By pure chance, I stumbled across this a while ago - someone doing incredibly awesome art with thread. But in a completely different way than expected:


This is one of the pieces Devorah Sperber makes, and it boggled my mind. You can see more of her work showcased here - and it really, really is worth a look.

Now if I had space and money for a few thousand spools of yarn and an acrylic ball...

This has been hanging around in my drafts for months now - I had intended to read some more in the book, but I am not going to get around to that anytime soon. So here comes a review of the not-fully-read book. I hope you enjoy it anyways.

I picked up this book when I was last in England, since there was one of those typical "buy more books"-deals and I still had some English money left and some space in the luggage (and since bookdepository got bought by amazon, I tried to stock up in brick-and-mortar stores).

I had heard of Bill Bryson, and I knew that he wrote travelogues or something like that. Now travel books are not what I usually read, so I had never looked into them - but a history of private life? That tickles my fancy.

I started reading with high hopes to find a nice, thoroughly entertaining book about history. And I am now more than half-way through the book (in the "Garden" chapter), which has been enough for me to sum it up and do a review thingie before I put this book away.

Bill Bryson writes in a style that I find easy to read and with a pleasant voice, and I absolutely love the idea of wandering through a bit of our daily life and looking at details and their history. I also like history that isn't bone dry and history that looks at bits and pieces usually overlooked, like daily life stuff. And I'm not averse to some snark. So I should love this book, right? Well.

Bryson rambles on about things - inventions, architecture, how people did things a long (or not-so-long) time ago. However, I get the impression that often he is just telling some fact or factoid that he picked up somewhere, and he does not ask himself why things would have been done like that. Humans do some pretty weird stuff and have done so for ages - and they might do things that are laborious or long-winded or expensive or seemingly mean, but they never do so without a reason. It might be a psychological reason rooted somewhere in their culture, or a religious one, or come from any other socio-cultural reason, but there is something behind it. And this is what I, personally, find enormously interesting - and what seems not to interest Bryson, who prefers to state the fact and then sneer at the weird folks from back then who did such stupid stuff.

At least this is what it feels like for me when he tells things about stuff folks did back then. And there are some things written in his book where I just can't agree, or where I know a very, very different version, or where he got old outdated theories or misconceptions and is in fact plain wrong.

For instance, he states that "making food out of plants is hard work" - and that converting grasses like wheat etc. into edibles is a complex task, because "wheat is useless as a food until made into something much more complex and ambitious like bread" (p. 66). Ah. Well, first of all, when I think of wheat or even one of its early forms, I don't think of the grassy stalks - but of the seeds, which is a completely different thing. And then it is perfectly possible to eat wheat or other cereal without turning it into bread first: fresh seeds can be eaten raw, and they can generally be cooked and eaten, or soaked in water and eaten before or after they start germinating. This may not be such a staple as bread is today, but it is still possible. And it is, in fact, nutritious. And not hard work.

And then, of course, his textile "explanations". And his view of the middle ages.

Upon the death of a serf the lord was entitled to take a small personal possession, such as an article of clothing, as a kind of death duty. Often peasants only owned one main item of apparel, a type of loose gown [...]. The fact that that was the best that a peasant had to offer, and that the lord of the manor would want it, tells you about all you need to know about the quality of medieval life at many levels. (p. 84)

Erm, what? WHAT? Do I even need to write anything about that here? Dark ages, stupid people, all only playing with piles of mud or what?

But what I really find irksome in a history-ish book is the snark about those stupid people back then. As if we today were so, so much better, and smarter, and whatever. There's bits and pieces, facts and factoids jumbled together, there is no clear line to the book, and it's mostly looking down on history as a time that was, yes, interesting, but so very yesterday. Sometimes the condescending look is not very clear, but it's implied that life was so, so much worse back then. Colours were not fast, meats that were non-delicious were eaten because the delicious sheep and cattle were needed for work, furniture was plain and noncomfy, beds were either infested with lice or so toxic they were also harmful to their occupant, and so on.

Plus, once I find some outdated theories presented as current facts, I sort of get suspicious and will lose my trust in the book. And that also cuts down on how entertaining I find a read. It's possible that Bryson's research on the modern times was a lot more accurate than regarding the medieval period, but regarding medieval times, I believe he's way, way off at many places.

I had planned to write a much longer review, and I had in fact marked lots and lots of pages with examples of stuff... but I have no real desire to read more in that book, andI think I have made enough of a point to stop.

The concept of the book - looking at the house, the home, and tracing things back to their origins, still sounds like a brilliant thing to me. With a little more research and a lot less snark and condescension, this would have been a brilliant read. As it is now - I really cannot recommend it. And that makes me a bit sad. (Also - I could have lugged home a different book from the two-fer offer. One that I might have liked better. Meh.)

Year before last around Christmas, I posted a link to a christmassy song video called "White Wine in the Sun".

Recently, I have really discovered the artist who did that song: it's Tim Minchin, and he is seriously weird and a really good musician. And since I do know the feeling that you're the smallest doll in a Babushka doll... here's Tim Minchin's song It's Not Perfect. I hope you enjoy it like I did!

2011 was a crazy year, with lots of good stuff happening, but also a few unexpected setbacks. It saw the start of my online shop, for one thing; way too little knitting; the death of several persons that I knew and the birth of several new persons in our circle of friends, plus a few illnesses of people near and dear that are mostly overcome, and we hope for the best regarding the rest. For me, it was a good year; not always easy, but what would life be without its challenges?

It was a good year, and so much of this is due to the people I know. Friends, family, dear colleagues - there is a bunch of human beings that make my life awesome by sharing a bit of their life with me. They make me feel as if I can never really fall, because there will always be someone who will catch me. And if I need a hand - I can be sure to find somebody who offers me help, and support, and pitches in with some additional ideas about how to solve my problem. They are people who will share their food with me, spend their time with me, give me a boost when it is needed and space for myself when that is necessary. I have friends that I can trust so much that it's no problem to show a weakness or to say that I'm down and depressed about something. And this is making me ridiculously happy, and wonderfully content, and makes me feel incredibly lucky. And if I had a wish free for the rest of the world, it would be that everybody could have wonderful persons in their life and really, deeply appreciate them.

And now I will have two weeks off, in which I will spend a lot of time with a lot of friends and family, and I am so much looking forward to this. I will thus not blog until January 10, when I will be back and hopefully totally re-energised by having had to eat way too much delicious food and having laughed enormously often.

So to all of you, wherever you are and whatever you may celebrate in the coming days:
Have happy holidays with lots of enjoyable moments, and have a really good start into the new year!
See you on the flip side!

Seasonal food at this time of year, in Germany, means food like duck and goose and dumplings and rich sauce and red cabbage. (And usually eating way too much. Which happened to me yesterday evening, so my brain is not all awake yet, which means you get a food blog entry.)

Now red cabbage is an interesting thing, because it is called either Blaukraut - blue cabbage - or Rotkraut - red cabbage - here, depending on the region and the regional typical way of preparing it. And both names fit the food, red or blue, because the colourant in the cabbage reacts to acid or alkaline milieu by a colour change. If you prepare it with lots of acid, it turns red. If you prepare it with only very little acid, it will turn purple.

And if you would like to see that for yourself, you can do so here. Or do a picture search for "Blaukraut" and "Rotkraut" and see all those colours!

I stumbled across an interesting link the other day - scientists expressing their love for their topic, and their geekiness, by ink in their skin:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/science-tattoo-emporium/

There are some really amazing tattoos in there!

I have this nasty (but quite common) tendency to tense up under stress in my neck and shoulders, and it can get really bad sometimes. And recently, somehow tension has built up again, sort of without me really noticing - so yesterday was high time for a therapeutic hot bath, some hot packs and before that quite a bit of stretching and relaxing exercises.

Even though working at the computer is not the best thing to do with tense muscles, it can sort of help relax with some really brilliant do-as-you-watch videos on youtube. So just in case you have the same tensioning tendencies, here is one exercise vid that I really liked yesterday.