I was phonebanking Jews in Colorado today and I got a retiree who said he couldn't vote for Obama because of his associations.    I queried, Ayers?  He said no, his other associations.  I said, "Because he's a Muslim? He's not."  He said he knew he wasn't Muslim.  We talked for a while about McCain and his pluses and minuses and we were very much on the same page there but he said despite really disliking McCain he just couldn't vote for Obama because of his associations.  I pushed again and he said, "You know, Farrakhan and Jesse Jackson." 

Ohh....

I said, "I'd add Al Sharpton to that trio," and he laughed and relaxed.  I said, "Jesse Jackson hates him!  Farrakhan is even farther away from him politically, I don't think you have to worry about them having any influence upon him.  I'll be blunt with you because you've been so honest with me:  I understand that you're worried that he's got a grudge he'll take out on white America, but that's not part of Obama's story.   That's not who he is.   His mother and grandparents are white, and he loves them enough that he's gone off the campaign trail to spend time with his dying grandmother.  Do you think he would listen to anyone who would want to hurt people he loves?"

He said to me, "Well, maybe I'll write someone else in or vote for Nader then." 

I think I just converted a McCain supporter to an undecided. 

Anyone, anyone, Bueller?

Lenders at securitization groups have little to do, since most shops aren’t actively quoting bids. Said one senior lender: “I walk through our
group and see these guys reading the paper at their desks, and I say, ‘Can you please try to look a little less dispensable?’ ”

Those remaining lamented the departure of colleagues and friends, many of whom have little chance of returning to the industry. “The people who were cogs in a big machine — they are toast,” said one industry veteran. “I have a hundred resumes on my desk from people who’ve been laid off and need a job. They cannot be employed again unless they take a big pay cut. For the last three years, we worked them into a state of exhaustion. The Street just chewed them up and spit them out. It’s brutal.”

I gather I won't be working there again.  After we get done with this kid thing I will need to reinvent myself.

Here are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you looksmart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish."
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel - but it's on my shelf waiting its turn
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin - also on my shelf
The Kite Runner - but it sucks
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles - it's awesome
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels - also awesome
Les Misérables - awesome
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things - hated it
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything - on the shelf as well
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences - LOVE THISS
White Teeth - went to school with her can't read acquaintances books
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

"A Good Provider Is The One Who Leaves"

My grandmother is being cared for by a grandmother from Fiji who has spent her career in the US so that her children and grandchildren are well cared for.  Eta's kind and patient with a great deal of empathy for a very bitter old woman of relative privilege.  And while my grandmother has not been kind to her, we have been, and as such felt like we were insuring her well-being as she insured my grandmothers.  Until yesterday.

Yesterday my grandmother upped the shenanigan scale to a never-before-conceived scheme and called 911 while Eta was in the shower to complain of physical abuse.  (Two months or so ago she had called and faked a heart attack.) The police arrived as well as an ambulance which took my grandmother yet again to her hospital/hotel of choice.  The police interrogated both women.  Eta was left shook and frightened.  We know full well that she isn't abusive, in fact she is the victim of a great deal of verbal abuse, and yet my very wilely grandmother who has no sense at all left in her brain can make up elaborate lies.  I don't trust that Eta is not in danger of some sort of investigation. While this scheme got my grandmother a free ride to the hospital, it may have destroyed Eta's career in the US.  As the sole provider for her family, she's got to be very careful not to get in trouble here.  Any mark on her record would destroy her future job possibilities. 

My aunt says, "It's no big deal.  Nothing will happen."  It's no big deal to her because she's getting off easy: my two unemployed aunts without families that live within driving distance of my grandmother are quite capable of taking care of her or finding her a nursing home instead of Eta.  But they won't lose their jobs, their future income or their US residency if she calls the cops on them.  Eta and I agreed that she needs to quit.  We had a long conversation and she worried about someone replacing her to care for my grandmother and offered to stay until we found someone else.  I told her no, because if I couldn't have fathomed this horrible act from my addlebrained grandmother what is next?  Does she attack Eta with a knife in her sleep?  We've got two weeks to worry about this and then I take Eta to her niece's house for a hopefully better job with a kinder woman.

I'm so embarassed that my favorite grandmother has become a monster in her last years.  I never before believed Roger Daltry.

At a knit-n-bitch chez moi, a bunch of bulky variegated yarn was left by knitters, and it sat in my knitting closet until a request from freecycle for yarn sent it to a private school in San Francisco.  Here are the enthusiastic knitters of your unloved yarn thinking it's the best thing ever:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/27599161@N00/2437862140/

I have no idea why i can't put this picture in the entry.  Fuck lj.

I would like to say that all of my male friends do not fall into this category.  But I have often often worked with men like this.  And I've even watch them undermine and destroy the careers of women around them by refusing to recognize their groundbreaking work, even my own.  In my case, my ground breaking work was passed off by a male colleague as his own despite him having done NOTHING to complete it.  He was well compensated for my work.  Another male colleague destroyed the career of a woman who had done all of the programming and mathematics to create a number of highly complicated bond models by dismissing the work as unimportant.  For both of us, we shared a boss who would give me reviews with comments like, "Despite her inherent lack of logical skills, she seems to always figure out these complex problems."

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-solnit13apr13,0,526991.story

What fills my mind these days:


And  Malcolm Gladwell's story "Perverse and Often Baffling"  in the podcasts for The Moth. 

I blame society.

From Newark, NJ Municipal Court website FAQs :

Can you give me directions to the Newark Municipal Court?
A. It depends. Where are you coming from? If we can not give you specific information, you may check the website or call the police
department.

Morons in my home state. 

Here is the URL of  a picture of two of the swatches for Moishe's sweater.  It will be his third, but my first fair isle, knit in the round, with a steeked button band and arm holes.  I have swatched this now, oh, at least four times.  I should go upstairs and take photos of all the swatches and post those so you can see exactly how much work goes into knitting, nay, designing a sweater from scratch.

In this case, I was trying to save money by using Cascade 220, which is relatively cheap, nice yarn.  However, even on size 3 needles, it's too many stitches to the inch for the design repeat.  That became Shabbir's hat. (gauge of 24 stitches over 4 cm, 6 per inch).

Moishe's hat was knit in Sandnesdgarn, 7 stitches to the inch on size 3 needles.  The cast on was identical for both hats.  Considerably smaller with an extra stitch per inch.  Really brings the swatching thing to life for me.

Next I need to cast on for the sweater, and I need a quiet block of time to do it - I'll need to cast on 170 stitches or so and then immediately knit a few rows to make sure I haven't twisted the cast on into a Mobius strip, or have a different gauge when knitting 170 stitches.

BTW, all of my swatches have been in the round, except for the very first one. 

Here are the details in Ravelry.

I'm outed.  I adore Dr. Who.  http://www.entropyhouse.com/penwiper/who/extermaknit.html