So hey, I went once again to the International ILLiad Conference in Virginia Beach. I think I have at least two pictures of the giant Neptune statue from every year that I’ve gone. That equals a lot of pictures. This is one of the best though.
Ishbuku is looking at you
Profile of a weed
My garden nemesis: Spanish needle, AKA Bidens alba, Shepherd’s needles, beggarticks, or butterfly needles. It can grow 5 feet tall, and spreads wide along the ground where it can. This makes it especially hard to get to the root of the things when you are pulling weeds from around and under other plants.
Why do I wage war against this plant when I have given a flower bed over to the wild vinca? When I have nodded my head at the, now huge, milkweed in my side yard? Spanish needle is supposedly edible, feeds bees and butterflies and has medicinal values. Surely that would compare to the simple, pretty, and easy to control nature of the vinca, or the fact that the milkweed is the only food of the monarch butterfly caterpillar. Yet I cannot make peace with the Spanish needle.
Mostly it’s because of the seeds: 1/2 inch little black needles that thread themselves through my clothes and scratch my skin. Each plant can produce 1200 seeds. After that, it’s the virulent way it spreads, sucking nutrients and choking every other plant in the yard.
But I must admit, it’s defense mechanisms and sneakiness are impressive. I often find it growing as close to the base of another plant as possible – long established plants, so I know it is not simply my hapless sowing of weed seeds as I am planting. It also sacrifices limbs like a lizard will sacrifice it’s tail. Though relatively sturdy and thick, the stems of Spanish needle will break away easily, leaving the tap root and other spreading roots to recover and re-sprout.
And, I swear that the new leaves of a Spanish needle can often look like those of the plants next to it. I’m getting better at spotting them, so maybe this was a learning curve for me. Maybe it’s all in my head, but it still throws me for a loop some times.
Happy Birthday Brad
Totally not Brad’s birthday, but when it was his birthday Richard (of doomedmoviethon) said, “you should draw a picture of Brad with Michael Myers.” So I did.
And then it sat around in my sketchbook until I filled the rest of the pages up and scanned it.
And then I gave it a little background.
Then I posted it on this here blog on a day that is totally not Brad’s birthday.
Happy birthday Brad!
The plan
My last mention of the Internet Archive’s Building Technology Heritage Library collection didn’t highlight my obsession with house/floor plans, and I though you should know. I have a whole notebook full of houses that I have dreamed up over the years and before any move, I would obtain the floor-plan of the apartment so I could plan the furnishings.
Lucky then that the Building Technology Heritage Library collection included home plan catalogs for prospective 40s and 50s home owners to dream and plan, right? Or, no. I was really hoping that I would stumble upon the original plan for our house, but I have not, yet. That’s the house as it is above. There are a few thick walls round the outside, making up planters and defining the patio space.
With what I have seen of common house plans and houses in the area, combined with examination of walls and doorways, I think the house was originally laid out like this:
The ‘dining room’ was a 60s addition that used the existing roof over the breezeway and added a doorway from it to the utility room hallway. A bathroom/bedroom area was made out of, what I think would have been, a workroom beside the utility room. Finally, perhaps in a 90s kitchen remodel, the wall separating the kitchen and living room was opened up and replaced with a counter peninsula. Even with two remodels, the house footprint hasn’t been changed from it’s original 1949 slab and footings.
I can find some plans with an original bedroom layout like mine, and some with a breezeway to utility/workroom area like mine, but none with all of it combined in one plan. It could just mean that my house wasn’t bought out of a catalog, and that’s just fine too. I just wish one day I will stumble onto some blueprints shoved in a rafter or something!
Oh hey, site updates
I almost forgot, a couple of weeks ago I gave theLeEMSmachine a bit of a facelift. A new, click-able, front page directs to some new landing pages for my biggest projects of the moment. Levi Levi and No Evil both have character galleries that I will continue to fill out.
Clement Skitt’s word of the day
“I wanted to have a butcher’s so I took a Dublin packet and slapdash, a bracket-faced seven sided animal gave me a dub o’ th’ hick.”
Let’s dissect:
butchers: Cockney slang meaning look. Cockney slang, or rhyming slang, was most prevalent in the East End of London. It consists of replacing a word with the beginning portion of a rhyming phrase. For example: substituting ‘look’ with ‘butcher’s hook’ but dropping the ‘hook.’ It may have risen to wide use as a way to keep outsiders from a close community (Wikipedia).
Dublin packet: turn a corner; to ‘take the dublin packet” viz run around the corner – probably a pun on doubling a corner (A dictionary of modern slang, cant, and vulgar words by John Camden Hotten)
Slapdash: Immediately, instantly, suddenly. (1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue by Francis Grose)
Bracket-faced: Ugly, hard-featured (1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue by Francis Grose)
Seven sided animal: you know this one 😉
dub o’th’hick: A lick on the head (1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue by Francis Grose)
So, to sum up “I wanted to have a butcher’s so I took a Dublin packet and slapdash, a bracket-faced seven sided animal gave me a dub o’ th’ hick” means “I wanted to take a look so I turned a corner and suddenly an ugly one eyed man gave me a lick on the head.”
I am loving the UK 1940s Radio Station
Nostalgia has a strange way of making everything look prettier. For instance the music played on the UK 1940s Radio Station music and vintage radio shows from the 1920s 1930s 1940s seems to me to be more good than bad. However, the music played on current pop rock stations seems to me to be more bad than good. I wonder if, 50 years and four generations from now, the music of today will also have the same type of soothing, safe, perfect in the background appeal to future listeners.
stuck in my head
do you know the muffin man
the muffin man
the muffin man
do you know the muffin man
who lives on Drury lane?
hey, Wikipedia/Project Gutenberg has an illustration of said muffin man.
matryoshka plan
I have a blank wooden matryshka in my craft cupboard. This is the plan I came up with long ago…
doodling
Clement Skitt’s word of the day
Introducing Clement Skitt’s word of the day. You may recognize Clement from Levi Levi and the Time Machine. He and his sister have since peeped into many different times and Clement has developed a healthy fascination with outdated slang. Today’s slang:
SEVEN-SIDED ANIMAL: a one-eyed man or woman, described as such because each has a right side and a left side, a fore side and a back side, an outside, an inside, and a blind side.
Random character coloring
Dictionary tidbits
There’s something about Clement Skitt that you probably don’t know because he hasn’t shown evidence of it yet: he is obsessed with slang. And, since he time travels wherever he wants, he’s picked up some pretty obscure and outdated vocabulary. Writing a character like this means I’ve returned to one of my favorite childhood pastimes of reading dictionaries. It’s amazing to find slang from the 1800s that is common usage today and also to see how it evolves over time. For instance, in 1811 England ‘games’ were “thin, ill-shaped legs: a corruption of the French word jambes” (Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue) by the 1920’s, ‘gams’ were simply ‘women’s legs.’
Another thing you might get from reading the dictionary is historical tidbits. Like this from the 1891 American Slang Dictionary by James Maitland:
Silly me, I knew the Mormons had faced opposition in a few of the states they attempted to set up shop, but I didn’t know about the killing. In addition to above, the Danites, were not approved of by Joseph Smith, Mormon founder, but may have evolved from the militia he created known as the “Armies of Israel.” They were most active during the Missouri Mormon War of 1838. Seems they had a war in just about every state they tried to settle: See the Utah War and the ‘lesser known’ Illinois Mormon War. Though the Danites are thought to have ended after the Missouri Mormon War.
robuts
