Tonight's the night!

There is a message on the Team Wales shoutout board from Team Wisconsin offering to shred us, but the writer identifies him/herself as a "cheesehead" so I suppose allowances must be made. Team Pittsburgh is gathering to watch the opening ceremonies together, but Team Wales will be joining together only in spirit, which is appropriate in its own way.

I am questioning my choice of pattern. It calls for 100 yards of yarn, which seemed like an amount that could reasonably take a forthnight to knit up. But I read through it last night, and there isn't much of it. I may finish it tonight in spite of myself. However, it is confusing and filled with unfamiliar abbreviations, so it may work. Are there any Olympic events which are just one brief thing and then the participant is finished and hangs around the Olympic Village knitting something else?

That might be me.

We don't cast on until tonight, so I may have a bit of time to look at patterns and consider a set of some kind. Headband and matching... I can't imagine. What on earth would you make to match a headband? The artyarn series does have a modular vest, but I must confess that I find it desperately ugly. There it is on the left. Doesn't it look like the sort of thing that a rogue economist might wear?

(Sorry, any rogue economists who happen by. I just love that phrase. It could just as well have been "superstart linguist" or "famous knitting blogger." And apologies too to any knitters who happen by and see this vest, which they made and love, being described as ugly. Maybe I had better stop now, before I have to apologize to any other imaginary readers.)

I have been tagged.

Five Things Regularly Stocked in my Refrigerator

1. nonfat yogurt
2. shrimp sauce
3. vegetables
4. fruit
5. anchovy paste

Well, we also have eggs, milk, and butter, and often meat as well. But for sheer space, the vegetables win. Shrimp sauce and anchovy paste don't take up so much space, but they have a good deal of Presence.

I tag twopeasinpod, PureGuava, Lanam Facio, and Splendid Swatches. I have never tagged non-xangans before. I guess tag seems like a game to be played in your own neighborhood, while waiting for your mom to call you for dinner. However, there has been discussion lately on the knitblogs of how some knitblogs are being exclusionary and having in-groups and cliques. They are not talking about me. They are talking about famous knitbloggers. I respond to the idea of "famous knitbloggers" as I do to Ozarque's use of the term "superstar linguist." Or "rogue economist." An oxymoron, in short. Mick Jagger is famous, and a superstar, and neither linguists nor knitting bloggers are in danger of finding themselves in his position. There are two knitting bloggers whom I would consider sufficiently well-known to be famous among knitting bloggers: Stephanie, aka The Yarn Harlot, and Wendy of Wendy Knits. Neither of them seems to me to be behaving badly. However, in support of those who are more in the know than I and are seeing a problem, I am reaching out to some non-xangans. Plus, I want to know what is in their refrigerators.

After I posted my list of projects, Chanthaboune weighed in with hers and the Vicster's. I haven't met the Vicster, but he sure attends a lot of meetings. If he doesn't watch out, he's going to end up on the faculty somewhere. And you can't even knit in faculty meetings, so be warned. They are, like most students, way too busy.

But I was apparently not really busy enough, because I added something to my list.

It started innocently enough. I was cleaning out my pantry, and came upon the Bad Soap. I set it out so that I could use it to scrub down my front porch. It is after all Front Porch week on the HP, and this sort of heavy housework is all that I use the Bad Soap for.

Now, I don't want you to think that I only make Bad Soap. I make good soap all the time. Here is what is left of my last batch. This is melt and pour soap. That is the closest to coloring books that an adult crafter can get. You stick the stuff in your microwave, mix up colors and scents, pour it into molds, and end up with good-quality soap for far less than you would pay for it. And if you want a eucalyptus-mint scented mandolin-playing frog, as you can dimly see in the upper left corner, you can have it.

But #1 daughter sent me for my birthday a book on making liquid soap. Seduced by the gorgeous names of the recipes, I attempted to make some out of chemicals. Unfortunately, it involved standing and stirring for ages, which I did not want to do. Having cheated on the stirring, I ended up with a jar of stuff that looked like a scummy pond. The Bad Soap. I use it for heavy cleaning. So I was looking at it and thinking that I ought to throw the scrofulous-looking stuff away.

Then I thought, what the heck, it's chemicals. If I do something with it, it will change.

I realize that this is a somewhat scary position to take. But I know what is in this stuff -- lye, which is already neutralized, and oils. Coconut oil, almond oil, oil of jasmine. What harm could they do? And when we make candy, the other bit of household chemistry that we undertake chez fibermom, we work through any failures and turn it into something else. Why not do the same with soap?

Also, I still have a lot of lye hanging around. I cannot throw it away, and making soap is all I can possibly do with it. I feel as though I must conquer this skill. Someday.

So I reread the directions. Unfortunately, they still involved stirring for hours. So I just poured it back into my soapmaking crockpot and plugged it in. After a couple of days, I let it cool off and it had become a lovely creamy paste. There was still a bit of separating going on, though, so I plugged it back in. I figure that I will give in and stir it a bit over the weekend when I need a break from knitting.

The Wall Street Journal had a reminder about how the early Olympic athletes prepared for the Olympics. They ate plenty of wild boar and cheese, rubbed their bodies with olive oil, and abstained from sex. I thought you would want to know.

Like Merchant Ships also steered me to this amazing post about laundry. If ever you begin to feel that you are doing too much housework, go have a look at this woman boiling her dishcloths (probably wise), mangling her tablecloths (probably less trouble than ironing them) and starching her towels. Then go sit down and fan yourself a bit.

My old friend M from college sent me a huge package of goodies -- more than a pound of strong tea, crystallized ginger, cake, baking mixes for exotic goodies, candy (which the boys immediately fell upon with glad cries, because we don't usually have candy around here), garlic basil linguine, and her local folk scene paper. What a gal!

Now, I live in a town where there is one commercial newspaper and the Free Weekly, so a specialized newspaper for the folk music and dance community seems as luxurious as the food and drink.

Back when we were students together, M and I both played folk music and danced folk dances. We were part of the little groups of people with stringed instruments who gathered at the campus fountains or whatever and played informally together. Of course, in those days, boys and girls, college students wafted around in flowing draperies and hair down their backs, so the whole thing was pretty picturesque.

M has continued in that tradition. I now sing classical music and hymns, and lift weights. I still know a lot of ballads, though. Perhaps some day I will be walking along and encounter a group of people with folk instruments, and sit down and join right in.

Last night in class we sang hymns full of blood. "O, precious is the flow, that washed me white as snow!" We never sing these in the churches that I attend. "Nothing can for sin atone, nothing but the blood of Jesus!" Brian Wren, in Praying Twice, explains that singing about blood fills modern people with disgust, and distracts them from the message of the song. "There's wonder-working power in the blood!"

Partygirl, when I passed this along to her, hooted with scorn. Though they do not sing about blood in her church, either, she feels that the squeamishness of modern people is from our squeamishness about sin, not about blood. And not squeamishness about committing sins, just about identifying things as sins.

M and I often sang songs about blood. "There was blood in the parlor, there was blood in the hall, there was blood in the kitchen, where my lady did fall." Those good eighteen-stanza ballads invariably have blood. My son is partial to "Matty Groves," in which a high-born woman picks up a young man at church and takes him home. When they are surprised by her husband, Matty responds to his questions with remarkable sang-froid, but the husband kills them both anyway. "And with his sword, cut off her head, and kicked it against the wall." Those ballads weren't squeamish about sins or blood, either one.

People of the past were not less violent in their amusements than our modern movies and video games. They just didn't have screens to put it on.

We are trying to come up with some local delicacies to send off to M in the big city.

Tonight at midnight is the deadline for entering the Knitting Olympics. The Yarn Harlot referenced this amazing advice for knitting olympiads. Were you wondering about the best position for sleeping during this event? Why knitters should also play the piano? You will know. Seriously, if you intend to spend more time than usual knitting and want to avoid sore hands and wrists, check it out. And Natalie is hosting the UFOlympics, where participants will finish their UFOs instead of starting something new. Sensible.

In a burst of madness, I have joined a sew-a-long. No, it isn't really mad. First, it doesn't begin until February 15th, by which time the Knitting Olympics will be half over. Second, it doesn't end until March 20th, which is plenty of time.

But most importantly, it will encourage me to do something I really need to do. As I have mentioned, I am attempting to move further toward the chic end of the continuum this year. One of the things necessary for this is that I should own more than six pieces of clothing at a time. Given a) my pleasure in making things vs. my dread of shopping and b) my budget, it makes sense for me to do some sewing. But my a) constitutional inaccuracy and b) lack of boldness with the sewing machine is against me. So this sew-along is for knitters to help one another get a skirt made. Marirob is the fearless leader. She says that, if the skirt is fun, there may be further pieces to follow.

There are 70 knitters from around the world signed up. What is up with that? Would you have thought that there were 70 knitters who would want to make skirts together? (Of course, who would have thought there were over 100 knitters who wanted to knit for Team Wales?)

I looked through my fabric. I find that if I wanted to make a skirt covered with space creatures I would be all set. I could also have a chartreuse fleece skirt. Neither of these would be likely to lead to my being well-dressed. I will therefore be checking out the clearance table at the local craft store this weekend.

Thus, I have Erin and the Knitting Olympics project, wardrobe enhancement sewing, the Prayer Shawl ministry, a quilt all put together and ready to be quilted, a few inches of lace shawl on hold since the fall, and the mystery novel contest. I should not be getting bored. Add 75 new boxes to unpack at work, the HP spring cleaning (this is Front Porch week), helping #2 daughter with senior recital chores and tour fundraising, Easter music, and of course daily life.

I have also done my taxes -- sort of. Actually, I spent an hour doing them at the clever online site, and then my husband told me just to write down the total. Apparently, he wants to shop around and see if someone else can get a better total. After he has discovered that tax preparers will not do you an estimate for free, I will have to do it all over. Or maybe he is right and I am wrong, and the tax preparers will be glad to compete for the chance to do our 1040. Personally, I'd just like to get it done.

In other news, Mayflower has left xanga. I am sorry that she has. Frankly, I would like everyone I ever want to read to be on xanga. It is easy to find out whether they have updated, I already know how to comment with them and never have to peer at and copy silly characters to prove that I am not a robot, and I don't have to remember where they are. But it would be unreasonable to expect this fact to overshadow the benefits of other blogging spots, whatever they may be. Sigh. I guess I should go visit her new blog now.

This is the completed first pattern repeat of Erin -- the ribbing, plus four pattern bands. Now I begin the first one again.

Freakonomics was a very interesting book. John Allen Paulos did it first, though, and possibly better, in his Innumeracy series. Freakonomics makes the error of trying to make their work sound more exciting than it is. "Rogue economist"? It's like when the Wall Street Journal was claiming that, after the Enron scandals, accountancy was dangerous and sexy.

Hmm. "Rogue economist, played by George Clooney, tangles with accountant Brad Pitt in this high-action thriller." Maybe not.

But Paulos hasn't brought a new book out lately, and it was time for an up-to-date mathematical news analysis. The Ancestor's Tale also requires a lot of math of its reader. However, it has handy charts to refer to. I have reached the point at which the gibbons split off from the apes.

Did you see the Rolling Stones on yesterday's halftime show? Mick Jagger was prancing around convincingly, looking better-preserved than Aretha Franklin or Stevie Wonder, except in close-up. He didn't sound as good, but I think at that age you probably have to choose between prancing and singing.

I have also just this second realized that I forgot and missed #2 son's dental appointment last week. They will probably still charge us for it, but of course the insurance will not pay that charge. And I will have to call and apologize and attempt to reschedule, though this dentist is harder to get in to than a hairdresser. Not the best way to begin the week.

Later: The dentist's office was very nice about it. Just a reminder that most of the things we worry about never actually happen. Or possibly they are scared of me. My iron self-control whenever I am in their office, combined with my pretending not to be there, have made them fear that I am some sort of dangerous madwoman, Little do they realize that my dysfunction is happiness. Oh, and that pesky little bit of agoraphobia. Anyway, they were nice.

The Ancestor's Tale takes us to look at 40 points heading back along the historical path of evolution. I am still with the humans. Dawkins is dealing with the very interesting question of how far back in time we have to go to find the earliest shared ancestor of all modern people -- Adam or Eve, if you will. In the course of this, he brings up many intriguing points, because that is how he rolls (I took this phrase from my sons; if it means something obnoxious, I apologize and assure you that I didn't know it.) But the one that has stayed with me for contemplation is the fact that, about 40,000 years ago, art and music appeared.

Prior to that time, people, or the folks whose descendants would be people, made tools and useful items, but they didn't decorate things. They didn't have musical instruments. They didn't make beautiful spear points and dishes. Then, very much in an all-of-a-sudden way, art appeared. Bone flutes, cave paintings, sculpture, utilitarian objects with aesthetic features -- all at once, there begin to be evidences of art. Dawkins suggests that this is evidence of change in the brain. He points to Russian experiments in the domestication of foxes -- within 20 years, the experimenters were able to breed tame foxes, who liked people. The amazing thing is that they looked like dogs. They had cute floppy ears and happy faces and soft fur. Dawkins does not suggest that the researchers unwittingly selected breeding animals for cuteness, but it seems possible to me. After all, choosing for tameness must have been rather subjective, and looking cute might have made the foxes seem more tame. Dawkins, however, suggests that there are side-effects of natural selection.

Just as some humans have been domesticated into lactose tolerance by extended contact with milk-producing animals, he suggests, art might have been a side-effect of the development of language or agriculture or something. Part, that is, of our becoming cute. Um, okay, I am paraphrasing. Still, it is an interesting idea. He points out that the big difference between us and dogs, when it comes to domestication, is that we have a different word for wolves, the wild creatures, and for dogs, the cute tame ones. For ourselves, we do not have a word distinguishing the wild hunter-gatherers from the domesticated artistic ones.

At another point, he says that "Anglo-Saxon Y chromosomes moved west across England from Europe, stopping rather abruptly at the Welsh border. It is not hard to imagine reasons why."  He then goes on to discuss how Viking Y chromosomes are well-traveled. All I can say is that it is hard for me to imagine reasons why. And I can imagine quite a lot. As a member of Team Wales, I feel that I should try to unearth the meaning of this. Suggestions invited.

Here is Erin, with the blue part completed and the return to its other colors underway. (Erin, from Alice Starmore's Celtic Collection, in Highland Wool). The cat is assisting me in determining the fate of the blue band. Granted that it is bright, I still think I will keep it. It adds a spring-like air to the whole thing, and we are having a nice false spring here. Confused plants are leafing and budding and generally behaving as though it were spring, and maybe they are right. Perhaps we will just have a nice long spring. It is still cold, but we who have shivered at Easter sunrise services know that spring is often cold around here.

Shortly before reaching this point in the sweater, I had an odd e-mail message. It was a fellow I dated in college (I think), saying "I have never forgotten you and never will forget you." He went on to tell me about his wife and children, and he lives far away, so I am not alarmed by this, but I am also not quite sure that I remember him. I rather think he was an anthropology student who had been a fruitarian till his thesis committee told him he had to eat or be cast out of the program. If I am thinking of the right person, he may well be harboring a grudge and intending to hunt me down. I was not the best-behaved person at my college, I am afraid. I have since then become more domesticated and tame, though, if significantly less cute.

This is the book that I am alternating with The Ancestor's Tale. It is not exactly the right kind of book, because it does contain some ideas, though not much in the way of Big Ideas. Ideally, I would have as my alternate a very frothy little novel.

However, I have been wanting to read Freakonomics for a long time, so I am seizing the chance. I have confessed before in these pages that I have a sneaking fondness for statistical analysis of data. I have discovered some interesting and surprising things through analyzing numbers -- and aren't you glad I am not going to tell you what they were? Statistics is right up there with punctuation (which I also find interesting) on most people's lists of truly dull things. Freakonomics gets around this by going for the shocking, the politically incorrect, and -- well, maybe most people buy it because it was famous, and then find after the first chapter that their eyes slide off the page, and they don't read it after all. I think that was true of A Brief History of Time.

If you are thinking "I know I've heard of that book... where was it?", this is the book that claims that the drop in teen crime in the 1990s was the result of legalized abortion. Made some headlines there.

I was intrigued to discover  in this book that the No Child Left Behind Act has led to teacher cheating on the high-stakes tests -- up to 35% in some studies. I have seen that it has led to a lot of fudging -- choosing tests that give  the desired results, teaching to the test, and simply doing things that we know are poor pedagogy because of the pressure. But there have been some large-scale studies that found actual cheating with pencils on the paper, chalk on the board, stuff like that. I think so little of the test that this doesn't trouble me much in terms of the test results, but the message to the kids is disturbing. And the effects on the teachers themselves are very disturbing -- they might have been honest men and women before they were pushed to that extreme, but now they have cheated once, they may find it easier and easier. The old French saying is "It's only the first step that counts."

This came in the middle of a discussion on honesty: the circumstances that lead to greater or lesser honesty in malleable people. Very interesting.

Well, I have been tagged.

Four jobs I've had in my life:
1. artist's model
2. college teacher
3. museum education coordinator
4. foreign student advisor

Four movies I can watch over and over:
1. Singing in the Rain
2. The Court Jester
3. The Mikado (with Eric Idle)
4. Holiday Inn

Four places I have lived:
1. Santa Rosa, California
2. Silver Springs, Maryland
3. Biloxi, Mississippi
4. Sarasota, Florida

Four TV shows I love to watch:
1. The Daily Show
2. Vicar of Dibley
3. The Thin Blue Line
4. Monk

Four places I have been on vacation:
1. Kansas City, MO
2. San Francisco, CA
3. Eureka Springs, AR
4. Broken Arrow, OK

Four websites I visit daily:
1. xanga
2. other people's blogs
3. my bank's website
4. newspapers -- New York Times and SF Chronicle

Four of my favorite foods:
1. fruit salad
2. good homemade bread
3. ravioli
4. French pastry

Four places I would rather be right now:
1. Here's pretty good, thanks
2. No, really, even though I stole that answer from Kali Mama, I'm happy where I am.
3. Oh, okay, I can be happy anywhere, so I pick a nice big city.
4. And also a beach, desert, or mountain, for variety.

Four bloggers I am tagging:
1. Rosalyne01
2. Sighkey
3. LostArts
4. Dweezy

Rosalyne and I were talking about how, when reading Dawkins's books, you don't want to read straight through, because you keep encountering Big Ideas that you want to think about more before going on.

The Ancestor's Tale begins with a quote from Mark Twain: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes." I love that. Dawkins points out once again that -- after the fact -- it is very easy to look at a series of events and say how amazing it is that they worked out that way. If even one little thing had been different, you can say, this would never have happened. And, if you like the outcome -- say, the existence of human beings -- it is easy to decide that this outcome was the goal of all those little events. Unless there was someone writing things down at the beginning of the series, though, you are just like the pool player who never called a pocket and says "I meant to do that."

This point, while hardly new, caught my attention yet again because I had just heard a lecture on the Doctrine of Providence. This is the idea that God governs the entire universe, in all things big and small, good and evil. Whatever bad things happen, happen only because God allows them. The enormous number of bad things that do not happen, do not happen because God prevents them. This doctrine is not prevalent in mainstream Protestant churches (where we generally believe in free will), but it is firmly held in the class I attend on Tuesday nights. I try hard to be open-minded in this class. It is probably the only time during the week that I talk with people who really completely disagree with me, so I think it is good for me to try to entertain their hypotheses, as it were.

But then Dawkins went on to a less familiar notion. That is, that the universe doesn't really have a lot of options, not because God designed it, but because it is in the nature of universes to behave in certain ways. If you believe this, he says, then you would have to suppose that pi is always going to be three and a bit in all potential universes, because that is just how circles are, and no alternative is available. It seemed to me, on reading this, that it is a long way from pi to, say, the tendency toward symmetry among living things.

Then Sighkey posted her math question: why, when you multiply negative numbers, do you get a positive result? My initial reaction was "I don't know and I don't care, and this is why mathematicians don't get invited to the really fun parties." It reminded me of imaginary numbers, which I have always found really irritating.  The question grew on me, however. (Particularly since our national honor seemed to be at stake.I mean, we all accept that our educational system is seriously flawed, and that Kiwi-a-go-go-land is famous for the splendor of theirs, but still...)

 In the course of the day, I asked a bunch of people. The answers mostly ranged from "Our teachers don't tell us that" to "That's what's in the book," with a very strong undercurrent of "I don't know and I don't care."

Now, I was asking teachers, for the most part. That Man, being an accountant, both knows and cares, and he said, "Because you're going backwards." The Empress said, with an unconscious echo of Dawkins, "It has to do with the nature of negative numbers." Chanthaboune gave such a clear answer over at Sighkey's xanga that I may ask her to do my taxes.

But are any of these answers really why negative numbers multiply to positives? Even Chanthaboune's answer is only a clarification of the statement that two negative numbers multiplied together produce a positive answer. It is like the time I asked a math teacher why the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter was always pi, and she opened her eyes very wide and said, "Because that's how God made it." Which is very like saying that it is the nature of negative numbers to multiply to positives.

In his sermon on Sunday morning, our pastor said that it was exciting to learn that the greenness of leaves is caused by chlorophyll, until you find that the definition of chlorophyll is "the stuff that makes leaves green." And it may well be that many of the things that we treat as reasons are actually just descriptions.

It is simply in our nature to want to have reasons and explanations. Even if sometimes we confuse naming things with explaining them.

Many thanks to all you kind people who went and welcomed Rosalyne01 to xanga. Here is Erin. I have done another row or two of the blue, and will welcome thumbs up and thumbs down votes on leaving it in versus pulling it out and redoing with something less contrast-y. And Kali Mama has tagged me. I will respond to that as soon as I can move on mentally from the Doctrine of Providence and the nature of negative numbers.

Rosalyne01 has recently made herself a xanga. She was telling me last night that she doesn't have anything to write about. Then she told me what it feels like to ride the train into NYC, what she thought of the Guggenheim, why she prefers the Met, her views on modern art, and what NYC smells like.

I told her she should write about those things. She said her life was too dull, and she would have to write about playing tug of war with her dogs. She also told me about life on a Navy base, her views on respect in marriage, how strangers react to boxers, and how gaming is affecting conversation styles.

So I suggested that she should write about those things. But she said that people would be bored by anything she had to say, pointing out that the other Navy wives don't want to talk with her about Dawkins's views on squid. I said a) I am almost the only person who even knows her xanga is there at the moment, and b) you don't have to be entertaining on your xanga, because if visitors are bored, they will leave.

Then she explained the difference between a forum and a blog, what it's like to go to the mall with a bunch of sailors, and -- well, anyway, she has a lot of interesting thoughts. And it seems to me that a xanga filled with interesting thoughts is entertaining, even if she is not embedded in a terrorist cell or something obviously exciting.

So, will you do me a favor? Will you go over to her xanga and leave her a word of encouragement? Thank you.

I can offer you no knitting content today because I have not had any time to knit. However, on February 1st, 2005,  I posted a photo tutorial on sock heels. If you were seeking pictures of knitting, you could use the little calendar thing on the left to go there.

Oh, and I just have to tell you about the little girl who came into the store yesterday. She was playing with the trains, and making them go "choo choo choo baah!" She then told me that the store dog was a sheep. He goes Baah!, she assured me, because he is a sheep. Apparently the train was also a sheep. I'll tell you, I had to restrain myself from inviting her to join the Welsh Knitting Olympics team.

Oh, and Sighkey has a math question up that demands an answer.