Saturday, July 28, 2012
Fifty Shades of Grey Elephants: Janet goes berserk!
Janet has had ENOUGH! Don't stay in your seats, folks. . . RUN!!!
Friday, July 27, 2012
I'm sorry to have to show you this: the East River Monster
But I'm doing it. I'm doing it in the interests of SCIENCE.
Things keep washing ashore - oh, not here, mind you, and I'm bloody glad, cuzzadafact that just thinking about all this makes me want to shed my skin and jump right out of it.
Y'see, well. Things wash up. . . not here, but under the Brooklyn Bridge (this time - then there were all the other times too, but we don't talk about them.)
People are saying it's just a pig, a dead pig that someone threw overboard (overboard - over what? A pig boat?). But pictured above is a closeup of its "hand", which looks distressingly. . . human.
Anyone who has seen dead cattle (and I haven't seen any lately) will be aware that after they die, they bloat up and their limbs kind of stick out every-which-way. So we can eliminate that particularly creepy effect as a normal aftereffect of being dead and decaying.
But OH, this isn't a pig. Isn't a pig. Most definitely isn'tapig.
Isn't. A. Pig.
But it's a "something", that much is certain, and theories abound: a very large dead rat; a very large dead racoon. . . some kind of dead "canine". . . but none of those theories fit this creature's fearsome physiology.
Please hang on to something now, for I am about to show you something even worse, something that washed up on shore in 2008.
I don't know why I do this. Why do I do this? I can't help myself. I look through my fingers, but I look, my scalp prickling with horror.
This is called the Montauk Monster, and nobody knows what-the-fuck-it-is or even wants to.
What I think is happening is this: somewhere, someone is doing experiments. Before you write this off, just think what is already possible with hybridizing, genetic engineering, gene splicing and dicing, and all that stuff.
This isn't a question of "an animal crossed with a human". "Crossed" is no word for what is happening here. Minute amounts of human genetic material are being insinuated into the genetic structure of certain animals, perhaps pigs, perhaps gigantic rodents like capybaras (except their teeth are different).
No, I don't jest because I think it's happening now and that there exist in labs or hideous farms somewhere, hybrids that contain maybe ten per cent human genes. Just to see what will happen.
So the pig has a little twist of intelligence along with his tail. Might be useful for certain research. How intelligent can a pig become? How human? Will it suddenly begin to talk in a squealy, irritating voice?
What if one gets away from the evil lab some time, such as now? What if one jumps onboard a cruise ship and someone sees it and freaks out so much he chucks it overboard?
Jesus!
Something scares me, scares me so much I won't bother to turn off the italics: someone is going to insist that this "thing" be genetically tested to see what it's really made of, and what percentage of it has been tampered with. What percentage of it might in fact be human.
Human.
This thing? There is no such animal. Yet here it is, right under the Brooklyn Bridge. Woody, don't leave the house.
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
It took me years to write, will you take a look
Order The Glass Character from:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA
Barnes & Noble
Thistledown Press
The Sacred Sweater, Vol. II
Shit on a stick, did I ever have a hard time with that last post. Trying to convert the text into something my blog would accept took forever.
But I persevered, mainly because I thought this piece was so astonishing. The actual text goes on for ten pages or so, and covers most of the Bible, even the Old Testament, in which the "teacher" says all the little Hebrew boys were being slain because "those Hebrews were just breeding like rabbits".
This thing reeks of fundamentalism, not to mention racism, with even the most innocent act (knitting!) dragged in to illustrate scriptural precepts. The thing that astonishes me is how long I fell for this. I was "in" this milieu for something like fifteen years before I came to realize that somewhere along the way, it had come to mean almost nothing to me.
It wasn't so much scripture, which can be interesting if contradictory (as is Jesus). It was the people trying to convey the messages. Hardly anyone I encountered in all that time seemed to have anything more than a superficial knowledge of what this was all about.
You see, the old-time message behind the Bible is that we're basically no goddamn good, if you'll pardon the language. We're selfish and hard-hearted and besides that, we have sex! We have sex. Do you know what people actually do when they have sex? And they enjoy it. Could it be worse?
So it's very important either to not have sex, or, if we do have it, not to enjoy it due to guilt, shame and a smothering feeling of sin that will never go away.
We were always controlled by guilt, not to mention shame and a sense of fundamental unworthiness and irredeemable filth that could "only" be cleansed by Jesus. Trouble was, we had to keep doing this over and over and over again, pretty much every Sunday.
We never quite "got there," as if the goal was to become some saintly figure that no one else would be able to stand. We always had to go against, against, against our true nature, or God wouldn't love us any more. Certainly, the pecksniffs at church wouldn't - that is, if they ever loved us in the first place.
So. We have the Biblical teddy bear sweater, and later on in the 10 or 12 pages of this drivel she uses the term "bear" in the most groaningly punning way. We "bear with" our sorrows, etc. I have to say, though, that though I may just try that little knitting pattern, I found her theology not so much unbearable as a complete sack of shit.
Holy cow (or bear): it's the Sacred Sweater!
Thursday, July 26, 2012
An incredible rescue
This is one of the coolest things I've ever seen. Note how the elephants work as a team to rescue the baby from the water. He's too slippery to pick up, so two of them gently herd him along to shore. Then he gets stuck in mud, and one of the elephants levels the ground out with its foot so he can walk. Elephants are amazing.
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Confession: I killed a panda (with scissors)
So we all know what pandas look like. Roly-poly, black-masked, adorable, with their woolly black-and-white contrasted coat. I wouldn't get in a cage with one, but I can admire their cuddlyness from afar.
So Caitlin said to me not long ago:
Grandma.
Yes, Caitlin.
Could you knit me something?
Sure, what would you like?
Could you knit me a panda?
A panda? I had so many panda patterns I didn't know where to start. Most of them were plain lousy, or even frightening.
This poor guy looks as if he was run over by a truck.
But hel-lo-o-o-o-o-o: what was this? Just about the cutest knitted panda pattern I've ever seen! And he looked easy to make. The pattern came from World of Knitted Toys by Kath Dalmeny, a book I've used for several successful projects, such as many of the characters in my Ugly Duckling story which I gave Erica and Lauren for their birthdays.
I showed her the pattern. "I want it! I want it!" Caitlin said, so I told her, alrighty then, I'll knit it for you.
And then.
Well, it got weird.
Then weirder.
This thing didn't look like a panda at all: more like an anteater who was a victim of Monty Python's Owl Stretching Time.
By the time I finished the body, which was knitted in one piece, I knew I was in trouble. It looked like a fat bowling pin crossed with a pig. The head had a strange point on it, and was twice the size of the body. The eye-patches were about 2" too long.
Where did I go wrong???
Trying to sew the legs on was worse: they were long, skinny and tubular, and the animal wouldn't stand up. It splayed on the floor like a disabled anteater.
I stuffed the body, tried and tried to sculpt it into some kind of shape that wasn't totally grotesque. It didn't work. I tried to open it up so I could unravel it and salvage the wool, which was very expensive.
No dice. It wouldn't happen. I took scissors to the thing, hacking the head off so I could at least have the stuffing back. My panda lay before me, a mass of unravelled wool and destroyed morale.
I felt like crap. Obviously I had done something very wrong, but what?
Then this morning, something happened. . .
I found an example of the same (finished) panda on a web site called Random Meanderings. This entry is for some time in 2009.
OK then. . . it's supposed to look like a pig on stilts!
Yes. It has a definite piglet quality, with elongated limbs, as if someone had fed it growth hormone.
So it wasn't my fault. Moreover, it looks to me as if Random Meanderings followed the pattern exactly. It wasn't bad knitting, at all. In fact it looked very neatly done, which is not such an easy thing with a larger stuffy.
But this is what she got: a "what-is-it?", which I simply could not give to Caitlin.
The only thing I could think of was that I used a yarn substitution. These patterns all call for something called DK, which is not available in Canada and which no one has even heard of in yarn shops (which don't exist any more anyway - you have to dive into sale bins at Walmart). I used a thinner version of "worsted weight", which makes up 90% of the yarn you can get here. It varies from almost threadlike to so massively thick, it should be labelled "super bulky".
(Blogger's note. No, that's not true. The funny-looking panda was knitted with the correct yarn and STILL came out looking like an English Bull Terrier with anteater genes.)
(Blogger's note. No, that's not true. The funny-looking panda was knitted with the correct yarn and STILL came out looking like an English Bull Terrier with anteater genes.)
Whew. These two could be cousins. Is that genetically possible? Anyway, my poor trashed anteater-panda didn't look nearly as good as this one because it had weird bumps and bulges and a lot of very visible seams. It didn't look so much like a handsome English Bull Terrior as Eeyore from Winnie-the-Pooh.
Let me tell you my best and worst traits:
(a) I never give up.
(b) I never give up.
I just can't. I have to try again, try to win, because failure opens up a desperate plug-hole in the bottom of my spirit, causing all my will to live to drain away.
In my life, I've had about 90% failure, so you can imagine how I feel when something like this happens.
We live in an age where we can order a pattern for a few dollars, and get it via email within the hour. I decided to gamble on Debi Birkin because I think her patterns are brilliant. I was even able to manage Piecrust the Tortoise (below), though it still doesn't look like the original picture.
I made a turtle family which I gave my daughter-in-law for her birthday. The pattern was challenging enough to be interesting, but never once felt the wrath of my scissors or the ripping-out of fibrefill guts.
So now, probably stupidly, I will essay to waste still more money on still more black-and-white wool to try to make Ping Pong Panda. If he turns out at all, he'll be more of a cuddly teddy than a stand-up panda (who never stood up anyway). But hey - if all else fails, I'll still have that tiny blue sweater.
Monday, January 24, 2005
I received The World of Knitted Toys for Christmas. I decided to try a panda bear. It knitted up quickly, but finishing took forever. For me, finishing stuff is not nearly as fun as knitting. Oh well, I'm not terribly pleased with the end product. The corners are too square. And his legs seem awfully long. Maybe next time I'll try something with fewer parts.
Here's the funny looking Panda:
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)