This is what I’ve been knitting, lately.

I ran across this the other day, and I am fascinated. Aquariums that look like landscapes. It’s an aquatic variation on bonsai forests. But with fish. Swimming over the mountains. The Japanese have kicked our asses once again in the realm of the fantastic. And miniature. And tripping. Check this out, it’s the number one aqua forest in the world.

This is number 15. Awesome. Everyone seems to use neon tetras, but I could never get the little bastards to live and reproduce.

Geeky goodness, non? For those of you who, like me, were graphic designers in the dark ages before computers, I bring you the Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies. I think I have used everything in there, except the green eyeshade. I certainly still have a jar of Super White, a pack of rubylith, X-acto knives and blades, some of those exact Design markers, and sheets of press type and Pantone paper. I once had my house painted by handing the painter two sheets of Pantone and telling him to figure out the house paint equivalent. In case you are wondering, it was a conch-shell pink with aqua trim… PMS 270.

Finally, my college boyfriend who went on to do well, as opposed to the others who went on to drop off the face of the earth, has sent me a press release, and because I have a soft spot for Bruce, I’ll pass it along:

Los Angeles, CA— Turner Classic Movies will feature on Sunday, January 18 at 9:00pm (Pacific Time) the world television premieres of the new 2K digital restoration of Manhatta (1921, Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler) and the new photo-chemical restoration of N.Y., N.Y. (1958, Francis Thompson) on “Sunday Silent Nights.”

This TCM milestone broadcast of two abstract-experimental films restored by Bruce Posner and Anthology Film Archives, New York, will be followed on Monday, January 19 at 8:30pm (Pacific Time)  at REDCAT with the Los Angeles premiere of Manhatta and N.Y., N.Y. as well as seven other restored film treasures at the Roy and Edna Disney/Calarts Theater in Walt Disney Concert Hall in Downtown Los Angeles.

The REDCAT screening will be presented by archivist, curator and filmmaker Bruce Posner, who will introduce the films and discuss the process of preservation and digital restoration for images at Lowry Digital, Brubank, and Cineric, Inc., New York and for audio and music at Chace Audio, Burbank, and Trackwise, New York.  Posner was a recipient of a 2005 Special Citation from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association for his restoration of “Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-garde Film 1893-1941,” the groundbreaking film-dvd retrospective released by Image Entertainment. 

I saw this the other night and knew that as soon as it came on youtube, it was going to go on Girlyshoes. Do you think that Bob Dylan would be hurt to know that he is fast being replaced by Keith Olbermann as my imaginary boyfriend? I’m not having naughty dreams about Keith, that’s still all Bob, all the time, but geez, can Keith do some righteous indignation.

I have been obsessed with a single recipe lately. I took it from 101 Cookbooks, and have been making it almost weekly since it was published. It is a perfect soul food for wintery nights, although wintery nights in Miami are like spring evenings in Rochester, New York. It is a dish that cooks in the oven, although a more accurate description would be that the ingredients are put in a pot where they melt over a couple of hours into this velvety, slightly lumpy melange of flavor and texture.

What is this miracle food that has me coming back again and again? A kale, red bean and winter squash mole. I have yet to put it over anything, because I’m too busy just slurping it down. I’ve used butternut squash, a blue hubbard and some other winter squash. I’ve used canned beans. I’ve added a couple of cocoa beans to the almonds in the grinder.

No matter what I do to this, it just tastes like some kind of heaven.

Don’t take my word for it, though, make a batch for yourself.

Last week, during the regular boys night out, the boys were actually hanging around the kitchen table. I’d asked Mr. Rings to bring a jewelry neck display so I could photograph my newest piece. He brought the velvet stand, and then asked what I was going to photograph. I showed him the mossy/violets/felted/beaded necklace and he acted as though he’d never seen any of my work before. The long and the short of it: yesterday I went into downtown South Miami, and placed about a dozen items for sale at 5 Golden Rings. There’s a beaded fetish doll, a heavily beaded cuff, many necklaces and even the stitch markers.

He told me that he’s going to make a display in his front window, just in time for the holidays.

(ETA: a picture of the display)

How’s that for happy holidays?

Copied from Mean Louise, and tickling the back of my memory like I may have done this before, I bring you a book meme.

Instructions:

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (I read “The Eyre Affair” by Jasper Fforde, does that count?)

4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6. The Bible

7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (OK, so not all of them, but I OWN all of them)

15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (Doesn’t this go with the Lord of the Rings? Granted it is a separate story, but really…)

17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18. Catcher in the Rye - J D Salinger

19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20. Middlemarch - George Eliot

21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens

25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34. Emma - Jane Austen

35. Persuasion - Jane Austen

36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (See 33.)

37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41. Animal Farm - George Orwell

42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (This book still scares the crap out of me. Especially over the past eight years.)

49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50. Atonement - Ian McEwan

51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52. Dune - Frank Herbert (But then there is Son of Dune, and Extended Family of Dune and Dune the Part Written by the Extended Family of Frank Herbert and who cares)

53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68. Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding

69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72. Dracula - Bram Stoker

73.The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

(I have actually started at least three times. And failed. I even tried getting a running start by re-reading “Portrait of the Artist…” and where is that on the list?)

76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78. Germinal - Emile Zola

79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80. Possession - AS Byatt

81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White

88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (Oh, for the love of God, people. Why don’t you just put “Johnathan Livingston Seagull” on here, too?)

93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94. Watership Down - Richard Adams

95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole (I have to re-read this, because I LOATHED it, and so many people I respect and admire LOVE it. Clearly I missed something. Maybe)

96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare (Didn’t we already do the entire works back up there on line 14?)

99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I seem to be particularly lacking in modern New York Times best sellers, don’t I? And why is there such paucity of sci-fi and fantasy? And such a heap of Dickens and Austen? And does watching any number of film versions and remakes count? What more could there be to “Pride and Prejudice” that I haven’t seen? And I’ve even watch the Bollywood version. And why is there no way to mark the books you hated reading? I mean, I read “The Handmaid’s Tale” and I couldn’t say I enjoyed it, because it still gives me nightmares, but I wouldn’t say I hated it. On the other hand, having been forced in my high school AP English to slog my way through both “Moby Dick” and “Silas Marner” I could honestly say I read and loathed both. While I’m asking, where is “The Wizard of Oz”? And any works by Toni Morrison or Zora Neale Hurston?

Anyway, if you chose to play, please leave me a comment, so we can all congratulate ourselves on how well read we are.