Baby Elephant Walk
This is what I’ve been knitting, lately.
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
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh27. 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.