Sunday, July 20, 2014

Another Sweater Back

I finished the back on Hagrid yesterday:

hagrid back

I started the front, too, but am not very far along. I find I get faster at patterns like this with experience, because I know what I'm doing.

I did make this a few inches shorter - this back is 24" rather than the 27 1/2" the pattern calls for. (It's a man-tailored sweater, and obviously for a tall, long-waisted man, because 24" is going to be long on me; 27 1/2" would practically be a minidress. (I am not unusually short for a woman - 5' 7" but my legs are proportionally longer than my waist)

A couple other things:

* I went to see "As You Like It" today. More about that later but this is going to be my next Shakespeare read. It takes me a while to get into the stories of the ones I've not read because I start off going "Okay, who's that?" when a new character comes on stage. I did get the plot but I'm sure a few of the jokes sailed over my head. (But not one that, I think it was Oliver? made, after he caught Ganymede/Rosalind in drag when she fainted....his comment about how s/he "had not a man's heart" while making a bit of a cupping motion (like a breast) over his own chest. Yeah, I'm 12, but a lot of the jokes in Shakespeare are ones that the 12-year-old in us can appreciate)

* I also mowed and edged the lawn. That was a hard job. It's very humid here right now and at the very end, when I was mowing the front lawn, I kept having to stop and "take a knee" for a few moments to get my breath back. (Also, the stupid edger, the line kept breaking, and ultimately the cartridge ran out, and I had old line but not a full cartridge, so I rewound line into the old one....ugh. Didn't work well).

* Current dewpoint is 72 and it "feels like" 92 out there, so that's why I was having such difficulty working. My body doesn't like humidity.

* I've been enjoying Weird Al's resurgence - he's introducing a video a day for eight days. One of my favorites so far has been "Tacky," a parody of Pharrell's "Happy." Part of it is that it's one of the few current pop songs I'm actually somewhat familiar with, but the other reason, it just feels like a "classic" Weird Al video: loud, silly, goofy, good wordplay. (I also liked "Word Crimes," but I admit I love "Tacky" just a little bit more.)

* I also really liked Sports Song, even if some of the online commentators aren't giving it much love. Rather than being an actual parody of an actual song, it's a parody of a STYLE: the college fight song. And oh, it's just chord perfect. As someone who's spent really her entire life in some way affiliated with a university (from being a kid going to University of Akron football games because my dad could get cheap/free tickets as faculty, from being a student at Michigan and then Illinois State, and now a prof where I am now) - well, it just makes me laugh because it does kind of both skewer and celebrate the silly bombasticness of sports-combat.

I also fully expect "We're great and you suck!" to become a rallying cry in the student section of many university stadia. Even if, as I said, the song is a giant parody of the attitude (And a few moments later, there's "Okay, full disclosure: We're not that great. But nevertheless, you suck")

Also, marching in time and drum-leading is not easy and I'm supposing Weird Al was either never in a marching band or hasn't been involved with one for years.

1 comment:

purlewe said...

I love the school fight song.. it cracks me up. Being a person who went to a big 10 Uni I agree.. this is on target. And now married to one of my rival schools.. we love to crack jokes once a yr (the day we play each other) about how the other person's team sucks. I plan on using lots of lines from this song as my backup this yr.