Snake Surly

First, I apologize for the complete and utter lack of knitting content. It’s just been to darned hot lately to knit, and the only thing I’m actively working on is the FBS, which is unbelievably, stultifyingly boring. Sorry about that.
Anyway, the movie. This should have been a great movie. It’s based on one of the best plays ever written, and the casting (can I tell you how much I LOVE Lionel Barrymore?) and sets were fabulous. But I use the words “based on”. I don’t know what the hell Frank Capra was thinking. I don’t know what the hell Kaufman and Hart were thinking.
There was all this ridiculous extra crap written in. WHY? My theory is that Capra wanted to cast Jimmy Stewart as Tony, and he’s really a supporting character, so they re-wrote it to make the love story the main plot. The point of Tony as written is that he’s of another world, and the play explores all the interesting things that happen when worlds collide. In this story, Tony starts out as an oddball who happens to live in that other world, so there’s no journey.
We have to get up in like three hours to go to Disneyland, so I’m not going to rant about this. Just go see even a crappy community theatre production of this lovely play, and rent “It’s a Wonderful Life”. You’ll be way better off.
p.s. I know everyone who’s ever been in a play has done this one, but my mom and I both played Penny in high school, and Nathan played Paul.

An incompetently run war! Racial profiling! An innocent man sent to some hellhole island! A paranoid and power-hungry government! Fickle public opinion! A hothead shouting “EAT MY SHORTS!”
(Okay, you caught me. Emile Zola said “J’accuse”, not “Eat my shorts”.)
This was an excellent flick, but it was almost too creepy to watch. You couldn’t make a film about the Dreyfus Affair nowadays because nobody would believe it wasn’t totally made up. Watching the scenes of Zola’s trial was like watching freakin’ Condi Rice lie testify before Congress. At least in this story you know the good guys are going to triumph, although if I’d been Alfred Dreyfus I would have told them to stick their apology up their derrieres.

This last Christmas, Elizabeth asked me to take a “nice picture” of her family. No problem, I thought. All four of them are extremely attractive and photogenic. I probably took a hundred pictures, and there was not a single one where everyone was looking at the camera and smiling.
Oh well.

It was three hours long, totally over the top and I loved it. I kept wishing someone would have edited the crap out of it, but that would have been a lousy way to pay homage to Ziegfeld.
Usually those crazy over-produced song and dance numbers with rotating staircases, dancers clad in glitter and feathers, and (I am not making this up) live ponies leave me bored to tears, but somehow this all worked. Maybe it was because William Powell is so much fun to watch. Obviously he’s going to be fabulous with Myrna Loy (she was fab, but why didn’t Billie Burke play herself?), but I was delighted by the chemistry he had with Frank Morgan (you know, the Great and Powerful Oz), who played Jack Billings, rival/enabler.
Speaking of Frank Morgan and Billie Burke (and Ray Bolger, who did play himself), we’re about to hit about ten awesome movies in a row. After we get through The Life of Emile Zola and the massacred script fiasco of You Can’t Take It With You, we’re going to get a whole bunch of my favorite movies ever. We’re going to try to watch as many nominated films as we can going forward, which isn’t going to be too tough. In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb and declare an Oscar Challenge Mini-Challenge, which is to watch all the Best Picture nominees for 1939.
Aaaaanyway, this was way, way, way better than I expected. I laughed, I cried, it was better than Cats.

Normally I’m a History Snob and I know too much about a story to enjoy it. Here’s what I knew before I saw this flick: There was this dick named Captain Bligh, and he was on this ship called the Bounty, and there was a mutiny and Tahiti and some breadfruit and, tangentially, Sir Joseph Banks (he has a nice rose named after him).
Yeah, that’s pretty much it. Timothy Spall Charles Laughton was a total dick, Clark Gable was a shirtless hottie, and the mostly naked chicks in Tahiti all had great hair.
Ignorance is bliss, I guess.

Boy, I suck at photographing shawls.

I’ll try getting a picture of it actually in use this weekend. None of the pictures I took of the thing draped picturesquely over the porch railings or the beam in the inglenook came out very well.
This was absolutely the most difficult thing I’ve ever knitted. I cast it on in January of 2007, and it went on two very long Time Outs. It almost didn’t get finished, but I’m so glad I persevered because it is absolutely flipping gorgeous, if I do say so myself.
Dorothy Siemens, the designer of this pattern, did one heckova job. It’s a beautifully written pattern with thoughtfully laid-out charts. She deserves a huge amount of credit for this shawl, but I’m going to go out on a limb and pat myself on the back for executing this sucker all by myself.
Yeah, there are mistakes in it. If you know exactly where to look, you can see where I fixed that dropped stitch, and evidence of the snag of doom is still there. The join in the middle is not very clean, and there’s a really crappily woven-in end in the middle of a row where I’d had a knot in the yarn. But I like to keep in mind the weavers of Persian rugs, who believe that only Allah is perfect, therefore it’s arrogant to try to make a perfect rug.
I know this shawl is far from perfect, but I love it and am very proud of it.

The Paisley Shawl of Doom is done, so are the orange Acero socks.
Now what? I’ve cast on a pair of emergency socks, but I’m feeling a little unfulfilled. My options:
1. the Forbes Forest scarf - I don’t really feel like it.
2. One of Cookie’s new socks - I have the patterns, but none of my stash is leaping out at me.
3. Gretel - I have the pattern and the perfect yarn and the needles. I just don’t feel like making a hat.
4. I could actually, you know, like, PHOTOGRAPH the purple shawl and blog about it, since it kicks some serious ass.
5. The old FBS could come out of exile.
Bleah. Maybe I’ll just go do the laundry.

So Margaret and George are in town and we went in to the City today to chill with them. We started out at the Ferry Plaza and had lunch at Taylor’s (yay), then we schlepped across town to the park and the Conservatory of Flowers. It was fabulous, but it was a freakin’ sauna in there. We still needed more flowery goodness, so we walked over to the Japanese Tea Garden. I TRIED to be tranquil and shit, but I couldn’t do it. (I was successfully tranquilized somewhat later by several Hendricks and Tonics at the Thirsty Bear.)

The pictures are on Smugmug. I’m going to put Nathan’s pictures up, too. It’s really cool how we took totally different pictures of the same plants. Mine are mostly close up and weird, and Nathan’s pictures show the plants in context with their surroundings.
Anyway, it was a swell day. I’m a little sunburned and a lot tired, but my unstylish new sneakers from L.L. Bean didn’t give me blisters. Woohoo!

Is this EVER going to be done? There are only about three rows of the last paisley chart left, then there are the hexagons, then some spacer rows, so I suppose I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Sigh. I just want it done.
Also, I’m very, very concerned that my gauge now is looser than when I started. I’ve been trying to knit tighter, but I don’t think it’s helping. (This is where Grace tells me it will all block out.)

I know, I know, get back to work. It’s not going to knit itself.

O hai, the Paisley Shawl is being haunted by Karl Rove.
Example 1: HOLYFUCKINGSHIT, there’s a snag in it. Let me just say that it’s WAY too far away to fix by dropping down to it. I don’t know what to do. I’ve poked and prodded at it and have determined that it’s not a live stitch, so if I do nothing it’s not going to get worse unless it catches on something. It’s not long enough to weave in, and I am loath to tie a knot in it. Any ideas? (Click on the picture - the bigger photo shows the loop really clearly.)

Example 2: Last night I was plugging away on the last bloody chart repeat of the Boteh Chart and noticed that in one of the middle sections, I had seven stitches instead of eight. I poked and prodded and couldn’t find where I’d screwed up, so I said “screw it” and strategically eliminated a k2tog.
About six rows later, I decided to put on my dorktastic Petzl headlamp. I was knitting along and right there in plain sight, about six rows back, was a dropped stitch. Just hanging there. I nearly had a heart attack. Strangely, instead of panicking, I hallooed for Nathan and asked him to bring me a sock needle (How cute is it that he knew what I wanted and where I keep them?) and then a Manhattan.
Anyway, the spirit of Elizabeth Zimmerman must have been watching over me. The bit where I picked up the dropped stitch isn’t gorgeous, but there’s no way anyone will ever see it unless they’ve got a microscope.
This thing is going to be the death of me.