Failure Bowl 2008

This is the Kentucky Fried Chicken Famous Bowl, mashed potatoes topped with corn, gravy, breaded chicken, and cheese:


This is American comedian Patton Oswald's take on the KFC Famous Bowl:



This is what happens when Jeff and Nat, inspired by the routine, decide it's a good idea to have a "Failure Bowl" party:


And this is the Onion AV Club story (which, for the record, was published five days after our own Failure Bowl) in which Patton Oswald finally taste tests the KFC Famous Bowl:

The Famous Bowl hit my mouth like warm soda, slouched down my throat, and splayed itself across my stomach like a sun-stroked wino. It was that precise combination of things, and so many other sensations that did not go together. At all.

Narrowly ahead of the curve in comedy-based fast food taste tests? That us.

Holiday Tally

Temporal
Total number of days in Calgary: 14
Days spent in Calgary before feeling homesick for Edmonton: 11
Days left before heading back to Edmonton: 1
Number of days after Christmas that stores were still playing Christmas music: 1 (or, still, if you count the strip mall down the street from my parents' house)

Caloric
Pieces of chocolate consumed: 50-ish?
Amount of turkey eaten: more than usual/too much
Highest number of consecutive days of alcohol intake: 5
Number of days spent without coffee due to having a cold: 4
Resulting caffeine withdrawal headaches: 3
People lecturing me about caffeine addiction: 2

Academic
Number of pages read of a novel: 184, so far
Pages read of a novel that I hadn't read before: 0
Guilty thoughts about neglecting work: too many/on par for an academic
Number of supervisor-imposed, major deadlines missed: 1

Yarn
Number of presents received in yarn form: 2 (one as gift card)
Number of presents given in yarn form: 3 (1 toque, 2 scarves)
Number of yarn shops visited during Boxing Week: 2
Amount of yarn purchased: enough for 2 scarves, 2 hats, and a sweater

Monetary
Let's not go there.

Misc.
Number of hints dropped by generous sister re: getting my driver's license: enough, already
Thwarted attempts to buy the Saturday Globe and Mail: 2
Trips to a mall: 5
Conversations about Guy Maddin: 1
Cell phones acquired: 1
Time spent catching up with good friends: lots and yet still not enough
Egg shells broken: 0

R2D2 toque

On the 9th day of Christmas (i.e., 4 days before), I finished knitting another Star Wars project:


An R2D2 toque for Jeff, the same recipient of the Boba Fett balaclava. The pattern was inspired by another R2D2 hat I found online, but because I wanted more of a toque than a beanie, because my gauge was quite different, and because I'm anal-retentive and wanted a super-accurate pattern, I made my own chart, which I will post once I have a moment to figure out how to make an electronic copy.

For the knitters: I knit most of the hat on straight needles so that I could use the intarsia colour knitting method, though there was some stranded/Fair Isle knitting in an attempt to reduce the number of ends that would need weaving in. I even decreased on the straight needles until I got to the blue circle at the very top, whereupon I switched to dpns and sewed up the seam with a mattress stitch. As it turned out, my attempts to keep the ends to a minimum were unsuccessful.

Witness the hat's insides:


But once everything was woven in and cut off, the end result was, if I may say, brilliant:



Edited Jan. 22 to add: Post with pattern and chart can be found here.

Slow news day, much?

One of these stories is factual and one is not (though both are kind of truthy). Guess which?



And it's street protests over antagonistic board meetings... this time.

Tuque and OED

My knitting group is composed of mostly English PhDs, but even they thought it was funny that I recently looked up "tuque" in the Oxford English Dictionary (online). If I hadn't though, I would never have learned that, according to the OED, a tuque is a knit wool hat that is actually folded in on itself—that is, it is a long tube, tapered at both ends, and one end goes into the other, making it hat-shaped. This construction seems to be the defining characteristic of a tuque, setting it apart from watchcaps, fisherman's hats, and wool hats in general.

And now I want to knit one.

What, no knitting geeks?

An astounding poster featuring 56 types of geeks is for sale here, with a full image here.

It's not that I know people who could be one of these geeks, it's that I know several people who are more than one of these geeks that alternately thrills and depresses me.

Glass shopping carts

Seriously? Holiday gift guides still divide merchandise into his and hers?

According to Chapters, women are interested in cooking, shopping, bland, inoffensive music by inoffensively bland young men (hello, Josh Groban!), Celine Dion, and soapy TV shows. Men, on the other hand are interested in politics, history, bland music by the shell of a formerly credible artist (hello, Eric Clapton!), Springsteen, and tragic-epic TV shows.

Oh, and Borat. Borat next to Brian Mulroney. That's almost—almost—enough to make the old-school sexism excusable.