Spoonerisms: Story of My Life

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I've also had plenty of afternoons and evenings where that was true. For mornings, though, it's as constant as pi.

Other: I Watch Too Much TV

So, I just finished watching the first batch of episodes of the "re-envisioning" of the classic 80s sci-fi cheezfest V. I can't say I'm enjoying the show, but it doesn't make me cringe too often, so I guess I'll keep watching when new episodes start again in March. However, I thought I'd share the show's theme with those who have not been watching. In one sentence: We need universal health care to keep the Scientologists from taking over the world.

Knittin' Crap: More Anti-Nazi Knitting

I just watched Cinema's Exiles: From Hitler to Hollywood, a PBS documentary about European filmmakers who became refugees during the Third Reich.

The Nazis had placed very strict limits on the amount of cash that a person could take out of the country, and German bank accounts could not be accessed internationally. Paul Kohner, who had been born in what was then Austria-Hungary and had gone to Hollywood long before the Nazi regime, still traveled frequently with his wife, Mexican-born actress Lupita Tovar. Now 99 years old, she recounts in the film how, one time as they were leaving Berlin for Paris in the mid-30s, he handed her a wad of cash to take to impoverished refugees of the Berlin film industry in Paris and told her to hide it. She was knitting a sweater at the time, so she unrolled her ball of yarn and rewound it with the cash inside. When the guards inspecting the departing train looked in, all they saw was a woman knitting from a very large ball of wool. When they got to Paris, he told her to get the money out so he could return it to its owners. She told them they would have to wait while she unraveled the large ball of yarn again.

Knittin' Crap: Anti-Nazi Knitting

I was going through piles of old magazines looking for my license plate (don't ask), flipping through issues that caught my eye. In an issue of Piecework from 2004, I found an article about an Australian man named Jim Simpson who had knitted himself a blanket while he was in a German POW camp in WWII. Wow! He got the yarn however he could and made knitting needles from pot handles. I got up and googled for him so I could share the story, and coincidentally, an Australian news site had just published an article on him last week. Check it out! And we're not even talking a wimpy, simple blanket, either!

Spoonerisms: Attention Dial Tone

In that twilight between sleep and wakefulness, my brain does strange things. Well, even more than normal. This morning, as soon as I began to stir, Dipity was on me. She and Spoon had had a very noisy row at 6AM so, even though it wasn't his "fault," per se, I closed Spoon out of the bedroom/bathroom area so they wouldn't wake the neighbors and so I could get more sleep. This left Dipity cut off from the food in the kitchen, so a few hours later, she was doing the Feed Me Cha-Cha. She was purring and snuggling, but it was in that high-energy, "I don't really want you to pet me, but I thought this was the best way to get your attention" way. I scratched her head and thought about how, while we probably most often associate purring with a happy cat, they actually use it for a lot of things. Yes, it's a bonding tool, but they also purr when they want attention and sometimes when they're afraid. Biologists think it may also aid in healing. Even the big cats purr, but because of the physiological changes made to their vocal chords so they could roar, they only purr on exhalation, unlike housecats, which have the duplex purr function. As Dipity was using the attention purr, it occurred to me her purr was a lot like a modem operating somewhere between 25 and 150 baud, and she had just issued the ATDT command: Attention Dial Tone.

Knowing she wasn't going to let me get more sleep, I got up and opened the door and she was in the kitchen like a rocket.