* I'm a believer in organ and tissue (bone cartilige, skin) donation, but was startled to learn that donated skin that isn't used for, say, grafting onto burn victims may be processed and used cosmetically to plump up wrinkles and aggrandize penises. While I have no preconceived notions of the hereafter, I stand firm in my conviction that it should not take the form of someone else's underpants.

- Mary Roach, Stiff

SEE ALSO: Igors Amalgamated membership

We are also learning which states have laws banning necrophilia and which ones are delicate or blunt about the phrasing (oh the phrasing is priceless). Frankly, it's less disturbing bedtime reading than Kelly Link's Stone Animals was.

Hey, did you hear? It was Pollinator Week this week! This illo is an idea that's been floating around my head for a while, but a week of celebration was the impetus it needed to get on to paper.
(Sorry, bats, beetles, butterflies, hummingbirds and all the other pollinators. No illo for you, but not because I don't think you're great at seducing plants.)



It's so appropriate an image to subvert, don't you think? And a healthy reminder that worker bees are female, no matter what the entertainment industry would have us believe.

Today has been one of those days where, despite the heat and the humidity and the thunderstorms that can't make up their minds, you are determined to wash the dishes and just when you think you're making some headway, one of the glasses on the rack decides to shatter half-in and half-out of the sink and you end up with a dozen tiny cuts on your feet from walking to get the vaccuum cleaner and you can't wear anything to protect them because the flipflops that seemed to have every intention of going on forever and ever broke last week.


Almost exactly like that. With everything you try to do.

Yeah.

Since earlofgrey appears to have an abundance of red cabbage from the local urban farm, I am going to pass along my favorite recipe for it. Just in case he becomes overwhelmed with cabbage, as the darn stuff is so often overwhelming.

( pheasant with cranberries (the pheasant is more or less optional) )

• figures of speech, folksy, which so far as I know have not been used in literature

"I feel like a hog starin' at a wristwatch."

"So ugly he looks like a homemade child."

"A wink is as good as a nod to a blind horse."

"She ran home so fast you could play dice on the tail of her coat."

"Tea so strong you could trot a mouse on it."

"Quiet as a mosquito doing push-ups on a lemon meringue pie."

"He lives so far up in the woods, the sun sets between his house and the road."

"He looked like he'd been sortin' wildcats."

"Quick as a hiccup."

These made me immediately think of Sophanne, who has been after these kind of phrases for a while. I fully expect to hear some of these at knit night in the coming weeks.

• Goody Two-Shoes
[. . .] You can tell it's a real writer's book by all the good crazy alphabet stuff. Goody rescues a raven from some cruel boys, names him Ralph, and teaches him to read and write. Ralph is her aide as she selflessly introduces other poor children to letters. "Put them right, Ralph!" she cries when her students get their alphabet blocks out of order, and he does. The raven is referred to as "that rogue, Ralph," at the point where the roguish author portrays him not only a versifier but a plagarist. Ralph is said to have "composed" the couplet "Early to Bed, and early to rise;/Is the way to be healthy, wealthy, and wise"—a slightly looser version (hey, he's a bird) of the adage in Poor Richard's Almanac thirty years before. [. . .]

There's a raven. Of course there is. And he's damn clever. Of course he is. And he steals things that aren't nailed down. Of course he does.

::suspicious look::

• etymology
Fron the greek for "the true sense of a word." That goes back to when roots showed through a lot more than they do today. But just as you appreciate a vegetable more if you know how it grows, you have a better hold on a word if you use it in acknowledgement of its roots, its background, some of the soil still attatched.

- Roy Blount Jr., Alphabet Juice

In theory, Semantic Antics and Alphabet Juice are the same sort of book, a couple hundred pages of cherry-picked words and explanations of what's behind them. In practice, the difference between the two is the difference of a professional lexicographer writing a book and someone whose vocation in life happens to be fooling with words. Compare the blockquotes in this entry with what I took from Semantic Antics a while back. Yeah. I routinely felt intimdated and outclassed for not having a degree in Literature-With-A-Capital-L when I was reading that, and I've never met a book that could do that to me in all my life.

They're both interesting, informative reads in their own ways. But Alphabet Juice is decidedly the friendlier of the two. Regular listeners of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me will have the bonus of practically hearing Mr Roy Blount Jr. narrate the book in their mind. Hee!

And . . . don't try to read them straight through. They're not those kinds of books; you'll get stuck somewhere in the Gs and wander off to find something with plot structure.

• English
[. . .] Esperanto is a regularized, scholar-designed system of Greco-Latin derivations idealistically aspiring to can't-we-all-get-along universality. Blah. English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewey, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies. English is the only western European language whose verbe for "to write" doesn't come from the Latin legere. Our write comes directly from the PIE [Proto-Indo-European] root wreid-, to cut, scratch, tear, sketch an outline. Our read comes from the Old English raedan, to advise, which, like a number of other words involving the concept of "to fit together" (army, harmony, art, order, riddle, arithmetic, rhyme) goes back to the PIE root ar-. The core of English is gritty, sonorous Anglo-Saxon. The rest of it comes from all over.

Italian is more melodious, German more precise, and I daresay Russian plumbs more nearly ineffable sorrows, but English embraces three times as many words as any other language, and they come from an unparalleled range of sources—Tagalog, Persian, Hawaiian, Mandingo . . . The reaches of empire have not only established English but enriched it: juggernaut from conquest of India, Oklahoma (originally Muskogean for "red people") from displacement of Amerindians, hip from American slavery. The scribes of imperial Greece and Rome helped to seize and (by their standards) to civilize the earth but ploughed it less tenaciously. English, both formal and casual, connects with catchiness, with vernacular, with kinesthesia.

. . . ok, he was doing well until he hit the conquering and human suffering aspect. Wouldn't you rather know that chutney—from the Hindi chaṭnī—sits right next to chutzpah in the English dictionary? Pretty awesome in my view.

IN OTHER LINGUISTIC-FU NEWS:

Ben Schott was interviewed on All Things Considered this week, probably in his capacity as the happy medium between professional lexicographer and vocational word-fooler. I love a happy medium. I also love when NPR decides to stop pretending to be hip and indulges in some serious word geekery. Because, omg, I-Before-E-Except-After-C controversy!!

Ok, so we're going to give buckram-backed cocktail fascinators a go in the next few weeks, largely because I have elastic and buckram instead of plasticky headband bases.

Potential adornments:

• pixie cups of all kinds

• pink oyster mushrooms

• earthstars

• Candle snuff fungus, while awesome, would not be convincingly decorative enough, I think. If I was going to do a naturally occuring branch-structure, I'd go with coral.

Suggestions welcome! Please include some sort of reference photo, though, because I never did get around to finding a handy-dandy illustrated mushroom field guide.

(Note to self: find Wensleydale shearings and dye green for moss effect. Pre-dreadlocked sheep FTW!)

All right my dears. You know what time it is—Titania's Bower is out,* the feast is set and it is time to boogie-oogie-oogie 'til you just can't boogie no more.

And if the sun doesn't come up tomorrow, I will know that you did not fulfill your part of the boogie-oogie-oogie-ing. OH SUCH SHAME WILL YOU FEEL.



(For my part, an hour's worth of swearing at bellydance practice is about as much boogie as I'm capable of, I think.)

---

* Photos are last year's because it is dark out, obv.

The cat would like you to know that, apart from him being astoundingly adorable, he is in no way in my room where he's not allowed. Not even a bit.


. . .

I can't decide if I'm irritated or amused that he is picking up all the mannerisms of my five-year-old-self.

That's about all the excitement around these parts lately.

Before I go run off erranding, I feel the need to remind you that in this sesquicentennial year, the zeitgeist arrow is never too far away from Charles Darwin and The Origin of Species. Woo!

Adventure!

Excitement!

Science!

. . . FINGER PUPPETS!!



Tangentially, a helpful list of latin-derived anniversary terms like sesquicentennial. Because sometimes they can be confusing.

Out I go into the world last Thursday, to get more Noro yarn for the fibonacci blanket and to match it with something neutral to sew it all together with. The Wall O' Cascade 220 is examined and contrary to my plans of a creamy pale green, I go with just plain white. How vanilla—actually, not even vanilla as vanilla. Ho hum.

And on the way to the checkout, like cunning yarn-selling fiends, the store has a basket of 'father's day' yarns, including this sumptuous shale grey Malabrigo.



Which I see on the day after the new Knitty comes out, and the oh-so fantastic Trilobite Hat. If you've been following me on Twitt'r, you'd know that I was musing how long it would take for my will to crumble in the face of a trilobite hat. It ended up being about . . . 36 hours. Because when the perfect skein of Malabrigo comes along, you seize it. Their method of kettle dying results in many beautiful and unique snowflakes, never to be repeated. Shale yarn + fossils + hat = FATE.

(There are, for some reason, two shades of Pearl in the Malabrigo Worsted line. It's very tempting to just keep on buying them and seeing what variations of exotic shades of grey I come up with. Heh.)



Then, after running all over tarnation, I return to find a packet on my steps. Oh, what ever could be inside? YARN??

YES. YARN. I CAN TELL YOU ARE SHOCKED AND AMAZED.



It is the fabulous Violet Baudelaire fibre bomb custom yarn that Gnomegarden was ever-so-kind to award to me for telling the lamest knock-knock joke ever. I shall have to think of something wonderful and Snickety to make with it. (I actually think there is more than a little Steampunk Sparklekiss in it, but that is OK. We are down with both those sort of things here.)



Tonight I brought it to my knitting group, so that it can be admired by people who will definitely envy me appreciate it. Oh, it was petted. And admired. And sparked a half hour joke telling extravaganza, where we laughed so loud, the Panera management turned up the muzak because we were drowning it out.

The moral of the story is: yarn is good for the soul. Or something. Yay string!

Strange Hours Atelier—



Where no scrap of paper is too small to be considered useless.



No, seriously. Some day I knew eensy bits of pretty paper would come in useful and I was right. My hoarding is justified!

There was going to be a big, looong post here about yet more grey yarn and trilobite hats and serendipity and post and how the universe is being really rather nice to me right now and I need to send out thank you cards and

and

and

and then our wonderful iceskatin' lads won Lord Stanley's Cup

in the best way possible



and I am nearly dead of GLEE

at us having bragging rights to the large, shiny, impractical silver punchbowl

again



and so I can't write anything that I had planned.

Sorry.


. . . I may have to illustrate trading cards in celebration. Eee!

For the most part I've been internalizing my squee this season so you've had to put up with fewer sports-related nonsequiteurs this year than I led you to believe. So there's that.

My dear Pacific Northwesterners,

If I was going to be visiting your fair realm, what time of year would you recommend? (Please also take into account that I'd be driving my way across the Rockies in a tiny, sturdy, but very old German car.) When I get there, what ought I go see?

It's something I've been thinking about for a while now, and I'm trying to gauge my schedule and budget accordingly, you know?



Weather is here, hope you are lovely—
Chrono

Every once in a while, the various typographic newsletters that litter my inbox will send me something useful (slightly more often than Border's newsletters do, but usually during June for whatever reason). Today FontShop felt the need to share their recent blog entries, including a sweet little piece on the Lemony Snicket end titles, using Emigre's Vendetta.



Understand, around here, those end titles are a Big Deal.

Apart from being pretty much in all ways perfect,* they made me want to draw again after I thought my illustration teacher had killed that impulse dead. They saw me muddle through a period of intense depression, and gave me the courage to start messing around with pen and ink. They urged me on to start the Hogwarts Tinies and helped to tie the whole aesthetic together. In short, they gave me a standard to try to live up to, and it's a dazzling one at that. I don't think I'll ever get tired of watching those end titles. How many times do you say that about movie credits?

I've never known who to thank until now—James Caliri's production company is credited nowhere in their own credits. O, irony.

While we're on the subject, Thomas Newman's score for A Series of Unfortunate Events is also brilliant and evocative. It's another one of those things that goes on endless repeats and I never tire of it. And, as you'd expect, squeeing about Lemony Snicket is what we've been doing here at Wound Tighter Than A Pocket Watch nearly since we began.

---

* I do not know what possessed them to use Apple Chancery for 'The End' but they deserve a swift kick. It doesn't even come off as The-Littlest-Elf- or The-Pony-Party-kind of cheesy horribleness. Argh. It was put there to give the typegeeks fits, wasn't it?

If our minds were in sync, when I'd say 'otter,' you'd say 'water polo.'

The odds on that are pretty slim, I know.

Sometimes it is lonely being me.

Thing that is singlemost making me happy right now:

2D Goggle's presentation of:

LOVELACE & BABBAGE: TOGETHER THEY FIGHT CRIME



'Happy' is probably a bit of an understatement. 'Deliciously and exuberantly dorky enough to break my face from the nonstop grinning' might be more accurate. Because, dear heavens, there is Isambard Kingdom Brunel. And Wellington. And Coleridge. And and and and and.

I recommend that you begin from the beginning though.

In related news, I've been drawing more but not nearly enough. (This is part of formal artists' training, I suspect, to counteract any innate laziness and make us all manic and paranoid instill good work ethic.) But part of the trouble is that a good chunk of reference photos I want to use are digital and I've never been at ease drawing from a screen. I don't know—the vertical-to-horizontal view is screwing with my perceptions?—there's more squinting involved?—I'm still living in my little bubble of Ye Olden Worlde? Weird. Any advice on overcoming that, people who draw from screens on a regular basis? Other than more practice?

I have ideas for Commerce & Alabaster Productions and they need to get out of my head. Real soon now.

I remain slightly but pleasantly baffled at all of the area's cheesemongers being discretely tattooed and unwholsomely attractive. My only conclusion is that it is part of the job requirements? Well done, those job requirements. Standards are important.

This does not in any way replace the Cheese Counter of the Gods, but having mascarpone-gorgonzola graciously measured out for me is a good place to start.

---

* To achieve this, flutter eyelashes, give them a sly grin and ask for a half-inch slab of the most expensive cheese on the block. You will easily be their favorite patron all day.

Hurrah, hurrah, 2ce's generous mailing of Magic for Beginners has arrived. Bringing cool and damp Portland weather in its wake.

MAGIC.



As fast as I was consumed with glee, I was consumed with guilt for wanting to ignore my library books that much more. Poor library books; poor Alphabet Juice—which I hear in my head as actually being narrated by Mister Roy Blount Jr. (Abecedariums, linguistics and word-fooling are just not doing well with me at the moment for some strange reason.)

A while back—and really for the past few years—I've been fixated on shelf fungi & polypores. Me being me, you should assume that a fair bit of that time was spent figuring out how to render them in hat form. Because, of course, what else do I do?

Et voila, a stump pillbox with a colony of shelf fungi growing out of it:



I've been debating how much more this needs to be 'finished' in a millinery sense. The freeform ribbing that gives texture to the bark pulls out awfully at the brim. Right now there's a thin piece of elastic threaded through there, but I wonder if a [mossy green] grosgrain sweatband wouldn't be more stable (& professional). I also am playing with the idea of some [mossy green] netting to spill across the top—giving it more of a cocktail fascinator look. Hmmmmm.

What do you think? The Etsy shop is pitifully sparse on hats and it'd be good to list this one soon.