Welcome To My Head

I promised E. that I'd list the podcasts I like. I'm relatively new to podcasts (I'm slow on the uptake), so I'm yet to build up a list of definitive favourites. If someone has recommendations, I'd be happy to hear them! Left Field Cinema is an intelligent podcast looking at both arthouse cinema (like Kieslowski) and mainstream films like Alien. I like the podcast because it assumes the listener is intelligent and it covers a lot of films I enjoy.

The Knit Picks Podcast. KP is a low-budget yarn company focused on the North American market - and they've managed to produce a podcast which is both very informative and very intimate. Kelley Petkun will either irritate or amuse you - she reminds me of a good friend of mine and so I enjoy catching up with Petkun's wide-eyed middle-class commentary on travelling, dogs and golf. I kid you not.

Oxford University's Medieval Podcasts. I have really, really enjoyed their podcasts on Anglo-Saxon texts and culture. This may not be everyone's cup o'tea, but these podcasts have been right up my street. To be avoided if New Historicism gives you a headache.

Lingua Franca. An Australian podcast on language. So far my favourite episode focused on linguistic typology (i.e. classification of languages based upon structural rather than semantic or historical similarities) but the podcast covers a lot of ground: spelling, loanwords, coarse language usage etc.

I'm yet to find podcasts dealing with current literature, modernism, poetry, art history, entertainment or humanism. Anyone?

In related news - that is, "Karie starts using web tools that have been around for years" - I am now keeping up with blogs via a blog aggregator. Gosh, I'm so 2003 sometimes.

Finally, I have (re-)discovered The Phoenix Foundation in recent days. If you like your music indie, mellow, folky and kiwi ..

Overheard in Glasgow

Kid looking at the zoological collection at Glasgow Kelvingrove Museum: "Mum, were these animals once alive?"Mum: "No, only the elephant".

*facepalms*

Brambles

It is odd how smells affect the human brain. Example: the leaking water pipe in our kitchen has finally been fixed but there is an odd damp smell in the air. If I close my eyes I'm immediately transported to my great-grandmother's pantry/scullery in rural Denmark circa 1981. My great-grandmother lived in a damp old house in a small village. She had a huge garden which supplied her (and her two sons who remained with her) with fresh produce virtually all year round. The house was always in constant need of repair, the loo was outside and there was no hot water - but I had my tree house in an apple tree, the attic was filled with relics pre-WWII and I'd do little archaeological digs at the back of the house (next to the caravan where my mother slept as a teenager, behind the makeshift football pitch/outdoors badminton court and right by the cherry trees). At Christmas time, the house would fill with her eleven children, their spouses and own offspring. Her sons would sit around the big table with their playing cards, their cigarettes and beer bottles. Her daughters would be in the kitchen cooking the Christmas food, opening the mysterious jars on the top shelves of the pantry and cursing the lazy men.

My great-grandmother (and her two sons) moved into our little rural town some fifteen years later. Her house had become too cold and too damp for an old lady. She finally got hot running water, a real bathroom and a shop across the street. But she had her sons build her a pantry and she turned most of the new garden into a vegetable patch.

She passed away some six years ago. And here I am, her quiet great-grand-daughter, in a Glasgow tenement flat on an overcast Saturday afternoon and I'm looking forward to picking brambles later this year and making bramble jam - just like Nan would've expected of me.

Oh. Em. Gee.

This t-shirt WILL be mine.

In August 2000 I spent an entire day in Te Awamutu - I even have a picture of myself posing with a sign saying Te Awamutu - and it's a small, small North island town in New Zealand. It only has two things going for it: its rose gardens and some people who left.

Like the Drip Drip Drip of the Raindrops..

I'm sitting here quietly listening to the gentle drips of water flowing into .. a bucket I have to empty every two hours or else.

Yesterday's sore throat/headache-tranquillity was broken by our downstairs neighbour pounding on the door. Water was dripping into the kitchen. Seeing as we've had some sort of leak around our sink and had been waiting for a plumber since last Monday (long story and a boring one too), I wasn't too surprised. A few phone calls later and I was still waiting for a plumber, but now I had been promised one and on the same day! Same day meant next day, of course, and so far he has put a bucket under the sink, ripped part of the window frame out, dismantled a tap .. and left.

Oh, if you are in Edinburgh on Saturday, my friend Lilith is doing a trunk show of her fabulous hand-dyed yarns (she runs Old Maiden Aunt). There'll also be handspun yarn and tiny trickets. The whole she-bang takes place at K1 Yarns just off Grassmarket.

Wednesday Woes

I woke up this morning with a very sore throat and a pounding headache, so I will make this brief.

Startling Things I Have Seen Recently On the Net:
+ The Han Solo Stitch Sampler
+ Dark Side Stained Glass
+ The 'Scariest' Garden Ornament Ever
+ Bad Baby Names (Legend Haakon? Calaya Delphine? Aemezolina Mercedes? Gennavieve Luaraleigh?!)
+ 10 Comics Creators That Should Make Movies Instead Of Frank Miller

Have at it. I'll try to find some LemSip and my bed in the meantime.

Addendum: NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!