A Corner of a Foreign Field

A blustery day in Glasgow. We seized the moment when the rain stopped and went into city centre to buy me a cinnamon latte and browse quickly through the bargain offers in Waterstones. This is what passes for normalcy - I could do it because the city was quiet, I had company and I had had a good night's sleep. Yes, I am starting to get cabin fever but the next hospital visit is on Wednesday. Please cross fingers for a solution. In the meantime life goes on.

And life right now equals being crafty with yarn. I have embraced Etsy - although I am slightly disturbed by the fact that you can buy handmade nipple tassels (link not safe for work, obviously) as well as pig ballerina cloth sanitary towels (reusable) (link not safe for your sanity). I have also become a beta tester of Ravelry which is a knitting/crochet community. I feel very middle-aged - particularly as I have been crocheting along to PUPPIES these past few days. Youth, youth, where hast thou gone?

Finally, I'm much amused by The Independent's latest marketing decision: free glossy booklets featuring the Great Poets. Who else would have thought that would entice more people to pick up the newspaper? Who?

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Underneath the Trees

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Ladies and gentlemen, we had snow the other day. You might think that my Viking Blood might've caused me to embrace the weather and frolic through the snow like some demented Norse god, but no. I hate snow. Blame it on too many schoolyard snowball fights which I always lost. No, I stayed indoors and read.

Speaking of which, today is World Book Day. Hooray. Worryingly the site has plenty of fun games involving Paddington Bear (who recently abandoned marmalade in favour of Marmite) and Jacqueline Wilson. I'm not so sure about the chosen strategy, but then again I'm an old hag who's currently more obsessed with yarn than books.

Selective linkage on the unrelated theme of anatomy (in the broadest sense) and art:
+ SteamPunk Lego Star Wars (yes, really)
+ Art resulting from asking children what they thought the body looked like “under the skin.”
+ InsectLab. Also rather steampunk and not for people with entomophobia.

Go forth and read. I'm curling up in front of the heater.

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Getting My Geek On

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I finally got hold of Alex Lloyd's third album, Distant Light the other day. It's the aural equivalent of me snuggling up in a blanket on a spring day: it's invigourating but also deeply comforting. However, most days I'm listening to Canadian band Alaska in Winter - their album continues to worm its way into my ears.

And most days I am passing time by harking back to my roots. My grandmother sews, knits, crochets, embroiders and works with paper; my mother crochets, works with paper and even writes songs; my uncle P. paints, does graphic design and builds small castles in his back garden.. you get the picture. We are a creative bunch. I can sew, knit, crochet, do calligraphy, work with paper, paint and dabble in photography with quite good results. Right now I crochet and am re-discovering my love for textiles, textures and multi-dimensional shapes. It is exciting to see something I have in my head suddenly begin to appear between my hands just through using a hook and some scrap yarn. Exciting, I tell you!

And then you get people who think of crocheting as a mathematical exercise. The Institure for Figuring has an entire subsite dealing with Hyperbolic Space. It's actually really damn cool:

We have created a world of rectilinearity. The rooms we inhabit, the skyscrapers we work in, the grid-like arrangement of our streets, the shelves on which we store our possessions, and the freeways we cruise on our daily commute speak to us in straight lines. But what exactly is a straight line? And how do such “objects” relate to one another?

This question, so seemingly trivial, lies at the heart of a conundrum that dates back to the dawn of the Western mathematical tradition. Though seemingly obvious, the property of “straightness” turns out to be a subtle and surprisingly fecund concept. Understanding this quality ultimately led mathematicians to discover a radical new kind of space that had hitherto seemed abhorrent and impossible.