Ordinary Canary

This weekend I went to the Hallockville Fiber Festival, which is an excuse for knitters and spinners and other fiber nuts to get together and swap stories and goods. It was held at the Hallockville Museum Farm, which is an old farm with dedicated buildings to weaving and spinning. I watched a demonstration [...]

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I don’t often sit down to watch a movie, but when I have been watching movies lately, they’ve been from the In Technicolor! era. Recent watches have been For Love of Ivy, Arsenic and Old Lace, Sunset Boulevard and Mogambo. Tonight I’m watching To Catch a Thief. I’ve been enjoying the [...]

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Last Thursday night, I sat down with my little family and watched Ninja Assassin, which was precisely as good as you’d imagine it to be.  (A coworker wonders why they cast a Korean pop star as the awesomest ninja of all; I wonder why we cast American actors as South Africans.  But neither here nor [...]

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The most amazing thing I saw all weekend.
Yes, we went in person. And yes, I desperately need to go to the gym now.
Such grace!

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In the last two days, I’ve been doing some coding and clean-up of my computer. In ways that I could describe but would be long and boring, I got the two random bits of text that I found particularly meaningful.
The first, output from a Perl script gone wrong:
They need to be tested and
need to [...]

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Warning: I will spoil the plot. You may not want to read further.
I watched Perfume: The Story of a Murderer the other night, after renting it because Dustin Hoffman and Alan Rickman are in it and it looked like it would have an interesting plot.
And, well, yes, if horrific means interesting, it [...]

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This weekend was very busy, since I was entertaining a friend that was visiting from out of town. The highlight was seeing Patton Oswalt who is an absolutely brilliant comedian from Sterling, Virginia (Virginia pride, whoo!). You probably wouldn’t like him if crude language offends you, but he has some very smart things [...]

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A very worthwhile article by Zadie Smith on multiracial identities, Barack Obama, William Shakespeare and My Fair Lady.
An excerpt:
A few minutes later, I was in a taxi and heading uptown with my Northern Irish husband and our half-Indian, half-English friend, but that initial hesitation was ominous; the first step on a typical British journey. A [...]

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I have finally succumbed to peer pressure and opened a Netflix account. I was forced into this because the people I watch movies with are, quite frankly, bullies about movie selection. I have basically zero knowledge of popular culture, so can’t keep up with what actors are in which movies and who is [...]

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Last night, the lovely Maya and myself watched Emma, adding to my list of Jane Austen movies that I adore.
Austen gets discredited as a romance writer and a generator of the “chick flick” (an awful phrase that writes off movies about women as unimportant). I love her because she writes about young people who [...]

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