(Savage Chickens)

• Beer Bottle Full or Empty: Which is Best as a Weapon? « B Good Science Blog

(A Softer World)

(H/t to the lovely Melle for finding the photo)

Again we ponder the eternal question of what to drink while awaiting election results. Last time around we went with Irish whiskey. It was an excellent choice but it feels a bit ponderous for a May election. Sunshine and daffodils and Irish whiskey? Nah.

I’m deciding to count anything other than a Harper majority as a success. While there does seem like a reasonably high probability of success thus defined, we’re still feeling it would be wise to employ some fiscal restraint, just in case. So we’ve settled on some cheap Aussie fizz, which D has just gone off on his bike to fetch. It’ll have time to chill before results start coming in.

Crossed fingers.

Go vote, if you haven’t yet. Polls in Ontario are open until 9:30 tonight. You don’t need to be registered in advance and you can find your poll here if you’re unsure (the link is to the official Elections Canada site — don’t believe any robo-calls you might get; apparently there are some dirty tricks being played to send people to the wrong place).

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• Space drugs

“Some people try to turn back their odometers. Not me, I want people to know why I look this way. I’ve traveled a long way and some of the roads weren’t paved.”

- Will Rogers
Quotation of the Day for April 21, 2011

• Coming Soon: Personal Jetpacks

A while ago I was chatting with someone about books and bookstores and all that sort of thing and the question was asked: so, what do I read? I answered rather stupidly — “um, not bestsellers” or somesuch — but it did remind me that I’ve fallen out of the habit of posting about books, so I’ll start to correct that now.

What do I read? The honest answer is, anything that holds still long enough for my eyes to focus on it. But I don’t have a lot of time (and even less money) for physical books, so — while I’m being honest here — I’ll admit that most of my “reading” lately has been either children’s books or audiobooks. (Although I was recently given some excellent books for my birthday, which I’m very much enjoying and which I will talk about later.)

I read a lot of kids’ books because my daughter brings them home and she has pretty fun taste in books. I like to get a sense of what she likes so I can buy her books she’ll enjoy. Given the amount of travelling she does each summer, I like to send her and/or whoever’s flying with her with lots of new books. Also, she’s a Talker so it helps to have read what she’s read if I would like to understand much of what she’s telling me.

So on that front, I can recommend Patricia C. Wrede’s four Enchanted Forest books, which have dragons and princesses and things but which are far more clever than that brief summary implies. The protagonist in the first book is a princess who flees to the dragons in search of a less vapid life and then has to explain to dozens of would-be rescuers that no, she does NOT wish to be rescued and would prefer to remain Chief Cook and Librarian to the dragons, thankyouverymuch. They’re quite fun. Fast reads in book form, and well done as full-cast audiobooks as well.

I’ve also dipped into the Dear Canada books. D calls them Canadian History Propaganda books, which is fair. M has been bringing them home from the library of her own accord. It’s a whole serious of deeply wholesome books purporting to be diaries of girls at various points in Canadian history. These I find a bit tedious but M loves them and they’re not horrible. Faint praise, but there you go. Harmless stuff.

Collectively we’ve also been enjoying the How to Train Your Dragon series, which are full of goofiness and farting and so on. The sample sentences in Dragonese are worth the price of admission.

The child has also enjoyed Kenneth Oppel’s bat books. I’ve only read the first one, and I admit I bought it for M on the basis of 1 degree of separation from Ken Oppel plus good reviews, but they are indeed good books. M’s read all of them and they led to much swooping about and pretending to be a bat, which I enjoyed much more than the princess phase, so there you go.

I’m terribly bored with this election — lots of pointless hot-air and genital-waving — so instead of involving myself in it, reading every word out of every politician’s machine and listening to the debates, I embarked on a bit of needlework. A far surer path to ongoing sanity, I think. (I will vote, of course. I always vote. And I always inform myself about the issues. But there seems to be little of import being waved about just now, despite many potential issues of import which might be good to raise.)

I was testing out a new pattern-transfer paper (Transfer-Eze), which I was hoping would simplify the matter of getting detailed/complex patterns onto the material to be embroidered. Wax transfer paper, pencils and the like are fine for most things, but I’d been stymied by my Green Man pattern and I thought it would be a good one to use to test the new paper, which promised that I could print right on it and stick it to my work and wash it out afterward. Would my printer work with it? Would the markings stay intact through the whole process? Would the paper wash out properly afterward? Would the project last long enough to distract me from both English and French debates? The happy answer to all these questions is an unqualified Yes, and I can definitely recommend the product.

So here’s my election-avoiding Green Man, embroidered on the front end of a heavy-duty canvas newspaper bag like this one (I also recommend reuseit.com — I’ve ordered from them a number of times):

At the beginning. I wanted to see how the transferred lines held up throughout the process.

Even halfway through they weren’t deteriorating much, even though I had my fingers all over them all the time and I moved the hoop a half-dozen times.

And the end result, before I washed out the paper — it looked identical afterward:

So there we have it. A Green Man. Which, I suppose, is as good a political statement as any about who I might vote for.

• Happiness, comparatively speaking: How we think about life’s rewards

Quotation of the Day for November 9, 2009

“That same afternoon I was sitting on a stool in an intoxicated condition in Grogan’s licensed premises. Adjacent stools bore the forms of Brinsley and Kelly, my two true friends. The three of us were occupied in putting glasses of stout into the interior of our bodies and expressing by fine disputation the resulting sense of physical and mental well-being.”

- Flann O’Brien, from his novel At Swim-Two-Birds.

Yesterday I had the chance to see a whole bunch of people I haven’t seen in ages, along with a whole bunch of people I see often. We ate and drank and talked and laughed and generally had a lovely time.

Today I am smiling and, as the quote says, full of a sense of physical and mental well-being (despite a lack of stout and intoxication). It is a privilege to know all the people I know, even if I only see some of you every couple of decades, whether I saw you yesterday or ten years ago. Thank you, all of you.

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Barbed wire & bouganvillea

Originally uploaded by morecoffeeplease.

A good summary of Mexico — prettiness resting on pointiness.

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This is a photo I did not take of a young black guy with the whole low pants, do-rag, big shoes thing going on, absentmindedly whistling along with and nodding his head in time to a subway busker’s heavily Spanish-accented version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.