more radical knitting and UK/Canada road relations

14 July 200813 July 20087 Comments

Funnily enough, after I put up my post last Friday I happened to get a card in the mail from a colleague outside of Toronto, sporting the following image:

The knitter/artist is Lisa Anne Auerbach… and clearly I think that she is just fabulous. This sweater series had real gold knitted into it, apparently… the amount of gold influenced the price point as you will see here:

And I’ve got to make a pair of these driving gloves that I saw on her website as well:

WTF? you ask? Well, exactly. These are driving gloves that I could very much use in Toronto to illustrate some points:

In talking with Amy, however, we decided that we would have picked a different colour for the middle finger. My preference would be traffic cone orange, for that little authentic highway touch.

(photo from http://www.featurepics.com)

Now, I’m not certain that my UK friends will get the traffic cone reference. Their traffic signs are quite different from ours…

I still can’t stop laughing about this for some infantile reason, although I assume that my UK friends know what “humps” means in North America. As a result, here they are called “speed bumps”.

I must confess, however, that I find the UK/North America reversals about traffic direction a bit curious. It seems even to be evidenced in DVD covers. Viz. this, which is the cover of a DVD I just got from the library (and JJ is still hee-hawing as I type about it):

When I looked it up on Amazon, I was amazed to learn that the UK cover looks somewhat different:

So now I’m wondering… are all of the Britcoms we get over here flipped over before we see them?!

I’d best sign off before I get too far down that particular path. Wishing you all a very happy, tranquil and non-topsy-turvy Monday.

Cheers,

PS. Oh, and if you’re looking for something to ~~kill time at the office~~ do today, check out Lisa Auerbach’s blog, The Little Red Blog of Revolutionary Knitting Whether you knit or not, I think you’ll get a kick out of it.

neatness: just say no!

17 May 20085 Comments

While at the office yesterday, I was quite tickled to read this tagline to a story in the Toronto Star:

You may see a disaster, a desk that looks hurricane-ravaged, strewn with papers and debris. Josh Freed sees creativity in the making.

This is the office of Josh Freed, a journalist who has just made a documentary about the “evangelism of neat freaks”. He suggests that they worship at big churches otherwise known as container shops. But he’s had it with being judged as a lazy slob just because he is messy.

His theory: a messy office means a creative mind:

I find almost everything fairly quickly. I think the issue with a mess is the aesthetics. There is an organizing principle underneath. I work with the archaeological system – the farther down in the pile, the more years back. While thrashing through, you find other things that give you ideas. It creates accidental thinking.

I love this guy! So, there is a method to my madness in not cleaning up that spare room after all!

Now, ironically enough, the head office of the organisation I work for just instituted a “clean desk policy”. Ordinarily a neat freak myself at the workplace, I’ve noticed that clutter seems to have built up on my des, perhaps as a form of rebellion. How dare some big shadowy boss/CEO make rules about how I organise my work, anyway! Sheesh!

Perhaps I could bring a constitutional challenge on the grounds that the clean desk policy stifles my inner creativity… hmm.

Anyone care to join me?!

Happy Saturday. Now that I don’t have to tidy up the house, I’m going to indulge in some knitting.

3 May 20086 Comments

My wish for you this weekend: that you have lots of time to..

Huh?

Well, courtesy of Gawker, I bring you these fabulous photos of bygone times, when people seemed oh so happy and funloving.

For example, they seemed to take pleasure from the smallest little humdrum things:

“Look, honey, Saran wrap!!!! AND enough sandwiches to feed a small army!!! Whoo-hoo!”

Great and inexpensive transportation methods…

“Hey gang! See how fun it is to drive to the ball game in these newfangled convertible thingies? But I’m wondering if I should have bought the pickup truck instead…”

Women enjoyed all sorts of exotic delights and pleasures not available to us today…

“Ooooooh! Fabulous pink shampoo! I think I’ll use that and then go out and order myself a big old Pink Lady!

“And maybe after five or six of those, I’ll meet a great guy who will want to stroke my silky smooth pink shampooed hair!”

Now, I know that they lacked certain creature comforts in that era, such as personal computers and TiVos. But hey, who needed the Internet when you could have a fancy dan car stereo?!