Britt’s Blog

(When exactly did I become such an art enthusiast? )

Check out the work of Ji Lee, creative director at Google Creative Lab.

Do not miss:

• Encaptionating advertisements
• The revolved alphabet
• Some good, old-fashioned rhebus-style wordplay
• The Redundant Clock. (Want.)
• The Lamp Calendar. (Want more.)

Via Unclutter, who, bless their collective heart, doesn’t seem to get it.

Check out this video of “starships.” As I watched, I started at “um, okay, this is kind of cheap and obvious,” around the corner of, “hmmm, it is really well done, though,” to feeling myself being sucked into the illusion. Some of the best stuff is in the middle and end.

More videos available from the artist.

As usual, this comes via Metafilter.

I really can’t describe this first video better than Metafilter’s geoff:

“Monks on Segways, with fire on the top of their heads, playing “Lightning” by Philip Glass.” Although possibly it should be mentioned that one of the monks has a banjo.

goeff also kindly reminds us of Philip Glass on Sesame Street. I remember being utterly transfixed by this as a child before I knew who Philip Glass was, of course. This may explain something about my Akhnaten obsession, although I hadn’t remembered the Sesame Street piece before now!

If you have seen the Watchmen, you may recall Dr. Manhatten’s theme, which is “Pruit Igoe & Prophecies” from Koyaanisqatsi.

I have given up on most of the life-hacky, self-helpy blogs that I used to read religiously during my quest for the perfectly systematized life, but I still read and enjoy Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project. Gretchen Rubin has more impressive credentials the the usual blogging phenom. She’s a Yale law graduate who clerked for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. In additional to probing contemporary experts on the happy life and interviewing lots of hip and trendy people about their happiness secrets, she plumbs many historical sources.

On weekends, she usually features a thought-provoking quotation, and this week’s resonated with me. It was from Pope John XXIII, of all people, and it was a great reminder of something I’ve been thinking about lately.

From the saints I must take the substance, not the accidents of their virtues. I am not St. Aloysuis, nor must I seek holiness in his particular way, but according to the requirements of my own nature, my own character, and the different conditions of my life.…If St. Aloysius had been as I am, he would have become holy in a different way.

I have a tendency to look at people I admire and think, “X is so good at doing Y… I wish I could learn how to do Y just like X does.”

And while there are some skills, heaven knows, I could work on, it’s also important to realize that it can’t be my goal to turn into X. Nobody expects me to do Y just as well as X, and there are probably things that I can do—or at least that I can learn to do—better than X. And I really should be working on that stuff, more than just trying to become another copy of X.

As Ira Glass so wisely says, “They already have the real Ted Koppel. Ted Koppel is already on TV. They don’t need you imitating Ted Koppel.”

What the world needs me doing the stuff that I am uniquely good at. So my mission shouldn’t be to emulate X in all things that X does well, but rather to be attentive to my own strengths so that I can become the best me I can be.

Yet another excuse for us Old People to look back at the eighties and wonder, what they hell were we all thinking? I blame all the CFCs in the atmosphere (due in no small part to excessive use of hairspray) and the unrelenting stress of Cold War Anxiety.

Anyway, you must watch the literal-lyrics version of “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” If you are a Young Person, consider it part of your history education. Beloit College students: see if you can get extra credit from your Div II classes!

And don’t miss the literal reinterpretation of “Take on Me,” relinked because the link in my previous post is borked. Sadly, in this version, the last bit of the video is cut off. :(

But, I say again, Piiiiippppppe Wrennnnnch Fiiiiiiiiiiight1!!1!

Surprise! It’s a baby jacket.

This is the Elizabeth Zimmermann Baby Suprise Jacket from The Knitting Workshop. It’s a weird little exercise in purl-free knitting. Viva la garter stitch!

Believe it or not, it’s worked all back and forth, in one piece, and its squareness and sleeves and cool rectilinear stripy-ness all come from strategic increases and decreases. It looks like a big floppy nothing in particular until you fold it in a fairly nonintuitive way, and sew two (count ‘em, two) seams across the top of the sleeves.

Is it retro? Has it come around to being modern again? Whichever, it’s a really striking pattern, and definitely stands apart from your run-of-the-mill baby clothes.

The yarn is Lion Brand Microspun, which I bought a ton of to make the Lion Brand Baby Corn Bunting (which is actually adorable and was very fun to make) and socks (gad!) when I was a novice knitter and didn’t know what was good for me.

I do not recommend this yarn. It is evil, evil, evil. Very hard to work with. If you’re kind, you won’t squint and see all the flaws. It’s not at all tightly wound, and naturally slippery, so it’s easy to miss a few strands or accidentally split the yarn—especially on this project, as I was working in an especially tight gauge.

I’m pleased with the color combo, though. And the yarn is nice and soft.

A long, long time ago, this double-knit scarf with stars caught my attention. I immediately thought “baby blanket!”

It was probably because of the blue and pink color scheme, but I also think that Elizabeth Zimmermann had a hand (as so often she does). In The Knitter’s Almanac, she says:

Double Knitting…always seems to me, though fascinating, a great waste of time…The knitting public, however, is intrigued by Double Knitting, so, as one of its members, you shall be given Double Knitting. Never one to waste time and effort, I have tried to incorporate four advantages, to make the undertaking worth while. First, Double Knitting is for some reason very light, relative to its bulk, and soft as a cloud if you make it in light, thick wool…with large needles. It makes a splendid pad when you lay the baby down on the hard floor for its kicking exercises. Second, it is the warmest of covers—warm as two blankets, which, of course, it is.

EZ goes on to give a third reason (specific to her project and thus irrelevant to our purposes here) but, curiously, no forth reason. Presumably, the reader is left to “unvent” a reason of her own. My own reason is that double-knitting is lots of fun.

EZ describes a method by which you knit across, slipping every other stitch, turn, and knit across the previously slipped stitches, slipping the previously knit stitches. I’ll agree with her that this method is frustratingly inefficient.

I prefer (as does, apparently, almost everyone else on the internet) the more modern method, which requires that you manage two strands of yarn at once, and knit the “front” stitches with one strand and purl the “back” stitches with the other. This has the same rhythm as a K1-P1 rib or seed stitch, which I find inexplicably soothing. No need to go over the row twice.

EZ also neglects the real charm of double knitting which is that by using two different colors, and working a color changes by switching front to back or vice versa, you automatically get a back that is precisely the inverse of the front.

This blanket is done in Caron Simply Soft Eco, which is nice and soft, cheap, machine washable and available the excellent deep purple and bright yellow colors I was looking for. As an added bonus, the blanket actually contains 3.6 recycled beverage bottles!

I made mine basically the same way the scarf is described, but bigger, with a moon thrown in for visual contrast.

If you’re interested in trying a tamer double-knit baby blanket, there’s the one mentioned above in the Knitter’s Almanac, under February, and there’s also a very charming dk blanket pattern at knitty.com.

If you like SF and you like podcasts, you owe it to yourself to check out the excellent science-fiction podcast, Escape Pod.

Take a listen toExhalation, a Hugo Award nominee by Ted Chiang and a mind-blowing (ha!) story. It’s all kinds of awesome: absolutely fantastic and imaginative but rooted firmly in the laws of physics, surprising yet exquisitely logically consistent.

The episode clocks in around 50 minutes, which is long for Escape Pod, but it is worth the time.

My laptop is filthy. I drag it around every waking minute (it seems), I eat while I use it, and I probably don’t wash my hands enough. As a result, my computer has all kinds of grime all over it and crumbs in the keyboard. (And probably swine flu virus too.)

My “A” key got a crumb stuck under it and wasn’t working right. (My students will be happy to know that this mishap occurred after I finished entering grades for the semester—otherwise I would have been unable to give a grade higher than a B+.)

Anyway, I popped off the key to remove the obstruction (my, there’s a lot of cat hair under there, too) and as always I forgot how to correctly reassemble the little white plastic interlocking ring-lever doohickies underneath to get the key back on.

It is deeply annoying that there isn’t a good tutorial out there on how to do it, but at least this one had a (underexposed, blurry) picture that is clear enough to see how it was all supposed to go. Reattaching a key on a MacBook Pro.

I post it here in preparation for the next crumbectomy.