Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Sorry about yesterday. I was – and still am – pretty well incapacitated by an embarrassing and uncomfortable ailment. Not for me the lying pale on a couch and coughing like Mimi, as other bloggers seem to do.

I bought VKB #19 on eBay last night. Six to go, concentrated in date between Spring, ’35 and Spring ’41. I notice, indeed, that five of the missing six are even-numbered spring issues. Knitting must have been more fun in the fall, even 70 years ago – no surprise. Number 19 itself is fall, ’41 and ought to be interesting. I’ll tell you all about it when it gets here.



I paid more than anyone else, of the seven wartime VKB’s that were sold last night. I wasn’t quite brave enough with the timing of my last-minute bid, and the underbidder had time to push me up twice.

In intervals of discomfort I got a little knitting done yesterday. I went on with the cashmere gansey – most of Sunday had been spent counting stitches, increasing from the rib to the body count, and lining up two opposite purl ribs to be the basis of false seams. I had knit the basic k2, p2 ribbing on a number of stitches divisible by four but not by eight – and that meant, if one thinks about it, that I didn’t have two p2’s directly opposite each other and had to add stitches to one side and subtract from the other to line them up. The great thing would be to learn to think.

So after all that I thought I’d start the initials yesterday.

They’re tough. (a) I can’t really see what’s going on, although I’m half-way through and (b) Theo has, I suspect, a particularly difficult set of initials, TELeC, and I keep forgetting where I am. I think maybe I’ll try to finish them today, while I’ve got the bit between my teeth.

Comments

Many thanks for the new anti-Jerry-Lewis votes. But now you’ve got to contrive to watch “King of Comedy”, if you haven’t seen it yet. The New Yorker did a big piece on JL several years ago, and if I’m remembering it rightly, the writer was surprised that JL didn’t seem to have much regard for or interest in that movie. He plays himself, needless to say, under another name, and there’s a scene in his fictional house when one sees a photograph of the young JL, just to underline the point.

I’m in the fortunate position of having seen Jim Carrey only in The Truman Show, which is wonderful. I tried to persuade Rachel to go, but she hates him so much she couldn’t face it. He was the perfect choice.

And, Julie, I loved your story about laughing in the wrong places – I’m sure you’ve married the right man. My only comparable experience was when my husband and I first saw “Mash” in a cinema in Birmingham. I think some of the operating-theatre scenes are still trimmed a bitwhen it appears on television. My husband and I sat there howling with laughter (and he hates medical drama) – “That’s BLOOD!” I remember him saying, slapping his knee. While the rest of the cinema sat in horrified silence.

But that was meant to be funny.

4 comments:

  1. Could you bypass Theo's initials by just doing a TELEphone receiver? It would be kinda C-shaped. Just a thought.

    Oh, and I had to read the K2P2 divisible for 4 versus divisible by 8 several times before I could figure out what you were driving at. I tremble for my brain's future.

    If you liked Carey in Turman I think you might enjoy him in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind". I can't bear him in anything verging on comedic but in his serious stuff I think he's very good.

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  2. Anonymous3:39 PM

    Hello Jean,

    I hope you are feeling much better today!

    Isn't it funny how we get such a sense of confirmation when others share the ideas we thought were ours alone. I agree with many of your commenters on Jim Carey and JL.

    When I was younger, I never could understand why my family laughed at Charlie Drake, Norman Wisdom, Michael Crawford or Benny Hill, all of whom made me cringe.

    All the best,
    Dawn

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  3. oh no cold hands is not something you could easily get. and thank god for that. oh knitting anything with letters makes my head go all topsy turvy. maybe it calls for knitting from the top down.
    speedy recovery from copenhagen.

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  4. For me the movie moment when I realized "Wow, my brain is working differently" was in the original Batman movie with Michael Keaton. Jack Nicholson, as the Joker, is in an empty room with a burned body, telling the dead guy why it's so great that he's dead. It's NICHOLSON, for crying out loud, being a total ham and playing the scene for all it's worth. I laughed and laughed and laughed. Everyone else in the theater glared at me.

    Hope you feel better soon!

    ReplyDelete