Found in a nook
I’m cleaning out nooks and crannies in the craft closet and found this pattern.
I’m alternately amazed and appalled by the hair, the headband which I just this moment noticed, the gladiator sandals, and the blousy pants.
I must have bought this sometime in the eighties. The plan was to make the shorter version cause even then I had enough sense to know that a cabled mini-dress knit out of soft cotton would be unflattering on almost every woman and would be a baggy mess after one wearing.
Can’t decide which is more distracting: their hair or their feet?
Wait, it might be that one is in the girlie, crossed leg posture and the other one is in the sporty, wider stance. Or is it the contrast between the belt-defined waist and the pleat-disguised belly. Let’s just pass quickly by the buggy and steamboat in the title.
I’m torn: do I keep it as an example of eighties textile design or do I add it to the St. Vinnie’s pile.
Photo by spacmonster / CC
The number of books I read a year has held steady for the last two or three at just over a hundred—usually weighted toward recent “literary fiction” with dollops of comics, mysteries, history, and work-related stuff. I’m happy enough with the volume and the proportion: sometimes the bulk reading threatens to get out of hand — always a sign of too much going on at work — but this year I’d like to try make some headway with books bought but not read.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society was a gift that languished on my to-be-read shelves for little more than a year. I think I’d pop it into a light-reading category but it held my attention longer than I thought it would. It’s an epistolary novel and the switching between multiple points of view is done well. It’s a bookish book full of conversation about books and reading. The tone is buoyant if glowingly nostalgic. And as long as you don’t think too hard about the back story (war, concentration camps, slave labour, collaboration, resistance), it’s a good way to read away some hours, especially on a dreary day.
Suggested reading: Anne’s House of Dreams
Suggested counter reading: The Tiger Claw
The line-up for TCAF 2010 has just been published. Lots of names I recognize and lots of new-to-me names: the best situation for finding and buying and reading new comics.
A like the new site design too — especially the promise of a Floor Plan since its absence last year would have been my only complaint about the 2009 event. Well. Aside from the deluge.
How wrong would it be to start counting the days?
The recent spate stories about the Vancouver Public Library and VANOC sponsorships caught my eye. Disapproval seems widespread but this strikes me as a very ordinary moment in a public culture that is constantly enmeshed in corporate sponsorships. I seem to recall rather similar discussions about Pepsi logo’d cafeteria cups in a non-public workplace.
My guess is that the VPL memo is a fairly ordinary piece of internal communications. And VANOC’s intervention, whether direct or indirect, and its attempt to control the flow of money is equally ordinary. A quick Google search will turn up dozens of examples of VANOC’s vigorous objections to non-official (ie, non-paid for) linkages between the games and commercial or charitable organizations.
The thing that puzzles me though is the idea that libraries would solicit food donations for in-house programs. As well it’s not clear to me whether the Olympic-inspired guidelines are tightly connected to the VPL’s publicly posted sponsorship policy. Supporting Coca Cola over Pepsi or McDonald’s over Wendy’s: does this “undermine the integrity of the non-commercial public space”?
Suggested Reading: No Logo.
After a too long time letting down the side on Plenty of Nothing, I’ve decide to give regular blogging another chance.
My hope is that I’ll have more to say now that I’m well past a long hard year in the corporate communication racket.
