If I Were a Poor Iowa Kid--Oh Wait, I Was

Art of the Rural has a complete and interesting recap of the Stephen Bloom kerfuffle in "The Atlantic." I wasn't really curious about it until I read Matthew Fluharty's blog post. He includes a link to this interview with Bloom, in which Bloom characterizes his article as "satire" and "parody."

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I read the article, and couldn't identify what, specifically, Bloom was parodying or satirizing. What I read was, mostly, an unsympathetic description of rural poverty. Why he (and The Atlantic) thought that another disdainful description of white people at economic and cultural disadvantage would be useful and informative is puzzling. There's been so much of it, ranging from the nineteenth century Hatfield--McCoy feud's national newspaper coverage to Bill O'Reilly ranting that drunken Appalachians should move to Miami and "get a job".

The Iowa article was so mean-spirited and so much in the mood of "white-trash" bashing that it reminded me of the appalling Gene Marks article, If I Were a Poor Black Kid, on the Forbes website. (Originally published as "If I WAS a Poor Black Kid"--I guess Mr. Marks is not quite as well-educated as he thought.)

"If I Were a Poor Black Kid" unleashed a flood of angry and funny responses, including Poorblackkid.com. Similarly, Bloom's Web article is now accompanied by a variety of responses, and helped inspire this much-viewed video:

Because of the vehement response to the Forbes article, several people have suggested that it is actually an Internet troll tactic, and that the outrage has raised Gene Marks' profile and readership. Perhaps that explains why The Atlantic published Bloom's grouchy and tired critique of his adopted home. Willie Geist's NBC interview above notes that Bloom is "in hiding" because he has received harassing phone calls. I certainly hope no harm comes to his family because of his flame-bait. That kind of behavior only reinforces Bloom's clue-less disdain.

The Long and Short of Writing Practice

Via Mirabilis.ca: A long sentence is worth the read --by Pico Iyer.

Not everyone wants to be reduced to a sound bite or a bumper sticker. Enter (I hope) the long sentence: the collection of clauses that is so many-chambered and lavish and abundant in tones and suggestions, that has so much room for near-contradiction and ambiguity and those places in memory or imagination that can't be simplified, or put into easy words, that it allows the reader to keep many things in her head and heart at the same time, and to descend, as by a spiral staircase, deeper into herself and those things that won't be squeezed into an either/or. With each clause, we're taken further and further from trite conclusions--or that at least is the hope--and away from reductionism....

Years of writing technical and scientific papers matched with my current practice of Web writing have coached me to appreciate the short and succinct, but my own prose runs to the baroque and confusing. I look forward to Sherry's and Dave's 140-character word snapshots, and I spent some time considering joining the River of Stones project, but my trite attempts seem more like "sound bites" and "bumper stickers" than Fiona's mindful writing practice:

A small stone is a very short piece of writing that precisely captures a fully-engaged moment. There are no strict rules for what makes a piece of writing a small stone, as there are for forms such as haiku. The process of finding small stones is as important as the finished product--searching for them will encourage you to keep your eyes (and ears, nose, mouth, fingers, feelings and mind) open.

I truly appreciate well-written instruction manuals, field guides, taxonomic descriptions, and crochet patterns. I reread Elizabeth Zimmermann's knitting books just for fun as often as I refer to them for techniques. They are special because they offer a little more than bare-bones instructions, but not so much blather that you lose track of the procedure. (I'm afraid my own instructions are blather-heavy.) I'm skilled with observation of detail, but haiku writing appears to be contrary to my nature. Pico Iyer gives me hope for when he says "...[T]he promise of the long sentence is that it will take you beyond the known, far from shore, into depths and mysteries you can't get your mind, or most of your words, around."

Textbook Troubles and Dr. Feynman

Sometimes I teach undergraduate college classes. As an adjunct faculty member, I don't pick the textbooks or write my own syllabus, so I'm painfully aware of how much textbooks cost, and how frequent production of new editions keeps the students buying new rather than used books. There's talk about how e-books will save students money, but in my experience, the e-books cost just as much as physical books. I was heartened to read this: Steinberg Proposal Slashes Textbook Costs for California College Students:

At a time when the affordability of higher education is at the forefront of national debate, this legislation would create Open Educational Resources (OER) in California, where undergraduate students would be able to have free access to the 50 core textbooks required for lower-division coursework via computer or mobile device through a digital open source library, with the option of buying a printed version for around $20. The legislation would also require publishers selling textbooks adopted by faculty for the most widely-taken lower division courses to provide at least three free copies of those books to be placed on reserve in California public college and university campus libraries.

If college textbook highway robbery were not aggravating enough, there's always the topic of K-12 textbooks in public schools. I enjoyed re-reading Judging Books by Their Covers:

In 1964 the eminent physicist Richard Feynman served on the State of California's Curriculum Commission and saw how the Commission chose math textbooks for use in California's public schools. In his acerbic memoir of that experience...Feynman analyzed the Commission's idiotic method of evaluating books, and he described some of the tactics employed by schoolbook salesmen who wanted the Commission to adopt their shoddy products. "Judging Books by Their Covers" appeared as a chapter in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman...(1985).

In case reading this makes you nostalgic for Dr. Feynman (as it did me), here are links to some fine Feynman videos: The Richard Feynman Trilogy: The Physicist Captured in Three Films | Open Culture.

New kwinrc Fixes KDE 4.6 Desktop Effects

To my great surprise, I've got KDE 4.6 Desktop Effects working again. My recent desktop environment problems had led me to reinstall Debian testing and upgrade to unstable (sid). The newly-installed KDE Desktop Effects were working properly until I copied all my /home/rebecca files onto the new installation and restarted. I tried to adjust them using the GUI panel:

System Settings > Desktop Effects > Advanced

No luck. I couldn't revert to a clean install. I was just going to live with it because I didn't care about the missing desktop effects at all, but I really hate it when I don't know why something does or doesn't work, so I have looked sporadically for answers, and this morning, I found this: [SOLVED] KWin effects not working (ATI, catalyst, KDE):

I have had something like this happen a few times, too. Removing ~/.kde/share/config/kwinrc always seems to fix it.

I renamed the kwinrc file, moved it to an out-of-the-way directory, and rebooted. A new and much shorter kwinrc file was generated, and I haven't found any other KDE attributes changed. Here's the difference in file size between the new kwinrc file and the old, renamed file:

rebecca@hecate:~/.kde/share/config$ wc -l kwinrc
23 kwinrc
rebecca@hecate:~/.kde/share/config$ wc -l /home/rebecca/xxx
166 /home/rebecca/xxx

I haven't yet figured out what those 143 lines in the old file did, but the problem must be in there somewhere. Something to occupy my idle hours, I suppose.

Closet Sachets--Upcycled and Emblematic

Sometimes I don't know what my New Year's resolutions are until the year is over. 2011 was a year of going through my old stuff, sorting, deciding what to discard and what to work with going forward. That was most obvious in my fiber activities, but I think my sorting, sewing, spinning and knitting projects symbolized some internal housekeeping processes best left unblogged. Perhaps Pincushion of My Ancestors, Slipcovered and Starched was a foreshadowing of my 2011 theme.

Whether or not they are emblematic of my soul, here are some sachet bags I made out of stained or unusable kitchen towels my grandmother and her friend embroidered back in the early 1950's. To pretty for rags, too damaged to display, I inherited a substantial collection of such linens.

I finished and photographed these in the early spring. Then I stuffed them with dried lavender flowers and stuffed them into my dresser drawers, where I see them whenever I change my socks.

The black-eyed-Susan-embroidered bags represent my first attempt at crocheting lace borders onto a sewing project. I'm not ready for delicate hankie crochet, but I'm moving toward that goal. The pale green and yellow crochet threads are leftovers given me from a friend's attic stash, so these represent totally upcycled projects.

Debian Wheezy to Sid--Are You Sure It Won't Blow Up?

Yesterday's post reporting a successful switch to KDE was a bit premature, at least on my desktop machine. The laptop is still OK (I hope).

After a few days, all the "Desktop Effects" quit abruptly, perhaps after an update. (I was running Debian testing, which has daily updates.) I tweaked and adjusted, and eventually some of them started working again, perhaps because I switched compositing type from OpenGL to XRender. This change is located:

System Settings > Desktop Effects > Advanced

KDE has changed so much since I last used it that I have much frustration in locating these sorts of things.

More updates, including a kernel update, ensued, and I had a flashback to my Mysterious Errors and kernel panics of a year ago. Restarting the computer produced either a grub rescue > prompt, a "can't find the file" message after selecting the kernel on the grub menu, or a kernel panic. In every case, I was able to boot from a Debian net install disk using "rescue mode," re-install grub thus:

# grub-install followed by #update-grub

I could then remove the CD and reboot successfully once. Every time I restarted the computer, I had to go through this song and dance. As I said last January,

After I...powered up, the little darlin' booted right up....I really hate it when I don't know what was wrong, or why it's running now. Did something reset while it was powered down? Did jiggling the cables do the trick? Was it dust? And what's with all the update-grub/reboot iterations? Why do I always have to do that over and over again? And why does none of this ever happen with my Linux laptop?

Last year, the problem mysteriously resolved after a few tries, but this time, I started getting more and different error messages that I couldn't figure out. Googling showed me that I wasn't alone in my troubles, but I couldn't find a solution that worked for me. I made two fresh back-ups of my home directories, and resolved to choose "Install" rather than "Rescue Mode" at the next reboot.

The re-install ran without any problems, and, while I'll have to reconfigure my localhost installations of Wordpress and Drupal (they needed work anyway), this fresh install is now scoured clean of all the Gnome, XFCE, icewm, sawfish, awesome, metacity, etc. libraries and programs, which I'm not using but which require updates anyway.

Last time I installed testing, I tried without success to upgrade to sid, that is, Debian unstable. This time, it worked for me, and I am now typing on cutting edge Debian. The Debian GNU/Linux FAQ--Choosing a Debian distribution recommends sid over testing:

There is no perfect answer but only a "wise guess" could be made while deciding between unstable and testing. My personal order of preference is Stable, Unstable and Testing. The issue is like this:

• Stable is rock solid. It does not break.
• Testing breaks less often than Unstable. But when it breaks, it takes a long time for things to get rectified. Sometimes this could be days and it could be months at times.
• Unstable changes a lot, and it can break at any point. However, fixes get
  rectified in many occasions in a couple of days and it always has the latest
  releases of software packaged for Debian.

Raphael Hertzog also reassures me that "Unstable is a quickly moving target and it's not for everybody. But you can use it and your computer won't explode" in his blog post 5 reasons why Debian Unstable does not deserve its name

Now, it's back to fiddling with my brave new Debian. I wonder how long before I break it?

Return of the KDE User

The last few weeks I've been shopping for a new Linux Desktop environment. I never do this voluntarily, but my distro, Debian testing (Wheezy) has upgraded to Gnome 3, and the transition has not been smooth. On my desktop machine, Gnome 3 hangs at shutdown (and sometimes at start-up), and the Gnome display manager, gdm3, doesn't work well on my laptop.

I've been using Gnome because at the end of 2009, updates to KDE 4.4 messed up, along with Xorg, probably due to a poor fit between my video chip and the open source driver. I used Kubuntu for a while, but eventually had so many problems that I reformatted my hard drive and installed Debian testing, complete with the default Gnome desktop. I had preferred KDE, particularly for Digikam, the photo management program par excellence, but it was just too much work to keep the KDE eye-candy functioning, and it was easy enough to install "Digikam + dependencies." This produced an unattractive redundancy of libraries, but there's plenty of room on the old hard drive, so what the heck.

Anyway, word on the Web has been that Linus himself has switched to Xfce because Gnome 3 and KDE 4 feature too much "crazy crap," so, even before Gnome 3 hit Debian testing, I installed Xfce on the desktop machine and the laptop, and tried it out. Xfce seemed fine, but I also auditioned some of the window managers, and revisited icewm, which I previously have run happily on pokey old hardware.

When the Gnome3 update finally happened, I discovered that the new Gnome display manager caused all sorts of problems, especially on my laptop, which is also used by a (reluctant) Linux novice. (The Mac mini he used to use bit the dirt a few months back.) I needed an easy-to-understand log-in screen, and the KDE display manager fit the bill best.

What with all the KDE stuff I was using, I gave the KDE 4.6 environment a whirl, and all the compositing features that used to mess up my desktop machine now work perfectly. They also work fine on the laptop. Most of the fancy "plasmoids" and "Activities" seem useless to me so far, but I can ignore them easily enough.

If I were a real, nuts and bolts Linux gal, I'd select a window manager like icewm or sawfish, edit my .conf files to get exactly the user experience I want, and never be bothered by all these fancy-schmancy desktop environments. My ideal user experience would resemble the 1998-era Sun Workstation I used so happily at The Institute. A few terminal windows, Xclock, an Emacs window, and a browser--I'm in business. Too bad I have this yen for shiny visual effects and big chunks of software that install themselves and never make me figure out where the .conf files are. Shallow and lazy--that's me.

This Should Discourage Mice

A mouse built a summer nest in my box of Christmas ornaments and stuffed the stable full of chew-able ornament pieces. Once I picked the bits of paper from behind the Holy Family and glued the middle King back in place, things were nearly good as new--provided you overlook how I broke two little lambs off and glued them back before Mom got home when I was eight.

Cold, wind, and snow make this another good day for indoor activities (such as packing up Christmas decorations), and Princess seems to agree. Certainly there will be no mice in the manger in this setting.

J.R.R. Tolkien--A Video On His Birthday

Today at Open Culture: The best free cultural & educational media on the web, a link to a wonderful video: J.R.R. Tolkien in His Own Words

In celebration of Tolkien’s 120th birthday, we present a fascinating film on the author from the BBC series In Their Own Words: British Novelists. The 27-minute film was first broadcast in March of 1968, when Tolkien was 76 years old, and includes interviews and footage of the old man at his haunts in Oxford.

Snowy Day Sewing Room

Yesterday's cold rain has given way to icy wind and dry snowflakes. Princess wisely has chosen to join me in the sewing room.

Links for the Teapot

Tee-Ernte und Produktion in Doi Mae Salong, Nordthailand - YouTube:

I don't know why I favor tea. I feel vaguely un-American when breakfasting away from home, but coffee just doesn't start the day for me. Tea has the added charm of coming from a beautiful woody plant. Here's a video of Thai tea production and a collection of tea links: Tea | Letha's Asian Health Secrets:

'via Blog this'

Droop Mountain, New Year's Day, 2012

New Year's early morning featured sun and blue skies over the valley fog, but by the time I left the house for the First Day Hike at the Droop Mountain Battlefield Park, these high clouds had moved in. Nevertheless, it was a fine day for a walk in my favorite park.

The hike as advertised in The Pocahontas Times:

"It will be a nice winter hike to see the park at a time when people don't normally see it," added Droop Superintendent Mike Smith.

While few people visit the historic state park in the off-season, Smith said the winter months offer their own special perspective on its trails. Smith said this is Droop Mountain Battlefield State Park's first scheduled winter hike in recent memory.

The First Day hike will cover two, mostly level, miles of trails, said Smith. Hikers will set out at 10 a.m. from the park office on a loop that encompasses the Overlook Trail as well as Horse Heaven or Old Soldier trail, progressing toward the lookout tower and back across to the park office on the Musket Trail.

Along the way, hikers will find an old bear den, small cave and rock features similar to those found at nearby Beartown State Park, as well as a stunning view toward Briery Knob. Smith will have a fire going in the park workshop and "maybe even some warm apple cider for when we return."

I've been all over the park at all seasons, but this is the first time I've had the pleasure of Mike Smith's guided tour. Civil War history, biogeography, prehistoric artifacts, or animal tracks--Mike can tell you something interesting about any aspect of the park.

The rain these clouds promised finally caught up with me on my way home. If you have to get caught in January rain, it's best to be within a quarter mile of the house.

Overlocking Lingerie Elastic--A Tip to Remember

Sometimes, when I can't think of anything to write, it's time to do something less verbally demanding, like sewing. I've been practicing my serger skills, and went out in the snow this weekend to photograph some recent projects. Overlocking small pieces of fabric together creates enough yardage to make these underbritches out of small jersey scraps and old tee-shirts with cool graphics. (That's a big green praying mantis on the far right.)

Overlocking jersey knit seams is fairly straightforward, but I've had some trouble attaching lingerie elastic using the serger. The overlock stitches stretched out the elastic and it didn't snap back, producing sadly drooping drawers. Serger books I've seen suggest flatlock stitch for elastic, and this looks alright, but it doesn't seem very durable.

This time, I used an overlock stitch and played around with the stitch length adjustment. A long stitch length means fewer stitches per inch, and less damage to the elastic. Sure enough, overlock at maximum stitch length gave a tidy finish, and allowed the elastic to retain its snap.

Overlocking alone attached the elastic adequately, but I've noticed that ready-to-wear lingerie often has the elastic turned under and stitched down with a multi-stitch zig-zag, for a more delicate look, so that's what I did here.

Proofreading Matters

This is wonderful, and Taylor Mali has much more, like:

Snowy Setback--2011 Tree Year

After several warm days that made the lilac and rose bushes pop new leaves, winter weather returned.

This is the same snowstorm that caught Sherry on her way home from West Virginia. Bourbon County had a sunny, snow-melting day today, but here on Droop, the snow persists.

St. Patrick's Day View of Lake Kilarney

Another holiday postcard from Grandma's album--this one was never addressed or mailed. It says "Erin Go Bragh--Upper Lake Kilarney." Happy St. Patrick's Day!

19th Century Doll Clothes Links

I confess I never quite outgrew my girlish fascination with doll clothes, doll houses, and miniatures. I quit making doll clothes because I needed clothes more than dollies did, and there were so many other things to do. However, browsing the Internet shows me that there are a lot of grown-up ladies (and gentlemen) who never put aside their interest in miniatures, scale models, dolls, and doll clothes.

Although I feel I could easily be sucked into the world of dressing vintage dolls or even creating fanciful cloth dolls, I'm going to confine myself to making clothes for this one doll. To that end, I've put together a collection of links that I found helpful, informative, or just interesting.

• Doll Clothes Patterns from the Butterick Publishing Company, 1901. I was surprised to find that "The Delineator" marketed tissue paper patterns for doll clothes. This page shows the pattern envelope drawings in enough detail to copy fairly easily.
• Child with china doll: 19th century photographs of children and their antique dolls.
• "Dolls' outfits are a feature in the toy shops this season."...from Harper's Bazaar, 1872. These drawings of doll costumes are small and not detailed, but it's interesting to see the variety of characters dolls were meant to represent.
• THROUGH THE EYES OF A DOLL From The Youth's Companion, 1842. This is a rather gruesome little tale, informing the magazine's young readers that their mommies and daddies would be sad if their children died, but that excessive grief is idolatrous, and they'll probably have replacement kids anyway. Presumably, the kids knew that already, but jeez, who wants hear that from a doll?
• Restoration and dressing of a china doll. Nancy Wilson Barbata, aka The Doll Fancier, photographed the steps she went through to restore and dress a nineteenth century china head doll.
• Those Old Dolls Are Much Fussier Than Humans by Joan Kiplinger. This is a detailed and helpful guide to designing and sewing period-appropriate garments for old dolls.
• The Doll Costumer's Guild The Doll Costumer's Guild publishes 4 journals a year with information, patterns and sewing techniques for authentic costuming of antique dolls made from 1840 through the turn of the century. I'm not sure if this Web site is still active, but the illustrations are quite informative.
• Freebie Friday - Drafting Doll Clothes. Links to several interesting approaches to making doll dress patterns
• Past Patterns makes historical patterns for real people, not dolls, but I find their pattern envelope illustrations very helpful in understanding how old-time clothes were constructed.

Dormancy--2011 Tree Year

It's snowing again today, and the sumac buds are tight shut still.

Like other smooth-barked tree species here, the sumacs have lots of lovely lichens.

Late Winter Sumac--2011 Tree Year

Yesterday's sky did not promise spring, and this morning we had snow and sleet. Robins have been visiting the sumac fruits, but the main customers there are our red-bellied woodpeckers.

Lately, they have been rather rough in their foraging, and pieces of the fruiting bodies are scattered on the ground under the trees.

I wonder whether they enjoy these dry, furry fruits, or if they're the last choice here at the end of winter.

Heraldic Socks

I've finished another pair of socks from my vintage yarn collection. This yarn is what they used to call "baby weight," and judging by the label and the pastel color palette, "Peter Pan" by Wendy was intended for baby clothes. The fiber content is 55% nylon, which made me think it would make long-wearing socks. If the nylon/acrylic fibers are uncomfortable in shoes (as is sometimes the case) I'll have a nifty pair of bed socks for cold nights.

I used Barbara Walker's Heraldic Pattern from A Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns, pp. 150-151. It's a pattern I've wanted to try for many years, but I had great difficulty converting the back-and-forth, flat knitting direction to in-the-round directions, mostly because every stitch is, at some point, twisted with another stitch. The odd directions in rows 23, 25, 31, and 32 reflect the way I worked around this.

The end result of a seamless tube of diagonals is very pleasing. I'm going to have to use this pattern on another pair of socks if only to justify the time I spent working out the "round and round" directions.

Barbara Walker's Heraldic Pattern
Multiple of 12 stitches, knitted in the round
Row 1: *K2, P4*
Row 2: *RT, K4, LT, K4*
Row 3: *K2, P4*
Row 4: Knit
Row 5: *K2, P4*
Row 6: *RT, K4, LT, K4*
Row 7: *K2, P4*
Row 8: *K1, LT, K2, RT, K5*
Row 9: *K3, P2, K3, P4*
Row 10: *K2, LT, RT, K6*
Row 11: *K8, P4*
Row 12: *K3, RT, K7*
Row 13: *K8, P4*
Row 14: *K2, RT, LT, K6*
Row 15: *K3, P2, K3, P4*
Row 16: *K1, RT, K2, LT, K5*
Row 17: *K2, P4*
Row 18: *LT, K4, RT, K4*
Row 19: *K2, P4*
Row 20: Knit
Row 21: *K2, P4*
Row 22: *LT, K4, RT, K4*
Row 23: *K2, P4* Last repeat, K2, P3. Slip last stitch
onto next needle, making it first stitch of next row.
Row 24: *RT, K6, LT, K2* 
Row 25: *K3, P4, K3, P2* At end of last repeat, slip
first stitch from next row onto working needle, knit.
Row 26: *K8, LT, RT*
Row 27: *K2, P4, K6*
Row 28: *K9, LT, K1*
Row 29: *K2, P4, K6*
Row 30: *K8, RT, LT*
Row 31: *K2, P4, K3, P2, K1* Last repeat K2, P4, K3, P2
Slip last stitch onto next needle, making it
first stitch of next row.
Row 32: *LT, K6, RT, K2* At end of last repeat, slip
first stitch from next row onto working needle, knit.