Free thing!

Family Circle Easy Knitting has apparently hopped to a new publisher, so Vogue and Soho Publishing started up a new magazine in its absence, called "Knitsimple." Which is coming to me to apparently fill the remaining part of my subscription.

I have somehow wound up with two copies.

So, if you want one, drop me an e-mail (link and address on the sidebar, left - from the link you need to remove the NOSPAM) with your mailing address. First person who requests it, gets it.

The magazine is aimed at beginner knitters and has some fairly basic patterns in there.

So let me know if you want it, and I'll get it in the mail.


Also, reading: I finished a couple books over break and got farther in the Trollope.

The "biggest" book I finished was "The Mold in Dr. Florey's Coat," which is about the early development of penicillin. (Fleming discovered it, but it was actually turned into a useful medication by Florey, Chain, and Heatley, working at Oxford). The title comes from the fact that the lead researchers were working in the 1940-41, when there was real fear that Germany would invade Britain, and they planned for what they would do if that happened: each man smeared spores of Pennicillium notatum (the research organism) inside their greatcoats, figuring that if the Nazis made landfall, and if they had to destroy their lab, at least one of them was likely to escape the country and he would have the spores to start new cultures to work with. Scary thought, that. Imagine doing research under the threat that you might have to smash up your equipment and burn your notes, and leave in the dead of night (and Chain was originally from Germany, a German Jew; he had had to leave his "home country" once before because of the Reich).

Some interesting bits:

Lysozyme, which is a natural cell product and is found in (among other things) tears and saliva (especially, it seems, cat saliva) was originally investigated as an antimicrobial. It does have antimicrobial properties but it isn't effective against the real "baddies," it mostly kills sort of your garden-variety non-pathogenic germs.

Heatley built a lot of the lab equipment, including using a discarded bookcase from the Bodleian Library that he "bashed up" to use in a separator or somesuch. Really the whole extraction and testing was carried out largely on a shoestring, and it's frankly kind of amazing that it worked at all.

The ultimate source of penicillin for production - production moved to Peoria, Illinois, after the war because the USDA helped- came from a rotten melon picked up at a market near Peoria. (I already knew that; the "moldkeeper" from the USDA facility up there came and gave a seminar when I was at ISU; it was one of the most memorable and interesting of the seminars I heard during the eight years I was there).

Florey and company didn't want to patent penicillin; they felt it was a discovery that should belong to all of humanity and should be kept within reach, pricewise, of ordinary people. (Penicillin and its derivatives are still among the cheapest antibiotics, if my prescription-purchasing experience is any indicator).

And I had no idea - NO IDEA - of how risky comparatively simple things like childbirth were in the era before antibiotics. (I do know that scarlet fever or scarletina is a lot less dangerous now. I had scarlet fever when I was eight, and I remember when I woke up sick, my mom saw the rash, and she guessed what I had before taking me to the doctor, I quietly freaked out. I had been reading a book, set in the 1800s, about a little girl, who, like Helen Keller, spent the rest of her life blind and deaf: the condition developed as a result of her having scarlet fever. I had also heard of rheumatic fever, which can damage the heart and can be another complication. So I went to the doctor, feeling that I had, if not a death sentence, very near it. You can imagine my surprise when he very nonchalantly said, "I'll give you an antibiotic and you can go back to school in a couple days." With a little more prodding on his part, I revealed what had been worrying me. He didn't laugh at me, and he explained to me that I didn't have to worry about that any more, that antibiotics could kill the bacteria before they could do any damage. He was a good doctor.)

I'm struck, when I read biographies/histories of science, how dysfunctional as people many famous scientists are. Florey may well have had a mild case of Asperger's Syndrome; he seemed to have difficulties relating to people (including his wife). Chain seemed to be somewhat paranoid and tended to see persecution in situations where he didn't get his way 100%. (By contrast, Heatley seems to have been a fairly nice fellow who liked to tinker with castoff machinery to build lab equipment. But then again, that might have been the result of the fact that Heatley was the only one still alive to talk with the author). Makes me wonder if I am temperamentally unsuited to be a "great" scientist because for all my talk of neuroses and that, I'm a generally pretty well adjusted person and someone who tends to look to other's comfort or happiness before my own, and not to look for nefarious motives when simple misunderstanding can explain something.


I also read a simple, cozy mystery novel by Susan Wittig Albert. It's a new series she has out, incorporating Beatrix Potter (and her animals) in the plots. Normally I do not care for the trope of "let's put this famous person from the past in a mystery novel" (tho' I do enjoy the grandaddy of all of that genre, the "Sam'l Johnson, Detective" mysteries). But somehow, I think, Miss Potter would be amused by the whole thing (whereas I think Jane Austen would probably be annoyed, and Charles Dickens perplexed, and Groucho Marx would want a cut of the profits). It's absolutely a "cozy" mystery - set in a small Lake District town, has lots of eccentric characters. The local cats and dogs get in the action - they 'talk' to each other, though the people don't understand them (I would have probably heaved the book aside in disgust if they had). There are a few scenes that stretch even my powers of suspending disbelief - particularly the ones involving the owl - but in general it was an enjoyable book and I'll probably read the others in the series when they come out.

I also read more in "The American Senator," by Anthony Trollope.

I remember now why I like Anthony Trollope's novels so much: first of all, there's the perfectly imagined, tiny, internally consistent world they create. I think I said once that it was sort of like looking at a snowglobe - you can peer in and look at all the detail. And there are lots of characters to follow. And nobody I've read writes thorougly despicable people (like Arabella Trefoil in the current book) as well and as enjoyably as Trollope. I normally don't like hating characters in books, but Trollope makes it fun, sort of like sitting next to someone at a party who talks smack about the "beautiful people" there and gets you laughing.

It's funny - I guess the book is designed as commentary, there are the usual protracted fox hunting scenes where horses get destroyed and people get injured and the fox gets away, and it's all a big waste, and apparently (if the prefatory notes by some English professor bigwig are to be believed) Trollope was using the character of Senator Gotobed (from the "western state" of "Mikewa") as a way of criticizing the upper classes in Britain. But. Sen. Gotobed is SO ridiculous, and frankly he's a tiresome fellow (criticizing your host's house when he is feeding you and housing you? Tacky, in my book), that I find myself sympathizing with the aristocrat John Morton (and also his cousin, Reginald, who I've not seen too much of yet). So Mr. Elias Gotobed is another character I love to hate, while throwing my sympathies in the direction of the Mortons (well, except for the odious grandmother) and Mr. Masters (but not his current wife and the stepmother of Mary Masters) and Mary Masters, instead. So if Trollope intended it as scathing commentary on the British upper crust, it's kind of lost on me, I'm just enjoying the story and feel outraged on John Morton's part that that hussy Arabella is playing him so, and he'd really be better off dropping her and maybe marrying one of the quiet Godolphin sisters, or perhaps not marrying at all. And I'm secretly cheering on Reginald, that he can win Mary Masters' hand, and that she doesn't do the "practical" thing that her stepmother wants, and marry Larry Twentyman (who is okay, I guess, but isn't as kind or thoughtful as Reginald) so she is out of her stepmother's house.

What? You don't give advice to the characters in the books YOU read?