Of ski masks and balaclavas

(August 28: Google Analytics tells me that a handful of web surfers are arriving to this post looking for a ski mask pattern. If I may, this post (scroll down) might be more useful.)

One of my current knitting projects is a ski mask and being without a pattern for one, I turned to Google.

And came up with this:


This is the first of four ski masks designed for an entire family. The rest of the photos (a definite must-see) can be found here. Click on that link. Seriously. Click on it.

According to the knitting blogosphere, the masks appear in a book of McCall's Vintage knits circa 1965. One reader liked it so much she made one for her son and took a photo of him wearing it and sent it in to the magazine, which ran the photo (scroll down the post to see the poor boy).

I actually found the PDFs of the patterns, but trashed them once I realized that they would not be useful for me (too many colour changes, poor-quality scan). I now wish I had kept them, because I can't find them online anymore. Not that I would actually knit these for anyone. Ever. You couldn't pay me enough.*

* "enough" negotiable

Torrington to Gopher: Get Stuffed!

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
A: To show the gopher that it could be done.


Today Anna and I went to Torrington to see the World Famous Torrington Gopher Hole Museum. About an hour's drive north from Calgary city limits, the tiny town of Torrington boasts a little museum filled with little exhibits: taxidermied gophers, dressed and posed in dioramas depicting different aspects of town life.


It sounds a little creepy, but nothing cutes up stuffed Richardson's ground squirrels quite like costumes and well-painted dioramas. And it was busy—at least five different groups went through the museum in the 30-40 minutes that we were there. At $2 per adult and $0.50 per child that doesn't seem like much, but it must add up. A map in the gift shop showed where visitors had come from, including all over Europe, China, and even Iceland.


When the museum was first conceived, an animal rights lobby group found out and started a letter writing protest campaign (clearly PETA doesn't understand that gophers are the opposite of endangered). The museum has a binder full of hate mail from as far away as the UK and Japan, including a drawing of a hand with the middle finger raised and a missive asking the mayor how he'd feel if he were to be stuffed for a "Mayor Museum." I think the funniest ones were people asking why the town couldn't just use readily available fake models in the dioramas. While using fake gophers would certainly diminish the impact of the museum, it made me wonder what countries/states/provinces sold stuffed toy gophers to begin with. The most boring letter was actually the one from PETA, which asked why the museum couldn't feature live gophers and educational displays for children. The obvious answer: where's the fun in that? The binder also contained encouraging letters, many of which were from rural areas in Canada and the US.

After Torrington, we drove to Olds and found the botanical gardens on the Olds College campus, where we saw pretty flowers.


More gopher photos here, many of which are worth seeing, though that's certainly not all of the roughly 40 displays. A few more photos from Olds here.

Visits

As a result of several factors (stress/burnout, free ride back, extended family visiting, sister having time off work), I am in Calgary for a spur-of-the-moment visit/vacation. I arrived unexpectedly on Sunday in time for a late dinner, bringing no work back except some non-dissertation books and lots of knitting.

After dinner, while I was in a food coma and still getting out of a dissertation headspace, my mom asked me if I was available the next morning to go along with my parents and my aunt (who is visiting) to see my grandfather. I said of course. The plan was to see him and then go for dim sum.

It wasn't until later that night, when my dad confirmed the plan to see my grandfather and my grandmother, that I remembered—my grandfather is dead. He died last October. When my mom said "see grandpa" she meant visit his grave, which happens to be next to the grave where my grandmother is buried.

For my part, I thought mom meant visit my grandfather in his apartment in Chinatown and then go for dim sum. I think it was the dim sum that threw me, because I immediately thought "Chinatown" and then placed my grandpa there. It's not like I could have forgotten the funeral—I had to fly back early from a conference in Tucson to attend it.

I guess that's confirmation that taking this vacation was a good idea.

Stupid ants

Working at night during a heat wave leads to every window in my apartment being open. This is not a problem except for the bugs that inevitably make their way in and go straight for my desk lamp. Before I switched to compact fluorescent bulbs, this meant a lot of zapped bugs (incandescent bulbs get hot). They would fly, they would hit the light bulb, and they would drop like so many mosquitoes on a desk.

Compact fluorescent bulbs do not have a similar effect on many insects, including mosquitoes and some weird little green bugs. Tonight, though, I found out that flying ants are a little more sensitive to hot surfaces than their insect bretheren. They're not killed by the CF bulb, but stunned and unable to survive the rather significant fall from my lamp to my desk.

Which is all a long-winded way of explaining why I've been cleaning bugs off my desk all night.

Harry Potter and the loss of innocence

This post is not really about Harry Potter. Sorry. This post is about the experience of reading Harry Potter for the first time and falling in love with it, before the hype, before everyone fell in love with it (or while everyone else was falling in love with it simultaneously only you didn't know). This post is about virginity.

There is something special about a virgin encounter with a special piece of art. By "virgin encounter" I do not solely mean "first" encounter, though that is a prerequisite. What I'm referring to is the experience of hearing, reading, or seeing a song, book, TV show, or movie without knowing anything about the author, band, concept, set-up. In such a media-rich world, this would seem almost impossible (and the Harry Potter 7 book spoilers online would attest to that), but there are times when people do encounter a piece of art "cold". The result can be anticlimactic (a shrug, a "meh") or it can be earthshaking.

Two such examples of the latter: The first time I watched the video for Coldplay's "Yellow", which also happened to be the first time I heard the song. I immediately fell in love with it, having no preconceived notions about the arist(s) at all. I experienced the joy of discovering something for myself, an enjoyment unalloyed by any future knowledge of self-made comparisons to U2, a mediocre third album, and daughters named after fruit. The name "Coldplay" brings with it all sorts of cultural baggage now, it can't be helped. But way back in 2000, all I had was a song, and it was all "Yellow."

Second example: It's easier to have a "virgin encounter" with a book because authors receive less publicity than movie stars. And so it was in 2001 that I read Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God for a class. The last third of the novel is breathtaking. I'm a devouring type of novel reader and got immersed in the book, partly because the plot takes a somewhat melodramatic turn, but mostly because I had become caught up in the characters and their plight (there's a scandalous relationship, a hurricane, a shooting, a trial). I remember finishing the book, closing it, and regretting that I would never read it again for the first time.

Other works that have inspired this emotion in me: Chagall's The Eiffel Tower, Norah Jones's "Don't Know Why", Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express.

This is not to say that context is unncessary for the enjoyment of a piece of art. I analyze and teach literature within various contexts—historical, cultural, literary. But I hold a special place in my heart for the times that a work of art caught me off guard, where I had nothing to go on but what was before me.

What makes the final Harry Potter book unique is that it combines both the eager excitement over discovering something anew with the apprehensive knowledge that the 'something' also marks an end. It would be an odd experience, reading with what might be described as a dreadful joy. I wish all Potter fans a good read this weekend. Don't rush it; after all, you'll have years to re-read, but only one opportunity to read it for the first time. May the last page be bittersweet and perfect.

----

Edited at 3:14 a.m. to add:
Running page count: 30.5
Pages excised in revision: 1
Pages added in revision: 2
Momentous file name change: Chapter 1b.rtf instead of Chapter 1a.rtf

Calling it an early night

Pages so far: 29.5 (yes, I am counting half pages)

Words added to spellcheck: heterotopically

Current temperature outside, including humidex: 30C

Clarissa is going to kill me

I spent a good part of the day (and night) trawling through an e-text of Clarissa looking first of all at all mentions of "worth" or "worthiness" or "unworthy", and then later looking for a specific reference to producing an heir for Mr. Solmes that I learned the hard way didn't actually exist. The problem with working on the longest novel written in English is that finding reference really does feel like looking for a needle in a haystack.

I also wrote a page-long paragraph about how the Sinclair House works to expose the prostitution of Clarissa that happens at Harlowe Place. It's unclear where I'm going with all this. I need to rethink this section.

Pages so far: 25 (I've taken quite a few days to catch up on secondary material)

Words I've added to spellcheck: hooped (as in petticoat), heterotopia (as in Foucault)

Coming up: A Harry Potter post to make up for this one.

It all comes down to brothels

Notice how, once you start working on a specific topic or issue, you suddenly notice how often said topic or issue pops up in day-to-day reading or conversations?

Take, for instance, brothels, the space I'm examining in the first chapter of the diss (it's time to get with the lingo).

Not long ago Karine sent me a link to this story about how British Justice Ministry is thinking about replacing the word "prostitute" in the country's criminal statues because it has become stigmatized. It also seeks to define the crime of prostitution, numerically. This story offers a more understanding take.

And then today, out of nowhere, I read this plot summary of Ian Fleming's Casino Royale (the book, not the movie):

[Bond is] charged with a smaller, simpler, but just as improbable task as the Bond of the movies: Defeat a French communist union leader by beating him at baccarat, thus forcing him to face the music with the Soviet intelligence agency SMERSH whose money he's squandered on a chain of brothels.

A chain of brothels? How decadent. And classy.

Two Jeffs diverged in a Yellow World

What's more fun than making an avatar of yourself as a Simpson's character?

Making avatars of other people. Such as:



















Bonnie!

What's even more fun is simultaneously making competing avatars of mutual friends with your sister. They say great minds think alike. Clearly, Anna and I are not in possession of great minds:



It might not be clear, but the above examples are our attempts to create a Jeff avatar (note the food-themed T-shirts). I thought it would be interesting to see what other people thought, so I'm opening this up to the readers of Excessively Diverted (those of you who know Jeff, at any rate).

Which avatar looks more like Jeff? Jeff A on the left, or Jeff B on the right? Please leave a comment. No flaming, now.

The academic equivalent of Kramer*

Now and then (though not lately) I come up with hare-brained schemes to make me a fortune in lieu of finishing the PhD.

With the impending release of the final Harry Potter book and rampant speculation about the possible death of the eponymous hero, one of the biggest problems readers will encounter is avoiding being "spoiled" for the ending by an unthinking acquaintance or passer-by. Much like the recent ending of The Sopranos, people will be hard-pressed to hear nothing about it the next day, given the blanket media coverage and general word on the street. When a major character died at the end of the fifth Harry Potter book, for example, major newspapers ran obituaries for him/her within days.

So while readers can avoid all forms of media until they finish reading (and god help the poor reader who wants to prolong and savour the last Harry Potter), I believe I have found a solution to accidental revelations: T-shirts that read

I haven't finished reading it! Don't tell me if he dies!

I wonder if Chapters would let me set up a booth in store.

* all credit for the post title goes to Ross

Doppel-starlets

I was checking the Globe and Mail website tonight when the following thumbnail photo made me do a doubletake:

Even though I've recently seen this particular actress in a movie that I had very strong feelings about, I could not remember her name. I could not even remember whether or not I knew her name. Was I losing my mind? A little Googling made me realize that there was a reason I couldn't immediately identify the actress:

Oscar aspirations notwithstanding, I do wish they would lay off the eyeliner.

List: Why I {heart} the Calgary Stampede

Is the Calgary Stampede a one-trick civic pony that cheapens the city's international image? No, of course not. In fact, there are a multitude of amazing, astounding, awesome things that make the Stampede great. For example:

1. Obvious economic boon from the tourist dollars.

2. Albertan premiers get pied (or attempted-pied) at their annual Stampede Breakfasts. Affordable housing for all!!!!

3. This photo:

4. And this subsequent, um, homage:


5. Internationalism: proves that people all over the world are suckers for cowboys. Speaking of...

6. Raises the profiles of fine establishments like Cowboys, a place frequented by actual royalty.

7. $tampede. $tampede. $tampede.

8. How every local station has to broadcast at least part of its dinnertime newscast from the Stampede grounds.

9. Educational: ability to understand the subtle distinction between "YA-HOO!" and "YEE-HAW!" (Anyone? Anyone?)

10. Oh, look at the cute ponies! They're so keeeewt! I want a horsie! Oh, shit.

Happy $tampedin', y'all. See you in August.

List: This quarter in analytics

In lieu of a dissertation post, tonight I present: odd info from my blog stats

Most popular search term that has lead to my blog: "knocked up controversy" (clearly this post)

However, if you take the results from "facebook remove friend" and add it to all the other search terms that are variations on "remove" "friend" and "facebook", the result greatly outweighs the Knocked Up hits. So for the record: if you remove a friend on Facebook, no one ever gets notified. How do I know this? It's a long story, but it's actually not my long story, so it's not getting told. I also know that if you reject a friend request on Facebook, nothing happens either.

Edited to add: A further test has confirmed that indeed nothing happens when you remove a friend from your Facebook list (i.e., they receive no notification). So go on, people, passive-aggressively break up with your friends online (or would that be your online friends?). Oh, the Internet. You are good for so many things.

Some of the odder search strings that lead back here:
brothel twickenham
chiswick brothels
eloping in london
neighbours having sex
"jena malone" "pride and prejudice" annoying
underbite keira knightley
"globe and mail" + "book review" + schadenfreude
hollywood actors who are credit card fraud victims (twice?)

And my personal favourite:
elizabeth bennett, drill sergeant

The key to productivity

...seems to be having somewhere to be and not letting yourself go out and play until the day's page goal has been accomplished.

Birthday party yesterday + Canada Day festivities tonight = 19 pages so far.

I'm getting there. Another page on Lovelace and convenience, something about space and the body, a little something about Lovelace and cover stories, and then on to a larger section on the heterotopic aspect of the Sincalir House.