Saturday, February 28, 2009

Brief, today.

Princess

I’m halfway along the final row of the 11th centre repeat. So, barring disaster (and disasters happen, believe me) tomorrow should produce a picture and the end-of-repeat statistics.

Gardening

We’ve ordered some more snowdrops – the books say that this is the time of year to plant them, “in the green”, rather than putting them in as wizened bulbs in the autumn. The order turned up this morning. That settles it, then – we’ll be going to Strathardle next week, barring disaster (see above). My husband is unmoved by the plight of my strawberry plants, but keen to get the snowdrops in.

Miscellaneous


There was an article in a recent New Yorker, the one with Obama morphed into Lincoln – if that’s what it was – on the cover, about some men who take a severely dystopic view of current affairs, meaning that they think civilisation may be about to collapse entirely (a defensible point of view) and that the wise man now retires to a cabin in the woods with a gun and a stockpile of petrol for the generator and of something that can be used as currency (drugs, perhaps) when coin of the realm no longer works. That’s a long sentence.

The article reported a speech by one of these men, Jim Kunstler, in Montpelier, Vermont. “His audience was an assemblage of nearly two hundred neo-Luddites and anarchists and socialists and freegans and steampunks and home-schoolers and folksingers and knitters and yak farmers.”

Unexpected company to find ourselves in.

6 comments:

  1. At least the folksingers and yak farmers would be good company....

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  2. Anonymous3:33 PM

    Long, complex, and perfectly clear - a sentence worthy of - who was it? Henry James? I should give back my English Lit degree.

    The survivalists have been around for decades, but it is interesting that knitting has become known to the newsmen. Time was they never would have mentioned that someone in the audience was knitting.

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  3. I would not like all knitters to be presumed survivalists, but it is hard to blame the journalists for being confused. Anyone who has seen an average knitter's yarn stash logically concludes we are hoarding against the end of the world (or the end of LYS's, at the very least).

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  4. Anonymous10:09 PM

    Actually, Jim Kunstler is author of my personal "book of the year" called Life As We Knew It. It's a novel about an America after the oil is gone. War and chaos. It's a future that's not so much "Mad Max" as it is "Life On The Mississippi" Lots to think about: things like making dinner without pepper! It's not a bad thing to have "extra" on hand. Yarn, for example :-)

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  5. It's actually Obama as George Washington. Haven't found time to read the article yet, but it sounds quite interesting. I'll confess to being of similar mindset, except without the guns.

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  6. Oh that quote is just hilarious - coming from a homeschooling, knitting socialist who likes folk music.

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