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adrian_turtleAnd five things make a post, right?
http://hobbitbabe.livejournal.com/756013.html
It doesn't seem to be one of those memes that everybody on LJ is talking about, but Hobbitbabe picked great topics for me. I suspect I could have made them converge if I kept at it long enough, but I'm posting now because I'm running out of notebook space.
>do you want five things to elaborate on? if so, i propose tea, children's fiction, failure analysis, gadgets, and winter weather.
When I have company for tea, I bring out the petit point tea set that used to belong to my horrible grandmother. Tea at home was made with Constant Comment teabags, in heavy pottery mugs, with hot water from the coffee maker (the filter holder slid out, as well as the coffee filter, so it didn't taste of coffee. But it wasn't close to boiling.) Tea at my horrible grandmother's apartment was made in the big petit point teapot, with Swee-Touch-Nee teabags and boiling water from a kettle. And my father poured it into little matching teacups with saucers, only he filled Grandma's cup halfway with hot water before putting in the tea because she didn't like it when the tea was too strong. Sometimes there were dry little cookies, on plates that looked like bigger versions of the saucers, with the same pattern of bright blurry cross-stitch on the china. I thought tea tasted different at Grandma's because the teabags were different. I didn't know how important it was to use boiling water.
If you come to visit, I'll make tea for you in the petit point teapot. I won't use Swee-Touch-Nee, though. I generally use filter bags and loose tea, these days, when I'm making a pot of black tea. (I do still like Constant Comment teabags...it turns out to be quite nice in a big mug when I use boiling water.) If it's too late for black tea, there is mint or rooibos. I like more substantial cups than the little matching ones with saucers, which might spoil the overall effect my grandmother (and the china manufacturer) wanted. But it seems more appropriate for me to give a friend tea in the Owls cup, or the Friendly Elephant & Giraffe cup.
I love children's books. In my extreme youth, my reading was completely uncritical. I didn't care that books were full of moral advocacy--if I liked the characters enough, I could swallow anything whole. Now that I'm in a position of introducing books to little girls I love, I worry about moral advocacy being in a direction I approve of. Anna Sewell said she wrote Black Beauty for adults, but it became a children's book anyhow. I'm not sure if children's books are the only books that are expected to be quite that didactic, but they're the only novels I can recall reading that preaches so much, and puts the preaching so close to the foreground. (I've read very little horror.) Black Beauty comes out forthrightly against animal cruelty, slavery, fox hunting, and exploitation of the poor. Just as forthrightly, the text is in favor of personal kindness, conscientious hard work, and keeping the sabbath. Opposition to rape and approval of union organizing are buried in subtext, but I'm not sure if its subtlety, or just lack of space. A book these days based on a metaphor of wage slaves=slaves=literal slaves would look insensitive, but it doesn't bother to see it in a book from 1871. Pity and kindness aren't respect, but they're better than cruelty and exploitation.
Robin McKinley wrote the text for an abridged version with lovely illustrations; it's about 1/3 the original length and keeps a lot of the original power. Subplots are skipped, but we still see our heroes' essential helplessness in the face of cruelty and callousness, and the death of a named character. Whitebird loves it. I read it to her in January, and she's asked me for several repetitions. And if there was a movie. (We got it from the library. It demands another post.) Black Beauty and Ginger seem to be mentioned every time the little plastic ponies come out. What surprised me was Whitebird wanting the book to be even more didactic than it is. She wants blame to be more clearly assessed than "it is shortening my life, and it will shorten yours, too, if you have to stick to it." I can't imagine a modern editor putting in enough footnotes to explain the historical context the way she wants it explained.
I really want to go on about Dr. Seuss and Nevil Shute. And Noel Streatfeld and Rumer Godden. Maybe later.
I began to study formal failure analysis about ten years ago, in the context of a profound, systemic, industrial failure. The machinery wasn't all that heavy or sharp; it was for recycling styrofoam, grinding it up and adding it to the product. The conveyor belt that carried broken pieces of styrofoam to the grinder was forever getting stuck, and workers had a lot of ways to release the jam and get the big system working again. There was a safety interlock in the other room, designed by a visiting safety expert, but it was so slow and cumbersome the workers couldn't use it and unstick the belt (which jammed multiple times every day). The safety interlock had been disabled for weeks, longer than the new guy had been working in the plant. The new guy poked at the jam with a wrench to release it, like everybody did. He'd done it before. Only this time, he wasn't fast enough. He lost his arm.
Maybe a factory worker broke a safety rule and lost his arm because of it.
Maybe a right-handed 19-year-old started work in a factory, and he believed the "right way" to do stuff was the way his supervisor and the other guys were doing it. Because he believed that, {really disturbing image}, and now his right arm ends just below the elbow. It is completely coincidental that I had very painful surgery on my right hand the day of the accident, but it affects my thinking even now and affected it very strongly in 1999.
Maybe the safety interlock was not compatible with the process workflow, (or the plant culture of contempt for weakness and cowardice.) Legal advisors pressured upper management to integrate safety improvements throughout the company--labs, factories, salespeople on the road, everywhere.
My favorite gadgets tend to be simple or non-electric, and those are rapidly falling out of the category called "gadget." Sometimes I think, "Wow that's clever!" But it's easy for that scale of gadget to fade into the background. Yaktrax. Folding multitools. Rolling suitcases. Those non-spill spouts on bottles of laundry detergent. Those new caps for medicine bottles, and gates for stairways, that are easy for an adult with arthritis but nearly impossible for a small child.
When most people talk about "gadgets," they're thinking about things that would not be immediately comprehensible to a time traveler from the past. Cell phones. E-book readers. Laptop computers. My lifestyle depends on them, but I feel less emotionally attached to them. Maybe it's because the driving need pushes us to use them out on the bleeding edge where they don't work all that well. When non-spill spouts didn't work all that well, most bottles didn't even try to have one. So most people weren't even aware of the concept until they saw it working really well, with the fluid dripping back down into the container instead of down the outside. Yet there are many circumstances where it's better to have a cell phone that feels like kind of a kludge, that works almost all the time, than not to have a cell phone at all.
I am thoroughly tired of winter weather. It's getting to be spring, here. I took Whitebird to the park yesterday, and she objected to the spray pool having no water. (The spray pool is a summer thing. I think the pipes would have frozen as recently as Monday night, and soaking small children with cold water does not seem like a good idea at a balmy 7 degrees C.)
Thinking about winter weather more generally, I've noticed that distress about cold weather varies with the intensity of the cold itself, how much time a person is exposed to it, and how much physical ability to cope with cold the person has. It's strange how all those seem to be correlated with moral judgements, or at least with impressions of toughness or respectability or competence. I used to live in Michigan, where it was very common to speak of people in milder climates with condescension or contempt. (Wimps. What do they know? Hah--Down in Nashville you might think this is winter, but it's really nothing.) I've become much less able to cope with cold over the last ten years. I feel ridiculous. This is a milder climate, with better cold-weather gear. I'm just more of a wimp.
http://hobbitbabe.livejournal.com/756013.html
It doesn't seem to be one of those memes that everybody on LJ is talking about, but Hobbitbabe picked great topics for me. I suspect I could have made them converge if I kept at it long enough, but I'm posting now because I'm running out of notebook space.
>do you want five things to elaborate on? if so, i propose tea, children's fiction, failure analysis, gadgets, and winter weather.
When I have company for tea, I bring out the petit point tea set that used to belong to my horrible grandmother. Tea at home was made with Constant Comment teabags, in heavy pottery mugs, with hot water from the coffee maker (the filter holder slid out, as well as the coffee filter, so it didn't taste of coffee. But it wasn't close to boiling.) Tea at my horrible grandmother's apartment was made in the big petit point teapot, with Swee-Touch-Nee teabags and boiling water from a kettle. And my father poured it into little matching teacups with saucers, only he filled Grandma's cup halfway with hot water before putting in the tea because she didn't like it when the tea was too strong. Sometimes there were dry little cookies, on plates that looked like bigger versions of the saucers, with the same pattern of bright blurry cross-stitch on the china. I thought tea tasted different at Grandma's because the teabags were different. I didn't know how important it was to use boiling water.
If you come to visit, I'll make tea for you in the petit point teapot. I won't use Swee-Touch-Nee, though. I generally use filter bags and loose tea, these days, when I'm making a pot of black tea. (I do still like Constant Comment teabags...it turns out to be quite nice in a big mug when I use boiling water.) If it's too late for black tea, there is mint or rooibos. I like more substantial cups than the little matching ones with saucers, which might spoil the overall effect my grandmother (and the china manufacturer) wanted. But it seems more appropriate for me to give a friend tea in the Owls cup, or the Friendly Elephant & Giraffe cup.
I love children's books. In my extreme youth, my reading was completely uncritical. I didn't care that books were full of moral advocacy--if I liked the characters enough, I could swallow anything whole. Now that I'm in a position of introducing books to little girls I love, I worry about moral advocacy being in a direction I approve of. Anna Sewell said she wrote Black Beauty for adults, but it became a children's book anyhow. I'm not sure if children's books are the only books that are expected to be quite that didactic, but they're the only novels I can recall reading that preaches so much, and puts the preaching so close to the foreground. (I've read very little horror.) Black Beauty comes out forthrightly against animal cruelty, slavery, fox hunting, and exploitation of the poor. Just as forthrightly, the text is in favor of personal kindness, conscientious hard work, and keeping the sabbath. Opposition to rape and approval of union organizing are buried in subtext, but I'm not sure if its subtlety, or just lack of space. A book these days based on a metaphor of wage slaves=slaves=literal slaves would look insensitive, but it doesn't bother to see it in a book from 1871. Pity and kindness aren't respect, but they're better than cruelty and exploitation.
Robin McKinley wrote the text for an abridged version with lovely illustrations; it's about 1/3 the original length and keeps a lot of the original power. Subplots are skipped, but we still see our heroes' essential helplessness in the face of cruelty and callousness, and the death of a named character. Whitebird loves it. I read it to her in January, and she's asked me for several repetitions. And if there was a movie. (We got it from the library. It demands another post.) Black Beauty and Ginger seem to be mentioned every time the little plastic ponies come out. What surprised me was Whitebird wanting the book to be even more didactic than it is. She wants blame to be more clearly assessed than "it is shortening my life, and it will shorten yours, too, if you have to stick to it." I can't imagine a modern editor putting in enough footnotes to explain the historical context the way she wants it explained.
I really want to go on about Dr. Seuss and Nevil Shute. And Noel Streatfeld and Rumer Godden. Maybe later.
I began to study formal failure analysis about ten years ago, in the context of a profound, systemic, industrial failure. The machinery wasn't all that heavy or sharp; it was for recycling styrofoam, grinding it up and adding it to the product. The conveyor belt that carried broken pieces of styrofoam to the grinder was forever getting stuck, and workers had a lot of ways to release the jam and get the big system working again. There was a safety interlock in the other room, designed by a visiting safety expert, but it was so slow and cumbersome the workers couldn't use it and unstick the belt (which jammed multiple times every day). The safety interlock had been disabled for weeks, longer than the new guy had been working in the plant. The new guy poked at the jam with a wrench to release it, like everybody did. He'd done it before. Only this time, he wasn't fast enough. He lost his arm.
Maybe a factory worker broke a safety rule and lost his arm because of it.
Maybe a right-handed 19-year-old started work in a factory, and he believed the "right way" to do stuff was the way his supervisor and the other guys were doing it. Because he believed that, {really disturbing image}, and now his right arm ends just below the elbow. It is completely coincidental that I had very painful surgery on my right hand the day of the accident, but it affects my thinking even now and affected it very strongly in 1999.
Maybe the safety interlock was not compatible with the process workflow, (or the plant culture of contempt for weakness and cowardice.) Legal advisors pressured upper management to integrate safety improvements throughout the company--labs, factories, salespeople on the road, everywhere.
My favorite gadgets tend to be simple or non-electric, and those are rapidly falling out of the category called "gadget." Sometimes I think, "Wow that's clever!" But it's easy for that scale of gadget to fade into the background. Yaktrax. Folding multitools. Rolling suitcases. Those non-spill spouts on bottles of laundry detergent. Those new caps for medicine bottles, and gates for stairways, that are easy for an adult with arthritis but nearly impossible for a small child.
When most people talk about "gadgets," they're thinking about things that would not be immediately comprehensible to a time traveler from the past. Cell phones. E-book readers. Laptop computers. My lifestyle depends on them, but I feel less emotionally attached to them. Maybe it's because the driving need pushes us to use them out on the bleeding edge where they don't work all that well. When non-spill spouts didn't work all that well, most bottles didn't even try to have one. So most people weren't even aware of the concept until they saw it working really well, with the fluid dripping back down into the container instead of down the outside. Yet there are many circumstances where it's better to have a cell phone that feels like kind of a kludge, that works almost all the time, than not to have a cell phone at all.
I am thoroughly tired of winter weather. It's getting to be spring, here. I took Whitebird to the park yesterday, and she objected to the spray pool having no water. (The spray pool is a summer thing. I think the pipes would have frozen as recently as Monday night, and soaking small children with cold water does not seem like a good idea at a balmy 7 degrees C.)
Thinking about winter weather more generally, I've noticed that distress about cold weather varies with the intensity of the cold itself, how much time a person is exposed to it, and how much physical ability to cope with cold the person has. It's strange how all those seem to be correlated with moral judgements, or at least with impressions of toughness or respectability or competence. I used to live in Michigan, where it was very common to speak of people in milder climates with condescension or contempt. (Wimps. What do they know? Hah--Down in Nashville you might think this is winter, but it's really nothing.) I've become much less able to cope with cold over the last ten years. I feel ridiculous. This is a milder climate, with better cold-weather gear. I'm just more of a wimp.
