Sewing chat

Gentlemen, if you would excuse us, I'd like to ask the ladies something.

Ladies, if you sew, do you suffer some sort of strange distortion of your judgment-related faculties when you walk into a fabric store? (Feel free to answer anonymously. I know this can be embarrassing.) The subject comes up because yesterday I got it into my head that I'd like a new skirt, and there is nothing left in the stash of cloth I originally bought to make quilts with, so for the first time in years I went into a fabric store. I almost, just very nearly, got right in and right out. After a quick swoop through the store, a nice print on a black background caught my eye and I picked it up and pondered and thought it would do and even started toward the checkout. But then I wobbled. And then I went around and around the store, half-deciding on this and half-deciding on that, only to choose something else, and then unchoose it. I was having a very good time at this, you understand. I considered color after color, print after print. My imagination had a heyday.

But, finally, I decided I'd spent altogether too much time on this, especially since I'm not all that particular about what I wear (ask anybody who knows me - I don't want to be an eyesore, but fashion-concerned I'm not).

To put it another way, the time and mental effort invested in picking out the raw material for what is to be an everyday, workaday skirt had reached well-nigh ridiculous levels.

So, I decided it was time to choose.

So, I had narrowed it to two fabrics.

So (ahem), finding myself suddenly unable to choose between those two, I (cough) grabbed a bolt of cloth that hadn't even been under consideration, and took it to the checkout and bought two yards of that.

Is to laugh. Is to sigh.

Not that it hurt anything. But...

I am painfully aware that this is not the first time I have spent an insane amount of time in a fabric store, only to buy something not in the top five as chosen during that insane amount of time.

In this case, I got it home and held it in front of me while I looked in the mirror, and wondered why I hadn't noticed what an odd green the background is. And how 1970s-ish it seems. And, in general, I wondered why I bought this instead of something else.

It's not bad, you understand. It'll do. My husband seems to like it, perhaps more than I do, which is just as well because he'll see it more than anybody else, once I get it made, assuming I can manage to get it made. (I'm trying to make this, more or less, but with in-seam pockets, and midi-length. It's about as complicated as I dare tackle when attempting to sew. A talented seamstress I'm not.)

But, honestly, fabric stores seem to do something to my brain. Tell me I'm not alone in this...

Notice to local seamstresses: I found out during checkout that the fabric store is closing in a week or two. There aren't any signs or notices, but the owners are moving across the state to be closer to their kids and they're taking the store's inventory with them. I don't know anywhere else within an hour's drive to buy fabric. Do you? There are lots of online options, of course, but if you delight in browsing and feeling the fabric before you buy, your days are limited around here. Fair warning.

If I might add another sewing story...

Recently I was about to get rid of an old flannel sheet, and it suddenly struck me that there was no reason I couldn't make a winter-weight slip from it. So I folded it double, plunked a full slip on top of it, cut a rough approximation of the slip's shape, making allowance for seams, and making the straps wide and the neckline a bit higher and the slip inches and inches longer, since this is for warmth, and then sewed the two pieces together. Worked like a charm. There's enough fabric left over to make a second one. Such a deal. With a bit more attention to the top, and appropriate fabric, I think I could make a sheath dress this way. The rub there is designing the neckline and straps (or sleeves), but I've got some old regular sheets I can use for trial and error and then for a pattern, if I ever decide to get ambitious in that direction. Anyway, I couldn't find winter-weight slips, and this solved that problem nicely.

Friday fun: How to counteract a bad hair day

Jennifer Rothschild was having a bad hair day so she decided to try something new...

Writing for your target audience

When I saw this cartoon I wasn't sure whether to laugh or weep. Ah, yes, the crazy world of publishing and promotion!

hat tip: The Point: Hope, love, ponies, and Oprah

Low carbon footprint

Sometimes cartoons say things better than mere words. Like this.

hat tip: Carl, via Dr. Sanity

Friday funnies

From Jokes - and how to tell them, by Sonny Fox (Young Readers Press, 1965):

Q. What is the kindest animal in the forest?

A. The skunk, because he is happy to give his last (s)cent to his worst enemy.

Another riddle, same source:

Q. What has a mouth but cannot speak, a bed but cannot sleep?

A. A river.

Friday funny

From Jokes - and how to tell them, by Sonny Fox (Young Readers Press, 1965):

Jim and Jack were fishing in the lake for the first time. They happened upon a spot where the fish were really biting. "We better mark this spot so we'll know where to come tomorrow," said Jim. The next day they were talking about their hidden cove. "How did you mark the spot, Jim?" asked Jack. "I put an X on the side of the boat." "What a silly thing to do," said Jack. "Suppose we get a different boat?"

Of course, it ought to be Ole and Sven instead of Jim and Jack, in my opinion...

Happy Birthday ditty

Tennessee Ernie Ford sings Don't Be Ashamed of Your Age.

That the men in this number can do it with (mostly) straight-faced gusto speaks well of their acting ability, I think. Also their senses of humor.

Beatle-based silliness in South Korea

Oh, my. Dawn Eden links to a video of a four year old boy who really knows his Beatles songs. If you can watch without collapsing in laughter you're tougher than me. And who knew the Beatles were still big, and in South Korea of all places?

I was about that age when the Twist became popular. One of my earliest memories is of my sister and me being talked into doing the Twist at a great-uncle's house, and the grown-ups passing the hat around after they stopped laughing. I didn't 'get' the laughter, but we did get to keep the money that had been dropped into the hat. I think it was the first money I ever 'earned,' and I remember it made me feel rather grown-up and important.

I've often wondered if they'd planned to pass the hat around, or only hit upon the idea when they realized they'd upset little girls by asking them to do something and then laughing at them when they did. My fuzzy, faded, undoubtedly-altered-by-the-passage-of-time memory seems to support the 'oh, my goodness, we didn't mean to make them cry, do something!' theory.

Not that I blame them for laughing. A little girl twisting with gusto would probably be hard to watch with a straight face. Two at once could push anybody over the edge.

The Korean kid, bless his heart, seems to be enjoying himself, and taking it pretty much in stride, despite the adults going nuts around him.

Here's a nonpartisan political joke...

... that might be a teeny bit funnier if there wasn't so much truth in it.

Laugh and learn.

Men's brains compared to women's brains

I'm not entirely sure it ought to be funny, and I'm not even sure all of it is entirely true, but all the same this reduced me to helpless laughter: Mommy Life: Men's brains, women's brains - very funny.

I would like you to notice that the audience in the video is composed primarily of couples, and that they seem to be happily married couples. You will notice how comfortable most of them are with each other, and how they share their laughter, won't you? Thank you. I wouldn't want this to be a source of animosity between the sexes. After all, our ability to take different approaches to any given situation is one of those things that makes a devoted husband-wife team such a force to be reckoned with. And the ability to laugh at our differences is one of those things that makes a good marriage so fun.

The video is just over five minutes long.

Umbert strikes again

Who but cartoonist Gary Cangemi could have taken the statement that as far as famous people go, "Of course, nobody knows you're famous BEFORE you're born" - and extend it to Umbert concluding that "In the womb, it's much easier to hide from the papparazzi."?

I also like this send-up of Star Trek, which is today's strip.

I realize that this sort of humor isn't for everyone, but I have to say that Mr. Cangemi routinely cracks me up.

You can find the current cartoon at Catholic.net.

Just for fun: "There are only 10 types of people in the world..."

Sure, it's a geeky joke, but it's a good clean one, too. Heh.

A day in the life of a mother...

... set to The William Tell Overture. No, really. Heh.

The piece is by Anita Renfroe.

My "fall color change" Japanese adventure

A few weeks ago we had a visitor who had lived in Japan as a boy, the son of missionaries. We fell to swapping "my life in Japan" stories. We soon found out that we'd both had some interesting experiences simply because we'd been in areas that didn't see non-Japanese people all that often, and more specifically because we're both blond.

In his case, for instance, the neighbors expressed concern because he had blue eyes, and to them that meant blindness. I guess if everyone you know who can see well has dark eyes, and people you know who are blind have light eyes, that sort of concern would be logical. It's not correct when you start applying that rule of thumb to the world population, of course, but it would be logical to worry if you didn't know better.

In my case, I was a twenty-something woman a few years into a newspaper career when I got an invitation from a childhood friend who was over there teaching English. She offered me a free place to stay, and guide service, and local transport, if only I'd come over and give her a native English speaker to talk to for a few weeks, and, as much to the point, an American to chat with. She was going a bit crazy, she said, being essentially the only resident foreigner in town, not to mention an American with no countrymen within visiting distance.

I got a leave of absence lined up, and then found out how unbelievably large the Pacific Ocean is. Yinga.

At long last, after flying (and flying, and flying), and train rides and more train rides, I was in the town where she taught, and was immediately adopted by various and sundry folks wanting to try out their English skills, for one thing, and to hang out with an American newspaper reporter for another (that I represented a small, regional paper didn't seem to matter all that much), and also, I think, just for the excuse to go play tourist themselves. At any rate, I was taken to all sorts of interesting places, sometimes by one group of people, sometimes by another.

One day, a group of young ladies took my friend and me to a place called, if I remember correctly, The Hawaiian Center. At any rate, it amounted to something along the lines of a mall combined with an entertainment complex, and the overall theme was decidedly the Hawaiian Islands. There were shops and eateries, and public baths, and a regular swimming pool or two, and a looped pool with a current in it, that you could either float in, going around and around, or else get a workout in, by swimming against the current. I don't remember what else.

After you changed into your swimsuit but before you got into a pool, you were supposed to shower under a nozzle set up outside the dressing rooms, in full view of people on the two or three levels of this mall (I can't remember how many stories it was, but only two or three I think). So I got into my swimming suit - my brand new, bought especially for the trip, sophisticated black swimming suit which I'd never worn anywhere before - and stepped outside to the shower and went under the spray. I heard gasps. I heard strange murmurings. I looked around and people were staring at me, from the upper balconies as well as ground level, and my hostesses looked like they would faint and some of them were crying.

My first thought - relatively modest American that I am - was that I'd had a wardrobe malfunction with the never-before-worn swimming suit. I'm of an age that I grew up with the occasional swimsuit that got baggy when wet, sometimes with excruciating consequences. (Bikinis, especially those made for rail-straight pre-adolescents, should never have been made of such fabric, in my humble opinion. But I digress.) But, of course, a baggy or shifted swimsuit wouldn't have shocked the Japanese people in that mall. It might have prompted giggles or rude comments, but it wouldn't have shocked people - and people were definitely stunned. And I was definitely the center of attention.

Their distress had knocked what English they knew clear out of my companions (and my bi-lingual friend was nowhere to be found, naturally) so there was much use of hand gestures and stabs at finding a Japanese word I knew that would convey something about the calamity. Finally, by pointing at my hair and using a Japanese word for the turning of the leaves in autumn, I was made to understand that my hair, subjected to Japanese shower water, had, unbelievably - and they were horribly, horribly sorry about it - my hair had gone not-blond, and was now a different color.

Having grown up with hair that always goes dark when it gets wet, it took me a while to understand what the problem was. But then I realized that black hair stays black when it gets wet, so of course if you only knew about black hair, to see hair that was altogether different when wet would be a bit on the supernatural or calamitous side.

I assured my hostesses that my hair - all blond hair for that matter, as far as I know - goes dark when wet and it would undoubtedly return to the usual color when dry, just like always. This was a huge relief, and after confirming it with me three ways from Sunday to prevent spreading false reassurance, they announced to all and sundry within polite yelling distance that everything was all right, that the foreigner's hair always changed color when wet and would be just fine when it dried - as surprising as it seemed, everything was normal.

People stopped being statues, and stopped being unhappy, and laughed a bit (or a lot, depending on how it struck them), and bit by bit people stopped pointing at me, and soon everything was back to normal, on the upper decks and down at ground level, too.

Not that stories need to have a moral attached, of course, but to me this one rather dramatically represents the concept: You don't know what you don't know.

"Obama Blames Katrina Survivors for Shattered Faith"

We have a liberal friend who fell all over himself getting himself active in Barack Obama's campaign for President of the United States.

This friend and I have canceled each other's votes from the time I started casting ballots. We both know this. I have been known to cast my vote with a remark to the effect that 'there, I've done my duty, canceling out So-and-so's vote.' I think he knows that, too. I suspect he's done the same thing back. But this is America, and we're both civilized, and there doesn't seem to be much of anything to do about it. We simply come down on different sides of the political fence, and we get there by entirely different reasoning techniques.

That doesn't mean that I'm above trying to point out to him, from time to time, what I don't like about today's Democrats and their faith in big government. Heh. (The linked post is satire, folks. Please, don't read it literally. Thank you.)

Lost in translation (updated)

The proofreading of the book I'm currently working on is down to the researching of various small details that didn't get nailed down in earlier drafts. For instance, when a Eurotunnel passenger goes through the Chunnel with his own car does he drive it onto the train himself or does staff do it? (Passenger.) Do you stay with your car for the journey? (Stay.) Do they sell duct tape in England? (They sell it on Amazon.co.uk, which is good enough for me.) Do they call it duct tape? (It appears they have the same problem we do over here, sometimes calling it duct tape and sometimes calling it duck tape, or rather, Duck Tape, as in a brand name...) Would a somewhat-Protestant, mostly-secular English gentleman of good breeding be more likely to think of it as intercessory prayer or as intercessional prayer? (I'm still a bit stumped on that last one. From the dictionaries I've consulted so far, intercessory appears to be an adjective in the U.S., but not in the U.K.? At least technically? Research continues...)

I've had a few pleasant detours trying to nail down the spelling of a French word. I still haven't satisfied myself as to whether it's permissible to spell laicisme with vowels any English speaker would recognize, or if I need one of those specialized ones with a couple of dots above it for that first i. (*Updated: see below.) But in the meantime, I've read that lever (ler-VAY) means lift, and that lever du jour (ler-VAY-dew-zhoor) means daybreak, and that lever du soleil (ler-VAY-so-LEHY) means sunrise. Day lift. Sun lift. I like that, particularly the idea of sun lift. It also sounds beautiful. I like that, too.

From another phrase book comes the info that a traveler should refer to an intensive care unit at a hospital as service de réanimation. (This particular phrase book's pronunciation guides are impossible to reproduce with the keyboard I have. Sorry about that. For that matter, I don't understand its pronunciation guide. Not in the least. I'm pretty sure that service is something like sehr-VEES, if that's of any use to you.) At any rate, I really like that an intensive care unit is more or less called a reanimation center or reanimation service. It shows proper spirit or attitude or something. :)

But then there's that word spirituel (spee-ree-TWAYL), which sounds like 'spiritual,' yes? No. According to the dictionaries I have, it means witty. [see update at bottom of post]

'Now that sounds like a misunderstanding waiting to happen,' I told myself when I read that.

This made me think of a few lost in translation misunderstandings I've bumped into in the past...

For instance, when I was on a college trip to Central America, another co-ed and myself somehow got ourselves invited to a live theatrical performance in Costa Rica. The gentleman who invited us worked at a university there, and somehow managed to have good enough references. It was, if I remember correctly, a production of Volpone (I could be wrong about that). At any rate, this gentleman was on something of a mission to prove to foreigners that his country had a world class theater company, and he took us to a show. After the show, he asked how we liked it, and I said that I had loved the show and the acting was so good it almost made up for the fact that I didn't know but a few words of Spanish. This led to him warning me that if I didn't know a word in Spanish, I must not try to bluff my way through by taking an English word and trying to make it sound Spanish. He was very earnest about this. Surprisingly earnest. Finally, he explained why.

The worst trouble he'd ever gotten into in his life, he said, was when he'd tried to be nice to a visiting lady professor from America. The woman was homesick, and so he spent time with her, and then, one day, invited her to share a home cooked meal with his family. He lived with his mother, I think. At any rate, his mama was in charge of the meal. The visiting lady professor -- trying to express her gratitude for being invited into their home -- told Mama that, really, she was awfully embarrassed about all the attention being paid to her by Mama's son.

Mama's son -- full-grown and a respected professional, definitely a suit and tie sort of fellow -- found himself dragged by the ear into the next room, where an enraged and righteous mother lit into him for bringing shame on the family for getting a woman pregnant out of wedlock. I guess embarrass is pretty close to the Spanish word for pregnant. It apparently took quite a bit of explaining before that mess was cleared up.

So, he said, I should never try to bluff my way through by giving English words a more Spanish pronunciation. I should especially never, never, ever, tell a gentleman's mother that I was embarrassed about anything.

I could see his point. Can't you?

I ran into a similar misunderstanding at a school for the deaf that we visited in Canada while on tour with Up With People. One of the first things the kids asked me (I was serving as translator), was to tell them what a certain sign meant to me. The sign consisted of holding the hands near the belly, interlocked, palms in, fingers straight, and then moving the hands in a circle parallel to the ground. 'Why, that means America, or American,' I said. (It represents a split-rail fence, if you're wondering.) They were much relieved. They'd had, they told me, a team of girls from another school for the deaf come across the border for some event, and, excited to have been told that Americans were coming to visit, had rushed out and asked the girls if they were really American. Or that's what they thought they asked. They didn't understand the fury and face-slapping that resulted... until they found out that at that particular school, somehow that sign had come to mean (you guessed it) pregnant. Good girls on a field trip to Canada did not appreciate being called sluts right after they got off the bus...

I can't remember if it was at that school for a deaf or a different one up in Canada that I made my big, televised sign language gaffe. At any rate, the concert's directors thought that it would be cool to have me stand on stage translating during the concert. The songs, however, had never been translated into song sign, and so I was on my own. Not funny. I had taken one night course in sign language. I explained that one night course does not a translator make, which idea they initially poohed poohed on the grounds that song sign is notoriously full of artistic license, or so they understood. I finally prevailed upon them to let me take some time off and go visit a sign language instructor at a college we were near at the time. The instructor and I ran into a bit of a snag on one of the signature songs of Up With People, "What Color Is God's Skin?" What color is God's was easy enough, and fell wonderfully into place as to one sign moving into another. Very artistic. Very easy to read, even from the back of an auditorium. But skin? Neither of us knew a really standard sign for skin, and the one we both had seen used (pinching the back of a hand or the forearm) didn't go with the flow of the song, and wasn't pretty, and might not be easy to read from a distance. So we made up a sign. (She agreed with the show's producers, btw, that song sign traditionally allows for a fair amount of artistic license.) We decided to have me run a couple of fingers down my cheek in a specific way. We figured that if people didn't understand it as skin, they'd understand it as face, which was close enough to the right meaning, we thought...

Fast forward to the performance. We got to the school, and there was a television news crew standing by to share the event with Canadian viewers. No pressure there, right? The crew was delighted that there was a sign language translator on stage. (It wasn't so common in those days.) I found myself not only fighting stage jitters but camera fright, with a camera right. on. me. but I muddled through pretty well, I thought.

After the concert, I was mobbed by adoring fans. Rock star city. The mob was horribly disappointed when they found out I wasn't deaf. I guess a rumor had got around... Sigh. My biggest brush with being a superstar and I have to explain they're mistaken about me... Sigh...

At any rate, at some point, quite a few kids in the mob started asking me what in the world that song was about God and color? What, specifically, did I mean by that sign with the fingers on the face? I spelled out s.k.i.n. 'Well, that makes the song make sense, finally,' they said. 'Why?' says I. 'Does that sign mean something else to you?'

They nodded, and began to spell M.o.r.m - at which time I suddenly remembered that it was the sign for Mormon. (After a founder's trademark sideburns, as I understand it.)

I think I might have mentioned this before (is it a sign of getting old, or what, if you write the same story two years apart and don't remember that until you're finished with the newer one???), but there might be an archive TV tape up in eastern Canada somewhere showing a young lady dramatically enacting "What color is God's Mormon?" in sign language. That would be me.

It's a good thing I know how to laugh at myself, that's all I can say.

Go ahead, laugh. I don't mind being the cause of a few smiles. :)

*Added: OK, I guess I probably need laïcisme. (And, no, I don't mean laïcité. They're related, but this book has a French Catholic thinking about the troubles she's had from extreme secularists, those that are anti-religious and not just interested in 'separating church and state' -- and my research, or at least my research so far, indicates that the Catholic Church sees laïcité as milder than laïcisme. This isn't my field, though, not by a long shot. So correct me if I'm wrong.)

Update: A reader clarifies things in the comments, writing: "spirituel" = "witty" in the way we would say in English "full of spirits" or "high-spirited". Thanks, coffeemama!

Hamlet in an alternate universe

In case my husband is wondering why his wife just laughed out loud in the other part of the house, it's because I was sitting at my computer reading about Hamlet in a coffee shop.

(OK, I laugh easily. But still. It is funny, don't you think?)

hat tip: Mama Squirrel

The best laid plans...

So, BooMama thought she'd go to a coffee shop and put in five hours of writing...

Talking to a fence post

We have a saying in this part of the world, that talking to someone "is like talking to a fence post." In other words, he might as well not have ears since he doesn't seem to hear what other people say. OK, admittedly, in less charitable moments and applications, it also is a way of saying someone seems to have no more brains than a fence post - but nicer people try not to use it that way. In any case, it means that it's almost impossible to hold a conversation with the person. This post featuring a passage from a Shirley Jackson book definitely made me think of it.

A poet confronted with a toddler

Melissa Wiley shares a poem by Thomas Hood, "A Parental Ode to My Son, Aged Three Years and Five Months," in which the poet's boy keeps breaking into the flights of fancy. Too funny.