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February 27, 2005

Clap on, Clap off

One down, eight to go.

Behold Clapotis. Of course, the last thing started is the first thing finished; this won't make the rest of my challenge easier.

I finished Clapotis in the car on the way to Madison, and also finished the back of the Must Have and got a little past the armhole on the left front. Clapotis hasn't been blocked yet because I've decided I hate the colour, and I think I'll dye the whole thing blue so it will match my hair. But not Blue Moon Berry Kool Aid blue:

Eeeew. Looks more like my blue hair when I let it fade to a horrible teal (like it is right now). Fortunately I got smart for once and did a test before throwing the whole shawl into that ugly dyebath.

So. We're home from our trip to Wisconsin, and exhausted from the drive back. Poor Peter had to work today; I on the other hand get to sit on my arse at home. The trip was fun--we got to visit with some friends that we otherwise only see once a year, when we all camp together in Pennsylvania in August. Some highlights:

I was working on Clapotis and Ghita's son Donny asked me if I was knitting, I said yes and he said "are you making a baby?".

Hah! Not on your life, kid.

Michael and Elyse took us to International Exports in Milwaukee. I can't talk about what went on there, though. But I can tell you this: there are no spies in Canada (honest!).

We got to meet Elyse's lovely daughter Angelique and adorable two-year-old grandson Kiernan. Kiernan is an absolute doll; after he got into the purple gouache paint and smeared it all over the workroom floor, he came up to me and put one purple hand on the couch and one on my leg and said "come see my mess!" with a big, gorgeous you-know-I'm-too-adorable-to-be-mad-at smile.

I think the paint will wash out.

On the highway between Milwaukee and Chicago there is a place called the "University of Lawsology". This is where you learn Natural Law. It looks like a classy place too; the barn is hardly falling down at all. I wonder if Doug Henning teaches there?

On the same highway we saw a sign that's a good reason not only to take your digital camera everywhere, but to keep it on, draining battery power but poised and ready to shoot all the time: Bong Recreation Area. (It's also a good reason to get a driver's licence, because if you're relying on someone else to drive you all the way to Wisconsin and back then you really don't have a lot of choice about whether to stop at the Bong Recreation Area or not. Peter's choice was not.)

I wonder if they rent out bongs for those who forget to bring theirs?

[a note to any U.S. Immigration officials who may be checking up on me before giving me a student visa: I don't own a bong. I don't know how to use a bong. We didn't even have that kind of technology where I grew up. And I don't know anything about spies in Canada either.]

Peter just e-mailed to tell me that Madison isn't farther north than my hometown after all: Madison, 43deg 4' 45" N, Huron Park, 43deg 16' 59" N. Windsor 42deg 17' 59" N. Huh. Geography has never been my strong point, no matter how much I think in pictures and love maps.

Wait a second: does that mean that my hometown is only twelve feet farther north than Madison? I think I can handle Madison, then.

I did get one good picture on the highway:

Although not as plentiful as in Canada, apparently the northern States have moose hatcheries too! Maybe it isn't such a foreign country after all.

*added later: woops! I forgot to add links and while rectifying that I found out that Doug Henning is not teaching at the University of Lawtology, because he's dead. Who knew.

Posted by jodi at 03:45 PM | Comments (5) | categories:  dumbass : self-absorbtion : sticks and string

February 25, 2005

Wisconsin welcomes you

Dear friends,
Here we are in America's Dairyland, having a wonderful time. Wish you were here! Don't worry, we'll bring you back a cheese hat.

So we visited the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison yesterday, and I like it a lot. The art department is on the top two floors of a crazy building that's like a doughnut, with lots of concrete and lots and lots of stairs. The whole campus is on kind of a slope; I can see that living here I could develop some pretty ripped calves really quickly. The campus is right on a lake, and look:

These people are ice fishing. In the four years that I've been living in Canada's Sun Parlour (yes, they really call it that!) I have become somewhat of a wimp about the cold weather. This town is a little farther north than the part of Ontario I grew up in (in Huron County, about 20 minutes inland from Lake Huron). I would really have to harden myself to the cold again to be able to live in a town where ice fishing happens right next to the campus. Ugh.

I liked the people I met in the art department, and the facilities look pretty good--the ventilation is much better than what I'm used to (I'm currently in a school where up until last year people smoked cigarettes in the litho studio, and we only had press high ventilation put in a year ago). The graphics area supports more types of printmaking than I currently have access to; it just occurred to me now that I didn't see a papermaking facility--I'll have to look into that. They seem really open to cross-disciplinary practice, which is important to me; printmaking is my main area but I certainly don't want to be limited to that, especially now that I've begun incorporating prints into larger installations and bringing textiles and sound to the work: I need to be in a place where that kind of work is supported and it looks like this is that kind of place.

I spoke to the secretary, who painted me a rather bleak picture of the funding situation. I'll need to apply for jobs in other departments to increase my chances of getting one that comes with a tuition waiver, as this is the only way I'll actually be able to go to grad school. Since I'm a "foreigner", it will be illegal for me to have a job anywhere other than the university, and I don't have the money to pay my own way. But I'm not going to worry about that just yet, I'll just start applying for teaching and project assistantships and hope for the best.

Wednesday night we stayed over at our friends Tom and Ghita's place in Chicago; today we're visiting with Michael and Merouda in Milwaukee. Michael makes these amazing television sets:

I want one.

Merouda has joined the WIP challenge, so I'll have to make her drag out all of her WIPs for me later. Maybe after the two year grandson goes home would be best.

Here's one more picture from UWM:

Posted by jodi at 01:28 PM | Comments (2) | categories:  school

February 23, 2005

Bitch took my money and she went to Chicago

So we're leaving in about twenty minutes to drive down to Chicago to crash with our friends Ghita and Tom, then tomorrow we're going to Madison to visit the school. We're bringing the camera and a borrowed laptop, so I might be able to blog from the road (what? take time off? as if).

Just a little note to the person who got here by searching "blowjob London Ontario": good luck. Most people in London are way too uptight to give blowjobs. Well, I'm not, but I don't live there anymore. But if you write me a 1500 word essay on why you think you deserve one, then maybe we'll talk.

Posted by jodi at 02:39 PM | Comments (1) | categories:  dumbass : self-absorbtion

February 21, 2005

I've been blogcrastinating

I guess you know the novelty has worn off when you spend days putting off making a blog post.

So what's new? Well, Korin is in for the WIP challenge. As is my non-knitting friend Elyse/Merouda, who has many, many unfinished projects languishing in her house (and I will get to see them all when I crash at her place later this week as part of my visit to the University of Wisconsin!).

I got my Knitty submission done, and photographed. I took the damned thing with me everywhere this week, class and work of course, but also to dinner on Thursday when we went over to Troy Michigan to hang out with our dear friends Kerri and PJ from Atlanta, who were in Detroit for a conference this weekend. I finished it in the bowling alley on Saturday, just in the nick of time; so we got to do a photo shoot with bowling shoes. My piece looks pretty good, and I definitely bowled better while wearing it (it also helped my bowling a lot when the others called me Rizzo).

Today I got a surprise in the mail: my 2005 Year of the Smartass date book from Disgruntled Housewife arrived, along with a couple of free towels. Go and check out her website, it's a riot (even if she doesn't update her blog enough for my liking).

Here's a pic of the calendar and towels:

I'm very excited to finally have this, as I can't really function without a calendar to carry around. Since the new year started I've been using the free calendar that came in the mail from our Member of Parliament, and it's just not good enough:

But look, my new one has colouring book pages, and stickers!

I'm a huge geek to be this excited about the book, eh?

So while we were at Kerri and PJ's hotel waiting for them to be finished working so we could go out for supper, Peter and I watched some Fox news (we don't have a tv, remember?) and I have to confess that it made me cry. Because they are such assholes, and their attempts to manipulate the public are so obvious and so filled with contempt. And I'm not sure that I'm ready to go and live in that country. Yes, I have a lot of American friends that I love, and Pete says that more people watch the Daily Show than watch Fox news, but still. Wal-Mart. Snacking cakes in every aisle of the grocery store. The whole Bush family. No universal health care, no Cancon regulations. It just scares the crap out of me.

I might be blowing it all out of proportion though; I'll be gone three years and when I get home Canada will be the same as the States. Last night on the way back into Windsor I saw a brand new Chuck E. Cheese's. In Canada. Oy.

Posted by jodi at 01:45 PM | Comments (7) | categories:  self-absorbtion

February 16, 2005

Why fish make better pets

You know it's going to be one of those days when you're pulling 18 inch pieces of poo-covered yarn out of your cat's arse before you've even gotten out of bed in the morning.

Posted by jodi at 07:51 AM | Comments (15) | categories:  crazy cat lady : dumbass

February 15, 2005

All the cool kids are doing it

Okay, MK is in for the WIP challenge, and has declared her works in progress outstanding in today's blog entry. She's even finished things already, so she's way ahead of me. Tracy and Jenni are also in. Anybody else brave enough to finish before you start?

You don't have to declare everything you have on the needles, or as many as I did. Just choose which works in progress you're vowing to finish before starting anything new, and post them on your blog. The reason I chose to finish nine plus one things is because I am a crazy woman and like to torture myself once in a while just to see if I can handle it (once I fasted for a week; once I listened to all the records I own in alphabetical order. Fasting was easier, and I have now weeded some crap out of my record collection that I never want to force myself to listen to again).

My ten WIPs (grammatically speaking, shouldn't it really be WsIP?) are everything I have on the needles, but only because I went through my entire stash and made some harsh decisions, and everything I will never, ever finish (and don't want to) I pulled the needles out of. Remember those black and red mittens? Those bitches were going to felt the first time they hit the outside air; they're off the needles. I had to say goodbye to a sweet little blue lacy top that I started six years ago on my first Greyhound trip to Atlanta, because I lost the pattern and it's really not my style anymore anyway.

I think we should all set ourselves some kind of deadline, but I'm not going to impose one for everyone else, because this is a personal challenge. I have set myself the deadline of March 20th to finish my nine things, for two reasons:

1. I am a crazy woman.

2. Peter has finally agreed to let me make him a sweater, and even given me some direction for what he wants it to look like. His birthday is April 9th, and I'm deluding myself that if I get my WIPs done by March 20th then I'll be able to design and knit his sweater in time for his birthday, and I'll be ahead of the deadline to submit it to Knitty's summer men issue. Hah.

3. We are going to Wisconsin next week, and since I don't drive, this means Peter is driving me to Wisconsin and I get to knit the whole way. I should be able to finish something in all that time.

I have made a little progress on Clapotis,

and since the web is full of photos of half-finished versions of this, this is the last picture I will show you before it's finished. I'm going to be putting it aside for a bit, because I should have been working on my Knitty submission (it's due today but I'm going to be late), but that has colourwork that isn't in a regular pattern I can memorize so I haven't been able to take it with me, thus I've been bringing easier things to knit on the bus and in class. Now that I'm past the colourwork section I can take the Knitty project instead; my deadline for that is now Saturday morning, because we are going bowling for my brother Kela's birthday, and wouldn't it be cool to photograph the finished garment in a bowling alley? Because it's going to look so damned cute with bowling shoes.

Posted by jodi at 12:00 PM | Comments (6) | categories:  knit design : sticks and string

February 14, 2005

The Magic 8 ball says. . .

I've been accepted to the printmaking MFA programme at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I've known about it for a little while, but have been holding out on you guys until I had it in writing, on letterhead. So now it's official, and I can tell.

Since I've never been to Madison before, I'll be visiting the campus on the 24th to meet people and see if it's the right school for me, but won't be making any decisions until I hear from the other schools; I seriously doubt that NSCAD will accept me (their programme is tiny) and Georgia's deadline hasn't even passed yet, so I won't likely know what I'm doing for a while yet.

If I wind up living in Madison, I will be only an hour or so from these fabulous friends:

Michael, Elyse and Sock Monkey. (don't worry, I know it looks like Sock Monkey is being cricified on the Shenango Bowl-a-way sign, but really he's just climbing it; he's a crazy daredevil)

Speaking of monkeys, here is the valentine I sent Peter in honour of Monkey Love Day:

And here's what he sent me back:

And that's about as mushyromantic as we're likely to get.

Posted by jodi at 01:29 PM | Comments (9) | categories:  school : self-absorbtion

February 11, 2005

Now's the part where you learn how seriously not-cool I am, if you hadn't figured it out already

First, go check out Leah's finished Mariah. She got rid of the square neckline and added a cable edge on the hood, and it's really cute.

Mandy has slapped me with that music questionnaire/chain letter thingy that's been making the rounds of the blogs. So here are my answers:

1. Total amount of music on your computer:
This is a shared computer, so some of the music is Peter's, but there are 1701 songs right now, not counting the ones that Peter hasn't filed in the library thing yet. Is that a lot?

2. The last cd you bought:
I honestly can't remember. We still buy more vinyl than cds, and the latest new records I've bought are Sonic Youth (Sonic Nurse) and Le Tigre (This Island). I just looked through our cds and couldn't even find one I'd bought any time recently, except for a used copy of REM's Life's Rich Pageant, which I already had on vinyl.

3. The last song you listened to before being tagged:
The Boomtown Rats, Mary of the 4th Form. On the computer.

4. Five favourite songs or songs that mean a lot to you:
This is impossible to answer; my answers would be different every day. Years ago when I worked in a mall, I used to walk over to the craft store once a week and buy five skeins of embroidery floss, just picking the five colours that suited my whim or mood that day. Only once in more than a year did I come home and find that I had chosen the exact combination of colours as I had on another day.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah, the music. . . okay, the 5 songs that appeal to me most off the top of my head right now:
New Order, Blue Monday
Violent Femmes, Add it up
The Rheostatics, Ballad of Wendell Clark (bam, bam, digga digga dam!)
Spirit of the West, Home for a rest. The official song of leaving Pennsic.
Joan Jett, Bad reputation. Because I don't give a damn about mine, either. (Jeez, am I stuck in the 80s? I need to go out and buy some new records.)
Even though I've already got five, I'm going to add I don't like Mondays to my list too, just because it's been playing in constant rotation in my mental jukebox for six weeks, an incredibly long time for one song to remain stuck in your head. And because I've been on a bit of a Boomtown Rats kick lately.

I'm not going to pass this on to anyone, because I just can't bring myself to send a chain letter.

Since my shout out to knitters in the Madison WI area worked so well, is there anybody out there living in or near Athens GA, besides Carrie? By the way, Alexandra, I'm so happy to hear that there's a town close to Madison with the word Beaver in its name; I don't want to move to the States and leave my Castor Canadensis behind! You don't know how sad I was that there's no good printmaking MFA anywhere near Shy Beaver, PA. I'm guessing there aren't any beavers in Georgia, though.

Posted by jodi at 10:55 AM | Comments (3) | categories:  self-absorbtion

February 09, 2005

Getting ready for my shower show

I was going to wow you all by having that red skirt done today, since it's so damned close, but alas, I cast off and tried it on and it's still not long enough. But I did make a new shower curtain for our scary basement bathroom:

Yes, it's a leftover panel from an art piece. But hey, it's a nekkid picture of me in the shower, how cool is that?

Down the side of the shower stall there you can see that the bathroom used to be emergency orange, before someone painted it mint green. I would have preferred the orange.

I had to get rid of the old shower curtain because we are billeting a couple of out of town artists this week for the Media City film festival, and the old one was too yucky for houseguests to see. The only time this house ever gets cleaned is when people are coming over (hey, I'm busy!). This is how lazy we are: the old shower curtain was Barbage, here when we bought the house a year and a half ago. It was way past time for it to go. But the new one was a cinch to make, and took about ten minutes if you don't count the month of cutting out the life sized lino block and printing it. It's got grommets, so the holes won't rip out like the Barbage kind.

Tara asked in the comments about the pattern for the red skirt: I made it up, but it's really easy. The bottom panel is crocheted sideways until it fits around your butt, then joined into a tube. Then you just pick up stitches around the top edge and knit, decreasing from the hips to the waist as much as you need to, then 2 x 2 ribbing at the top. I'll go look for the crochet pattern I used and try to post it tomorrow.

Posted by jodi at 02:49 PM | Comments (3) | categories:  projects : self-absorbtion

February 08, 2005

The WIP Challenge

Oh hell, kids, is this going to hurt.

I have decided to do something drastic, in order to save Peter some agony when I go away to grad school next fall and leave him with a house full of my crap creative materials. Because, when it comes right down to it, I love Peter more than I love my stash. This doesn't mean I'm throwing out stash, although I did just get rid of a large amount of half-sewn clothes I'm never going to finish, and some truly crappy yarn. What I'm going to do is make some more room in the chest of drawers for stash by imposing some severe limits on myself and moving some items from the stash dresser to the clothes dresser.

I am not going to start any new projects until I have finished and am wearing all nine of these things:

So, what have we here?

Top row, left to right:
1. A skirt with a cable up the front, of recycled cotton. I want it to end mid-calf, so I'm only maybe 1/3 done. This is a boring, boring knit.
2. Sassy red skirt, also recycled cotton. It's almost done, just needs an inch or two more ribbing and a drawstring.
3. Top-down raglan Glampyre-style, recycled cotton, dyed by me. This needs maybe six more inches, then I'm going to add a very narrow ribbing on the sleeve and neck edges. Then I'm going to duplicate stitch a black star on the front, just like my star tattoo.

Middle row, left to right:
1. A very tedious garter stitch shoulder strap for a granny-square satchel. The strap will go around the whole bag to make the width, and be long enough to cross the body, so it's taking forever. I'm going to line the satchel with silver pleather and put in some nickel pyramids and 1/2 inch spikes, to punk it up a little.
2. Funnel top by Girl from Auntie, in Stahl Portofino (see, sometimes I buy new yarn). I'm almost to the armholes, where I'll switch to the black, but I still have the whole front to do too. It's a quick knit though.
3. Marnie MacLean's Evening diamonds, in a cotton with rayon slub that I bought about ten years ago and dyed blue. The whole thing just needs to be re-knitted smaller, so it doesn't hang off me. (this is the one project here that I might allow myself to drop, because the yarn is possessed by demons and I can only handle the heartache of one more failure. The whole sordid story is here, down at the bottom of the page).

Bottom row, left to right:
1. Skirt made from a cut-off secondhand sweater; I'm just adding some ribbing at the top (it probably needs 2 or 3 more inches) and some belt loops.
2. The Patons Must Have Cardigan, in recycled lambswool. A quick, fun knit, but one I just can't motivate myself to work on very often. Maybe I'll take it with me more now that I've got it on a circular needle; the straights I was using before poked holes in my purse when I carried it around.
3. Clapotis. Even though I just started it, I'm almost to the point where I can stop increasing, so I think it now qualifies as a work in progress rather than just a swatch.

The tenth item, not pictured, is my spring Knitty submission. Which I'd better get a move on with.

So. Anyone up for taking the WIP Challenge with me? A finish-along, perhaps?

Hah. I have a feeling that won't be a very popular knitalong to join.

Posted by jodi at 01:28 PM | Comments (12) | categories:  sticks and string

February 07, 2005

Second thoughts about desperate men in cars

Peter, like Elabeth and Alison, thinks that the lunch guy probably just sincerely wanted to have lunch with me and wasn't mistaking me for a prostitute. Maybe you guys are right. I'm just so used to being taken for a whore around here that I assumed that was it. Just so you guys know, I wasn't MEAN to the guy or anything, okay?

I really did look like a pig though, and it was 3:30 in the afternoon, a little late for lunch. Maybe he just wanted someone to go watch the American football match with, but if he did then I'm afraid he still picked the wrong girl.

Now THESE girls,

they look like the kind of girls you'd pick up on the street and take for "lunch", don't they? She's got her thumb out and everything.

I'm kind of sweet on the red pantsuit in the middle, but I think it would be nicer if the jumper and pants cuffs were plaid, like the Bay City Rollers.

Posted by jodi at 07:30 PM | Comments (5) | categories:  dumbass : self-absorbtion

February 06, 2005

I might LOOK like a whore, but. . .

Everything I do is done for love, not for money.

Before I tell you the story of what happened to me walking home today, I should say hello to everyone wandering by here from the RAOK group, which I just joined, and also to all of my new Bloglines subscribers (I'm assuming that my recent surge in Bloglines subscribers has something to do with joining RAOK). At any rate, welcome! I hope I don't drive you all away with my trashy stories and bad language. Because there's some of that coming up.

So. Walking home. You have to picture it: I was wearing jeans (okay, they were tight, but not really enough to offset the frumpiness of the rest of my look), tan coloured sneakers, a thick black sweater with an unflattering kangaroo pocket and one of those black fake ski jackets with the thick ribbing on the cuffs. And carrying my knitting and the Globe and Mail in a plastic bag. I did not even style my hair today, let alone wash it--just sprayed some water to soften up yesterday's gel and moved some hair over to cover the flat spot I slept on (oh, baby, you gotta love the way I tart myself up to go blow up balloons for a living). Plus my long blue bangs, which stick out because I'm lazy and can't be arsed to force them straight, make me look like one of those expensive little dogs.

So here I am walking home, and this car pulls out of a side street, right in front of me, and sits there blocking the sidewalk, and the driver (a good looking guy) puts down his cellphone and stares at me. I give him a dirty look for blocking my way and go to walk around the front of his car, and he says "can I ask you a question?".
"What?" god, I'm charming.
"Tell me you don't have a boyfriend" he says. WTF?
"Why?" I say, giving him my best ninth-grade "you're a stupid shit" look.
And he says "Because I'd like to ask you to lunch".
As if.
So I said, "no, I can't" and he said "okay" and drove off.

Um, did you want to fuck me first and then eat, or buy lunch first?

Actually, what pissed me off was not the assumption that I was a whore, that happens all the time. I live on G. street, in a nice friendly neighbourhood with lots of happy children and families, very wholesome and normal. But just one block away (about the length of two regular city blocks) where our street intersects with W. street, is a major pickup corner for street whores. There are two bus stops here, one I use to get to school and one I use to get to work, and I have been mistaken for a whore many times while waiting for the bus. At the W. street bus stop (a busier street), the guys usually just pull up to the bus stop and wait and if you ignore them they go away. Around the corner on G. street is the major ho stop, with an alley right alongside it, and they come around the corner off W. street, cruise by the bus stop and turn into the alley and wait. Sometimes when they do this and I ignore them, they will call out the window "working?". Dude, do whores knit while they wait for clients? Do they wear party store shirts? Jeez. Except for the party store shirt thing, it's kind of understandable for someone to mistake any woman standing at the ho stop for a prostitute, because around here they don't dress up like in the movies; most of the regular prostitutes I see here wear jeans, sometimes even sweat pants, hoodies, frumpy winter coats. So that when the police give them a hard time they can pretend they were just waiting for a bus.

No, what really pissed me off was partly the boyfriend thing, and partly the offer of lunch. First of all, lots of prostitutes have boyfriends; does having a man to protect me make me off limits? If I want to get in a car with someone and go for a drive, have lunch or have sex or whatever, I will do so, boyfriend or no boyfriend. But I certainly will not get in a car with someone who doesn't even have the courage to just say "I want to pay you for sex". Man, I've been waiting all day to have lunch with a wimp like that.

Posted by jodi at 04:17 PM | Comments (8) | categories:  assholes : self-absorbtion

February 05, 2005

Everyone else has the Clap, so of course I want it too

I'd been resisting the lure of Clapotis just fine, but lately I've been seeing a lot of pictures of other people working on and finishing this pattern, and I can't resist any more. I too want to be beautiful without even trying. So I cast on this afternoon:

How do you like my exotic stitch markers?

The yarn is, of course, recycled (what? you think I buy yarn? hah). It's merino from a secondhand sweater that was a pinky colour with darker pink and brown running through it; I dyed it with green and blue Kool-aid. I'm not sure I like the resulting colour all that much, but I'm going to give it a while to grow on me and if it doesn't I'll just dye the whole thing later. I do like how the green parts and the brownish parts are forming a stripe pattern, but I'll have to wait and see when I start dropping stitches. I'm a long way from that, though.

I've been battling a sinus infection all week, and just as I was starting to feel better, on Thursday I started feeling like I was getting another cold. Ugh. It seems to have mostly passed, but I still feel like I need to sneeze. So I haven't been getting much work done, and I'm seriously in danger of not having my spring Knitty submission ready in time (wouldn't be the first time. . . ). A case of STARTITIS isn't really what I need right now.

Posted by jodi at 04:04 PM | Comments (2) | categories:  sticks and string

February 02, 2005

Getting my priorities straight

Okay. I know that Carrie lives in Athens, Georgia, and she assures me that there are plenty of knitters and bloggers there. What I need to know is: does anyone know any knitters and/or knitbloggers in Madison, Wisconsin?

(yes, there are other factors in choosing a school. but. . . already knowing some knitters would be nice).

Posted by jodi at 11:44 AM | Comments (7) | categories:  school

February 01, 2005

Reunited at last

Krista gets the bonus points for identifying the Iron Sheik on my dining room railing, even though she had a hint: she's been to my house a thousand times and seen his tag team partner, Nikolai Volkov, glaring out from behind my bathroom pipes (by the way, chica, he was behind the toilet--were you peeing like a boy? heehee).

I have a soft spot for these two characters because of their roles as products of American xenophobia. The World Wrestling Federation's creation of these guys as villians was such an obvious play on Americans' fears of Russia and the Arab world--some people get taken hostage in Iran, and instantly this Iron Sheik shows up, and hey! let's pair him up with the Russian dude! Duh. Of course, they got their asses kicked by all-American characters like "Sgt. Slaughter", a mean, crew-cutted bully in fatigues who pushed his weight around all over the world. Simplistic, but interesting.

I guess if I want to go live in the States next year to work on my MFA, I'd better stop saying these things, eh? Freedom of speech might not extend to people on student visas.

I'm starting to sound like a big wrestling fan, but I'm not, really. There's another reason why I love Nikolai and the Sheik, though: the Volkov doll used to belong to my little brother and I've had it for years. After we bought our house in June 2003, I was cleaning up some of the tonnes of "Barbage" (junk left behind by the previous owner, Barb) from the attic and I found the Sheik lying smothered in a batt of insulation. What a happy tag team reunion! Obviously, we bought the right house.

Yesterday in the comments, Susan asked if the Magic 8-Ball was supposed to be garbled. It actually says "cannot predict now", but it's hard to read because there are bubbles that cling to the letters and they're impossible to shake off.

Posted by jodi at 11:22 AM | Comments (2) | categories:  dumbass