say it ain't so, joe!

CNN mini-headline of the day:

JOE JACKSON DENIES ABUSING MICHAEL

werner, ich liebe dich

My love affair with Werner Herzog continues. I recently watched My Best Fiend (about his work with Klaus Kinski), Little Dieter Needs to Fly (documentary about Dieter Dengler), and Woyzeck (film of the drama fragment by Büchner, starring Kinski).

Before we begin, let's just get one thing out of the way: Klaus Kinski was brilliant, and also absolutely, monumentally batshit fucking crazy. Exempli gratia: he did "Jesus tours" where he basically went around and did a stage show where he raved semi-coherently at his audience while informing them, and not very politely either, that they ought to be kneeling before him and kissing his dusty feet. "I'm not the official church Jesus," he admits in one clip from My Best Fiend. Which kind of makes me love him, to be honest.

Anyway, back to Werner Herzog. His resemblance to my father prevents my schoolgirl crush from going anywhere beyond the platonic--which is probably a very good thing for Herr Herzog, who'd otherwise be contending with me on his doorstep on a regular basis, or at the very least suffering an aggressive multimedia campaign attempting to persuade him that his true love resides in Northern California and enjoys knitting, the collected works of Bob Dylan, and theoretical linguistics.

I think what I love most about Herzog is his resounding capacity for understatement. For instance, when describing the filming of Fitzcarraldo (in the Amazonian jungle), he mentions that he was staying in the hut of a local woman, a hunchback dwarf with nine children, who kept about 150 guinea pigs. "These were for food," he notes, "But at night they would crawl all over me, and this was uncomfortable." So, you know, he went to stay in some other hut.

Here's a photo of my dad, so you'll see I'm not joking about the similarity. Plus they're both nutty Germans with adorable accents, which doesn't exactly downplay the resemblance.



(I am 18 years old in this photo, in case anyone is wondering.)

keeping austin weird

I am in Texas for the Fourth of July weekend, mainly because I love 100+ degree temperatures, large bugs, and copious and unabashed pro-U.S.A. "these colors don't run" style sentiment. Also, I am a devout Christian and favor big hair.

The real reason I am in Austin is that this is the home of my fun and kooky pseudo-in-laws, as well as the lovely and delightful Vickie Howell, who is one of my MEOW kitties and who has a wee 5-week-old bebeh at the moment.

James's sister and her husband live in a development called Agave, which is all cubist/modernist and eco-friendly, and it is so effing cool that I almost want to move to Austin so I can live in one of these homes. There's also the fact that even the largest, fancy-schmanciest model still does not set you back as much as an 875-ish sq ft Edwardian apartment in San Francisco (ask me how I know). Plus this neighborhood attracts the upscale lefty hipster tree-hugger types, what with being all sustainable and shit, so it would practically be like living in San Francisco anyway. Except for the heat and the giant bugs and all.











Here is my sorta-brother-in-law-in-law in his kung fu outfit. Also, a photo of his horrifying gorilla-foot kung fu shoes.





There are cute cats here. This one tries to act all dignified:



Except when she doesn't:



But she is still awfully cute:

vodka snowclone

Last night James and I were playing the Extreme Engineering drinking game again, and there was an episode about an indoor ski park in Dubai. I swear to god, one guy announced that "Eskimos have 200 words for snow." That is when I decided/realized that if you are a linguist and playing a drinking game--and I don't care what it's based on or what the rules are--if someone says that Eskimos have n words for snow, you must drink an entire drink. In fact, I think that you need to drink an entire drink even if you are not currently playing a drinking game.

l.a. arboretum

I went a little crazy with James's Canon SX10IS yesterday at the Los Angeles arboretum. Here are a few of the 150 or so photos I took. I am pretty sure my next major(ish) purchase will be my own SX10IS...because I have a lot of fiscal self-control like that.

Updated to add: Someone asked me whether these were cropped, and the answer is no. I prefer to frame my photos old skool style; isn't that half the fun?

ass menagerie

I've been on a spree of creating crocheted and knitted mascots for my coworkers:

A dolphin for Amanda:



A dachshund for Dan:



Cthulhu for Casey:



A gibbon for Jim:



A jackass for Lon:



A mutant, bacon-eating panda for Andy:



6/10: Updated to add an aardvark for Johan:

I predict I'll be sleeping in tomorrow

James and I have discovered the best drinking game EVAH. It involves watching the Discovery Channel's series Extreme Engineering. Here is an approximation of the rules. Take a drink any time:

1. Something's mass, length, weight, or other physical feature is described in terms of some other (often itself fairly inscrutable) measure, e.g., "X is enough to fill the Roman coliseum TWENTY TIMES," "Y is as heavy as TWO THOUSAND SUVs," "Z is as tall as THIRTY EMPIRE STATE BUILDINGS," "enough cable to reach from San Francisco to Kathmandu EIGHT TIMES," "enough for EVERY MAN, WOMAN, AND CHILD in JAPAN"

2. Someone mentions lasers

3. An imaginary worst case scenario involves a fire in a tunnel

4. Football fields or 747s are used as a measurement unit (subset of rule 1)

5. A painfully awful simile is invoked, e.g., "it grips the earth like Titan's fingers"

6. Anything is described as "the X-est Y in the world," e.g., "the longest tunnel...," "the tallest structure...," "the most advanced test site...," etc. (worth two drinks if they say "in the history of the planet" instead of just "in the world")

7. A painfully awful cliche is invoked, e.g., "the bigger they are, the harder they fall"

8. Someone likens something to a LEGO structure

9. An imaginary worst-case scenario involves an earthquake or a typhoon

10. Cheesy ethnic stereotypes are invoked, e.g., Swedish construction workers referred to eighty times as "Vikings"

11. Someone says "Disaster is averted"

12. An imaginary worst-case scenario involves a last-minute life-saving outcome (worth 2 drinks if they actually refer to this as a "happy ending," and 3 drinks if the "happy ending" involves something being able to proceed through a tunnel).

I'm sure there are more, but I am too fucking drunk to remember right now. The really beautiful and/or scary thing is that you can watch this series via Roku on Netflix, i.e., instant play, one after another, all damn night if you want...or until you run out of alcohol, whichever comes first.

senility: it's what's for breakfast

Yesterday I received in the mail a comped copy of Vickie Howell's new book, Pop Goes Crochet!, as I had designed and produced a hoodie for said volume. As I was flipping through its pages looking for this garment, I came across a pattern for a pair of cute red socks with crocheted cuffs. These socks looked remarkably like my previously published Granddaughter Socks, just in another gauge and color, and maybe with a slightly different version of the squares.

"Hey!" I thought to myself. "That is a total ripoff of my design! Who had the NERVE to submit this for publication?!"

I checked the credit line: "Designed by Karen Baumer."

Oh. Right. I made those socks. This also answers a question I had recently as I was sorting through some yarn, namely, "Where did this partial ball of red cashmere come from, again?"

I can't find a photo of the socks, but here is the hoodie:

HOODIE!

reruns--volume 1

I've decided to just be lazy and revive some old posts from the India days. There are a bunch that I redacted last fall for various reasons that I am no longer as concerned about, so what the hell. I was reminded of this one today by something Robin said:


Today I wore my pink and beige custom-made salwar kameez to work, and, I won't lie to you, the office basically went berzerk. The outfit apparently screams "pretty." People all day were telling me how pretty I was. (And not a single person called me sir, come to think of it!) One of my linguists mentioned it in her daily email update. The office manager lady who is waiting for the rapture (that should probably be its own post someday) made a special trip over to my desk to inform me how pretty I was. ENGINEERS were noticing my clothes. Engineers. 'Nuff said. It was all very funny and kind of sweet. But my favorite comment came from our adorable adorable adorable security guard (I think his name is Jayir--he's the guy who loves to make Alex speak Hindi). His English is not that fluent, and when I was waiting for the elevator at the end of the day he exclaimed, "You are looking better in that dress, ma'am!"

but wait there's more

There's an article by Jane Fonda at The Huffington Post with the headline

Adolescent Pregnancy Must Become a Priority for All Americans

So get out there and start impregnating teens, people! Jane Fonda says so.

syntax is your friend

Headline spotted this morning on MSNBC:

MRS. EDWARDS TALKS ABOUT HER HUSBAND JOHN'S AFFAIR WITH OPRAH

inappropriate animals

I just got an email from James, who is down at his house near Los Angeles. The subject line was "guess who was climbing the loquat tree?" and the attachment was an m4v file titled "bear-in-yard."

I do not make this stuff up, people.

is mah birfday w00t!

It's birthday week here at Casa de Phibetakitten: mine was last Tuesday and James's is this coming Tuesday. James showed up last Monday, and when I got home and saw this hugemongous box in my living room I thought I'd finally gotten that pony I've always wanted:


Turns out it was an iMac 24", which comes in at a very very very very very close second to a pony. Plus, as Jenny Jo pointed out, it's way better than a dead pony in a box. I have to give her that one.


I'm really wondering what James is going to do for Xmas this year, because I am running out of room for Apple products in my home. Maybe I really will finally get a pony!

April is a dangerous month for my pocketbook, because it turns out that I can justify quite a lot of things by telling myself they are "for my birthday." I don't exercise a lot of fiscal restraint during the remaining 11 months of the year as it is, so you can see where this attitude might get me into trouble. My favorite birthday present to me this year is this painting, which I got from a Romanian artist named Andrada Anghel:


It's called "Outer Space Landscape." (Click on the photo to enlarge it and get a better sense of the texture it's got going on.) I love it.

We spent this weekend in Santa Rosa, visiting one of our favorite restaurants (GG's Earth and Surf) and our favorite brew pub (Russian River Brewing Co.) and going on a geeky hike called the Planet Walk in Sugarloaf Ridge state park. I don't have anything particularly funny to report about any of this, but since I refuse to miss an opportunity to use my "inappropriate animals" tag, allow me to present to you two rattlesnakes I noticed hiding out under a bush:


We also saw two ridiculously large wild turkeys running down the trail and making ridiculous noises.

Even though James's birthday isn't till Tuesday, I was unable to resist giving him one of his presents ahead of time. This is handknit sweater #31:





And by that I mean it is #31 for JAMES, not the 31st that I've ever knit. I have no idea what that number would be, but particularly if baby clothes count it is easily in the many hundreds by now. I may need to get a life.

hello, dolly

Recently I was talking about the mini news headlines that I see on the TVs at the gym, and my fascination around the choices made as to which stories to "report" on in this way and how they attempt to convey the salient content with half a line of text. Well, apparently I am far from the first person who's been struck by this, because I recently learned that you can in fact buy tee shirts from CNN with various of these actual headlines printed on them. I saw another good one earlier this week: "CHARLES MANSON SPENDS MOST OF HIS TIME ALONE." Uh, isn't this guy in solitary confinement? Also, I think that right around the time you finish carving a swastika into your forehead is also right around the time when you are making a decision to henceforth spend most of your time alone. I am not seeing the news here.

This brings me to my mom. Last time I visited my parents, I was working on a fiction piece involving the concept of giving young girls a "last doll," and I was wondering whether this sort of thing, this manikin moratorium if you will, had perhaps been common in wartime or other occasions of economic stress in the past (I encountered the idea in an antique photograph; I didn't make it up). Mom reported that no, she had never been given an official "last" doll, and then went on to casually mention that she'd had a doll she called Edda, named after Hermann Goering's daughter. This caught my attention. The manner in which she conveyed the information suggested that naming one's poppet after the child of a war criminal was somehow, you know, what's the problem? Given that she was maybe six years old at the time and had spent her entire life in Nazi-ruled Germany, I wouldn't expect her to have questioned it then, but to report on it 65 years later as though it were the most normal thing in the world, and with no apparent retrospective queasiness...that to me was a bit odd. I pressed for further details. Turns out the Goering family was sort of Fascism's version of the Pitt-Jolie clan. They were celebrated in the press and there were Goering family propaganda calendars with scenes of the carefree, wholesome tots frolicking happily through Teutonic meadows or some such. One of these hung in my grandparents' home.

I'm not really sure where I'm going with this, except...Goering family calendars!!?!!?

A while later James and I were watching movie previews on his Apple TV, and we called up the trailer for The Reader. Neither of us had heard of it yet, and it was unclear at first what it was all about. Then the scene switched suddenly to Kate Winslet sitting in a severe suit as a defendant in some kind of war crimes tribunal, and I said, "Ohhh, I see. She's someone my mom would have named a doll after."

crafty crap

I haven't had any home dec updates lately, mainly on account of my spending 111% of my time sitting on my ass and knitting. But today I installed some really cool wall graphics to show y'all (click on the photo for a better view). They come from this Etsy shop, and if you're looking for a fairly inexpensive way to spruce up your walls on a large scale, take a look at their designs.

I haven't posted much knitting lately either, I guess. Here are some recent highlights, brought to you straight from my couch:

kitties in vegas

The MEOW kitties (a.k.a. my internet knitting posse) decided we'd have our semi-annual retreat in Las Vegas this time, so a bunch of us rented a vacation home for the long weekend and we're enjoying the lovely weather as well as the drinking and the gossiping. And the knitting, of course.

Technically we are in Henderson, NV, which I'm told is a popular location for finding dumped bodies on C.S.I.

Speaking of knitting, I would like to present to you young Diego modeling the 'aviator helmet' I made for him a while ago. Wow that is a cute kid.

seriously?

Dear guy on the 38 bus,

Do you seriously think that The Joy of Gay Sex is appropriate reading material during evening rush hour?

Also, I can't decide whether the fact that it was a library book makes it better or worse.

Sincerely,

Karen

there are some things that should be illegal

...and profusely sweaty, balding, foggy-eyeglassed men at the gym on stationary bikes grasping the Wall Street Journal in one hand and checking their stocks via their iPhone in the other hand are definitely one of those things.

making headlines

When I work out at the gym I frequently turn on a news channel on the little personal TV screen they have attached to each treadmill and watch without sound. As you no doubt have noticed, it is now de rigueur to have a constantly running stream of mini-headlines scrolling underneath the main features. As a linguist I dig seeing the attempted synopses of various stories into such brief snippets; often it feels like you can only understand the little headlines if you're already familiar with the stories anyway.

For instance, today they periodically ran a line that said something like "Comment leads to Missouri standoff." OK...thanks for letting us know! The other day it was "Caylee's grandfather under suicide watch." Who the fuck is Caylee and why do her grandfather's death-wish issues warrant time on the national news? Sometimes the headlines are funny for entirely other reasons; my favorite one from today was "Men see bikini-clad women as objects, scientists say." Shouldn't that be a headline from The Onion? Who are these scientists? I want to know who designed the study protocol for that one. And whether any of my tax dollars were involved.

Speaking of questionable uses of my hard-earned money, the San Francisco Municipal Railway this morning provided yet another notable public transportation experience. I was heading to work on the 38, and an older woman in a dingy hoodie and sparkly but tattered skirt was sitting near me. Her personal odor was not altogether agreeable, but I've seen and smelled a lot worse on MUNI, and since I was reading a magazine I only really noticed her when she started softly and repeatedly lilting "James Brown!" in dulcet tones, followed by the observation "He and I are from the same place." The she looked at me and asked if I knew the time. I was unwilling to dig out my cell phone, so I showed my bare wrists and said "Sorry, I don't."

"You don't know the time?"

"Sorry."

"I have to take my psych meds."

I smiled and nodded sympathetically. Then she asked, "What are you?"

"What am I?"

"Yeah, what are you?"

I hesitated and replied, "I don't understand the question."

"Are you a nurse?"

machine learning

As I have mentioned previously, I have a fairly severe allergy to science fiction, but enough smart people had told me that I would nonetheless enjoy the new Battlestar Galactica series that I finally went ahead and Netflixed it. And I do indeed like it well enough, particularly the parts involving Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, who is a hot, blond fighter pilot with a no-bullshit attitude, and who also is very hot.

Moving right along. So, I just started season 3, which so far I am liking the best of anything in the series so far. Based on the initial two episodes I feel it can perhaps best be summarized as Watergate Meets Birkenau. In other words, exactly the sort of kitten-filled happy rainbow festival I tend to love.

Oddly enough, James--whose brain inhabits science fiction approximately 98% of the time--had not ever watched BSG, so I got him started on it as well. When I visited him in Los Angeles this past weekend I commented that the machine Cylons really freaked me out, but the human-form Cylons didn't scare me much at all. James looked shocked.

"For me it's exactly the opposite," he said.

"Really?"

"I understand how machines work. Why would anyone be afraid of a machine? That's stupid. That would be like...being afraid of your car. Or something."

"I'm a little afraid of your espresso machine, to be honest."

I was mainly (although not entirely) joking, but then I found a photo of his espresso machine's innards:


People, am I wrong? Would you turn your back on this monster? Give me Number Six any day of the week.