Thursday, October 13, 2011
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Japan, the Press and Lethal Rain
I'm going to Japan in a couple of months and am on the getting end of a lot of concern from my loved ones, and my liked ones. And for their concern I am profoundly grateful. Thank you all. I dig love, and I dig concern from loved ones. And, you know . . .
A concern of mine at the moment is the way some of the press is loving the Japanese catastrophe. Fine, Press, get all huffy, but let me give you an example or two of the way some of the press is reveling in the chance to sell product. The Reader no doubt could supply examples of her own.
Some of the press, as is unfortunately not rare enough, is selling fear. No, it's not necessarily most of the press, but it's a lot of the press. It seems that too many "news" outlets are afraid that worldwide concern over the plight of the Japanese and fear for its own safety will dwindle and people will stop buying newspapers to help them worry. Potential readers will, they fear, turn their attention to something other than the earthquake, the tsunami, power outages and direct danger to the workers who are braving the radiation, and so we are treated to ever-changing fears and new and evolving fears of what the radiation is going to do to the Japanese and to you and me. They're selling it hard because they can.
That's right, we're buying it. Literally, and not just the newspapers. You've heard, I guess, that in many places supplies of potassium iodide are gone. So, in response to the panic the irresponsible press is selling us, we are self-medicating, apparently, even though the small chance that the chemical would be harmful hugely overshadows the essentially nonexistent threat of Japanese radiation to the health of the rest of the world. I love the above "graphic" that shows you how afraid you ought to be. Look at that yellow cloud! If you want to go look outside your window right now so you can see the real thing, I'll wait.
. . .
Welcome back. Actually, it's not the graphic that I love best. My favorite piece of fearmongery is a headline I saw in the Australian publication Perth Now: "Nuclear crisis: Australians stranded in Japan as lethal rain looms."
Hmmmm, lethal rain. Kind of makes you wish you were back in your parents' or grandparents' 1961 fallout shelter, doesn't it? Tell, me, Perth Now, about this lethal rain and how it's going to turn Australian tourists in Japan into latter-day Godzillas.
Happily, Perth Now does explain its commercially promising alarm: the one use in the entire story of the word "rain" comes in this sentence, in paragraph number -- wait for it -- twenty-six: "Tokyo was in gridlock with reports thousands were trying to flee amid fears the wind would bring downpours of nuclear rain."
OK. OK. In an effort to safeguard the public's right to know, and incidentally to pick up some loose change to the great joy of the circulation department, Perth Now's headline editor, which I'm assuming this publication has something like, scans the article, and not finding anything sufficiently newsworthy in paragraphs 1-25, warns us in this informative headline that traffic in Tokyo is heavier than usual "amid fears" that the winds would shift suddenly around to the northeast, glom onto the radioactivity, and dump it as "lethal rain" in Tokyo, thus endangering the unsuspecting Australian tourists.
It's the "amid fears" that I particularly love. "Amid" means, I don't know, that Tokyo traffic is in gridlock for some reason and that one or more of the locked gridians are afraid (the "fears" that the reporter has discovered, somehow) that the rain contains --what? -- something lethal. Bad, anyway.
So the headline editor converts this intuition about what's causing the gridlock into the positive statement, "lethal rain looms." Yes, it's science on a par with a uoija board, but it's presumably good news for Perth Now's shareholders.
OK, I don't really know Perth Now. Maybe it's Perth's tawdriest tabloid, but although it's the worst example I've seen of dishing fake pain from an ocean of real pain, you've seen a bunch of stuff nearly as bad and so have I.
Note -- Since posting the rest of this, I found something called the Journalism Wall of Shame, which has a long, long list of mostly fear-mongering, often shoddy and, in may cases, hugely insensitive stories filed by, in some cases, otherwise reputable journalists. I'd note that Perth Now's "lethal rain looms" entry was among them. Interestingly, it rated only a 9 out of 10 on the bad journalism scale -- there were several that got the full 10.
And, hey, while we're on the subject, let's talk about lethality, because I think fear that's floating around is mostly fear of lethality-related radiation. I don't think most of us really are afraid of turning into Godzilla. Or, you know, being bitten by a radioactive ballerina and turning into a ballerina. I think people tend to fear, radiationally speaking, what they think of generally as lethality.
Here's a chart that puts it all in perspective. It's essentially logarithmic, so it's a little tough to understand at first, as far as relative danger of things such as eating bananas and living in a brick building for a year. But look at it carefully and you'll see what constitutes and what does not constitute danger. And if the chart is anywhere near accurate, living in Tokyo does not constitute danger, other than, you know, the possibility of subway gas attacks. But that was a long time ago.
I for one am still planning my trip to Japan, without any radiation-related concern for myself, though in my constant search for something to feel guilty about I do worry about how my presence may add to some current Japanese burden. And I'm not taking potassium iodide with me. If you worry about this national calamity and its victims, instead of buying these silly newspapers or hoarding potassium iodide, you can really help in other ways. Click on the Red Cross logo for some of the ways.
頑張って -- let's all do our best.
Oh right, and this is theoretically a knitting blog, so also, you know, knitting.
A concern of mine at the moment is the way some of the press is loving the Japanese catastrophe. Fine, Press, get all huffy, but let me give you an example or two of the way some of the press is reveling in the chance to sell product. The Reader no doubt could supply examples of her own.
 |
| Really? I mean, REALLY? |
That's right, we're buying it. Literally, and not just the newspapers. You've heard, I guess, that in many places supplies of potassium iodide are gone. So, in response to the panic the irresponsible press is selling us, we are self-medicating, apparently, even though the small chance that the chemical would be harmful hugely overshadows the essentially nonexistent threat of Japanese radiation to the health of the rest of the world. I love the above "graphic" that shows you how afraid you ought to be. Look at that yellow cloud! If you want to go look outside your window right now so you can see the real thing, I'll wait.
. . .
Welcome back. Actually, it's not the graphic that I love best. My favorite piece of fearmongery is a headline I saw in the Australian publication Perth Now: "Nuclear crisis: Australians stranded in Japan as lethal rain looms."
 |
| Run away!! |
Happily, Perth Now does explain its commercially promising alarm: the one use in the entire story of the word "rain" comes in this sentence, in paragraph number -- wait for it -- twenty-six: "Tokyo was in gridlock with reports thousands were trying to flee amid fears the wind would bring downpours of nuclear rain."
OK. OK. In an effort to safeguard the public's right to know, and incidentally to pick up some loose change to the great joy of the circulation department, Perth Now's headline editor, which I'm assuming this publication has something like, scans the article, and not finding anything sufficiently newsworthy in paragraphs 1-25, warns us in this informative headline that traffic in Tokyo is heavier than usual "amid fears" that the winds would shift suddenly around to the northeast, glom onto the radioactivity, and dump it as "lethal rain" in Tokyo, thus endangering the unsuspecting Australian tourists.
 |
| See? Proof! It IS looming!!!!!! |
It's the "amid fears" that I particularly love. "Amid" means, I don't know, that Tokyo traffic is in gridlock for some reason and that one or more of the locked gridians are afraid (the "fears" that the reporter has discovered, somehow) that the rain contains --what? -- something lethal. Bad, anyway.
So the headline editor converts this intuition about what's causing the gridlock into the positive statement, "lethal rain looms." Yes, it's science on a par with a uoija board, but it's presumably good news for Perth Now's shareholders.
OK, I don't really know Perth Now. Maybe it's Perth's tawdriest tabloid, but although it's the worst example I've seen of dishing fake pain from an ocean of real pain, you've seen a bunch of stuff nearly as bad and so have I.
Note -- Since posting the rest of this, I found something called the Journalism Wall of Shame, which has a long, long list of mostly fear-mongering, often shoddy and, in may cases, hugely insensitive stories filed by, in some cases, otherwise reputable journalists. I'd note that Perth Now's "lethal rain looms" entry was among them. Interestingly, it rated only a 9 out of 10 on the bad journalism scale -- there were several that got the full 10.
 |
| Hey, it happened to Spiderman |
Here's a chart that puts it all in perspective. It's essentially logarithmic, so it's a little tough to understand at first, as far as relative danger of things such as eating bananas and living in a brick building for a year. But look at it carefully and you'll see what constitutes and what does not constitute danger. And if the chart is anywhere near accurate, living in Tokyo does not constitute danger, other than, you know, the possibility of subway gas attacks. But that was a long time ago.
I for one am still planning my trip to Japan, without any radiation-related concern for myself, though in my constant search for something to feel guilty about I do worry about how my presence may add to some current Japanese burden. And I'm not taking potassium iodide with me. If you worry about this national calamity and its victims, instead of buying these silly newspapers or hoarding potassium iodide, you can really help in other ways. Click on the Red Cross logo for some of the ways. 頑張って -- let's all do our best.
Oh right, and this is theoretically a knitting blog, so also, you know, knitting.
Thursday, March 3, 2011
The Thing
 |
| Nothing a little orthodontic work and a visit to Kathi couldn't fix |
I don't go in for horror movies, although never having seen one, I can't really blow them off. I just figure there's plenty of stuff in real life to scare the socks off any sane person, and I don't see any point in paying Rupert to help me with that. As far as I'm concerned he has more than he needs already. Anyway, so I never saw The Thing, either the first time around or the more recent version. Although, you know, come to think of it, I'm not so sure Rupert isn't the star of that movie anyway. Oliver Stone insists they've never been seen together, and he knows all about these things. Oh heck, you decide.But believe it or not, this post isn't about Rupert, Fox, the Thing or even Oliver Stone. It's about Things.
I get them sometimes, and have most of my life. I have no idea where they come from, but they stick around for years, and sometimes for decades. In some cases they're just hugely abiding interests and in some cases they really become obsessions. Knitting, I'm quite pleased to say, is a Thing.
 |
| Where do they all belong? |
My first Thing, the best I can recall, was the Beatles. That was in high school and then college and then after. I ended up teaching a course on that subject at my college's "free college." So I guess the first qualification for a thing is what Mr. Darcy called "the improvement of the mind by extensive reading." Even as early as the late 1960s there were some pretty decent biographies, including one that, probably because it cut out the dodgy stuff and lavished the individual band members with pretty much unqualified praise, was "authorized." Yeah, I'll bet.
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| I'll tell you: I don't know. |
I won't go into all my Things, but they've stayed with me -- WWII (which evolved out of Judaism, on a direct line through the death camps), beekeeping, modern physics and cosmology. Most recently, by which I mean the last three or four years, it's knitting and Japanese, as you can tell by looking at my blog, if you do. Knitting sweaters especially. Wool. Sheep. Warm, snug sweaters that are proof against old man Murdoch. Uh, winter.
 |
| No, it's not mine |
My kids apparently take bets on how long a Thing will last. They don't tell me what they're betting on, long or short. I imagine some of the Things they think won't last actually do. And anyway, a short run for me is a couple of years.
Things. Who knows why they happen or what the next one will be.
Do other people have Things? Do you?
Monday, February 21, 2011
Songs
NPR has, over the course of the last decade or two, had little pieces that particularly appealed to me on two aspects of popular music. The first, and the one I'm thinking about right now, is songs that get stuck in your head. When they're songs you like, it's all to the good. At the moment I have the (very pleasant) voice of Ginger Rogers singing Jerome Kern's "A Fine Romance." It's because "Swing Time" was on TV this weekend. As I said, it's all to the good. The NPR piece, however, was more about songs you don't like having rattle around in there. We all have them, and mine aren't going to be the same as yours. Nonetheless, the radio piece had people calling and writing in and giving their own, which of course prompted NPR to play the selected number, to I-don't-know-whose great enjoyment. Maybe the NPR engineer who is a full-time sadist.
Anyway, after hearing the story all the way through, one disgruntled listener, who I can only presume had no on-off switch on his radio, called in to complain about how much it had ruined his day. In retaliation, and pretty effective, in my opinion, at the end of his call he sang the first two lines of one of the verses of "Candy Man": Who can take a rainbow/Wrap it in a sigh. I can say I could have done without THAT. Ann and I have a nonbinding agreement that we don't talk about songs that are in our head, for this very reason, though I break the agreement more often than she does. That's ok, she tells me her dreams sometimes, so I figure we're kind of even.The other piece was on things we think songs say, that they really don't. These are called "Mondegreens," a nonsense word which itself was an early mondegreen. An example is from the classic Neil Young song, "Tell me Why," which instead of "When you're old enough to repay/but young enough to sell" half of the Neil-Young following population thinks is "When you're old enough to repaint/But young enough to sell." Which, when you think about it, may make more sense.
Anyway, the NPR piece was funny because things that people think the songs say can be a hoot, mostly from the pictures they conjure up.
I haven't been able to find the exact photo I'm looking for on google, because necessarily the toddler would have a knife clenched between his teeth and a broken-off beer bottle in his hand. I'm thinking with Davy's reputation it took at least five full-grown men to take him down. Anyway, I did find one photo that at least gave the idea, though he obviously is way older than the real 3-year-old. In any event, I guess the whole Alamo thing was just part of the legend.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
When I'm not knitting
When I'm home, it's typically one of two things -- one is knitting and the other is studying Japanese. I don't even want to try to think of a way to try to do them simultaneously.
When I study, this is what my work area tends to look like:
It's the paper equivalent of what my knitting area tends to look like when I'm doing that.
I'm only pointing any of this out because I've been accused of doing nothing but knitting. And since I'm done knitting for the night and ready to start studying, I thought I'd prove it to the people who occasionally take a look at my little blog. Both of you.
BTW that character on the lower right means "wrap" or "envelop." It's a picture of an embryo in an egg, and it's part of the overall character that means "to hug." And although kissing is a recent phenomenon in the world of Japanese affection (witness the Japanese word for the verb to kiss -- "kisu"), the word for hug has its own Chinese character and it's very old.
It's one of the many, many reasons I love this beautiful language. To hug, from "wrapping" the way an egg wraps its little internal embryo.
When I study, this is what my work area tends to look like:
It's the paper equivalent of what my knitting area tends to look like when I'm doing that.
I'm only pointing any of this out because I've been accused of doing nothing but knitting. And since I'm done knitting for the night and ready to start studying, I thought I'd prove it to the people who occasionally take a look at my little blog. Both of you.
BTW that character on the lower right means "wrap" or "envelop." It's a picture of an embryo in an egg, and it's part of the overall character that means "to hug." And although kissing is a recent phenomenon in the world of Japanese affection (witness the Japanese word for the verb to kiss -- "kisu"), the word for hug has its own Chinese character and it's very old.
It's one of the many, many reasons I love this beautiful language. To hug, from "wrapping" the way an egg wraps its little internal embryo.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Thing 1 and thing 2 2
Finished off #2 tonight with some excellent kitchener-related advice from Astrid. I'm not much of a photographer, but fortunately that won't matter except on this blog. Here they are,
Thing 1
and Thing 2:
I'm just about to get going on the whole reason I took up knitting 4 years ago: the snowflake sweater that will be a reminder, though not an exact replica, of the one my Mom knitted for herself, and the companion one she knitted for my Dad, presumably when they were getting along. It's the one she made for herself that I grabbed when I was 16 and eventually wore out that I loved so much. My brother got my Dad's, which was a kind of forest green.
That's why I took up knitting in the first place. I can't get my Mom back but I can get the sweater. I figured out a couple of weeks ago that that sweater is probably the reason I've always loved navy and white.
Here's the hat I knitted a couple of months ago essentially as a swatch:
As I said before, I can't (yet) produce the kind of photographs I love to see in blogs and on Ravelry, but this is the hat and this is going to be the basic pattern appearance of the sweater, the RILTK.
Well oh golly I was just about to sign off when I was looking around thinking about the sweater, and I stumbled upon a piece of it on a blog. I know this is it because I have a photo of me wearing the sweater. So here is the photo
and here is the blog I found it on. Just, I don't know, for posterity.
Thing 1
and Thing 2:
I'm just about to get going on the whole reason I took up knitting 4 years ago: the snowflake sweater that will be a reminder, though not an exact replica, of the one my Mom knitted for herself, and the companion one she knitted for my Dad, presumably when they were getting along. It's the one she made for herself that I grabbed when I was 16 and eventually wore out that I loved so much. My brother got my Dad's, which was a kind of forest green.
That's why I took up knitting in the first place. I can't get my Mom back but I can get the sweater. I figured out a couple of weeks ago that that sweater is probably the reason I've always loved navy and white.
Here's the hat I knitted a couple of months ago essentially as a swatch:
As I said before, I can't (yet) produce the kind of photographs I love to see in blogs and on Ravelry, but this is the hat and this is going to be the basic pattern appearance of the sweater, the RILTK.
Well oh golly I was just about to sign off when I was looking around thinking about the sweater, and I stumbled upon a piece of it on a blog. I know this is it because I have a photo of me wearing the sweater. So here is the photo
and here is the blog I found it on. Just, I don't know, for posterity.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Thing 1 and thing 2
It's all sweaters now. I did all the hats I'm going to do for the time being, except for a cousin who's asked me vaguely to consider knitting more children's hats for, you know . . .
So now there are two new sweaters, nearly identical, completed for myself and my son.
No, that's not us. You can tell because those aren't sweaters. As soon as I can find my camera-talking-to-computer cord, I will post #1, which I finished on 22 January, and #2, which I finished today except for kitchener-ing up the armpits.
I love love love this pattern because there are only these two little seams and the kitchener stitches totally hide them, besides which you wouldn't see them most of the time anyway since they're the armpits, unless, you know, you were playing basketball in them. Which, seeing as how they're very toasty, I don't recommend.
I did one for my son accidentally. Not that he doesn't deserve one, which he does, what a great person, but of course we all think that and I won't bore you with that, I'll bore you with the rest of this story. Except that the only two people I know who read this already know this story, so I won't bore THEM with it I don't think, because if I were them I wouldn't read a story I'd already heard a boring enough oral version of once already.
But the thing is, in case anyone at all has come this far, I mis-arithmeticked (the blogspot spell-checker is working overtime tonight) the sweater I was going to knit for myself because I didn't include the ease, so the boy gets that. And I get the other one, which I wore last week and it fits quite nicely.
The weather was really sweet this weekend (I don't care about sun or rain but I do so like when it gets warmer) so melting most of the remaining North Carolina mountain snow left over, in amongst my woods, from Christmas plus a similarly unusually deep snow that happened the second weekend in January.
It's not even February yet, though. We're in the middle of the period I've always referred to as the "Days of Dearth," which is January 15 to February 15. It's not that the weather is dismal, it's that the weather is dismal and the hope of spring is really not in sight. Fortunately, I now have the Kanuga Knitting & Quilting Retreat on Martin Luther King weekend, which I don't seem to be able to shut up about, and which, in addition to Thanksgiving, is really the big deal of the year for me. Except this year, of course, I'm traveling solo to Japan in June, so that may be pretty cool too.
That's no one I know, just a photo I like.
So now there are two new sweaters, nearly identical, completed for myself and my son.
No, that's not us. You can tell because those aren't sweaters. As soon as I can find my camera-talking-to-computer cord, I will post #1, which I finished on 22 January, and #2, which I finished today except for kitchener-ing up the armpits.
I love love love this pattern because there are only these two little seams and the kitchener stitches totally hide them, besides which you wouldn't see them most of the time anyway since they're the armpits, unless, you know, you were playing basketball in them. Which, seeing as how they're very toasty, I don't recommend.
I did one for my son accidentally. Not that he doesn't deserve one, which he does, what a great person, but of course we all think that and I won't bore you with that, I'll bore you with the rest of this story. Except that the only two people I know who read this already know this story, so I won't bore THEM with it I don't think, because if I were them I wouldn't read a story I'd already heard a boring enough oral version of once already.
But the thing is, in case anyone at all has come this far, I mis-arithmeticked (the blogspot spell-checker is working overtime tonight) the sweater I was going to knit for myself because I didn't include the ease, so the boy gets that. And I get the other one, which I wore last week and it fits quite nicely.
The weather was really sweet this weekend (I don't care about sun or rain but I do so like when it gets warmer) so melting most of the remaining North Carolina mountain snow left over, in amongst my woods, from Christmas plus a similarly unusually deep snow that happened the second weekend in January.
It's not even February yet, though. We're in the middle of the period I've always referred to as the "Days of Dearth," which is January 15 to February 15. It's not that the weather is dismal, it's that the weather is dismal and the hope of spring is really not in sight. Fortunately, I now have the Kanuga Knitting & Quilting Retreat on Martin Luther King weekend, which I don't seem to be able to shut up about, and which, in addition to Thanksgiving, is really the big deal of the year for me. Except this year, of course, I'm traveling solo to Japan in June, so that may be pretty cool too.
That's no one I know, just a photo I like.
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