This Is Not A Knitting Blog

This is not a knitting blog. I am not much of a knitter.

I can, however, make a hat - and I made two as Christmas presents and just finished one for my husband, using random yarn I had in the cellar. The Christmas present hats were very scrappy - mostly navy blue worsted, with dribs and drabs of other yarn striped in (hello needlepoint wool from 1972). The hat I just finished is more refined - only two yarns, in alternating stripes of navy worsted and black cotton.

Every time I decide to make a hat, though, I agonize about the pattern - and especially about how to do the decreasing to shape the top. I have finally settled on a pattern that works, so - even though I am not much of a knitter and this is not a knitting blog - here goes:

Worsted Weight Adult Sized Rolled Brim Hat - Knit in the Round

You'll need to know how to cast on, how to knit, and how to knit two stitches together (to decrease). You don't need to know how to purl or increase. As far as the porcupine business with the double pointed needles, do it when no one will interrupt you, in a good spot with great light, and have patience.

Materials
120 yards of worsted weight yarn (or, you know, a good sized ball or two)
Circular needle - size 9 US, 16" long
Set of double pointed needles - size 9 US
Gauge? We don't need no stinkin' gauge - just go ahead and make the hat.

Instructions
Cast 80 stitches onto the circular needle. Place a marker and join, being careful not to spiral the whole thing around the circular needle. Knit for about 6”, ending at the marker.

Begin decreasing on the next round, as follows:

1. (Knit 6, k2tog) repeat to end. You'll now have 70 stitches left.
2. Knit.
3. (Knit 5, k2tog) repeat to end. 60 stitches remain.
4. Knit.
5. (Knit 4, k2tog) repeat to end. 50 stitches remain.
6. Knit.
7. (Knit 3, k2tog) repeat to end. 40 stitches remain.
8. Knit.

Switch to double pointed needles.

9. (Knit 2, k2tog) repeat to end. 30 stitches remain.
10. Knit.
11. (Knit 1, k2tog) repeat to end. 20 stitches remain.
12. Knit.
13. (k2tog) repeat to end.

Cut the yarn leaving a 12" tail. Thread it through the remaining 10 stitches, draw up tightly and secure. Weave in ends.

If your intended recipient has a bigger head than usual, make the hat bigger by 1) casting on 90 stitches, and 2) beginning the decrease with a row of knit 7, k2tog followed by a row of straight knitting - and then continue as above.

The Reluctant Envoy

I turned the page in the paper today, and learned that Peter Serkin had died. He was a good one, and straddled a line between new and old - playing the old stuff, and championing the new. According to his obituary, in 1973 he got Grammy Award nominations for two records - one of several of Mozart’s Piano Concertos, and another of the 20 piano solos that comprise Messiaen’s “Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus”. He was also described as “the counterculture’s reluctant envoy to the straight concert world” - per Donal Henahan.

Once upon a time, I worked at a small arts organization. And once, before my time, Serkin had played there, as a benefit for the organization. Lou Reed had also played there, and the organization convinced Serkin and Reed to sign a fundraising letter. Hey you, we're cool musicians, we both played at this cool place, send money - that kind of fundraising letter. Well, one of the letters came back, stuffed into the postage paid return envelope. On top, someone had scrawled "Peter Serkin is a bum". I mean, what? (No, there was no money enclosed.)

I'm sorry someone thought you were a bum, Peter. And I hope Mozart and Messiaen have embraced you. R.I.P.

What Were They Thinking?

It's time for another round of charitable crankiness. You may recall that in 2012 I kept every charitable solicitation that arrived by postal mail. At the beginning January, I thought I might do that again, but instead of waiting to do a round up at year end, I think I'll do it monthly.

There were ten solicitations that arrived in January - however, two of them were from the same organization so nine places tried to get me to donate.

Of the ten envelopes, four came with plain return envelopes, to which I would have to supply my own stamp:



Five came with business reply envelopes - where the sender gets to mail something and the recipient pays the postage. (I've heard this compared to making a collect call.):



With business reply mail, the post office charges the recipient for each envelope that comes back - plus a premium for handling, and an annual permit fee.

Note that two of those envelopes ask you to put your own stamp on anyway: "your stamp on this envelope is an additional contribution" and "your first-class stamp on this envelope adds to your gift". It's a little disingenuous to call it an additional contribution - but it would arguably reduce the expenses to the organization because they wouldn't have to pay the postage on that particular envelope and would therefore save a dollar or so. However, in my experience as a career non-profit person, who has worked at organizations that have tested using business reply mail, if someone puts a stamp on a BRE, the post office charges ANYWAY. So both the donor and the recipient have now paid postage, and that's ridiculous.

What really chapped my hide, though, was a return envelope from Human Rights Watch - which was a BRE with stamps. Five cents worth of stamps:



I just don't know what they were thinking - so I looked it up. Apparently it's a thing:

Here’s a relatively inexpensive trick that can increase the prominence of the BRE (and make it look like an SRE). Try adding a few low-denomination stamps, such as one-cent, two-cent, or even a five-cent stamp, ideally aligned with an element of your mission. (For nature accounts, we’ve had success using Bobcat or other animal stamps.)

Not only does Human Rights Watch have to pay for postage plus the handling charge for any envelopes that come back, they have also spent money on postage for EVERY ENVELOPE THAT THEY SENT. That seems like a crazy waste of money.

The USPS probably likes it though, all those stamps bought and never used.

Hot Diggity

Today's New York Times had an article about Amy Klobuchar ... in the food section. It was titled: A Classic Midwestern Dish Becomes a Talking Point in Iowa, and I read it with great interest (even though I think I never want to eat or make said classic dish).

For one thing, is it hot dish, hotdish, or hot-dish? Does it take an article - like, is it a hotdish, or is it just hotdish? The Times article is all over the map - I guess there's no style guide to hotdish?

I was also decidedly unimpressed with the campaign's printed recipe:



Any sane person knows that when you write a recipe, you list the ingredients in order of deployment.

That said, Amy's Twitter feed got the ingredients in the right order:

But one version calls it Hotdish, and the other calls it Hot Dish.

And I just don't know what to think.

Does Elizabeth Warren have a signature recipe?

The Magic Gunslinger

Sometime in December, my sister asked me if I wanted to go to a show. She would get the tickets; it was to be my birthday present. Because the tickets turned out to be for 9:30 on a Friday night, we decided to make an event of it. We checked into a hotel in the late afternoon, had wine and cheese and crackers and pâté in the room, availed ourselves of the rather inadequate sauna and steam room, and took the subway downtown to see The Enigmatist.

It turned out to be spectacular - the kind of "wow" that I can't stop thinking about. It's basically a magic show by one David Kwong - but there are no disappearing women or appearing doves, just card tricks, puzzles, word games and math, all deeply woven together. First things first: when you arrive, there are four puzzles arrayed in the foyer. You are supposed to solve them to gain entrance, and they play a part later in the show. It sets a mood, and primes you for what's next. What's next includes a dollar bill, a kiwi, audience participation, a Scrabble demonstration, and a crossword puzzle constructed on the fly. Wholly delightful, and completely in our sweet spot. Scrabble and crosswords? We're there.

On the way out, they were selling copies of a Kwong's book, Spellbound. I didn't buy one, but I did take it out of the library - hoping for great reveals. There aren't really any reveals, because magic, but the book is not uninteresting. It's published by the business books arm of his publisher - and it has a certain "here's how to get ahead in business" vibe to it, which I wasn't expecting. In essence, control your narrative and stay ahead of your audience - and your magic show will succeed.

I have been ruminating about the one bit part I got roped into: Kwong handed me a book, and asked me to look for a longish word, and write it in a notebook and tuck the notebook under my chair and hand him back the book. Later, of course, he revealed the word - the right word. I think I know how he knew the word...but I don't think I can buy a copy of that paperback book so I can't check.

Easter eggs and other unexpected pleasures

I read. A lot. Maybe not as much as some, but I logged 81 books in GoodReads last year. If I were more organized, I'd be able to tell you the ratio between fiction and non-fiction. But 36 were library books. A bunch were little obsessions:

• 6 of the Mrs. Polifax books by Dorothy Gilman
• the whole of Deborah Harkness's All Souls Trilogy
• 3 Tana French books (two of which I read while watching Dublin Murders and that was probably a bad idea because I was so confused)
• 8 in the British Library's series of reprints of vintage mysteries

Some were books I feel like I should have read a long time ago: I loved Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark and I think of it often. I cracked through nine books in a two week beach vacation - starting, aptly, with Pamela Paul's My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues.

Other notable books read include these that I'd read again:

• The Library Book (Susan Orlean)
• Someone At A Distance (Dorothy Whipple)
• The Nutmeg Tree (Margery Sharp)
• Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret (Craig Brown)
• Uncommon Type (Tom Hanks)

The last book I read in 2019 was The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King. It's the first in a series wherein Mary Russell befriends Sherlock Holmes and becomes his collaborator. My friend Teresa had sent me the first three just before Christmas. Teresa's sent me books before - she sent me all 12 of the Robin Paige mysteries a few years ago.

And what I love about reading the books from Teresa is that she is a die-hard editor: every book that she has passed along to me has at least a few edits (in pencil - only in pencil). She fixes typos. She edits out unnecessary words.

She replaces infelicitous words.

And in A Monstrous Regiment of Women, the 2nd Mary Russell book, which I have just finished, she added page numbers.

It's like finding Easter eggs.

---

Recently, someone created a Facebook group of OG bloggers - people who'd attended one or more BlogHer conferences back in the day. Reading those posts is an exercise in a lovely sort of nostalgia, even though I was so tangentially attached - there, but not "in". Teresa never went to BlogHer, but I'd never have met Teresa but for the blogging community. There are so many people - mostly women - that are good friends to this day, who have made my life immeasurably richer, who I'd never have met otherwise. I am so grateful for that, even though the platform is not what it was and there's far less reading and writing of blogs going on. Nevertheless, I persist.

Myriad Poetry

I have been housecleaning (desk cleaning?) in my office, following a complete (and long overdue) rewrite of the employee handbook. I've been tossing notes and samples and articles and whatnot, and today I went through an enormous bound Powerpoint handout from some seminar I once went to, checking for notes in case there was anything I *needed* to keep.

Well. There's a slide titled "The Myriad of Leaves".

I mean, who talks like that?

If it's not obvious, the leaves in this case are not the kind that grow on trees, but rather the different kinds of times off from work.

I was clearly bored and my mind wandered to the other kind of leaves ... resulting in a haiku in the margin.

Myriad of leaves
Falling from the autumn sky
A Powerpoint dream

You write poetry during boring workshops, yes?

---

PS Apparently "the myriad of leaves" is not incorrect, at least according to Dictionary.com and Grammarist. But it certainly sent me off on a tangent.

R E S I S T

There was an article in the Times the other day about a new law in California, that mandates "that every public company in the state should have a woman on the board by the end of" 2019. I read it with great interest. It's not that I'm a candidate for a board seat, but I am concerned with gender equity and I've long been aware that many public companies and mutual funds have few to no women on their boards.

I have shares in a couple of mutual funds that entitle me to vote by proxy on various things - including the election of people to the funds' boards. For years, I have consciously voted FOR all of the women, and AGAINST all of the men. I know that 1) it won't change anything because my one vote isn't enough to make a difference, and 2) some of the men are probably great and some of the women are likely awful, but I don't have time to research each and every one of the candidates and (back to #1) it's not going to change anything. It is, however, my little act of resistance and it pleases me enormously.

Fashion

Do I begin with the book or the bag?

Let's start with Bill. Bill Cunningham's death in 2016 left a hole in the heart of the New York Times. He was something else, a charming eccentric with a great eye. Happily Clarkson Potter has come out with a delicious coffee table book, collecting decades of his street photographs and, incidentally, acting as a history of fashion from about 1970 to 2015.

I'm not a fashionista. I'm happy to wear jeans and a cardigan every day, I don't go in for designer labels, and I haven't worn heels since I was 19 and foolish. But those photographs by Cunningham, and the way he assembled them into essays - 4 pictures of people in black & white stripes, or 7 pictures of people jumping over or stepping in puddles, or all the leather jackets, all the skin tight dresses, all the palazzo pants - pure joy. I can love it without wanting to dress up.

Relatedly, and in the department of "I never learned how to be a real girl," is I don't go in for fancy leather bags. I pretty much only use a handbag on the weekend or on vacation (I use a tote bag to get back and forth to work), and usually I tend towards a useful smallish nylon bag with a cross body shoulder strap. I find, though, that when I'm running errands and climbing in and out of the car, I tend to grab the bag by the top - where there isn't a handle - and that kind of defeats the whole shoulder strap thing. So I've had my eye out for a small bag with no shoulder strap, and I haven't found one. Well, that's not totally true - I found a lovely one on line one day, but it's rather out of my price range. But! Not so long ago, I remembered that I had once upon a time bought a small black cotton tool bag, and I rummaged around in the house and I found it! And it was exactly what I was thinking I needed.

Imagine, then, my surprise and delight to find, in the Cunningham book, a 1987 picture of super model Naomi Campbell, in 1987, in which she's CARRYING THE VERY SAME SMALL BLACK TOOL BAG.

I just about plotzed.

Was it a thing? Did I somehow know that little black toolbags were all the rage? Or was it just happenstance? I cannot remember where or why I bought that bag, but I am distinctly amused to own it.

And if you too want to be like me and Naomi Campbell, you can find them online: Military Surplus GI Style Canvas Mechanics Tool Bag - Small

Here's to inadvertent fashion in 2020!

On the 25th day of ...

Breakfast over.
Presents unwrapped.
House tidied again.

And the girl and I are off to the movies. I think it's a new tradition - last year, she and I saw Mary Queen of Scots on Christmas Day.

Today, we are seeing Little Women.

A happy Christmas to you, and a merry New Year too!

On the 24th day of ...

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care...

Right now feels like the calm before the storm. The stockings are up, the cookies are made. Yes, I made those crazy beautiful striped cookies from the Times special insert - using green instead of red for the stripes because I've got pink pigs and candy cane crisps and green coordinates better.

The house is sort of a little tidy, but for the wrapping paper that is inexplicably shedding its tiny HO HO HOs. I keep finding HO in random places, usually the floor.

p>

The fireplace log plays on the TV (I had to get my husband to add an app to the Apple TV), and the curiously pyramided paperwhites are happy.

And I am drinking the 24th tea from my Advent calendar of tea.

On the 22nd day of ...

Another perennial family favorite Christmas "cookie" is the cinnamon toast. I know, right?

It is improbably wonderful, kind of in the matzo crack department in that it relies on a base of commercially available bread, but without chocolate.

(I might be a heretic; I don't do chocolate cookies or chocolate anything as Christmas sweets.)

Every time I set out to make it, I have to call my sister and ask her for the recipe because I think I've never written it down and she makes it more than I do and therefore can actually remember the details.

Yesterday morning, I texted her a picture of the loaf of bread at the ready. (I should point out that it's actually the wrong kind of bread - ideally you want Pepperidge Farm Very Thin - but regular sandwich bread will do. I suppose you could be fancy and make your own, or buy some artisanal pain de mie, but Pepperidge Farm is fine.)

My sister promptly called me back and this is what I wrote down.

To be a little less cryptic, here's how to make Cinnamon Toast:

Buy a loaf of Pepperidge Farm Very Thin. Working with 3-4 slices at a time, carefully (gingerly) cut off all the crusts. (Save them for breadcrumbs or to feed your local opossum.)

Mix together one stick of well-softened butter, 1/2 cup of sugar and 1 teaspoon of cinnamon. Gently smear this on the bread - the Very Thin is fragile so you really do want your butter soft. Cut the squares into halves - either triangles or just rectangles. Spread out on cookie sheets and bake for an hour at 275°F.

On the 21st day of ...

I cannot explain this, but one of the family holiday traditions was pigs. Sugar cookies, dough tinted pink, cut out in the shape of pigs. With blue eyes.

No one has made the pigs in a long time. But a couple of years ago, my sister boxed up the cutters and gave them to me for Christmas.

I decided this was their year.

First though, I had to find some blue eyes. My mother had this container of flat sugar disk sprinkles, in mixed pastel colors, and she painstakingly pulled all the blue dots out.

I went to New York Cake, figuring that a crazy obsessive store would have flat blue sprinkles. I was wrong. They had green, and they had a mixture of yellow, black and blue. So I got the yellow, black and blue and painstakingly sorted out enough blue for pigs' eyes.

The dough is always a plain sugar cookie from the original New York Times cookbook, with a healthy dollop of food coloring. Because the recipes includes a quarter cup of milk, it's best to add the color to the milk - it disperses into the dough better. There is something ineffably lovely about dropping food coloring into milk. It blooms into a sort of flower.

Today I rolled and cut the pigs. The girl placed the eyes.

A box of them is going to family Christmas tomorrow. They've been missed.

On the 20th day of ...

For rather a while, the default email signature in my phone's settings has been:

-M.
(sent by my steam-powered mechanical pigeon)

Mostly, either people have seen it and don't need to ask about it, or don't notice, or keep it to themselves that they think I'm some kind of ridiculous poseur.

But sometimes someone asks. And it delights me to tell them that I learned, in a 2012 New Yorker article by Nick Paumgarten called "Here's Looking At You: Should we worry about the rise of the drone?", that there really may have been such a thing, a really long time ago:

The prospect of unmanned flight has been around—depending on your definition—since Archytas of Tarentum reputedly designed a steam-powered mechanical pigeon, in the fourth century B.C.,

You know you want to know more about Archytas of Tarentum. Ancient Origins can help.

On the 19th day of ...

I think I am running out of steam.

Also, I seem to have left my phone unattended on the coffee table, because there are umpteen selfies of the girl - alone and with her father/my husband. And because she took them and didn't delete them, I think they're fair game.

Ha!

Maybe I will be more inspired tomorrow.

On the 18th day of ...

The thing about my magpie tendency is that I have two stashes of ribbons - one in Christmas colors of red, green, white, silver and gold - and one for all the other colors. And because I have hoarding tendencies, some of those pieces of ribbon are really too short for much of anything.

But the other day when it came time to package up a mess of little gifts* for staff in my office, I was able to drop each one into a little paper gift sack, fold over the top, punch a hole or two near the top, and tie a different ribbon onto each of the 16 bags. So, they're the same - but not the same.

And my ribbon stash is just that much more manageable.





*candles, if you must know.

On the 17th day of ...

This never fails to amuse me, this being addressed as "The Honorable".

Tonight, though, was supposed to be my last meeting as President - an ice storm postponed the meeting until after Christmas. Next month, I'll be past president, and when my term ends in June, I'll be a mere former board member.

On the 16th day of ...

I take the subway to work every day. And whenever I find myself parked in front of one of the posted subway maps, I marvel at it. So many miles, so many stations, so many places to go.

And then I look for my pet dog. The mapmaker has shaped the East and Harlem Rivers into a dog - tail to the left, snout to the right, back legs straddling Roosevelt Island, front legs dipping into Flushing Meadows. One beige belly spot courtesy of Rikers Island.

See him?



Of course, it's all the subway map designer's doing - because the subway map has been skewed and tweaked and distorted so that everything fits. (For a really cool look at the subway map, check this out: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/02/nyregion/nyc-subway-map.html)

Google Maps is more representative of the actual geography - and if you can find a dog in the East River, you've been imbibing too many George Booth dog cartoons.

On the 14th and the 15th day of ...

Yeah. We got distracted.

In fact, we were supposed to go to an afternoon tea yesterday and didn't.

Let's back up. The kid and the husband were out all day, and I was home alone, so I started wrapping presents. And - like eating peanuts - I just kept going. And didn't go to the party - and finished all of the wrapping except for a few things that have not yet shown up in the mail.

Why yes, I am working my way through an old California road atlas. It's mostly green, so it counts as Christmas wrapping in my book.

Next up? Christmas cookies!

On the 13th day of ...

I put my toasty winter coat on the other day and found stuffed in a pocket a crumpled piece of paper from the holiday tree-lighting / sing-a-long. Oh right! What are the words to that song again?

I have sung Deck The Halls countless times in my life, and never before noticed that after one dons some gay apparel, one trolls the ancient Yule-tide carol. As we were singing, en masse, I caught the eye of a fellow townswoman. We are both well aware of the significant local sniping and trolling that goes on on the internet, and troll jumped out as a typo.

But! It is not! In fact, thank you Mental Floss, troll is a good old word well utilized in Deck The Halls:

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), one of the meanings of troll, in use since the 16th century, is “to sing in a full, rolling voice; to chant merrily or jovially.” It’s related to the sense of rolling, or passing around, and probably came to be used to mean singing because of rounds, where the melody is passed from one person to the next.

Go figure. Troll on.