Pieced Quilt Backs

Sew Mama Sew's blog did an awesome February Quilt Month. At one point there was an open thread and someone posted a question that I would like to respond to here.

I saw some quilt backings that were pieced. I really do not care for the designs available on the backings. Any hints on putting together a pieced quilt back?

If you're just slapping together pieces of the same fabric to make a back the size you need in a fabric you like, you're in good company. Quilters have been doing that since the beginning. Consider piecing it diagonally (for a how-to check out John Flynn's The Story of the Diagonal Seamed Back).
I like to piece simple, bold, modern designs for the backs of more traditional quilts. For example, I backed a simple 30s reproduction one patch with a Josef Albers' square using four larger scale reproduction fabrics.
You can piece the back of a quilt just like the front of the quilt. I saw two very intricate two-sided quilts by Jan Krentz at my quilt guild meeting in February. Jan actually made two impressive quilt tops with Hunter Star blocks and made one quilt out of them. She said she didn't do it for an aesthetic reason, but to keep the weight of her suitcases within the airlines' limits.* So she gets to show two quilts for the weight of one while she's on the road. Genius!
There are two things to consider when piecing a quilt back.

1. Due to the additional layer of seam allowances, if you're hand quilting it will be a little harder because you'll have to get through all those layers, and if you're machine quilting you'll have to be more vigilant about getting the bulk through the machine evenly. If you piece your back diagonally, when you look at the finished quilting, any variation due to the back seam will be less apparent because the variation is on the diagonal rather than straight vertically or horizontally (you know how the diagonal words are always the hardest to find in those find-the-word puzzles, same idea).
2. You have to be more careful about aligning your back and your top when you're basting. To align your back and your top mark the center of each side of your top and back, then line up those center marks when you lay out your layers to baste. Also if your back design has wide, plain borders in a fabric without a noticeable direction (not lines, plaids, or orthogonal patterns), it will be less noticeable if your alignment isn't perfect. For the same reason, I also like to make the borders on the back intentionally unequal (for example one large asymmetric log cabin block).

Technicalities aside, approach designing the back of your quilt as another opportunity for creativity. Just because it's not on top, doesn't mean it never gets seen. At the Indiana Heritage Quilt Show the white gloved quilt angels were kept particularly busy showing the back of a quilt that had an amusing bit of sassy appliqué on the back. Your next quilt back is a great place to try something new.

Edited 8/21/2008 to add:
Pink Chalk Studio blogged her process of deciding how to arrange a gorgeous Denyse Schmidt style pieced quilt back. The photos and her description of what was going through her mind as she made design choices are very instructive.

Edited 1/21/2009 to add:
Weeks Ringle, of FunQuilts fame, dedicated a post on her new blog Craft Nectar to the wonders of pieced quilt backs. Her primary advice:

Be sure that the back and front of the quilt are square and in alignment because you don’t want one side to look fine and the other side to be out of whack.

Edited 3/18/2009 to add:
Kathy of Pink Chalk Studio meticulously documented her attempt to implement the John Flynn method to create a diagonal seamed quilt back. Her verdict: "it’s awfully darn fussy for the results I got and the amount of time it took to cut the fabric!"

* Apropos of John Flynn's column in the May 2008 issue of Quilters Newsletter.(back)

Review Review

I read a number of craft blogs. The book review is a staple of the craft blog genre. There are so many craft books published these days that it is a bear to sort the wheat from the chaff and Amazon.com's reviews are often filled with people complaining that they wanted a book on a particular subject, so they bought this and it's not really on that subject, which is nice if you're not sure what the subject is, but otherwise unhelpful. So you would think craft book reviews would be a wonderful addition to the content of craft blogs. But it seems like no one in the crafting community is willing to grow a pair and be honest in their reviews. I mean, I dig, I scratch your back, you blurb my back cover. But you can still keep it positive without fabricating lies.

For example, a book that shall remain nameless (mostly because I have read so many lately and been so disappointed not only in the books, but in the bloggers’ reviews of the books that I’ve forgotten exactly which one), had artsy, hand-drawn diagrams which occasionally made the process less clear and inconsistent measurements within a project (like it would say “cut a piece of fabric into 30 4-inch squares” and then, “Now take one of your 40 3-inch squares . . . “) on multiple projects. Typos happen, whatevs. But when you review this book on your blog don’t rave on about its super accurate and helpful diagrams and instructions, which is exactly what one blogger did. Complement the pictures and the layout (which do seem to be what the publishers are concentrating on). Compliment the resources page (which is often one of the most useful things I find in even the craptastickest of craft books). Complement the font. But don’t lie to me.

Many moons ago I lived in a hip college town with an alterna paper that published the best movie reviews I have ever read. The reviewer succinctly made it clear whether he liked the movie or not, but also whether YOU would like the movie or not. More eloquently than this he would say, “It’s not my cup of tea, but if you’re into action movies made for their ability to put a THX sound system through its paces, do not miss this film.”

I want my craft book reviewers to do the same. Sure you can love it, but say, “This book rocks in the following ways . . . Just FYI, the publisher has posted an errata sheet (for example: the errata for Jan Krentz's Lone Star Quilts and Beyond). Where the directions might not be robust enough for a novice, the Flickr group (for example: the Flickr group for Lotta Jansdotter Simple Sewing) that has grown around the book has created a community of helpful crafters more than willing to hand-hold newbies. And don’t forget to check out the author’s rocktastic blog (for example: Angry Chicken, the blog of the author of Bend the Rules Sewing), the archives of which are rich with her instructive musing while working on the same or similar projects.”

And better yet, show don’t tell. You write a craft blog. Do one of the projects in the book and share the experience. You can’t judge a book by its cover, and you certainly can’t judge a craft book until you’ve actually walked through a project in its shoes . . . OK those metaphors got a little Sir Mix-a-lot, but you understand me.

more mortgage deduction

(shoulda been clipped in previous)

clipped from www.theatlantic.com What it does promote, studies show, is spending on housing—that is, people who would have been owners anyway pay more for their houses. Prices are higher than they would otherwise have been, and mortgages are bigger. As many owners have learned abruptly, this can worsen economic insecurity.

Mortgage deduction silliness

Via Matt Yglesias

clipped from www.theatlantic.com The mortgage-interest deduction is the backbone of American housing policy. It exists, ostensibly, to encourage widespread homeownership. In its favor, it doesn’t actually do that. But it does have consequences: It’s been one of the quieter causes of the housing bubble. The mortgage-interest deduction deserves special recognition for the stupidity with which it subsidizes something that should not be subsidized in the first place. I challenge you to design a subsidy for homeownership that is as wasteful, as unfair, and as harmful to the economy in the long run.

Sales of Obamaphernalia as a Function of Candidate Popularity

I've been a little obsessed with my Zazzle sales lately, specifically, the precipitous drop off in my Zazzle sales. On February 3rd I create two or three t-shirt designed using quote from Barack Obama's speeches. These shirts sold like hotcakes through about the 10th. Then they've tanked. Why? I took a look at Gallup's daily poll to see if there was some sort of connection between the Obama's popularity among Democrats and my drop in sales. Maybe people buy underdog t-shirts (well, not literally), but when their candidate stops being an underdog, they stop buying. What do you think?

Caffeinanxiety

Ever since I overheard someone say that people with arthritis shouldn’t drink caffeine because it is an inflammatory, I have seriously laid off that wonderful little legal upper. But in these short winter days when my mood regularly plummets toward blue in the shade of navy or midnight, I figured I could use a little pick me up. Well, one cup of Earl Grey later and I am Michael J. Fox in Bright Lights, Big City. A plus side of this is that I read my usual 30+ blogs in less than 20 minutes. A downside is I am deeply concerned about the my friendships as fomented by the peppering of quotes in Robert Genn’s Twice Weekly Letter.

First, I do not think I have kept my friendships in constant repair. I doubt I’ve even kept them in sporadic repair. And this explains why the hardest question for me on the FBI background check is name five people who are not related to you and who you have known well for over five years. But background checks aside, I am concerned. Not concerned enough to join a social networking site and start stalking my old friends, but concerned.

Second, the weird thing is I think about these long lost friends all the time, to the point that I have to consciously remind myself to stop clinging to the past and live in the present. But they don't know that. And how creepy would it be for me to send a card that says, "By the way, I think about you all the time. Today, while I was chopping squash, I almost cut off my thumb because I was thinking about you. But this card is it. I'll keep forgetting your birthday. I won't respond if you write back. I'm not including my phone number, because I never answer the phone and hate to return calls. But I'll feel guilty forever about not maintaining our friendship, and every so often I will wonder what you are doing right this very instant, and every time I chop squash I will think of how once I almost cut my thumb off because I was thinking of you."

Things to Do: Update

Breeders: +1, Sarah: 0

Add one more baby quilt to my list of Things to Do. A dear friend of mine just announced that she is on a short list to adopt a newborn, which is so awesome . . . and yet mysterious. The adoption process is completely mystifying to me.

Let's hope it's a girl, because I've got the pieces of a girly quilt all cut out and ready to roll from when I laid out a, what I thought was pretty unisex, 30s reproduction quilt for an impending boy. Right before I started sewing I found out that the boy's room was decorated in a farm theme, but his dad thought that wasn't masculine enough, so his bathroom was going to be decorated in a shark theme or something equally terrifying from a Freudian childhood development standpoint. So I pulled all the blocks with flowers or pink as the dominant color and then had my husband look through them and pull out any other non-masculine patches that my butch-filter didn't screen out. So I was left with a stack of pink, lavender, flowery patches and an inordinate level of anxiety about the color and motifs in the baby quilts I make . . . or rather the baby quilts I have in various stages of production, since I haven't finished a baby quilt since that masculine 30s repro quilt, which was a huge hit, btw.

Product Review: Fresh Repair and Restore Face Balm

As the only specific post anyone has ever complemented me on was the product review of Seikisho Mask White, I feel compelled to review the other free samples I got from Neimans. And this was the spirit with which I tried Fresh Repair and Restore Face Balm.I do not actually feel that my face is in need of repair or restoration. These are the sacrifices I make for you, Gentle Reader.

Following my standard face wash and toner I popped open a miniature tub of Fresh Repair and Restore Face Balm. The packaging alone is leaps and bounds better than the little packets most samples come in. Usually I don’t use the whole sample in one go, (well other than the Seikisho Mask White, but that was because it kept telling me I wasn’t applying enough) so I end up using mini-binder clips and other office supplies to keep the rest of my sample from oozing all over my ablutions basket. And even in non-sample sizes I’m a big fan of little tubs instead of tubes or bottles with pump tops because I feel like I can get all of the stuff out of little tubs, but tubes and bottles take a little for themselves, like the IRS. Does that make the little tub of Fresh Repair and Restore Face Balm Ron Paul?

Anywho, at first sniff I thought, “Fresh, zingy.” At second sniff I thought, “Instructions or no, I am not getting this noxious material near my eyes, mouth, or nostrils.” Which was quickly followed by, “Do I have Poison Control on speed dial?”

Then I applied. A little dab will indeed do ya’. I just thought about the idea of putting it on my t-zone and that was plenty. It’s not like applying Bullfrog, my sunscreen of choice and the top choice of surfing vampires everywhere, which actually turns all organisms into amphibians and can only be removed with turpentine and a sandblaster. And it breaths better than a lot of moisturizers who will go unnamed (Trish McEvoy, you know who you are). This is particularly impressive given that it is a night cream, so it’s not meant to be wearable while you go about your activities of daily living. It’s meant to stay on your face while you sleep. But I applied it AND went about my activities of daily living quite successfully. It did not melt into my eyes and burn, contrary to its initial olfactory threat (and unlike my beloved Bullfrog which, at least in the formulation I have, will burn your eyes worse than onions, so wash your hands after applying, consciously avoid touching your eyes, and consider applying to your face only from the cheeks down and wearing a big hat; the things we vamps do to get our surf on). And it didn’t make my skin sweat weirdly, like other night creams will if you wear them around, which is why they’re called “night creams.”

And this is when the fun really began. My face started to feel like it was not my own, like maybe it was some other, hopefully more attractive, person’s face. I kept rushing into the bathroom to look at the mirror to see who I’d turned into. It worked for, Barbara Harris and Jodie Foster, and Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis, though I think that trade was really pretty even. Buffy and Faith? Clark Kent and Lionel Luthor? It seems to happen every day on the CW, so why couldn’t it happen to me? Mirror, mirror on the wall, answered the same old way it always does: just Sarah. Which is good enough for me.

We Cannot Shop Our Way to a Greener World

Today's must read: The Dangerous Delusions of 'Inverted Quarantine', an article by Andrew Szasz, a professor and chairman of the department of sociology at the University of California at Santa Cruz and author of Shopping Our Way to Safety: How We Changed From Protecting the Environment to Protecting Ourselves. Not only does it briefly review the evils of bottled water, but it goes on to discuss the idea of an "Inverted Quarantine" response to environmental awareness

in which people act not as political subjects, not as citizens, but as consumers who seem interested only in individual acts of self-protection, in trying to keep contaminants out of their bodies.

This leads to the bigger problem, the problem that kept Bush in office two terms while Whole Foods expanded its marketshare and Wal-Mart started selling organic produce.

Inverted-quarantine products do not work nearly well enough to actually protect those who put their faith in them. But consumers believe they work. That belief, in turn, tends to decrease our collective will to truly confront serious environmental issues.

My Geek Fell Out

I'm sure those of you who fly your geek flag proudly
(>cough< >Bob< >cough<)
have long ago bookmarked the wonderful Random.org. I just discovered it today . . . and I'm in love. Please provide me a long list of things to do that involve using it. I think I might make some random bitmap t-shirts, just because I can.

Home

When I was a senior in high school I wrote a series of essays, short stories, and poems based on all of the definitions in Webster's Unabridged Dictionary of the word, "home." At it's height, it was easily a hundred pages long. I wrote it for an assignment in English class and had explained to my teacher that I needed extension after extension because this was going to be My First Epic Work. My teacher, who was clearly Neal Cassady living under the pseudonym Fred Tremallo after retiring from CIA, upon reading the first thirty pages, approved. Then my disk began to corrupt. I have attempted many times to write a poetic description of this harrowing ordeal, but words fail me, like that disk failed me. Arachne spun her web in my 5 1/4" drive. I even brought my disk to my teacher's office - he was quite the computer wiz for an old dude, probably picked it up at the Agency - and we watched together as the bits disappeared from the disk. He asked if I could recreate the lost works. But the words never came out quite the same way again. And I never felt the same passion for the project. It broke my heart. Just thinking about the very idea of home hurt like a bad breakup. Somehow I feel like an expert in the idea of home because I spent so much time with it that one year so long ago. And even though thinking about home hurts, I've thought about it ever since. The one conclusion I can retrieve from the wreckage is this: A house is not a home.

I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

A friend of mine is moving from the house in which he married his wife, in which his daughter was born, and it's breaking his heart. It wasn't his choice. His landlord terminated their lease. I want to console my friend. I want to tell him that his marriage will endure, his daughter will not miss the place. I sought some factual basis for my argument (doesn't everyone craft their condolences like they craft an argument?). The closest thing I found was this article by Carol Lloyd The American dream and our conception of home about a contest and survey conducted by Coldwell Banker. Ms. Lloyd pointedly states:

By linking home ownership to invisible forces like love and family and tradition and happiness, we've all bought into a powerful yet sometimes destructive myth.

Renting a house instead of owning a house does not mean you have less of a home. Renting does not make you unAmerican. 95% of Americans were at one time or are now renters.
The closest I got to an answer to the question of whether his daughter will be somehow damaged by living in a house other than the one in which she was born, the survey results included this little nugget:

When asked what makes a house a home, the most popular responses from adults were: "family" (60 percent) and "love" (47 percent), followed by "family time." This matched the children’s top three responses of "family," "love" and "memories," demonstrating that adults and children are aligned on the core values that make a house a home.

Can a home you weren't born in have memories attached to it? I hope so. I couldn't pick the house I was born in out of a lineup.

You Would Never See This During the Cold War

Due to some truly desperate and/or misguided marketing, the U.S. Navy mailed my husband a recruitment brochure. But more disturbing than the idea that the U.S. Navy is so desperate that they're trying to recruit thirtysomething Spanish professors with bad backs, is their pitch.

Want to heat up your career before you leave college? NUKE IT.

And on the other side:

Ready to start a high-speed chain reaction?

I am not making these up. I tried to find an image of this brochure online to no avail. As soon as I can get to a scanner, I will scan and post it.
But wait, there's more inside.

Start a high-speed chain reaction. Propel your life and your country forward!

So the Navy is actively pursuing people with a proclivity for dropping The Bomb, or at least playing fast and loose with fissile material. This does not make me sleep easier.

Atheists have their say. Virtually.

John Allen Paulos, bringin' math to the masses like we all should, has some questions for the candidates.

This puts a point to the conversation had some time ago over at thecitizens about how the atheists/agnostics felt more looked down on than the Mormons. I remain frankly dubious of that characterization, although proponents like Christopher Hitchens are actively baiting religious folk, so perhaps the trend is heading that way.

Anyhow, as always, Paulos has some excellent questions, though there are a few in there that seem rather lacking in oomph to me. No doubt Paulos himself could say something about the pros and cons of the "top X list" format of articles -- oh wait, he already did (see A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper).

Daily Show interview

Bob: "Well, that was a nice interview."
Rebecca: "Of course, it's Tim Gunn! They're like the two nicest guys on television!"

Hope . . . Vote (alt title: Obama-sing-a-long-a)

Am I the only person that was moved to tears by this YouTube video in support of Barack Obama? According to www.yeswecansong.com it was made independently of the campaign by Bob Dylan's son, director Jesse Dylan, and musician will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas. It features a singing Scarlett Johansson, Harold Perrineau, and some other famous people who I am not qualified to identify, but who are all listed at www.yeswecansong.com.

Of course, as is often the case these days, I was moved to create a number of t-shirts of Obama quotes from this and other speeches.


Here are the lyrics if you're a YouTube-phobe.

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation.

Yes we can.

It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail toward freedom.

Yes we can.

It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness.

Yes we can.

It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballots; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land.

Yes we can to justice and equality.

Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity.

Yes we can heal this nation.

Yes we can repair this world.

Yes we can.

We know the battle ahead will be long, but always remember that no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.

We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics...they will only grow louder and more dissonant . . . . We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope.

But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.

Now the hopes of the little girl who goes to a crumbling school in Dillon are the same as the dreams of the boy who learns on the streets of LA; we will remember that there is something happening in America; that we are not as divided as our politics suggests; that we are one people; we are one nation; and together, we will begin the next great chapter in the American story with three words that will ring from coast to coast; from sea to shining sea --

Yes. We. Can.

Slave to Fashion

I am a big supporter of the Writers Guild of America strike, which is particularly easy given that I don't watch television. However, along with the economic impact on the rank and file entertainment industry workers, the big bummer about the strike is the lack of red carpet.

I love me some red carpet. It's just a completely fantastical fashion brief: make this person who just stepped out of a car look amazing from all conceivable angles for both still photography and video while standing on a brightly colored, non-reflective surface in a garment that has to be unique but appealing to that actor's target demographic. And the pictures of this person in this garment will make or break their career . . . so no pressure.

Alas, this season we are thus far left with the Screen Actors Guild Awards as our only fix. So enjoy the lasting photos of people not sure how to dress for an event that they usually don't bother to show up for, and certainly wouldn't wear a gown to, cocktail dress being more appropriate, and vote, Unions Yes!

There are some gorgeous ones at the New York Times.
And of course the ladies of Go Fug Yourself gave their two cents on a few ensembles.

Keep your fingers crossed for the Oscars!

What a political blog post is NOT supposed to be.

Some thoughts:

Somebody DO something!

So we've got a lame duck president, who continues to sign bills into law and comment that he won't follow them, who wants MORE surveillance powers and thinks lawsuits against his pals should be ex post facto taken off the books, and now I hear on NPR that he's making treaties with Iraq that he won't call treaties and building permanent bases that he won't call permanent, because if he calls them something else, apparently that makes it so the un-permanent bases are legal and the un-treaties, while binding, don't need ratification.

Take the craven Republican congress away, and his truly despotic nature came to the fore -- in the face of the craven Democratic congress.

I am furious! This administration is a blight and he STILL keeps coming up with new and worse wrongs to commit and nobody's DOING anything to stop him!

I don't want to advocate violent upheaval and active dissent and passive resistance and civil disobedience, but come on! What do I do inside the rules that ends the flagrant horror?

So, it's all waterboarding under the bridge?

Before he was confirmed, Mukasey wouldn't say whether waterboarding was torture because he didn't have the information. So now?

He won't say if waterboarding is torture because the CIA doesn't do it (or at least, it isn't policy) and they're not planning to do it. Never mind that they unquestionably DID it. And why is he not going to look into whether it WAS torture? Because if he "second-guesses" his predecessors, that sends the wrong message. It tells the interrogators that they if they get told to do it and later it "turns out" to be torture, then they might get in trouble just for following orders. And that's the wrong message because...um...

Seriously, the only way to finish that sentence is "because they won't do what they know is torture if we tell them to." Anyone care to argue that would be "the wrong message"?

Luckily for us, this isn't the only vile fume issuing from Mukasey's mouth. He also put forth the position that whether
waterboarding (or whatever) "shocks the conscience" depends on the circumstances. Like, if the information that might result from the "interrogation" would save lives, then it might not be torture.

I _had_ thought that all this absolutism about torture was just unserious. I mean, it's _only_ torture; obviously _sometimes_ it's not so bad. If it was wrong all the time, you'd call it something else, like, uh...

The snark in me assumes the Republican position would be that sentence ends in "homosexuality", but more seriously, isn't the whole friggin' point of banning TORTURE is that "even in extremis, when lives are at stake, we DON'T DO THIS?" What moral high ground are you claiming with "we don't torture, but we do exactly things that in other circumstances would be torture if it's really important"?

I'm not accusing Mukasey of dissembling and hypocrisy at orders unthinkable. I'm writing words that in other contexts could assert that he's an unthinkably hypocritical liar, but given the dire circumstances and horrific scenarios that could result if he ISN'T called an unthinkably hypocritical liar, the potential benefits of this action preclude labeling it an accusation.

Granfaloons

So, I had a touch of an epiphany during a conversation with my wife's uncle. He talked about grand jury duty, and I found that he used words to mean something I would use the antonym to mean. Kind of like "flammable" and "inflammable". For example, he said he was a conservative, so he thought you needed to have some evidence to indict someone. Or similarly, that busting someone for drug possession and drug paraphernelia possession because the weed was in a baggie, he didn't think that was right. He didn't know if I would agree, since you know, I might be liberal, but that was his opinion. A different uncle assumed I wouldn't like his thoughts about health care at all -- when he expounded those ideas, they sounded exactly like the Australian system.

The first realization is that we attribute our virtues to political designations even when they don't deserve it -- there's nothing "conservative" about "innocent until proven guilty" and rejecting sneaky end-arounds by DA's to try to rack up felony counts. But there's nothing "liberal" about that either. In many real ways, we are not politically divided at all.

The second realization, after reading Ronald Reagan's rejection of "Trust me" government and John Ashcroft's demands to preserve privacy rights (?!) (see Glenn Greenwald), was that the labels were just teams: the Republicans spend like "Liberals" when they're in power, and the Democrats serve big business when they're in power. It's very 1984ish.

Politically speaking, the party in power tries to extend and calcify the reach of government generally and their hold on the reins, and the party out of power tries to limit (executive) government control and promote opportunity -- for them to wrest control.

It would make more sense for citizens to identify as "pro-incumbent" or "pro-opposition", rather than R or D. That the politicians would switch party titles when they switch roles would be more honest hypocrisy than what we have now -- an endless redefining of liberal and conservative and neoliberal (which means conservative) and neoconservative (which means fascist, which Jonah Goldberg tells me means liberal) to fit the exigencies of the moment, resulting in a cascade of political identifications that, though more confusingly used, are in fact rather less meaningful than "Bloods" and "Crips".

I'm mostly curmudgeonly, bitter, pessimistic, etc. But there's a small silvery lining here: despite the similarly disingenuous use of the word "bipartisanship", there really are (potentially) swaths of stuff that government could do (or get out of) that "liberals" and "conservatives" alike could agree on, if they didn't vilify it by association with the other camp. I don't know that this is true of the politicians claiming to be the heads of those two groups, but the actual people on the ground are a different story.

Death in Georgia

The New Yorker has an excellent article about the prosecution of Brian Nichols for the 2005 courthouse shooting spree in Atlanta. It focuses on the challenges of defending the indigent. One of the main characters is Stephen B. Bright, the senior counsel for the Southern Center for Human Rights.

He is my hero. I saw him on a panel at the New School's conference on punishment in the U.S. Everyone was complaining about the piling on of post-release punishments for sex offenders when someone said something like, "The problem is, who is going to take on the incredibly unpopular role of the defender of sex offenders' rights." Bright raised his hand, "I am."

Charitable Giving and Your Tax Rebate

I received an email from TrueMajority today that caught my eye. The subject line was, "Can part of your rebate save the economy?" Reading further it asked me to donate 10% of the six hundred dollar tax rebate check that is my part of the economic stimulus package to TrueMajority.
This touches on a debate I have been trying to foment among my peers about alumni giving. Specifically, if you have a limited budget for charitable giving why would you give it to, say, for example, a school with a billion dollar endowment, instead of, say, people in actual need?
It also touches on a basic problem I have with these economic band-aid refund checks. I want the troops to have proper equipment. I want poor people around the country to have access to healthy food. I want public schools to educate children about more than "be sure to fill in a bubble on every line because you're not penalized for guessing." So should I oppose the $600 rebate checks? Or should I donate my share to charity? If so, which charities? Who do you send the check to for, "properly equip our troops"? Who do you send the check to for, "teach children in public schools"? Who do you send the check to for, "save WIC and food stamps and make the application process easier"?
While you contemplate the answers to these questions, be sure to play FreeRice.

Edited 5/12/2008 to add:
Check out Brad DeLong's post, tangentially on the subject of irrational alumni giving to schools with excessively large endowments.

Prisons and Politics

If you asked me in 1988 who I would vote for in the Democratic primary in 2008 (because I knew in 1988 that I would be voting in the Democratic primary in 2008, don't all 14 year olds strongly identify with a political party?) and you told me my options, I would probably have voted for Hillary Clinton.

But then I went to law school and learned about the criminal justice system and now I cannot possibly vote for someone who opposes crack guideline retroactivity and who justifies this irrational position by citing Giuliani's apparently similar position. For those not in the sentencing know, back in the heyday of crack paranoia, the U.S. Sentencing Commission established sentencing guidelines which punished offenses related to crack 100 times longer than offenses related to powder cocaine. This has long been held up as an example of institutionalized racism in sentencing. Whether the U.S.S.C. was being racist or whether it was succumbing to the media frenzy, the result was bad law. The U.S.S.C. recently issued new guidelines which reduce this 100:1 disparity and recommended that they apply retroactively.

Clinton and the Bush Administration oppose the effort to make this change retroactive. This is the first evidence I've seen that Hillary is taking the same "tough on crime"/ irrational sentencing stance as her husband. While Bill Clinton was great for this country in many ways, he undermined the rights of the accused arguably more than any president in history. I expected better from Hillary. I am now officially disappointed. Therefore, I am not going to vote for Hillary Clinton.

Criminal justice reform is the new civil rights movement. And the Clintons are moving in the wrong direction.

Edit: It has recently been brought to my attention that in all fairness I should post all of the candidates' positions on retroactivity. Obama and Edwards support retroactivity. Clinton and Giuliani oppose retroactivity. I can't find Romney's or McCain's positions, though given Romney's attempts to be tough on crime in Massachusetts, I'd bet he's opposed. I emailed both of their campaigns to ask what their position on crack retroactivity is. I'll update if I hear anything.

Edit 2/12/2008: No, I haven't heard back from McCain, and I don't think Romney is taking this time off the campaign trail to respond to emails. But I did find another post over at Prof. Berman's blog that covers the candidates' positions on crime and punishment a little more thoroughly:"Where candidates stand on crime, death penalty".

Edit 3/25/2008: Still haven't heard back from McCain. But the ever wonderful Prof. Berman posted a link to The Sentencing Project's guide to the 2008 Presidential Candidates' Platforms on Criminal Justice that provides information on a range of key criminal justice issues, including sentencing policy, reentry, death penalty, and felony disenfranchisement.

Product Review - Seikisho Mask White

In the spirit of this blog's complete lack of a coherent theme, I would like to share my experience with
Seikisho Mask White. When you order stuff from Neiman Marcus online they make up for the tons of free stuff the people at their makeup counters normally throw into your bag by letting you choose three sample sized freebies from a relatively short list upon check out. I usually get whatever shampoo samples they have to take to the gym and then whatever isn't perfume. This time the whatever isn't perfume was Seikisho Mask White. If you follow the above link to the product you will see a picture of a white woman in the mask. Which is probably a good thing because I had no idea that this substance labeled "Mask White" would in fact be black. First, it is merely disconcerting to squish what looks like recently unearthed petroleum onto your fingers. Second, upon applying said mask I had a flashback to a very special episode of Gimme A Break in which Nell explains to Joey that wearing blackface while performing his tapdance routine to "Me and My Shadow" is horribly offensive. My next thought was, "Please don't let the house catch on fire for the next twenty minutes while this goo dries because I'm fairly sure that my merely exiting the house in this mask would violate someone's civil rights." What would possess a company to make such a mask? The company that makes Seikisho Mask White is Kose, which according to its website is a leading cosmetic company in Japan.
When I was a kid my mom had a tube of peel-off mask which smelled like lemon dish soap and probably was some misformulated batch of lemon dish soap repackaged and sold as a beauty product . . . like 3M developed the repositionable adhesive on the back of post-its from a failed foray into finding a more adhesive adhesive. Anywhoodles, Mom's lemon peel-off mask was clear, so you couldn't tell exactly where you'd already applied it to your face, nor how thickly you'd applied it. When it came to the fun part, peeling it off like a creature from the black, or in this case clear, lagoon, it was hard to see what patches you had failed to remove. This was particularly true around the hairline. So later that day, after your fantastic beauty routine made you feel 100% more pretty, oh so pretty, you'd be doing something you would otherwise not feel fit to attempt, like, say, talking to a cute boy. And at a particularly flirty moment you would attempt to flip your hair and your finger would get caught on what you might easily mistake for straw, but was in fact the dried, clear mask in your hair. There is no cool way to pull dried mask out of your hair. Think monkeys grooming one another. Then turn the monkey into a mortified preteen girl.
Flashforward to today: make the mask a color so you can see where you've applied it, see how thickly you've applied it, and see where it's still left on you . . . including your hair. But as Harry Chapin taught us, there are so many colors in the rainbow. Why black? Why not blue or purple or green?
Maybe someone thought, "Let's sell a product to rich white women (i.e. the consumer base of Neiman Marcus), which forces them to confront race." Ingenius. Or maybe it was just a placeholder color until someone tested it and enjoyed the moments when they looked like a racoon, a Guy Fawkes mask, Lenin, Groucho Marx. I know I certainly did.
Does my face look better? I dunno. Feels about the same. Maybe my pores are a bit more svelt. But that's not really the point, is it?

Things to Do

In the spirit of togetherness and sharing and progress that is M.L.K. Jr.'s legacy . . . O.K. or just because I told Bob that if he posted his list of things to do I would post mine . . . and that is SO not nagging. If you want nagging, I'll show you nagging. Bring it on, little man! Sorry, this post is getting away from me. Oh yes, things to do and togetherness and sharing.

• Finish two baby quilts and start and finish two more. These kids are going to be thirty by the time I finish their baby quilts. I am contemplating telling my friends that I need to be notified before they even start trying to conceive. Every time they have unprotected sex, I should get a reminder email to get started on that quilt.
• Make a camera obscura. This needs no explanation.
• Affix the color tabs to my New Munsell Student Color Set.
• Put finish on end table. I decoupaged an end table with postcards of Spanish advertisements and a tapas menu. But I don't think two layers of Mod Podge will protect it from the horrors that are life as an end table. So I've got this insane resin to cover it so it will look like the end table in the cabin on Cape Cod with the seashells and the sand all embedded over a yellowing map of the area. But without the seashells or the sand . . . or the map.

Nagging works. Once.

Here's some things I want to do:

• Work on database design with SQL. Databases that I ought to make: commodity prices (grab daily prices and /or daily price changes), math students (course history, success as function of background), contacts (although I might use Google for this), comic books.
• Playtest a mathy game about functions.
• build a robot.
  
• And some other devices with less electronics.

Other things as I come up with them. And, ideally, progress updates on the above.

Parenting Resources (I am not pregnant)

I know, I know, why would I compile a list of alternative parenting resources if I am not now nor in the coming year going to be a parent? Well, partly it's because the New York Times Magazine had an article Family Values in it's Consumed column that had a number of references to things that, while inapplicable now, may be applicable in the future. And when I'm wigging out about folic acid and organic everything and not sleeping and constantly nauseous, I'm thinking I won't be in the mood to ferret out cool resources like this to assuage my alternahubby's fears of impending daddiness.

• Yo, Gabba Gabba!, the Nickelodeon television show that inspired the NY Times article.
• Neal Pollack authored Alternadad.
• Kidrobot
• Salon.com's article about Kindie Rock
• Dan Zane's Music
• Laurie Berkner's Music, who Salon dubbed the Ani DiFranco of kid's music
• Offsprung
• OhDeeDoh from the people who brought you Apartment Therapy


• Stroller Reviews at New York Magazine

And just to make this clear, I am not pregnant.

Edited on 5/4/2008 to add:
There's this really disturbing article on CNN.com about ultra posh pre-natal nonsense (which I found via OhDeeDoh, which had the even more disturbing comments implying that all this ultra posh pre-natal nonsense was O.K., e.g. "The photography session and the five-star vacation sound normal to me," which sorta makes me never want to read OhDeeDoh ever again). But perhaps the most disturbing thing was not about the ultra posh at all.

Babies cost an average of $10,600 in the first year to feed, clothe and care for, according to 2007 federal statistics.

Seriously?!? And is it wrong for me to think, "I'd kinda rather have a new car"? Maybe that's just a sign that I'm not ready yet. Which is true. I am not pregnant. I am not trying to become pregnant. I will not try to become pregnant in the next year. Just in case you weren't clear on that.

Edited on 5/13/2008 to add:
If you're one of those future parents who thinks you have to unplug all modes of media in your house once the tiny tyke arrives, apparently you can relax and let them play violent video games from like birth or something and studies show it will all be O.K.

Edited on 6/2/2008 to add:
A neat Time Magazine article on green parenting which name drops three different green parenting books:

• Raising Baby Green: The Earth-Friendly Guide to Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Baby Care by Alan Greene, Jeanette Pavini, and Theresa Foy DiGeronimo
• Growing Up Green: Baby and Child Care: Volume 2 in the Bestselling Green This! Series (Green This!) by Deirdre Imus
• Healthy Child Healthy World: Creating a Cleaner, Greener, Safer Home by Christopher Gavigan

Edited on 9/18/2008 to add:
Inhabitots posts about cloth diapering.

A friend of mine suggested the Boston Women's Health Collective, of Our Bodies Ourselves fame, as a great resource for pregnancy and childbirth information. She also suggested that What to Expect When You're Expecting is a horrible book for expecting parents as it is entirely couched in negative terms, like pregnancy is a horrible disease and birth is the cure of this affliction. The BWHC has a very thorough critique of childbearing advice books.

Edited on 9/23/2008 to add:

AskMetafilter responses to a question about parents expressing anger in response to a child's wrongdoing. Perhaps like a lot of AskMetafilter posts, the responses provide no real answer to the question posed, but provide a number of resources that might be interesting to check out.

Edited on 9/29/2008 to add:

Alice Waters on raising kids to eat right via Serious Eats.

Edited on 12/11/2008 to add:

Whip Up's elephantine list of tutorials about how to make stuff for babies and parents.

Blue Marble's post about a study that indicates obesity is linked to grandparents' diet.

Re-Nest scavenges Etsy to find an Eco-Friendly Toddler Flatware Set.

AskMetafilter on natural birth vs. medicated birth. The key to AskMeFi is to read the comments as that's where the good stuff is.

AskMetafilter on parenting issues around two kids sharing one bedroom.

Re-Nest on how to make your own baby wipes.

Edited on 1/8/2009 to add:
Serious Eats' video interview between chefs Mario Batali and Tony Bourdain about baby food.

Edited on 1/15/2009 to add:
The Kitchn (Apartment Therapy's food-centered blog) recommends a children's book: Let's Cook! by Robert Crowther. This interactive cookbook for kids includes pop-out cardboard bacon and utensils.

Edited on 1/16/2009 to add:
The hive mind of AskMeFi seriously pondered what material possessions a new baby requires. One oft-noted book I'd never heard of: Dr. Harvey Karp's The Happiest Baby on the Block: The New Way to Calm Crying and Help Your Newborn Baby Sleep Longer.

A question that is seriously taxing my husband's mind: will our relationship with our dogs change when a new baby joins the family? The AskMeFi hive mind wisely pondered this concern. A book recommended by the hive: Childproofing Your Dog: A Complete Guide to Preparing Your Dog for the Children in Your Life by Brian Kilcommons and Sarah Wilson.

In the fantasy world where I'm an awesome parent and my kids buy into my crazy parenting nonsense, we would totally do this resolutions thing Laura from Girl in a Swirl posted over at Whip Up.

Edited on 1/29/2009 to add:
The Write Start is a blog by a mom/pediatric occupational therapist/writer Jennifer Hallissy about getting young children ready to write. Via Whip Up.

Parents.com has a toy and kid gear recall finder. Via Consumerist.

Edited on 4/24/2009 to add:
A number of friends of mine who have recently had children have not found breastfeeding to be as easy as it's cracked up to be. From what I've heard that's a very common experience that a lot of women just don't talk about (I have this whole conspiracy theory involving La Leche League and the baby formula industry, but I'll save that for another day).

A friend of mine who just had a baby in October highly recommends The Nursing Mother's Companion: Revised Edition by Kathleen Huggins.

While she didn't agree with everything The Nursing Mother's Companion said, she found it very helpful for nursing. She also offered the caveat that reading it required her and her husband "gathering the ability to move past laughing hysterically at all the pictures of breasts in it." So if nothing else, you might get a laugh out of it.

Edited on 7/22/09 to add:
100 Geeky Places to Take Your Kids This Summer by GeekDad Doug Cornelius over at Wired (via OhDeeDoh) includes old standbys like Colonial Williamsburg and Old Sturbridge Village and annual events like Comic-Con and the Penny Arcade Expo.

Linked through an ad on OhDeeDoh to an online store for natural toys called ChildTrek. I totally want the Kidsonroof TOTEM Tree to play with all by myself.

The Boy's Almanac is a blog by "two mothers constantly striving to maintain a wild, self-sufficient childhood for our boys and wanting to revive the old school methods of practical scouting, bypassing the modern organization and its discriminating baggage." I like that mission statement. And they're not sexist, they just don't have girls. The blog follows their adventures as they undertake the projects in The American Boy's Handy Book: What to Do and How to Do It, Centennial Edition. Via OhDeeDoh (let's just call today's update The OhDeeDoh Digest).

Uncommon Goods sells Your Body Puzzle, which seems like a neat way to introduce a 3+ year old to their parts both external and internal. This puzzle is a little more cartoony and a little less Grey's Anatomy than the 3-D Muscle & Skeleton Puzzle (for 8+ year olds). I love the idea of anatomy toys for kids. I have to say, I spent hours looking through my dad's medical books, mostly for pictures of skin diseases to gross myself out. Again, via OhDeeDoh. Fat Brain Toys has a set of Human Anatomy Models for 7+ year olds that looks seriously anatomically correct AND lots of fun. Kids Toy Chest has a wide array of human anatomy toys as does another childhood favorite Edmond Scientific. Of course Dover has the Human Anatomy Coloring Book.

All that talk of human anatomy is making me hungry. Good thing OhDeeDoh found tempered glass Kidishes available at Zoe B Organic. In case you're not up on the major issues in child dining, here's a quick summary: plastic is evil. Even if it's BPA-free plastic or melamine, it's still evil if you put it in the microwave. That's where tempered glass dishes come in. They're harder to break than normal dishes, but they're just as safe to throw in the microwave as normal dishes.

Edited on 7/23/09 to add:
While I was assembling yet another piece of IKEA furniture, I got to thinking about The Boy's Almanac from the previous update. When I was a kid, messing around in my dad's workshop was so much fun. With shop classes eliminated from so many school curricula, covering at least basic hand tool skills has, yet again, become the parents' responsibility. There are a few books out there to help even novice parents meet this challenge. Woodshop for Kids by Jack McKee seems like a good one.

Edited on 7/28/09 to add:
All Things Considered had a great segment on the "MommyBlogger" phenomenon . . . and pretty much how they're all a bunch of sell outs. But then the accompanying web article has all these enticing articles that make me want to patronize nothing but sell outs . . . I mean MommyBlogs. One that sounded most entertaining from the article, but is unfortunately not linked to from the accompanying web article (it is linked to from the associated All Tech Considered blog post - which totally seems like trying to generate hits at multiple sites rather than actually providing content in a usable fashion) is DadLabs [READERS AT WORK BEWARE: DadLabs has some autoplay video that will start playing even before the rest of the page has finised loading, so mute].

Edited on 7/29/2009 to add:
Check out Playful Learning, a website (with a link to a blog) by Mariah Bruehl, an educator cum mommy. She adapts what she knows "about educational research and practice into simple, playful learning experiences that parents can easily share with their children." Via OhDeeDoh.

And edited again on 7/29/2009 to add:
My dear college roommate who had a baby about two months ago (not to be confused with my dear college roommate who had a baby about a month ago) suggested the following three resources.

• Let's Panic - a hilarious website dedicated to the crazy stuff people wig out about regarding pregnancy and parenthood
  
• Diary Of A Baby: What Your Child Sees, Feels, And Experiences by Daniel N. Stern
  
• The Birth Of A Mother: How The Motherhood Experience Changes You Forever also by Daniel N. Stern, which she described as speaking directly to her experience despite its heterocentricity and other flaws.
  

And edited yet again on 7/29/2009 to add:

Urban Preschool takes a fairly abstract approach to early childhood education. It's mostly links to resources for interesting stuff for/about kids. It covers everything from art and design for kids to eco-literacy.

Edited on 8/2/2009 to add:

Organic stuff for babies seems way overpriced to me. I just saw an organic onesie for over $10. That's nuts. Get thee to Dharma Trading Comapany, a store known for its tie-dyeing paraphernalia. As of today they sell organic onesies, t-shirts, hats, and bibs. All white (see they're ready for you to tie-dye, but you don't have to). Their Lap Shoulder Organic Infant Creeper comes in four sizes: newborn, 6 mos, 12 mos, 18 mos. If you buy 11 or fewer, the price is $5.85. If you buy more than that, the price per onesie goes down. If you bought 60 or more (like if you were starting a baby factory), the price would be $4.35 per onesie. Their Lap Shoulder Organic Infant T-Shirt also comes in four sizes: newborn, 6 mos, 12 mos, 18 mos, and if you buy 11 or fewer the price is $4.60. Their Organic Infant Pull-on Cap comes only in infant size and is $3.05 for purchases of up to 11 (I mean how many hats does a baby go through?). Their Organic Cotton Baby Rib Bib, also one size fits all, also for $3.05 for purchases of up to 11 (I bet they can go through bibs faster than they go through hats).

If you're not so hung up on organic, Dharma also sells a slightly wider array of baby stuff made out of bamboo fabric. Dharma has this to say about bamboo clothing, "Bamboo fabric is enjoying a popularity boom because of it's low environmental impact, absorptive and antibacterial properties, as well as it's sublime softness." Sounds pretty good as far as baby stuff goes.

If you're not hung up on organic or bamboo, Dharma has just about everything a baby trousseau requires, so long as you want it in white and cotton.

Edited on 7/4/2009 to add:

Giver's Log made a soft mailbox out of fabric for the aspiring letter writer and receiver in your household. She provides a great tutorial so you can make one too. Sounds like this would work nicely with all of the suggestions for encouraging writing over at The Write Start. Via OhDeeDoh.

Playful Learning put together a tote full of tools for the aspiring writer. Again, I think this ties in nicely with everything The Write Start has to say. Via OhDeeDoh.

On a non-writing preparedness related note, the big debate among new parents (who do not have unlimited space) seems to be whether to invest in a swing or a bouncy chair. The bouncy chair contingent seems to swear by BabyBjorn's Babysitter Balance.

Edited on 8/11/2009 to add:

Consumer Reports has a very thorough report on baby proofing your home. You don't even need a subscription to access it. You do need a stiff drink or stiff drink analog to handle the proclamations of doom. For example, if you don't put a child-proof lock on your toilet, all babies within a 10 mile radius will die. I'm exaggerating . . . a little . . . only a 5 mile radius.

Edited on 8/12/2009 to add:

Would someone please explain to me why books and such recommend pregnant women read other women's stories about their experiences in labor and birth? As a follow up question, would someone please explain to me why women share their stories, in graphic detail, with complete strangers, so frequently? O.K. Birth story rant aside, if you're going to read any birth story, you should read Dooce's birth story, not because it's a birth story, but because it is funny as all get out.

So I am REALLY not into toy buying for children. It is almost universally done to excess. It's all plastic crap made by child slave labor under dangerous conditions. And these days it is usually stamped with some corporation's branding and/or character. But then I see this giant photorealistic inflatable globe, and I must have it for my spawn. Via OhDeeDoh.

Edited on 8/13/2009 to add:

PBS has a website for parents. It's not keyed to any particular television program that I can discern (I haven't watched television in about four years except for the occasional Law & Order binge in hotels when traveling, so I could be wrong). Not only does it have a ton of information, it also has lots of ideas for activities parents can do with their kids.

Edited on 8/30/2009 to add:

Angry Chicken's post about making a poultice for her daughter's bee stings sent me down the rabbit hole of kid safe herbal remedies. First, check out the book Angry Chicken recommends: A Kid's Herb Book by Lesley Tierra. Then one of her readers recommended Walking the World in Wonder: A Children's Herbal by Ellen Evert Hopman.

Edited on 9/1/2009 to add:
While digging through eco-focused parenting blogs I stumbled across this post at Green Parenting about a little girl who always screamed like a banshee at the dentist and what the parents did about it. At the end there are links to a bunch of videos about little kids having positive experiences at the dentist.

Edited on 10/3/2009 to add:
AskMeFi had an interesting question about teaching a 9-year-old to cook, which led me to this neat website: Spatulatta. Spatulatta is primarily a series of webcasts that show two sisters, Isabella, 13, and Olivia, 11, cooking. They post the recipes used in the webcasts as well. Apparently they published a cookbook back in 2007 and won the James Beard Award. Not bad.

Edited on 11/4/2009 to add:
My mom was, among many things, a sex ed teacher. So we didn't have so much of a "talk" as an anatomically correct torso on the dining room table. Other people have distinct and often traumatic memories of the "talk" their parents had with them about sex. Time Out New York Kids has an entire issue dedicated to kids and sex including a section on how to talk to your kids about sex. One of the things I find most helpful about this article is that it starts with ages zero to three. I am pretty sure the reason I wasn't traumatized by talking about sex with my parents was that stuff like the anatomically correct names for body parts were part of the conversation from the start. Via the New York Times parenting blog Motherlode.

Political Resources

Tis the season for brushing up on your candidates. Check out these three sites for some neutral information:
FactCheck
OpenSecrects
TechPresident
Check out these sites for some less than neutral information:
The Becker/Posner Blog
The Citizens
DailyKos
edit: Bob just shared a little gem in the less than neutral category that you must read, though, I advise you as a former labor law attorney who is in no way giving you legal advice, that you might not want to read it at work because people can be sensitive about the truly funny. goodCRIMETHINK and I know reading the "About the Author" part of a blog is like the most uncool thing since global warming (sorry I've been reading a comedian's blog, so now I think I'm a comedian, and I'm really really not), you should totally read his, because it's REALLY funny. Way funnier than that crap joke I just made about global warming.
Another Bob gem this time to add to the neutral category GlassBooth

Shameless Commerce

I have a secret life as a not nearly as unsuccessful as I thought t-shirt designer. More specifically, at least 20 different people have bought a t-shirt I posted on Zazzle, my Please Don't Feed the Animals t-shirt.
Now, I must give credit where credit is due and that is to Jon Stewart. I read an article about him in some magazine, either Entertainment Weekly or Vanity Fair, since that's all I read in law school . . . I mean other than law stuff. He wore a very similar shirt in a photo in the article. It must have been VF because I was able to find that the t-shirt was from some French company. I tried to find said French company to purchase said t-shirt to no avail. So I made a knock off.
But I am not just a knock-off success. Four of my Chesty Potato Chips shirts are out in the world somewhere, well technically three of them are in Galesburg, IL, and one of them is in Baltimore, MD. And two people other than me are wearing my Guinea Pig shirt.
It's kinda freakin' me out.

Listening to . . .

The soundtrack to Juno makes me want to serenade someone. I predict All I Want is You by Barry Louis Parker will be the most popular first dance song at hipster weddings in 2008. The right couple could do a mean Cajun two-step to that ditty.
Wolf Parade Apologies to Queen Mary makes me want to dance like I used to with my friend Thalia around the living room to the soundtrack to Zorba the Greek.
Spoon I don't know which albums (that damnable iPod obscures origins), possibly all of them. And I wonder where my money goes.
Jack's Mannequin Everything in Transit has very good boy-in-love songs by the vocalist/pianist Andrew McMahon of Something Corporate. He has leukemia. Though I recently discovered through the wonders of Wikipedia that this album was released only three months after his diagnosis, I had listened to it thinking he was in some sense writing about his illness. And maybe he was. Anywho, there are parts here and there that resonate with me in terms of dealing with my RA. Which is particularly embarrassing given that the lyrics are likely about twenty something angst and NOT dealing with one's body rejecting oneself.

Sign from the Slow Foods Gods

I finished reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma last night. And today, on the community radio station there he was giving a lecture on the cornification of food. Am I the last to know that ethanol is not nature's friend? I have also resolved that in our next destination we're going to become members of a C.S.A. - not Confederate States of America, but Community Supported Agriculture. Though I feel like that handy acronym does not clearly express what it is. Am I the last to hear about CSAs? I feel so out of the loopy. Now if only I can hunt down some grass-finished beef for dinner.

Visual Inspiration

Continuing the Top 10 2007 Roundup theme, and breaking into the world of posting images, here are ten of the images I've found inspiring. Most of these I've found through dear ada or print & pattern. I'm hoping that posting these inspiring images will coax me into taking action on that inspiration. Maybe this time next year I'll be posting the Top 10 Pieces I've Completed in 2008 Based on the Top 10 Images I Found Inspiring in 2007.


This is a picture taken by my friend Mary of an art installation by Matthew and Jonathan Stemler at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia.






This is a collage by Ian Pedigo. I have some Martha Negley fabric printed with vegetables that is waiting to be made into something inspired by this collage.









This is a painting by Sarajoe Friedan.











This is a print called Red Volcano by Dr. Atl, a Mexican artist. I saw this in an exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Mexican prints. I haven't been able to find many resources on Dr. Atl. So if there's some great book all about him with lots of images of his amazing print work, please let me know.






I found this image on the Buy Nothing Catalog site related to Buy Nothing Christmas. Which reminds me, go see What Would Jesus Buy?






This is a painting by Alice Stevenson. It is yet another sign that I need to work on my rokkaku kite battle quilt that has been aging in my brain since the kite festival in D.C. two years ago.









This is a work by Bill Renkl. I have a palm tree quilt project that is currently occupying my design wall that needs a little inspiration from this image. I swear I only bought all three seasons of Arrested Development on DVD because the sets all have palm tree images tucked all over the place.







This is a work by Friedrich Kunath. There's some polka dotted fabric that wants to break free from its matrix every time it sees this image.










This is a painting by Mark Grotjahn.











This is one of a growing collection of images I call SimpleTrees. I don't know what I was working on that made me think "I need to come up with a better way to represent tree-ness," but I started collecting images of simple trees and now I'm up to 20 of them and I don't know why. Now I just paw through print & pattern scrambling for my next tree fix. It's disturbing.

Blog Roll

I don't know what a "blog roll" is, but if it is a list of my ten most frequently read blogs in 2007, then this is it:
design*sponge
Angry Chicken
Dear Ada
Go Fug Yourself
Am I Really Going Through This?
print & pattern
Robert Genn's Twice Weekly Letters
Sentencing Law and Policy
Spirit Cloth
Wee Wonderfuls

Usurpation

I don't know if this is the manifestation of a New Year's Resolution or just a thought I've been pondering for some time, but I'm going to start blogging more and worrying about fitting in with the Gnomicon theme less. Not sure if I can sustain a post-a-day pace, but it's good to have goals and then not meet those goals and then be depressed about never meeting your goals. Well, maybe not that last part.

So the end of the year roundup that has me most freaked out: The Top Science-and-Tech Privacy Threats of 2007. The chipping I'd contemplated in the correctional context. But culling the human herd of those with the "homosexuality gene" has me totally wigged.

Now I feel compelled to round something 2007ish up. I don't watch TV in the broadcast sense. And I don't watch nearly as many movies as I should in the theater. I can't recall all the books I've read this year (maybe I should remedy that in 2008). But Netflix conveniently remembers everything I rented from them ever.

Top 10 DVDs I Netflixed in 2007
How to Draw a Bunny
Good Night and Good Luck
Heroes: Season 1
Extras: Season 2
The Departed
My linguistic background is strictly upstate New York and broadcast television. I have no reason to have any accent whatsoever. However, given immersion in any accent that truly entertains me, I will adopt it. If you want to hear my accent circa 1989, listen to Marky Mark in The Depahted.
Cold Mountain
I held off on this for a long time because it did not really seem like my cup of tea, but then I saw that Philip Seymour Hoffman was in it. And his tiny part makes it entirely worth watching.
The Devil Wears Prada
Outfoxed
Technically, I also Netflixed An Inconvenient Truth in 2007 and I did rate it 5 stars and it is a film everyone should watch. However, I was fascinated by the mode of production of Outfoxed. Watch the extras. Hear the crazy people who were assigned to watch hours and hours of Fox News and note when particular things were said. In this overly determined world, this voluntary collective process is an amazing way to filter through the noise.
Eddie Izzard: The Definite Article
Veronica Mars: Seasons 2 and 3 (I netflixed season 1 in 2006)
Arrested Development: Seasons 1 through 3

The important steppingstone that is What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy

What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee (which is accurately titled, but it's too long to type, so I'm going to abbreviate it as What Video Games... from here on) is an important book -- one of those books that I'll refer to (in all senses) time and time again. It is sure to be cited in numerous other books. (To be honest, I special ordered it because of its citation in Game Design Workshop, although maybe that's a false memory because I can't find the reference.)

However, although the seeds of many significant things are there, I think I wanted the book to be more than it is. It so whetted my appetite for a Grand Unified Fun Education Theory (my useless one-time acronym for today is GUFET, pronounced "guffit"), that when no GUFET emerged I felt let down. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Despite my disappointment that What Video Games... didn't solve my life, it resonates so much with me that I want to talk about it in several different genres: first, I feel like I ought to give it a brief review, both to summarize the main thrust and also give a useful preview to anyone else that might be interested in reading it. Secondly, I want to write a book report on it: the book makes fairly strong claims which can be argued with, extrapolated from, and so forth. Hm...that sounds more like I want to be in a discussion group or book club. Yeah, throw that in there too. And, at the moment being a math teacher, I want to translate the book's main points for people who care about teaching math but don't care about videogames at all. (As seen from the title, What Video Games... puts a space in the term "video games", but I don't.) I have questions about the applicability of some of Gee's ideas specifically to mathematics, and I'd like a specifically math-oriented book club to discuss those.

So, that should tell you I think it's a pretty good book, in the sense that it's chock full of provocative ideas.

I plan to do the "book review" part next, though all my half-baked ideas are subject to change by the time they're, uh, full-baked.