now, just Diablo Canyon), some solar, and a little geothermal (mostly Imperial Valley and the Geysers). Solar is used on a fair number of individual buildings (in my neighborhood, there's an industrial plant and a church with rooftop panels). I think there might be one coal plant, and it's a small private one: coal is pretty close to non-existent locally, and what little there is, is low-grade.
(I spent some time with EPA and other reports, locating power plants for work.)

For Robin Williams (July 21, 1951 – August 11, 2014)

in despair, he said, what dreams may come
of age in the tortured mind of man?
fragments, parts of a greater sum,
sharp, wretched splinters of the eternal plan

or streams of sludge in search of a sump
to rationalize cause and effect,
a comforting lie to ease the loss, to pump
the joy from heaven to hell, to neglect

the sage advice of he who wisely taught
that "laughter is the tonic, the relief,
the surcease for pain" yet painful thought
rebounds with power such that no belief

will overcome the traps, the doubt, the lies,
unless we manage once again to improvise

I've seen an argument that China has been running long-term plan for Solar PV since at least the turn of the century. It's part of the reason why Europe was getting antsy about cheap Chinese solar panels: China was starting production development for low-cost production of efficient panels and it wasn't dumping or subsidies.

It's something where there was a step-by-step series of five-year-plans, and they're starting to pay off. With other cost increases for fossil fuel, including the costs of the smog, China is at a cross-over point.

That, at least, is the argument I saw. And with the long-term planning involved, I can see it as possible. If the product cost works in their export markets, or maybe in third-world countries, we could have missed the boat.

Incidentally, compare cheap solar with small generators: there's a lot of Africa without a grid, and there are similar reasons for them using mobile phone tech rather than landline phone infrastructure. It easy to imagine a wind/solar mix at a medical centre in Africa (though the old generator would still be there as back-up ).

Advance notice for Amsterdam-area peeps: there will be an Amsterdam Gathering of Light on 31 August, starting at 1 pm. It'll be at Proeflokaal de Prael in de Wallen.

More prominent notifications will be posted later.

Jacque: I saw Robert Carlyle comment in an interview that he's becoming quite taken with spinning.

Maybe they will have a shot where the wheel isn't doing impossible things (seriously, I don't think a single instance of spinning in that show has been accurate to how wheels work).

Sarah: I'm wondering if spindles, together with hatpins and parasols, fall into the category of "things that are unlikely to be confiscated as weapons, but which can be used in a pinch against an attacker."

Depends on the spindle: one with a whorl weight might (think rock on a stick). but most aren't really suited. Delicate, and light. The heavier a spindle gets, the harder it is to spin fine yarns; so most aren't more than a couple of oz (and some are really lightweight, with tricks to move the mass to the outside of the whorl).

Re wool combs: Yes, scary (even the small two-row viking combs I have would be fearsome weapons, and I have protocols for how I lay them down when using them, and a dedicated storage place; to keep them from ending up in a random location.

English combs became quite large. One was bolted to a post, and then the other pulled the wool off of it. Then they were reversed. Once the wool was processed enough the fiber was pulled through a small eyelet (called a diz) into a long strand of fibers (all aligned) called "sliver" (long i, so that it's pronounced Sl-eye-ver). Referred to (in mass) as "top) is the preparation for worsted spinning. Which is part of why worsted yarns (not worsted weight) are more expensive.

Worsted is the usual spinning style for warp threads (done two-ply) because it's much harder wearing, and the warp gets a lot of strain in the weaving.

Carding is quicker, and easier, but the resultant rolags/batts are not as aligned, so there is more air (even if the spinner does a worsted draw), and they are more likely to break if used as warp, but they are fluffier, and warmer. In fulled fabrics the weft (at least) is made with woolen spun yarns.

For the home spinner commercial fiber will be either one style or the other, and may need to be carded/combed to switch the style before making the yarn.

Not all fibers are well suited to all treatments, so one has to learn (and even that can fail one. I recently tried to work some wool which was said to be very good for what I wanted to do, only to discover that it was very much carded treatment, and needs to be combed before I can see if this supplier's wool is suitable.

But, the treatment it's got now will make glorious sweater wool.

Xopher: I understand that the bang/exclamation point was originally a ligature or shorthand way of writing "Io." Which in turn implies that in spoken Latin, an emphatic sentence would end in "io." This practice continues to this day!

I'm reading a pretty good book on the history of punctuation, and that's not the history I recall him giving. I don't have it handy (in London, won't be home until Sept.). I"m not sure, from here, if I"m confusing myself, and I've not gotten to that chapter (I know I've read on the interrobang, and fear I may be mistaking aspects of that for the actual exclamation point).

What I do recall is that it's in the middle of the pack for age, not showing up until the beginning of the 15th century. It wasn't any form of common usuage. It could just be that someone using the convention of dots (from which we get periods and colons) had a sloppy stroke of the pen, and it caught on.

re question marks: It is not derived from quo, but started life as a varation of the punctuation system of Donatus (a librarian in Alexandria, devisor of the aforementioned set of dots). Alcuin of York called it "a bold of lightening, from right to left", placed above a stop.

The medevial manuscripts show the reverse of the "quaestio" transmogrication, with the Q shape getting more pronounced, not less.

Re "Vor": Speaking with Lois, she didn't know it when she wrote it, but incorporated it later. As a point of note this is not an obvious jest/play on words in the Russian editions as the name/class is spelled Forkosigan/For (it's also odd, to me, to read Aivan, for Ivan).

cajunfj40, your post about electric cars finally made me realize that the "FJ40" in your name wasn't just a random combination of characters, so I looked it up.

Even though a Toyota Land Cruiser is not a Willys jeep, I want you to know that I've been earwormed with "Sugar Magnolia" as a result.

"She can dance a Cajun rhythm,
Jump like a Willys in four-wheel drive,
She's my summer love in the spring, fall, and winter,
She can make happy any man alive."

If I don't find the old iPod and the dock speakers soon, I may have to grab the CD of American Beauty and play it through my laptop.

R.e. spinning, there's also the medieval great wheel to consider. A bit tricky to build properly so that it does't wobble annoyingly and turns well, they were in use by the 14th century in Europe, at least. But some cloth types really required well spin worsted type yarns.
Unfortunately when they did the Tudor monastery farm program last year, Ruth completely misused one rather than ask how to use it properly.

Dave Bell #418 - coincidentally I was looking at the solar power in Africa thing today after someone mentioned it on a climate blog. Found this interesting article on how solar isn't taking off as well as it should. Surprise surprise, it's in part down to lack of capital to invest/ lend, current incumbents with political power and a couple of other issues.
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2013/04/why-africa-is-missing-the-solar-electricity-boat

Enough of the problems seem to be solvable that it should improve a lot in the next few years.

dotless ı @ 303: Fascinating! I wonder whether anyone has tested how that pronunciation is perceived; e.g. can native speakers "hear" it on tape / deduce it from facial expression / assume it from grammatical context.... Or do they assume it from social context: e.g., "this is a {sloppy Southerner, ignorant foreigner} who is leaving out this particle"?

Clifton @ 305: how much would repairing the "pineapple" water tower have cost? I remember the fuss over the Citgo sign in Boston's Kenmore Square, but not where the cash came from to keep it standing; IIRC that's a common issue with publically displayed, privately owned artifacts.

Helen S @ 316: as recited by Leonard Nimoy?

abi @ 323: but where's the fun in that, when you have to \imagine/ the reaction instead of seeing it? Baby pictures (the canonical) seem so much more effective.... (No direct experience -- no children, and nearest collateral sprogs are >300 miles away.)

Sandy B @ 402: you say a tiny fraction of "refined" oil products are used for electricity -- but IIRC, much oil used for generation is the leftovers from refinement ("bunker oil"?). What the overall set/fraction of electricity sources in the US? I know that New England is heavily into natural gas -- but IIRC that's only about half the total.
      I question your statement that Navy fuel prices are heavily affected by having to be shipped to "the middle of the ocean". Civilian ocean shipping is \very/ cheap (I was quoted as low as $70/ton trans-Atlantic), and I wonder how much mid-ocean refueling is necessary outside of conditions requiring high-speed travel (e.g., wartime).
      Tesla may be the biggest shipper of pure-electric cars -- but many plug-in hybrids come from companies that already have large plants, lowering the cost of both shifting and selling. A friend with a Chevrolet Volt speaks of going months without refueling; quick refueling may be a win for gasoline due to the need for special dispensers, but electricity is \everywhere/ so a slow fill isn't as much of a problem.

Was Breaking the Ward ever published? I want the scene where Pbany xvyyf Zntn.

(The peril of rereading something is finding many interesting discussions about it one would like to contribute to on r.a.s.w...ten years later. Zombie thread, yo.)

Rikibeth @ #371:

And, Carol Witt, *squee*! I'm just recently moved to Boston myself - as of August 1, though there's still mop-up packing to do in CT. Drop me a line - email is my name at gmail - if you want to get together. We could even have a mini Gathering of Light if we wanted to try to assemble one. I'm in Dorchester, right on the Red Line. Where in the Boston area will you be, if you don't mind specifying? (Or by email.)

I'll be in Newtonville, so using the Green Line's D Branch when the local bus is running, and the Framingham/Worcester Line when necessary. Getting together and/or a Gathering of Light would be excellent! The current plan is to drive down on the 23rd and start to get settled before school activities begin on the 2nd (I'm going to the library school at Simmons), assuming that there are no issues at the border and the cat doesn't kill me for all of the trauma that I'll be causing. I'll send an email once I'm in town.

I did a lot of book purging in my last two moves, and REALLY I only had two and a half bookcases' worth plus the cookbooks, and I STILL wound up with ten or so banker's boxes of books and three of cookbooks (to be fair, one of the cookbook boxes is looseleaf binders filled with plastic-sleeved recipes and back issues of Cook's Illustrated).

I was surprised by how many boxes/bins are needed compared to the number of bookshelves used. Their weight means that there will be more trips than expected too, because the cargo trailer gets too heavy before it's filled.

Carol, I had a 14' U-Haul, packed to the gills, with my framed pictures and mirrors laying flat and cushioned by blankets and towels in the back of my hatchback. I had random items on top of them, can't even remember what. And that was for one bedroom, my share of a kitchen (which did include a table and four chairs), and a notional office (huge desk, ordinary chair, 2-drawer file cabinet, and boxes of files). And at that I had to leave some low-priority clothes and the non-furniture contents of a second bedroom for other trips.

The cat isn't here yet. He's still living at his present home with Kid's dad, and we don't plan to bring him until we've moved everything that involves leaving a door open for extended times.

Steve C. @410: I found out this morning when I was peddling past Mork and Mindy's house and noticed people were putting flowers and signs on the fence. Then I noticed a Channel 9 news truck, and stopped to ask what was going on. :-(

Terry Karney @420: Maybe they will have a shot where the wheel isn't doing impossible things

Well, maybe that's the required mode of operation needed to produce gold from straw...? :-)

guthrie: R.e. spinning, there's also the medieval great wheel to consider. A bit tricky to build properly so that it does't wobble annoyingly and turns well, they were in use by the 14th century in Europe, at least. But some cloth types really required well spin worsted type yarns.

From my reading/the people I know who've used great wheels, they are great for woolen, not so much for worsted. What they are really good for is finely spun yarns, esp. if they have a "mother" on them to increase the ratio.

CHip: I question your statement that Navy fuel prices are heavily affected by having to be shipped to "the middle of the ocean". Civilian ocean shipping is \very/ cheap (I was quoted as low as $70/ton trans-Atlantic), and I wonder how much mid-ocean refueling is necessary outside of conditions requiring high-speed travel (e.g., wartime).

The Navy doesn't use civilian tankers to refuel. A fair bit of refueling at sea takes place because "PAC" tours are 3-6 months, and the carriers, being nuclear powered, don't need to make landfall. The attendant fleets are large, and they all need to be refueled, in all sorts of conditions.

Civil tankers don't have 1: the equipment to discharge, and 2: don't tend to carry refined products; they are designed to carry crude.

Carol/Rikibeth: I was surprised by how many boxes/bins are needed compared to the number of bookshelves used. Their weight means that there will be more trips than expected too, because the cargo trailer gets too heavy before it's filled.

I had enough to fill (more than) seven Billies. It filled most of a "cube" (as I used a mover to get my things cross country). I had a 14 moving van when I took my things from LA to SF.

Off to see Antony and Cleopatra at The Globe.

Dear open thread:

Twitter #Ferguson

My husband told me about this last night. He says it's been making him angry "for days." I never heard about it until then, and I'm still not hearing about it. Anywhere. "It's Twitter hashtag Ferguson," John tells me. And there it is.

Short story: White police kill unarmed black boy. Neighborhood protests. Police show up to protests with riot gear. Neighborhood appeals to police next county over. Next county over barricades public property to prevent protestors from gathering. Tear gas and rubber bullets continue to rain on protestors, including when they are standing in front of their own homes, because the Castle Doctrine apparently only applies if you're white. Everything is horrible.

Twitter finds this eye-witness account of the shooting death, and a single article on the Washington post. But mostly the only place to find out about this is on Twitter.

wtf i don't even.

Nicole (432): Long Island's Newsday has had articles about the Ferguson story yesterday and today. But most of what I know about it comes from Twitter.

Rikibeth @ 421:
Good song, that one. :-)
Crossing threads, in some sense I at least used to claim Land Cruisers as the object of my "true fandom". I miss the times I had when I was a part of both a local and national club, and a mailing list, and various annual events across the nation. In a way, I GAFIAted (FAFIAted?) from it when a pair of good friends in that fandom with me had a rather messy divorce, destroying a haven I had been to many a time to wrench, to chat, etc. Parked the 'cruiser not long after that, then moved, changed jobs, ran out of money after dissassembling it for a restoration, and held on to the carcass for another 6 years (through 2 more moves!) before selling it all off and starting a family. Have an old motorcycle now, but no time to work on it either. Only managed to ride it 60 miles in 4 years...
Need to move, shorten commute, gain garage/shop space, so I can wrench again and perhaps find a new haven of like-minded folks with a similar "really strong focus".

Nicole:

Oddly enough, there was coverage on TVE (a Spanish TV network which puts many of its shows online--I watch it partly to improve my Spanish). And I have family and friends in the area, so I've seen some discussion on Facebook, mostly of the "stay safe" variety.

I think there's a common pattern of:

a. A questionable shooting[1].

b. A public protest, with police (over)reaction.

c. Opportunistic looting while the police are busy with the protest, which at this point may have degenerated into a riot.

I imagine in a few days, this will blow over. The policeman will probably eventually be returned to the force. Many of the stores that were looted and burned out will be gone forever--even if the buildings and inventory were insured, most small businesses like that can't survive being shut down for a month. The whole community will be much poorer all around.

[1] And one driver of the protests and anger here is that recognition that the police very seldom turn out to be responsible for having shot someone they shouldn't have shot, even if he's been shot several times in the back while unarmed. The big case in NYC recently even had the cops arresting the guy who recorded the police choking some poor guy to death, and then later arresting the video recorder's wife. I'm not sure this sort of thing would be defused by having actual independent investigations and trials, but it sure seems like it would help.

Open threadiness: TWIV episode on ebola They have a very high ratio of informed discussion and facts to wild speculation and fear mongering.

On a broader note, one thing is really striking about podcasts and blogs. If you listen to/read the best ones, the low quality of most media (especially broadcast media) becomes *painfully* apparent. I imagine there are immensely stupid podcasts out there; certainly there are immensely stupid blogs. But they don't have the impact and draw of someone like CNN or Fox, and I never actually have to pay any attention to them.

And at another level, I wonder about the results of the kind of fragmentation you get when some people learn about ebola by listening to TWIV, and others learn about it by listening to Fox, or even some whack job that makes Fox look like a good source of information. I've told the story before of sitting with my mom and both of us looking at the news, and almost no stories were in common. I wonder what effects that kind of split has on the world.

@various electrical:

@424, electricity sources: eia.gov's Electricity Browser has all the detail you could want. The short version is we're about 40% coal, 27% natural gas, 20% nuclear, 7% hydro, 4% wind and 2% everything else (for 2013.) Wind and sun have gone up by a factor of 15 and 20 [respectively] in the last 10 years, and solar today is about where wind was 10 years ago.

@424, Electric cars: I used to think that 90% isn't enough ("90% of the time, you do less than 50 miles a day", or whatever the number is) because 90% of the time, you don't need any passenger seats in your car. As long as the standard is a 2-car household, you can probably get around 90% of the remaining cases with planning. And electric cars will handle the remaining 1% of cases, although imperfectly. ("Yeah, I'm at the gas station charging, I'll be there in about an hour.") The fear of 8-hour-charges turned out to be overhyped.

@415, grid and baseload: This is a topic I myself am happy to ramble on about, and listen to others. We have a few years to work on the problem of storage. Here is a nifty little story about how better weather prediction lowers the amount of backup power needed to firm the grid against solar and wind irregularities. I personally suspect that we can get by with minimal storage until we're at 25% fossil or so. [This depends on our nuclear fleet staying the same size or even growing.] Which implies turning "Wind and solar" from 5% into 45% of our power.

Getting slightly off topic, I suspect that faster evolution is going to beat maybe-better ideas. To take an example from power generation, in 2008 PV cost $8.00/watt all-in. First quarter 2014 PV cost $1.83, utility-scale, all-in . They've done thousands of experiments, built a lot of 1 cm^2 devices, made millions of panels and done thousands of installations.

Since 2008, there have been about six solar thermal plants completed. Even if they were thermodynamically better, they're still on the first generation since 2008 and PV is on, like, the fifth since 2008.

In energy storage, batteries may not be the smartest way to do mass energy storage, but you can build 'em on tabletops and run thousands of experiments. They started out ten times too expensive and are now maybe ... two and a half times too expensive?

Outside batteries, there are some really interesting ideas going on there. There's a rail system with trains loaded with weights (APEX), there's a "ski lift" system with gravel, there's at least five compressed-air systems that I know of; there are a LOT of possible ways to store energy without batteries. But you're going to get one or two examples of each, and half a million batteries. They'd have to get everything right on the first try, and batteries can screw up dozens of times and still win.

I've got some ideas for gravitational energy storage, but I think it's a $10 million experiment to build the first one. I'd probably get beaten by someone who could build fifty variations of their battery idea, in a year, in a garage.

AKICIML:

I'm trying to remember the title of a Christmas movie I watched as a kid, probably between 1985-1995, about finding the perfect gift.

• It starts off as a portal story - kid falls out of the real world and into a world made of ice and snow.
• He is accompanied by an old woman with a "the other magi" sort of backstory - she gave away the perfect gift to someone she encountered on her way to Jesus, and she's been trying to find a replacement ever since.
• There are small glowing fir trees that die as soon as you pick them up unless you are... selfless enough, I think.
• The two main characters are walking, everyone else they meet is on ice skates.
• Live action, not animated.
• Probably TV or direct-to-video. I think it was full length.

Carol Witt #426 - over the last couple of years I have been tidying my attic and putting the books into plastic boxes (Books are my old childrens ones and inherited ones I don't have shelf space for, although I have taken some down to read them). The reason for htis is because of a mouse infestation, which chewed a couple of them, and because the attic got damp, so I realised I'd better look after the books better.

The problem now being that books in plastic boxes take up much more space than being stacked into cardboard boxes. It's hard/ expensive to find plastic boxes of a good efficient shape, and so the attic has a much greater height of boxes now with only a slightly smaller footprint.

So I feel your pain. I have no plans on moving yet, and have no idea what I will move my circa 3,000 books in bookcases into when moving. Some sort of antigravity device seems to be in order, then you could just move the bookcases themselves with the books in.

Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little @432: I've been hearing about this on NPR for the last couple of days. It is getting some coverage there.

Sandy B:

That's a nice point at the end, about the advantages of being able to try variations of some design many times vs. having each trial take ten years and half a billion dollars.

My intuition here (I'm way, way outside my field) is that this comes up with things that don't scale in a straightforward way. Batteries can be built on a small scale, and then can be combined to allow more energy storage in a way that's not too hard to figure out. Are there alternatives that we could find that scale in a relatively straightforward way, so we could develop storage for one house, and use the same basic idea for a neighborhood or a city?

David Gerrold spares no invective on CountenanceTome when it comes to Rush Limbaugh's repugnant remarks on Robin Williams.

The most horrible thing about Rush Limbaugh is that he continues to have an audience; an audience large and loyal and enthusiastic enough have made him a wealthy man. It dismays me that I live in the same country as the people who eagerly lap up his hateful audio-vomit.

albatross: This is bigger (in terms of the police reaction) than most. The got the FAA to ban all aircraft below 3,000 ft. That means no news crews in the air.

Their are also photos of the police chief's home... with the Stars and Bars.

The stats on stops shows a significant racial bias (7:1 for stops, with a 2:1 population ratio.

The search rate is twice as high, but the hit rate is only 2/3rds that of whites who are searched. Total number of whites searched was 47, blacks searched totals 562. Whites arrested = 36. Blacks arrested = 483.

Total population is 15,865, if 63 percent are black that's 4632 stops, out of a population of 9995. That's almost half the population. For whites it's 686 stops, out of 5235, or about 12 percent of the population.

There is a pattern here, and it's one which supports the contention that the cops have (at best) disdain for the black residents.

It ought to be big news.

Sandy @437: they still have to work out some practical kinks, too. Such as that wind farms can be bat death traps.

A different sort of police murder, from (of all places) The Weather Channel: The real Death Valley... Mass Graves and Migrant Deaths in Texas

My reference book (Wind Energy Explained, 2nd ed.) for wind is from 2009 and at that point they didn't think bat deaths were a major problem based on a couple of 2006 studies. Unfortunate if exploding bat lung syndrome turned out to be a serious problem.

(Google helpfully suggested, in attempting to complete a search, "Texas Batsquatch." Apparently that's, if not a thing, a cryptothing.)

C. Wingate @442, your link takes me to a Facebook page which I cannot read (not being a member). Can you summarize?

@448 & @449, never mind; when I enabled Java I can see it. The man does know how to write....

Solar (as Chris Clarke has been talking about) can be lethal to birds (esp. wetlands migrators) who think the mirror farms are lakes and go out of their way (burning limited reserves) and/or get cooked.

albatross@441:
Lead acid batteries already scale up quite well for house level storage, and recycling them into new batteries when no longer useful is already a mature industry. On a larger scale, various redox flow batteries (Vanadium is one element exploited there) scale even better: just build a bigger set of electrolyte tanks. I don't recall the efficiency, though.

Lithium is good for energy/power density, needed for transport. Density not nearly as much of a concern for land-based storage.

Pumped hydro is good if you have the geology for it, too.

The grid is one of the harder parts: good places for solar/wind don't often have good enough powerlines. There are already places/times of year when solar/wind capacity is idled because hydropower is at full output, has seniority in purchasing contracts, and the grid is basically sized for the hydro full output.

Power companies are already having some economic trouble in some areas due to efficiency-driven (and other drivers) "demand destruction". Funding the transition is not a trivial thing, especially if we want it to go fast.

I'm curious about how fast "good enough" electric cars (not hybrids) arrive on the used market, at 70-80% of initial range on their factory battery. (Warranty on Leaf battery is 70% capacity left at 60 months/60 kmiles) There are already small businesses that refurbish hybrid battery packs, EV packs will also attract this attention. 60% capacity for 20% cost? Leases for battery packs priced close/below gas/oil change equivalent per mile?

Neat stuff ahead, but lots of things to work out.

By the time I got around to unpacking my desk things tonight, where I knew the iPod and speakers to be lurking, I had already lost the earworm, replaced for most of the day by OMD's "If You Leave". However, I've found them now, and can have music tomorrow.

I also found my MOUSE, missing since the LAST move, nearly a year ago. I never fully unpacked my desk stuff in the last one, you see, and then circumstances led to me using my laptop in my bedroom rather than spend any time in the living room at all, so there never seemed to be any point.

I couldn't tell you what possessed me to drop the mouse into the shopping bag that was holding my writing reference books - really, desk decorations at this point, but I really do love the hardbound Bartlett's and Roget's that came from my grandparents' house and that I used through elementary and high school, even if they're outdated now. I'm really glad that I decided to take them out of their bag and set them up on the top of the desk with the gold scroll bookends. If I'd left them, I'd never have found the mouse.

HLN: Woman tries out stand-up comedy. Had to wait for the perfect time.

Carrie S. @425: No, Breaking the Ward was never published; I don't think that any significant portion of it was ever even written.

albatross @ 435: I Keep stalling on this bit:

"c. Opportunistic looting while the police are busy with the protest, which at this point may have degenerated into a riot.

I imagine in a few days, this will blow over. The policeman will probably eventually be returned to the force. Many of the stores that were looted and burned out will be gone forever--even if the buildings and inventory were insured, most small businesses like that can't survive being shut down for a month. The whole community will be much poorer all around. "

In a few days, it will blow over that police are attacking people on their own front lawns. In a few days, it will all blow over except for the damage due to opportunistic looting. The community will be the poorer - because of the opportunistic looting and its damage to small businesses, not because a man was shot, not because the police have gone beyond not caring and into abusing the victims.

Opportunistic looting which, sorry, I haven't heard much about. Especially as compared to police-caused harm.

This reads wrong to me.

From here in Britain the situation in Ferguson MO looks like crazy policing for a First World country. It's the local Police acting like thugs, though some of the pictures are showing a lot of Police from outside, like the French have their CRS, and it's not really reported.

But one important part of UK policing is the dependence on consent. Armed Police are unusual, and specialised. And there's a bit of shock at the sight of these specialised armed Police carrying their guns on routine Police work.

Yet other European countries, with routinely-armed Police, still emphasise the consent angle.

Balance: my parents, visiting cousins in Washington state, had a bit of a shock when an armed police officer happened to call. No raid, nothing out of the ordinary by British standards, but the guy had a gun. Yes, you can point to white privilege, but it happened to be a black cop.

What strikes me as ugly is that a majority-black district has overwhelmingly white government and police force, and they're being backed by what look like similarly white riot-trained police, and units looking like soldiers fighting a war.

Why aren't there black candidates winning elections? What has turned this into something looking like a war, and why have media reporters been locked out?

Maybe we're seeing the reason why Israel thinks they can do what they do. though at least the Ferguson Police can't deploy artillery.

(Yes, the British system does have riot police. They're ordinary cops who get get training in the tactics, which I suppose is a form of shieldwall. They don't get guns. They learn procedures to process an arrest quickly: things like the number on their uniform are important. Some of the pictures from Ferguson look not unlike them, but the protesters don't look like a riot. It's the stage where the riot teams would have been assembled, and bussed across the country to the troubled city, but they would be sitting in the bus, waiting, and hoping.)

(dons cap of experience)

Re Riot Training, the National Guard, being tasked with that, is required to get some training. Because one of my commanders was in the LAPD (which has a very effective training program) I can speak to some of this.

LAPD does not use sheields. Officers tasked to being in a "Crowd Control Team" are without firearm; instead having a 36"/1m baton. They are in "sticks" of ten, with an officer directing them.

In larger situations there will be another officer, issuing commands to more than one of the officers controlling the "sticks".

In such a situation there will be a stick set in reserve, to do arrest raids into the crowd, or to manage rescue/recovery of isolated officers, or persons who have been injured.

Batons, in the rest positions, are held arms down, across the body. At the ready they are moved to a sort of "port arms", with the trailing hand near the hip, and the leading hand about breast high.

Advancing is done by means of a half-step, with a thrust of the baton, stomping move forward and the recovery of the trailing foot. Any commands to the crowd are made in unison. That helps keep the unit together (as moving in line is the hardest piece of military drill).

If the unit needs to move quickly the sticks are moved into a column of twos, and the advance is made in Double Time (i.e. they run). The officer commanding the stick tells them where they are going, so they don't overextend/find themselves isolated.

Well managed this arrangement allows cops to control groups with anywhere from a 10-20:1 ratio.

If the situation merits the use of firearms they are in an independent team, and fire control is NOT in the hands of the people with the weapons.

What's going on in Ferguson is a completely different thing. As I tweeted (and others have commented) those cops are more heavily armed than I was in April 2003. In April 2003 I was headed into a war. I had tens of thousands of people who were being paid to try to kill me.

I had less firepower on my person than those cops do (I had some more effective gear in the unit, machine guns, heavy machine guns, grenades, automatic grenade launchers: and we could call on even more: arty, tanks, choppers and fast movers. Again, I was in a god-damned war).

That's what angers me. It's what frightens me. It's what makes me more afraid of the possibility of civil war. If I were a citizen of Ferguson, I'd be out there screaming at the cops too.

https://www.facebook.com/brad.hicks.982?fref=nf

Brad Hicks is posting about what happens in Ferguson.

shadowsong @ #438

I don't know the title, but I recall seeing that one too. There were two jester characters who sang a song about discussing "Nothing Matters," weren't there?

Terry @457

One of the threats in a British riot is the petrol bomb. I suspect it's an easy way to get shot dead in the USA, and I don't think that's a crazy reaction.

But it means the British Police in a riot are trained to block petrol bombs (and other missiles) with their shields. They wear fire-resistant overalls. They don't want to get into the business of shooting rioters, and the armed police in the rest of Europe share that view.

I heard a few stories about the training from British cops. I heard a few other stories. And I can quite believe that the guns in the USA make a huge difference.

One of Ben Aaronovitch's Folly books mentions petrol-bomb training; I remember it [possibly rhetorically] as a day of standing with a shield while people try to light you on fire. Good books, by the way. Turns out I've recommended them on here before.

Leonora:

I saw pictures from Ferguson in the news that showed looted stores. As with all news coverage, I have no idea how representative this is of the situation--maybe it's the one place that got looted, maybe the whole town's business district is a flaming ruin. But there is a pretty consistent pattern that rioting leads to looting, and the looting can do a huge amount of damage. I assume the looting is opportunistic--the criminals see that attention is elsewhere and the police aren't responding to calls, and go steal some TVs. As far as I can see, the looting has nothing to do with the justice of the original protests, or whether rioting happened mainly from angry protesters or police provocation.

Terry:

I wonder how they managed to get the FAA to do that! Is this a normal thing to be able to shut down all low-flying aircraft like this?

All:

I grew up within a hundred miles of where these riots are going on, and know the local culture there. I can *easily* imagine awful racial tensions and racist police--it's actually pretty striking to go back to St Louis from the DC area where we live, and see how racially segregated a lot of the city is. I don't know specifics of this case, but it's easy enough to imagine how it happened.

In general, we (the US) have some big problems with how our police handle crowd control, and how militarized they are, and their willingness to protect their own in cases of police misconduct, and also with race-relations, and segregated black neighborhoods with lots of crime, and racial profiling, and all sorts of similar stuff. And they all combine to give us awful stories like this a couple times a year.

Dave Bell @ 460

The guns are, possibly, an important difference; I don't think, though, that they are the key difference.

I have the impression that the English[1] police are still basically following Peel and his principles. This is only sometimes the case in the US>

The relationship between citizenry and police in the US is (like so much else) subculturally specific. The "Dick and Jane"[2] US has at least some remnant of that kind of police, and its attitudes seem to be based on history where that was normal. My part of US does not; it never did. In Appalachia, the police were always other; in some cases, a respectable enemy, but never us.[3] In the black-and-white South, the police were always part of the structure of white power.

This gets tangled up with the growth in black markets[5], and the growth in the pervasiveness of government. But I think that "the police have guns" is a consequence, not a cause, of "the police are our historic enemies." This ties into the "community-oriented" vs individualist discussion upthread as well.

1)I'm using English deliberately; this does NOT seem to have been the case in Northern Ireland.
2)White, suburban - my old choirmaster's "nice white people"
3)The Sheriff's men in Robin Hood are really the right analog.
4) The "black-and-white" South and Appalachia are quite different.
5) Marijuana now, alcohol before

So, I'm looking for an antonym, and the online dictionaries keep giving me the wrong antonym. I'm starting with "xenophile/xenophilia", in the sense of sexual/etc. focus on people of other races/nations/cultures. The dictonaries offer only "xenophobe" as an opposite.

But the original sense is in contrast to a normal tendency to seek partners within one's own race/culture etc, which does not warrant being tagged as "phobic". I'm looking for the name of that normal tendency. Unfortunately, I have a distressing feeling that going back to the word roots gives "homophile", which has picked up an incompatible meaning.

albatross @ 462:

First, please remove the excess letter-o from my name. AGAIN. At least this time it wasn't in the middle of a discussion of identity and labelling. Since on Making Light, the only other regular poster with a variant of my name is a Lenore, I can only assume you either know a Leonora elsewhere or are focused upon leonine names. If it helps you remember, Lenora is derived from Eleanore is derived from Helen, with no lions in sight.

My point was not that there was no opportunistic looting - I'm sure there is: It was on your rather odd emphasis on the looting as if it were the evil and the thing that was ruining the neighbourhood, and not AN evil. It seemed to put the focus on the looting and not on the police action as the worst aspect of the story.

Also something about "This will all blow over in a few days" -- but if that is in fact that you have had too much personal experience with this sort of thing and a bit burnt out, this is more understandable and less itch-inducing than the whiff of ennui I first caught off it.

re 465: Perhaps I'm wrong, but I'm reading a slight trace of bitter sarcasm in Albatross's responses here.

SamChevre #463: I would say that American adherence to Peelian principles (and thanks for linking that list) has been dropping drastically over the last few generations, with a matching alienation of people from the law.

The relics of slavery and segregation go back of course to the 19th century and beyond, but after the Civil War, those were mostly relevant in the "black-and-white South", as you put it.

But then came Prohibition, and that affected pretty much the whole country -- between the public non-compliance and the police corruption, Prohibition seriously damaged the public's relations with not only the police, but the law itself. (It also brought large-scale organized crime into the country.)

And then a generation later, there was the return from WW2, where blacks who'd served in combat found that back home, they were expected to go right back to using the "colored" facilities and so on.

That led directly to the start of the modern Civil Rights movement, which led (less directly) to the Counterculture of the 60's and 70's. At each step there, more people, and especially young people, experienced the police as a hostile force rather than protectors, and the law as a means of suppression rather than a part of community. And rather than try to repair relations, too many of the police forces (including various Federal "enforcement agencies") just kept doubling down on violent suppression of "unrest", which have kept the problems going for the latest couple of generations. (This also ties into the ongoing attempts to "suppress" the homeless.)

"There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people."
- Edward James Olmos in "Galactica"

Dave @464: a normal tendency to seek partners within one's own race/culture etc, which does not warrant being tagged as "phobic". I'm looking for the name of that normal tendency.

"endogamy" (vs. "exogamy")?

There is a long tradition of paramilitary policing in the Anglosphere, going back to the nineteenth century. In the United States, it has to do with race and goes back to the 'paterollers' who ensured that slaves did not seek to escape their bondage. In the UK it goes back to the heyday of empire and to the days of the Ascendancy in Ireland; it has to do with ensuring that the lesser breeds were firmly kept in place.

In both cases, the policing was armed and intended to suppress specific crimes, those of insubordination and rebellion. It's not an accident that post-colonial police forces in the West Indies have as their original model the Royal Irish Constabulary. Nor is it an accident that a majority black city like Ferguson, MO has a police force in which only three of the 53 officers are black. The police are not there to enforce the law and serve the people, the police are there to enforce the people and serve the few.

TFRs (Temporary Flight Restrictions) can be set for any number of reasons. Whenever the President goes somewhere, they'll put a TFR with a 30 mile radius around his location. There are TFRs for big sporting events. Private pilots don't like them because they can restrict VFR flights.

The type of TFR, its duration, and the type of aviation it affects varies. The one for Ferguson was in response to reports of gunfire at police helicopters.

http://tfr.faa.gov/save_pages/detail_4_2599.html

A minor data point: my roommate lived in Oakland for a while. She has seen people from rich (white?) areas decide to come to Oakland to riot.

#465 ::: Lenora Rose

I wouldn't be surprised if albatross is anchored on Leonora from Fidelio.

I've been wondering whether a political movement against police excesses would be a good idea.

My initial notion was that mayors should lose elections for police outrages.

A friend who's more into politics than I am said that he doesn't have a mayor (I think) and that what would be needed is to influence the board of county commissioners, and that localities are organized in a wide variety of ways.

Still, there's a lot of evidence that journalism only helps a little (much better than nothing), and going through the court system (I think-- there may be some other method of arbitration) can get large cash awards for victims (again, much better than nothing), but doesn't affect policy and may not even lead to abusive officers getting fired.

A political fight-- I think it would take getting a lot of people to be single-issue voters-- would be very hard with no guarantee of victory, but is there any reason to think it would be a bad idea? Are there alternatives that might work better?

See the Looting section, which I think says what most of us are trying to say.

re 470: Calling Ferguson a "city" is really inadequate; it's like calling Lesotho a mighty nation. Ferguson is simply a residential neighborhood of St. Louis which for historical reasons has its own government, and it's surrounded on all sides by more of the same. Indeed, without the boundaries laid on the map, its extent cannot be determined at all. You can see from the census stats that it's poor, black, and with a lot of female-headed households. Given the surroundings and the kind of requirements laid on police hiring these days it's all too easy to hire whites from outside rather than blacks who know the community, without malice aforethought.

476
I understand that in the 70s, Ferguson was majority white, and its government hasn't changed.

Terry Karney@387

I recently spun what was supposed to be 10 grams of bombyx silk combed top. My goal was to see what yardage I could get if I was spinning for fine-but-easy -- not something that I'd have to pay attention and worry about it breaking every second. It took a couple of evenings, and I ended up with a 360-yard 2-ply skein that actually weighs 8 grams, which -- if my math is correct -- comes to 22,500 yards per pound. It's a beautiful little skein in gold and purple and green, but I'm not sure there's anything real-world-useful to be done with it. I did enter it into the Minnesota State Fair in the cellulose or 100% silk category.

Julie L. #469: Thank you! That word-pair is actually more specific to the distinction I had in mind. And of course, that xeno- prefix has gotten around to a lot of places, and picked up some odd bedfellows. ;-)

C. Wingate, #466: I think you're right that albatross is cynically suspecting that nothing of substance will be done about this, and that the news will be quickly supplanted by the next outrage everywhere but in the immediate area. However, it's also true that (whether it was intended so or not) #435 sounded as though the blame for the deterioration in the area was being placed squarely on the "opportunistic looting" without reference to the abuses that gave rise to the situation in which said looting could occur.

Some people, here and there, are starting to recognize and speak openly about the epidemic of murders by entitled white men with guns and anger management issues as a public-health problem. Perhaps it's time to take the same approach to the epidemic of out-of-control police forces.

Serge, #468: I think that is equally true when the police start to think of themselves as quasi-military, and that has definitely been happening here over the last decade or so. IOW, it doesn't matter which side the merge comes from, the results are equally toxic.

Steve C., #471: Interesting. That makes me wonder, in turn, if there actually were any reports of gunfire at police helicopters, or if that was just a convenient excuse to (as noted above) keep the news copters out of the area. It's an easy claim for someone on the scene to make, and who's going to check?

Beth, #478: What weight is it? (Got a picture?) That sounds like something which would make quite a bit of kumihimo cord, which could then be used for various decorative purposes.

Nancy Lebovitz #474: I've been wondering whether a political movement against police excesses would be a good idea.

I'd say this is of the same order as the other civil rights issues that have pushed their way to the public stage over recent decades. The question isn't whether it's a good idea, but when, and what needs to be done to prepare the way.

Beth: I think the finest I've got is some targhee I got about 13,500 YPP out of (I'd say it's more like 13,700, but I underplied it, and need to put some more twist in it; which is why I didn't bring it to LonCon).

It's really nice, a rainbow striping yarn, with some good interference from the striping not being perfect. Very much a lacey yarn though.

Someday I am sure I will fall prey to the desire to get some neck-wool from Shetland and try to spin some honest-to-goodness Shetland Lace weight yarn.

Lee, #478

The weights for yarn finer than lace weight (which my silk is) aren't really standardized. I've heard cobweb, zephyr, and gossamer used.

I don't have a decent photo, but plan to take some after I get it back from the fair in early September.

It would make a fair amount of kumihimo cord, but that again leaves the question of what to do with it, since (like spun yarn), it's usually not considered a final object. That's not always true, of course; I saw someone wearing one of my skeins as a necklace a couple of months ago. I'm not sure which is stranger -- her wearing a silken skein as a necklace, or the fact that I recognized it as my work, totally out of context and half a year after I sold it.

P J Evans @ 477: It wasn't even that long ago. The census shows a dramatic white flight from 1990 to 2010, with the white percentage dropping from 74% in 1990 to 29% in 2010. I wonder what happened.

Lee @ 460: I would agree that in this case there is of course a racial element to it all. But I'm not convinced that big black guys in combat gear and anger management issues aren't a problem.

Not wanting to distract from whatever serious topics may be going on, but I need to know:

Jacque @ 153: What happened with the chair?? Followup, please! :)

Rob Wynne: Oh my goodness. Hi there. Yes, I finally managed to get myself out there (it's a non-trivial trip) about a week and a half after I'd called and noodged them.

Have to say, they did a lovely job. Got it home, got it installed, and my plywood-seat-induced sciatica is slowly but surely healing up!

Relevant to the Ferguson subthread, the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown.

Relevant to the Ferguson subthread, the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown.

That link should be

#If they gunned me down.

Steve C, Lee @ 471, 480: This is a fantastic theory they've got: Someone is allegedly shooting at police helicopters, therefore other aircraft aren't allowed in the airspace.

I'm going to call bullshit on that. It only makes sense if it's news copters shooting at cops.

The Furguson police (or possibly the county police, but who's going to make the distinction?) have just bought themselves a HUGE extra PR problem. They arrested a Washington Post and a Huffington Post reporter for the "crime" of not leaving a McDonalds fast enough. And assaulted at least one of them. AND refused to give a name or badge number.

What's that saying? Never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel? You've got to admire their completeness, though: arresting a reporter for a major Old School ink newspaper and also a reporter for a major New School newsblog? That takes a certain genius...

490
It's an excuse for keeping the news choppers out of video range.
(I didn't say it was a good excuse.)

491
The local authorities - whoever is in charge of this particular flustercluck - don't seem to be aware how fast news spreads these days. Or the fact that cell phones transmit photos to people who aren't nearby, and can spread them really, really fast really far.

I've seen some of those photos. It's clearly an occupying force.

If there's any justice, Missouri will have lots of highly experienced bad-attitude mall cops by Christmas.

clew @17: squee! Barber's _Women's work_ is one of my favourite non-fiction books, in both subject and style. Both book and hands-on research, about distant times and cultures and places, written for laypeople, about a topic that rarely gets any attention at all. Sometime I would like to make/acquire one of the string skirts she discusses, because they sound like so much fun to wear.

Re: Ferguson. "On August 14, 2014, citizens across America will gather in solidarity to hold vigils and observe a moment of silence to honor victims of Police Brutality". Search for #NMOS14. There are events planned in many cities.

In light of Abi's opening remarks I was amused to come across a troglodyte I know of proclaiming that "Men are the ones who take nature's bounty and make civilization with it. Women can't do that." Sure enough, when he gets down to listing basic needs, clothing isn't among them.

C. Wingate, that article is...I can't really think of a single word to adequately describe it. For one thing, it's less than clear which bits were written by whom.

What really makes me giggle is that it seems very concerned with pointing out that a lone woman can't maintain civilization. Well, no, but neither can a lone man.

I think what's needed is a series of books on how to rebuild civilization. (This book purports to be that, but isn't; it's too heavy on the theoretical.)

At this point, I'm wondering what excuses are left for those who want to whitesplain black and Latino distrust of the police?

I have some Thoughts on Ferguson

But now I am for heiing myself to LonCon.

And while I'm on right-wing jackasses, there's this: coal rolling.

Now here's an image for a writing exercise: buildings wrapped in silvery foil in a forest, their sides awash with golden light as fires consume the trees.