Talk Like a Pirate Day

Ahoy Matey!
Today is international Talk Like a Pirate Day, which, according to Wikipedia, is "a parodic holiday created in 1995 by John Baur and Mark Summers, of Albany, Oregon, USA, who proclaimed September 19 each year as the day when everyone in the world should talk like a pirate."*

Pirate behavior isn't an exclusively-male province. For example, in the drawing above, despite the beard, do we not detect a couple of distinctly breast-like lumps under that pirate shirt? 

I certainly try to do my part for contemporary pirate culture. Among my customized birthday songs (with which I'm known to ambush unsuspecting friends via the telephone on their birthdays) is a pirate version, complete with accompaniment by Polly the Parrot.

My inner pirate is heavily influenced by repeated playings of a record, during childhood, that featured an exchange between Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam. Some 60 years later, I can reprise Yosemite Sam's song on the slightest of provocations. 

So, channel your own inner pirates, friends. Today is your day to talk like a pirate with impunity. Yarr!

*According to Wikipedia's sources, "The archetypal pirate grunt 'Arrr!' or 'Yarrr!' first appeared in fiction as early as 1934 in the film Treasure Island starring Lionel Barrymore. However, it was popularized and widely remembered with Robert Newton's usage in the classic 1950 Disney film Treasure Island. It has been speculated that the rolling 'rrr' has been associated with pirates because of the location of major ports in the West Country of England, drawing labor from the surrounding countryside. West Country speech in general, and Cornish speech in particular, may have been a major influence on a generalized British nautical speech. This can be seen in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Pirates of Penzance, which is set in Cornwall; although the play did not (originally) use the phrase 'arrr,' the pirates used words with a lot of rrr's such as 'Hurrah' and 'pour the pirate sherry.'"

The Art of Blogging

Dear Readers and Fellow Bloggers--
Here's something to consider from today's The Chronicle of Higher Education:
Blogging as Art

September 11, 2012, 1:30 pm

By Julie White

Earlier this summer Rob Jenkins asked “What Is a Blog Post?” He suggested that, “More than anything else, a blog post is intended to be a conversation starter.”
I like that notion, but I think we’ve all seen the focus on generating hits and comments lead to a race to the rhetorical bottom, with posts and comments becoming ever more outrageous. Of course, generating hits is not the same thing as having a conversation, but the distinction is often lost on less-thoughtful bloggers than Rob.
Additionally, perhaps blogs can serve other purposes. Over my years of maintaining a personal blog, and now a year of writing here, I have had scores of people tell me personally that they are regular readers and look forward to my posts. Most of those people have never publicly commented on them. If they didn’t tell me, I wouldn’t even know that they were reading.
For another answer to Rob’s question, Commenter 11182967 offered a quotation from her/his brother’s blog, supposedly cited from an Elliott Gould character in the movie Contagion: “A blog isn’t writing; it’s graffiti with punctuation.”
To consider that answer fully, we must ask, “What is graffiti?” I would describe graffiti as a form of self-expression, often in an unlikely or illicit location, intended to provoke a reaction. One person’s vandalism may be another’s public art.
Of course, here at On Hiring, graffiti is usually welcome, but could it still be considered a form of public art? Hilde S. Hein, now an associate professor emerita of philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross, wrote in “What Is Public Art? Time, Place, and Meaning,” an essay that appeared in the Winter 1996 issue of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, that “Artists do not have privileged vision, but they do have a practiced eye and the ability to speak in a rich variety of languages …. Sometimes and somehow they break through ordinary expectation and cause people to venture upon new perspectives.”
Now we’re getting somewhere. When I blog, I hope to inspire such ventures, at least occasionally. Those ventures may be shared publicly or remain private. But new perspectives are always worth considering, especially in an era of shrinking resources and conflicting visions about the role of community colleges and higher education.
[Creative Commons-licensed photo by Flickr user Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com.]
Read the article online at: http://chronicle.com/blogs/onhiring/blogging-as-art/33636?cid=pm&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en

                     

T-Shirt Quilt

Last month's sewing project, Secular Prayer Flags, was so much fun that I decided to keep the sewing machine set up and see what project struck my imagination next. It didn't take long for me to stumble across my t-shirt collection.

Now, these aren't just any old t-shirts. These are historical t-shirts. These are t-shirts that commemorate specific periods and events in my life, and that's why I've held on to them all these years. The oldest ones date from the 1970s. 

While watching David Lynch's film Eraserhead in 1981, my husband and I kept saying to each other, "This is awful. We have to leave," but we stayed to see how bad it could get. It was so bad that, afterwards, I just had to buy the t-shirt.

I was wearing this shirt in a restaurant in 1977 when a man came up to me as I was leaving and said, "Honey, you don't want to be tall and blonde. You're cute just the way you are." What a sweet guy.

So, what can you do with a dozen old t-shirts? You can make a quilt out of them!

I arranged the shirts in random order on the back side of a plaid flannel blanket that I had spread out on the bed. Once I had the blanket completely covered, I pinned the shirts in place and began sewing them on, following the outline of each shirt and stitching around necklines and sleeves. 

In some cases, I stitched around the slogan or picture on the shirt's front. Occasionally, I flipped the quilt over and stitched along the lines of the plaid blanket.

When a t-shirt sleeve over-ran the edge of the flannel blanket, I wrapped it around to the opposite side and stitched it in place.

I didn't add any batting between the flannel blanket and the shirts, which turned out to be a wise decision. A dozen t-shirts are surprisingly heavy, so the quilt would have been too thick and cumbersome to stitch through, especially on my ancient sewing machine.

There were a few places where a splash of color was needed, and I toyed with the idea of top-stitching on a stray pocket or a sock. 

Then, I realized I'd probably spend the rest of my days absent-mindedly trying to pick off what looked like something that got stuck to the quilt in the dryer.

 

My first instinct was to use black or white thread, depending on the t-shirt's primary color. However, my craft projects are all about using up materials that I already have, rather than purchasing anything new, so I used some yellowy-gold thread that came from who-knows-where. In doing so, I emptied several old wooden spools of their thread, which created a need for another craft project that employs wooden spools. I'll have to give that one some thought.

Fortunately, cold weather is coming soon. I'm ready to snuggle under my new-old t-shirt throw!

Secular Prayer Flags

What do you do on a day when it's too hot to go outside? 

You drag out your ancient Singer sewing machine and your stash of fabric, and you make PRAYER FLAGS!The idea behind most prayer flags is that with each thread that unravels and flies off in the wind, a prayer is sent to whichever deity the flag honors. Inspired by my neighbor's string of colorful flags, each stamped with a Sanskrit prayer, I decided to make my own set.  Immediately, I encountered a philosophical problem: Since I don't subscribe to any particular religion, wouldn't it be hypocritical to be sending "prayers" to gods I don't believe in?
 Solution: "Secular Wish Flags!" Just because I'm an atheist doesn't mean I don't want to express goodwill toward my fellow Earthlings. Why can't each tiny thread of my flags represent positive thoughts and wishes streaming into the atmosphere?
This was my first effort (above), and I strung it up in the kitchen to observe the full effect.

Then, I surveyed the still-huge stack of fabric, most of it left at my house when my older daughter (who was a quilter) moved to Florida.

Why stop with one string of wish flags?  I made another and another...

...and soon, my kitchen was festooned with wish flags of all colors and patterns. I hung strings on the porch and in the garden.

Still, the stack of fabric seemed undiminished.
Before I knew it, the strings of flags had spread to the living room.With all this fabric to work with, where will it end?

Help!

The Shaggy Garden

A couple of months ago, a FaceBook friend posted about "The Shaggy Garden." The term seemed to be particularly applicable to my garden, because I associated the word "shaggy" with "shabby." Shaggy shabbiness reigns at my house, because I use recycled materials to furnish my yard: old fence wood, salvaged wire, reclaimed bricks, etc. Early in the Spring, the garden does look "shaggy," barren, and dry. See photos below:

As Spring moves into Summer, however, fresh greenery takes over, mitigating the shagginess:

I love my beautiful, shaggy garden!

Electrified Pineapple, Part III

"But You Promised"

"Homunculus"

"Ingesting Love"

Electrified Pineapple, Part II

"Observe"

Mary writes: My sketchbook is about how we are all connected on this planet. Like this bird, who walks about and seems a free bird, but he's connected in by the electrodes to the universe (sort of like a twist on the whole astral plane cord thought).

"Hooked"

"2 Become 3, 3 Become All"

"Bee Mine"

The Electrified Pineapple, Part I

"The Electrified Pineapple" is the title of my daughter Mary's sketchbook, which is part of the nation-wide Sketchbook Project. Each registered artist receives a bound paper book, on which to create his/her contribution to the project. Once the sketchbook is completed, it is digitized, and then it joins the other sketchbooks in an exhibition that travels throughout the United States.

"Layers of Betrayal"

Mary writes: "I heard about the Sketchbook Project from a friend I made through the ATC forum, but it wasn't until this year that I felt like trying it out. In previous years, there were themes such as "dirigibles" that felt too restrictive to my muse, even though on the Sketchbook website, they said the themes were just a way to get a person started, that anything basically goes."

"Under Seige"

She continues: "This year, the themes are book-like categories: the atlas, almanac, chronicle, etc., and that sparked my muse. When my blank sketchbook arrived, I started working on a piece. I was sitting at the table, and Holly's fish, Wilson, was swimming in his bowl in the middle of the table. Wilson swam in and out of his pineapple house (see photo below) as I began to sketch. Pat came in and looked at my work, then looked at the fish bowl, and said, 'The Electrified Pineapple.' Zap! There went the lightbulb above my head, and my sketchbook had a title and a direction." 

"Forging Ahead"

Wilson's pineapple house

To learn more about the Sketchbook Project, go to: http://www.arthousecoop.com/projects/sketchbookproject