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The Next Doctor?

Philip Rhys - a UK actor starring in BBC’s new adventure series Survivors with Freema “Martha Jones” Agyeman and Paterson Joseph - had a little slip-up during an interview on BBC News 24 tonight: “Yeah, we have a great cast. Max Beesley, Freema and Paterson Joseph .. y’know, the new D.. potentially the new Doctor.” And then the good Mr Rhys looked mortified and the interviewer quickly changed topic.

Potentially? Let the speculation continue, although I suspect this might be confirmation enough for a lot of people.

Addendum: Behind The Sofa picks up on the potential slip-up. They’ve posted a link to a youtube clip of the interview.

Posted 20 November 2008 † Karie § Popular Culture ‡ Comments (2)

A Bit About Yarn

I wonder what my favourite colour is..?

I have been spending the past few evenings winding up a lot of yarn from hanks into these cakes you see. It’s both totally gratifying and hard work.
Gratifying because I get to rummage around my stash, see all the gorgeous yarns I own, daydream about future projects and fondle the fibres as I wind them up using the swift and ball winder that socherry let me borrow (thank you! thank you!).

Hard work? Well, my right wrist is sore thanks to all the laceweight yarn I am winding. Believe me, 1300 yards of any yarn will make even the strongest wrist a bit sore. I must admit I’m cursing my thriftiness: “Ooh, laceweight yarn is cheaper by the yard and will totally last longer than bulky yarn, so I’m going to buy that laceweight, yes!!” - of course by “thriftiness” I mean a completely patchy sense of thriftiness that mysteriously allows me to buy more yarn.

People (who shall remain nameless, but I live with them) claim that my knitting groups have a “cultish” air to them. I would like to refute that by directing everybody’s attention to The Advanced Bonewits’ Cult Danger Evaluation Frame which examines how likely it is that a given group is a cult. I’ll just go through a few of the questions.

“Lack of clearly defined organizational rights for members”? Certainly not. Anything mildly important is decided via polling and discussion. Anything mildly unimportant is also resolved thusly.

“Amount of infallibility declared or implied about decisions or doctrinal/scriptural interpretations [by leaders]“? As accomplished some of these knitters are, even they have to frog rows and picked dropped stitches. Sorry.

“Emphasis put on attracting new members” ? Okay, I’ll give you that. We like new victims.

“Advancement or preferential treatment dependent upon sexual activity with the leader(s)”? Sadly, we get our kicks from fondling yarn, not each other.

Cult claim refuted, I believe.

Anyhow, I’m off back to bed with my almost-flu/cold. Thank you, Paula, for your professional medical advice. I might just survive (although I’m not sure Other Half will).

Posted 20 November 2008 † Karie § Purls ‡ Comments (4)

And Then We Came To This

We have the dreaded November lurgee in Casa Bookish. I have also found myself embroiled in an unexpected and uncalled-for family drama (it’s double the fun when you’re in another country). So, this is all the blogging you’ll get out of me today.

This little animated video will have to do:

Peace out, dudes and dudettes. Although anybody with a great flu remedy should leave a comment.

Posted 19 November 2008 † Karie § Blogging § Personal ‡ Comments (6)

Fa’en!

My partner, David, doesn’t really speak Danish. He knows a few, carefully selected, words like tak (thank you), hej (hi), ja/nej (yes/no), tillykke med fødselsdagen (happy birthday), and the good, old chestnut undskyld (sorry). He’s also very fond of exclaiming kylling (chicken) whenever we make it across to Denmark. He says it makes him look special. I say exclaiming “chicken” in public places makes him look very special indeed.

For fa’en is David’s favourite Danish expression, though. He says that swearing in Danish means you don’t really swear. Hmm. When I came across this youtube clip explaining the Norwegian swearword Faen, I knew David would get a kick out of it. He did and so will you, I promise.

Afterwards, go to this Metafilter thread for commentary and an insight into Scandinavian neighbourly “love”:

“After living in Finland, I just can’t take Swedes seriously.”

“I mean, Norwegian is, without a doubt, the wussiest of all Nordic languages. Icelandic and Finnish are the two hardest languages, then comes Danish due to its awesome gutturalness, then Swedish, then Norwegian.”

“I lived in Iceland where national sports involved remarking on how the Finns are always drunk and how Danish sounds like Icelandic spoken by a retarded sheep. I do firmly believe that both of these are true.”

Posted 18 November 2008 † Karie § Denmark § Popular Culture ‡ Comments (3)

Fangirl Overload

I hardly ever post twice in one day, but this needs to get out of my brain, through my fingers and onto my blog so I can stop saying Holy Guacamole!!!

Neil Finn announces “Seven Worlds Collide, pt. 2″.

In 2001 Finn had members of Radiohead, the Smiths and Pearl Jam playing with him for a series of concerts in Auckland, New Zealand. This time around? Johnny Marr (The Smiths and, now, Modest Mouse), Phil Selway and Ed O’Brien (both Radiohead), Lisa Germano, Sebastian Steinberg (Soul Coughing) and Liam Finn (of Betchadupa, own solo career and Finn junior) join forces with four members of Wilco, Don McGlashan (of fab Kiwi legends The Mutton Birds) and, er, KT Tunstall. A record of original material with be produced by Jim Scott (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Wilco, Lucinda Williams, Foo Fighters and Johnny Cash).

And there is a NZ tour announced.

HOLY GUACAMOLE.

Posted 17 November 2008 † Karie § Finn ‡ Comments (7)

Rules and Regulations

I like that Rufus Wainwright attempts to get on the radio. I am not sure it is the best format for him, but bless him. His latest studio album, Release the Stars, was said to be his most accessible and mainstream album to date. I adore that in Rufus’ head that translated into “a huge wave of German romanticism” and songs about Prussian rococo summer palaces and a dramatic spoken word segment performed by Siân Phillips. I just feel like ruffling his hair, I do.

So, this is Rufus Wainwright’s second single off Release the Stars, “Rules and Regulations”. The video is absolutely barmy as you might expect and it’s possibly the funniest thing I have seen all year:

Posted 17 November 2008 † Karie § Music ‡ Comments (0)

Buttons and Books

These are my Buttony Mitts. I test-knitted them for Lilith of Old Maiden Aunt. Basically, she asked me one day if I wanted free handpainted yarn and I replied with my best teenage “dooooh” face.

The yarn is gorgeous. It is a soft alpaca-merino-bamboo blend and is handpainted in shades of forest green, khaki and pine. It knits to aran-weight but Lilith had decided to use a 4mm needle to create a warm, durable fabric. It worked a treat. The pattern itself was well-written and taught me how to make paired increases. If not for other commitments I could have finished the mitts in the course of two evenings (I love instant gratification projects).

Lilith is planning to make Buttony Mitt kits available on her site, so keep an eye out for those.

Other commitments? Among other things I went to Edinburgh on Friday night for a panel on the future of the book at The Scottish Book Trust. I was pleasantly surprised to see a relatively large turnout (fifty people or so! on a Friday night! in November!) and was even more pleasantly surprised by the panellists who all had interesting points to make. I was particularly impressed by Donald Smith (of the Scottish Storytelling Centre) who knew his book history and made good points about the book (codex) as a material object. The panel ran out of time, so the Q&A session was cut short, but I managed to raise a point about the socio-economic implications of digitalising books which was well-received. I suppose “you had to be there”, but I really enjoyed myself.

As an aside, I was cornered by an American who wanted to know what I had bought my cardigan. Score!

PS. I trust the permalinks are working for people now. If not, let me know.

Posted 16 November 2008 † Karie § Craft § Personal § Print Culture § Purls ‡ Comments (0)

Either I’m Nobody, Or I’m A Nation

Oh, my president-elect crush burns strong: Barack Obama seen with poetry collection. Of course it’s not just any old poetry collection, it is Derek Walcott’s Collected Poems. A Nobel Prize laureate; a Caribbean poet straddling colonialism, post-colonialism, and the Western canon; someone who proclaims “.. either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation”. Of course, as Bookninja warns, it could be a coldly calculated photo prop, but I like the idea of Obama reading Walcott. It makes sense, y’know?

Maybe Obama is just returning the favour. Walcott wrote a poem on the occasion of Obama’s election victory: Forty Acres: a poem for Barack Obama.

Read more:
+ Derek Walcott: The Schooner Flight (and I’ve always maintained that Walcott is re-writing Eliot’s The Waste Land with that poem)
+ Derek Walcott: The Sea Is History
+ A Life in Writing: Derek Walcott
+ Buy Walcott’s Omeros - an epic poem/novel-in-verse charting the “restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary”.

Posted 15 November 2008 † Karie § Literature § News ‡ Comments (0)

Codex or Kindle?

I am off to Edinburgh to attend a discussion on The Future of The Book. Codex or Kindle.. or something else? In the meantime, have fun with these links.

+ Urban Knitting: the world’s most inoffensive graffiti. I’d argue it’s not graffiti (as that word refers to lettering or the act of writing) but it’s street art. Regardless, it’s pretty cool.
+ Mighty Morph Pads. Sculptural notepads that you can morph into different shapes and/or decorate. Quite fancy.
+ Rethinking Garbage. How one man is very happy to receive your (empty) candy wrappers and why the end result can be bought on Etsy.
+ Swedish Dansbands of the 70s. Amusing photos for non-Scandinavians and painful family party memories for all Scandinavians around my age. Dansbands (Eng. “Dance bands”) is a genre of music still going strong in Scandinavia - think of it as Scandinavian country music and bands like Vikingarna (youtube) continue to sell out venues. And Swedish TV is doing a The Dansband Factor primetime show! Aaaghrr!
+ Jenny Everywhere - an open-source comic book heroine.

Posted 14 November 2008 † Karie § Craft § Popular Culture ‡ Comments (1)

Six Weeks of Solitude: Back To Reality

Anna left an astute comment to my first post on the Six Weeks of Solitude idea:

I find the idea of six weeks alone in the middle of nowhere very tempting, but I think I’d had to not take my knitting - for me it would be less about silence, and more about not ‘keeping busy’ all the time.

When I originally thought about spending six weeks on my own, I worked out how many books I could read in six weeks, then trimmed the number as to leave me some spare time and still wound up with eighteen books. Anna reminded me of the intention behind spending six weeks on a windy island. It is not to glance at pages (however tempting) but to glance inwards.

So we will leave the number at twelve (first list, second list) plus one: Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I remember when the US Army captured Saddam Hussein and news reports claimed that Hussein had been stashing Dostoyevsky novels in his underground chambers. My old mentor and I were enjoying coffee in central Copenhagen just after the news broke and I still remember my mentor drily saying he hoped Notes from the Underground had been one.

Six weeks of solitude. Thirteen books. A chance to centre myself. Should I bring knitting? Absolutely. Knitting can be very meditative - particular if I am knitting miles and miles of stocking stitch (as I would with my first project). Stocking stitch is not the only type of knitting that relaxes my body and focuses my mind. Lace knitting can be frustrating at its worst, but at its best I drift into a strange realm of “k1, YO, k2tog, YO..” which feels as good as any Aum.

My second knitting project would be lace. Evelyn C. Clarke’s Forget-Me-Not Lace Shawl hits all the right marks, especially when I imagine it knitted up in Old Maiden Aunt alpaca/silk/cashmere in a deep forest green. Hours and hours of pleasure - and much introspection too. Knitting is good for the soul.

On that little note, I’m leaving my imagined island cottage. Time to face the busy streets of Glasgow.

Posted 13 November 2008 † Karie § Craft § Literature § Personal ‡ Comments (0)