kentucky radio
February 20, 2011
Driving through rural Kentucky on a Sunday morning means that most of the available radio stations are offering religious programming. Below is just a very small sampling.
1. Marble Mouth Thankful Guy. Highlights: says everything twice for no reason, for example: “we fail the lord, as I’ve said many times, ’cause we don’t give god the glory for the things he’s done for us and done for us”. Every word sounds as if it’s spoken around a wad of cotton wool.
2. Praise the Lord Lady. Highlights: the phrase “praise the lord” is inserted again and again in her speech like punctuation or some sort of ecstatic Tourette’s. Praise the Lord Lady presents a litany of examples of people being healed by god, both her and people she read about in the bible (like “the man that waited to poo”, or so it sounds like, but Peter informs me it’s probably “the man that waded the pool”). Just before the recording started she told of god healing her hernia in 1997 and she stopped taking all of her pills (this is what the demons were trying to trick her about at the start of the video). It was a moving story, I tell you what.
3. (on a different station from the first two): Corny Hoedown People. This show was actually pretty awesome, with lots of disorganized singing that devolved at the end of each song into a babble of “praise the lord”s.
4. more Corny Hoedown People. Highlights: an utter lack of any attempt at enunciation. Whole lines go by with nary a consonant. We’ve gained a new favourite all-purpose phrase: “that’s the key word, Roscoe”. What he said in full: “praise the lord are you ready to go, that’s the key word, Roscoe”. Also when the guy actually starts preaching for real, he flubs his lines like crazy. And meanwhile, we’re driving past a water park that has its own little chapel in it. What’s scary, to me, is how little time I need to spend listening to Southern radio before I start picking up the accent.
Bonus story! A couple of years ago Peter and I visited Rock City, and while we were up in one of those lookout spots up in the mountain there, looking out (as is the custom), a little kid next to us started pointing excitedly at a rocky outcropping a ways down the mountainside where someone had placed a gnome. He shouted over and over (in the cutest and most funny Southern accent I’ve ever heard, and I tell you what I’ve heard some doozies): What’s that down there, Snapper? (down thay-ere, Schnayuhper?) There’s a little man down thayre! Yeah, just like I said it in the video because four years later I still think it’s funny enough to say all the time even though Peter’s no doubt beyond sick of it. That’s the key word, Roscoe.
Bonus #2: here’s a flickr group of photos from our Rock City trip. Look down there, it’s a little man!
*I just want to add, in case it’s not clear, that this is not meant to make fun of either A) my friends or other sane people who are Christian, or B) my friends or other sane people who are Southern. But yes, I do think these evangelistic people are a bit off their rocker. Also, I’m interested in accents and dialects in general, so my discussion of (and clumsy attempts to imitate) various Southern accents is in no way meant to be mean or make fun. I am totally making fun of Praise The Lord Lady, though.
**also: that is a photo of the ACTUAL LITTLE MAN. The one of Snapper!
Posted by jodi on February 20, 2011 at 8.13pm
vikkel braid (a tutorial)
February 17, 2011
This new design in progress, worked in my January handspun, uses a line of Vikkel Braid to set the main pattern off from the 1×1 ribbed hem. The braid creates a little line of knit stitches that seem to move sideways across the work. It’s normally used for small projects (such as mittens) knitted in the round, but there’s no reason it can’t be used to great effect in a larger project knitted flat as well.
There are a few descriptions of this technique around the web, but I learned it from a German video (link) Nancy Bush’s Folk Knitting in Estonia is probably the best print source on Vikkel Braid. As putting it into a design intended for publication means having to describe in writing how it’s done, I thought making a little photo tutorial would be good practice. The technique looks a little fiddly in the video linked above but it’s actually quite simple to execute.
While learning the stitch I took some photos; please excuse the quality, as I didn’t realize just how tricky it is to photograph closeups of your own hands, and the lack of adequate natural light only adds to the murkiness. I’m not apologizing for the dry skin, though: it’s February, y’all.
Step 1
Start with a M1 increase (shown above) and slip that onto the left hand needle.
Step 2
Knit a stitch through the back loop of the second stitch on the left hand needle:
like so:
and (without slipping that stitch off the needle) bring the right hand needle back to the front and knit into the first stitch.
Slip all of that (the first and second stitches from the left needle) off.
Now you have two stitches made, the tbl stitch and the regular one. In retrospect this is probably more images than are really necessary. Ah, well.
Step 3
Slip the last stitch from the right hand needle back to the left.
Now, repeat steps 2 and 3 until you get to the end. You’ll wind up with one stitch more than you started with; when working in the round, you’ll slip that last stitch over the first stitch of the next round to get rid of it. Working flat, just make the first stitch of your next round a k2tog or p2tog decrease. And now you have a lovely line of sideways knitting that will impress your friends and instill bitter envy in your enemies.
Here’s what the finished braid looks like in Berroco Ultra Alpaca (unblocked):
Posted by jodi on February 17, 2011 at 4.34pm
studio sunday morning!
February 13, 2011
Printing woodcuts onto a stack of jersey fabric pieces that are destined to be sewn into scarves (after a few more layers of print first, of course. Horror vacui, remember?).
The music room is a great place to do this work, because unlike my actual work space there’s no half painted china cabinet sitting in the way there’s a nice empty closet in which to hang newly printed fabrics to dry. The music room is not a great place to do this work, because it’s on the second floor of our house and now the whole second floor smells like cobalt drier for which I’m going to be in big trouble when the family gets home today. And the bedrooms will probably still smell like it when everyone goes to sleep. Whoops.
Posted by jodi on February 13, 2011 at 1.00pm
tonight on the listening project
February 12, 2011
It’s 1958 on The Listening Project, and tonight we’ll be listening to two records:
The Four Lads Greatest Hits, undated 1958:
and Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode, released March 31, 1958.
The needle will drop on the first record shortly after 8pm EST. If you’re nerding around on the internet on a Saturday night, come by and chat with us! About this music, or about other music, or about whatever. http://lp.pzed.ca/
Posted by jodi on February 12, 2011 at 8.04pm
toronto visit, february 2-5
February 7, 2011
Michael Snow’s Flight Stop at the Eaton Centre, a piece I’ve loved since first seeing it on our grade 7 & 8 trip (probably also my first time in Eaton Centre), right after that moment when some boys outside on Yonge Street challenged us to a breakdance-off and one of the grade 7s, Thuy Nguyen, took them up on it and we all thought we were about to get the crap beat out of us West Side Story-style but instead Thuy turned out to be an awesome breakdancer and the boys turned out not to be a breakdancing knife gang and then we went into the mall and there were all of these geese and it was magical. Now every time I’m on Yonge Street I secretly hope to see breakdancers but it never happens.
On Spadina, waiting for the streetcar after a visit to Lettuce Knit (where I got to meet Laura Chau for the first time!). Would you believe this was the first time I’d ever found my own way around in Toronto by myself? It’s true! I walked from the Royal York Hotel to Lettuce Knit, about half an hour in the slow shuffle necessitated by slushy sidewalks, then took the streetcar back. Although we don’t visit Toronto often I’m familiar enough with the neighbourhoods I traveled through, but have always had someone to rely on to guide me in the past. The whole way back on the streetcar I was watching the stops go by and calculating and re-calculating, if the streetcar suddenly turns here I can get off and walk back THERE, okay if it turns up here I can walk back this far and then. . . And when I finally arrived at Union Station and found my way back to the hotel (the scariest part because I have a somewhat irrational fear of train stations and airports and getting lost in them and did I ever tell y’all about the first time I flew out of Atlanta and how I totally gave birth to a cow right there in Sandy’s car when she told me I had to take a train INSIDE THE AIRPORT holy crap!) I felt like a total grownup who can navigate a big city without losing her shit. Which I almost am, finally, at age 39. Whew!
Posted by jodi on February 7, 2011 at 12.18pm
wonders of modern technology
February 4, 2011
On Wednesday we took a trip to Toronto on the train at the same time as a Copa del Rey match we wanted to watch between FC Barcelona and UD Almeria. Here we are trying to watch a live stream of the match on the laptop using the free Via Rail wireless.
Although I was annoyed at the time that the connection was too weak to actually watch the match, it’s still amazing to me that we can have internet on a train at all. In my day, sonny, phones were attached to the wall and you had to stand there to talk on them! Anyway, the slow connection caused some lovely impressionistic effects.
Affelay’s first goal with Barca!
Posted by jodi on February 4, 2011 at 8.16pm
