Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I am pretty sure these ‘journalists’ were not always such a bootlicking sycophants.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

Oppose, oppose, oppose. do not congratulate. this is not business as usual.

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

If you cannot answer whether trump lost the 2020 election, you are unfit for office.

Hell hath no fury like a farmer bankrupted.

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

Roe is not about choice. It is about freedom.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

The arc of the moral universe does not bend itself. it is up to us to bend it.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

I don’t recall signing up for living in a dystopian sci-fi novel.

Jesus watching the most hateful people claiming to be his followers

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

Also, are you sure you want people to rate your comments?

Consistently wrong since 2002

Trump’s cabinet: like a magic 8 ball that only gives wrong answers.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

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Artist in Our Midst – Manyakitty Embraces the Chaos!

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Let’s give a warm welcome to Julie, aka Manyakitty!

Hello Jackals!

 For as long as I can remember, I loved to play with some form of sticks and strings. First crochet, then sewing, and finally knitting. Add in the needlepoint, embroidery, and weaving phases and I cover a lot of fiber/textile arts and crafts. As a result of my hobbies, I have a deep and diverse stash of supplies.

 Back in May, my pharma-adjacent job disappeared because of the regime’s intentional turmoil in the industry. As interviews failed to materialize and unemployment ran out, I considered my options and thought of all the craft stuff sitting in what used to be my office. Maybe I could turn some of that into things people would buy.

 Several months ago, I completed my first quilt. It is substantially imperfect by any measure, but I am delighted with it. A friend calls it a physical expression of endorphins and she’s right. I included a picture of it in action because it pretty much captures my overall vibe–lots of color and fun patterns. Additionally, I engaged with the Japanese concept of kintsugi and went bold with my patches and repairs.

 Fast forward to the present…

 My Etsy shop is now up and running: Chaos Crafting Crones. “Chaos” because <gestures broadly>. “Crafting” is self-explanatory. “Crones” because I am a woman of a certain age. “Collective” because I want to try to grow this into something bigger and bring together other like-minded crafters.

 A short video of jelly roll rugs on Facebook sucked my into my latest obsession. See below for images. I have tons of ideas about projects to make with this method, as well as expanding into other techniques for creating rugs. In addition, I created lots of other fun and useful items, with lots of plans for expanding my offerings. Also, too, I am available for custom orders and welcome suggestions for new products.

 The world is adrift in a sea of chaos right now. Instead of clinging to whatever we can in a desperate attempt to maintain stability, we can find the beauty in the variations. Embrace the chaos!

My friends, thank you for your time and attention.

 Here is a picture of Cygnus enjoying the above-mentioned quilt. Asimov also appears but he is the lump in front of Cygnus.

 Artist in Our Midst – Manyakitty Embraces the Chaos! 6

 This is a detail of a jelly roll rug

Artist in Our Midst – Manyakitty Embraces the Chaos! 7

Overhead view of a different jelly roll rug

Artist in Our Midst – Manyakitty Embraces the Chaos! 5

Pile of cat toys. I stuff them with a mix of yarn, fabric scraps, wool roving, and synthetic fluff. The variations in texture are irresistible to the cats

Artist in Our Midst – Manyakitty Embraces the Chaos! 8

Bonus picture of Cygnus amongst the Kitty Hugs and Kickers 

Luncheon-sized napkins. Fun, colorful and economical!

Atomic chicken pattern small potholders–good for young cooks and small spaces 

 

Bowl cozy. Generous fit for a 6” bowl. 

Lined, reusable bags 

 

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Finally Introducing The Game I’m Making, What Are You Making?

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Your scholarship is in danger, your friends aren’t human, and something ancient is awakening in the dreamlands. Welcome to Miskatonic University.

Hello jackals! I am super chuffed to formally show you all the video game my friend and I have been working on. We’re sort of thinking of it as a weird expensive art project, but if you ask us, it’s got some potential. The going has been a little slow what with the baby and all, and working with artists can always be time-consuming, especially if you include yourself in that category, but the demo is finally ready!

It’s an adventure game & dating sim set in the H.P. Lovecraft universe. You play a college student who wakes up one day from a very strange dream to find that everything’s a little stranger than it was yesterday–even your best friend, it turns out, is some sort of fish-monster. Even worse, you’ve been thrust into a conflict that’s far older than humanity itself, and threatens to unravel two worlds. Along the way, you can use your free time to make friends with the other main characters, and even romance them, if you play your cards right. There are ten potential story routes based on the choices you make.

It’s… been a lot of work! But now it’s time to show it off.

We’ll be launching a Kickstarter soon to raise funding to finish the game. There’s still a lot of art to go, and only so much that we can self-finance. You can read about it here on the pre-release page, including the cool rewards we’re offering, like an original short story collection. That page also contains links to the ~40-minute demo, available on Steam and itch.io. If you think you’d be interested, definitely click that “notify me on launch” button. Or don’t–I’ll be back to bug you all about it once it’s live! Oh, and you can follow us on Bluesky, too.

So that’s been my big creative project for, ah, about two years now. Time sure flies when you’re moving, installing a garden, panicking about the state of things, having a baby…

What has everybody else here been up to, project-wise?

And since I need to pay the cat tax, here’s a peek at everybody’s favorite character, which is, okay, probably not actually a cat:Finally Introducing The Game I'm Making, What Are You Making?

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Artists in Our Midst – Dave Buchen

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If you would like your talent featured in Authors in Our Midst or Artists in Our Midst, just send me an email message and we’ll make it happen. Don’t be shy! I have no more Artists or Authors posts in the queue, so please get in touch if you would like to be featured.

Let’s give a warm welcome to Dave Buchen!

Hello all and thanks for this opportunity to share my work. I started making books on my printing press back in 2000, hand-printing, coloring, and binding 100 books at a time. As the books I wanted to make got more complex, I moved to self-publishing in various forms.

My newest book is Why is an Apple an Apple? A Garden of Etymology. It tells the story of how our words for fruits and vegetables have evolved over the years with 50+ papercut illustrations. The story of words like rice, rhubarb, and rutabaga led me down many rabbit holes of where fruits were first grown and how they traveled the world. For example, rhubarb can be translated as “Russian Barbarian” or “Wet Barbarian.” I make children’s books, but as a father and former teacher who has read countless children’s books, I try to write them in a way that any age can read them and be neither bored or overwhelmed.

This book is a sequel to Why is a Tiger a Tiger? A Bestiary of Etymology which I published years ago. My fascination with etymology was really sparked back in Chicago when I found a great dictionary with etymologies in the garbage. It’s its own way of studying culture and language that reveals connections and meanings that one wouldn’t have otherwise deduced. I then published a Spanish version which included new animals and some other animals taken out. An interesting etymology in one language does not guarantee an equally fascinating story in the other!

In many ways, my books have evolved as my children have grown up. I made Bilingual ABC Bilingüe back when they were small, and I was faced with a dilemma. I moved to Puerto Rico in 1999, and my children were both born here and are bilingual. Finding a decent bilingual ABC was way harder than it should have been. Too many books had pages like “A is for Apple [ M es para Manzana]”! So I made my own in which the letters actually match the words in English and Spanish (Acrobat/Acróbata, Bubbles/Burbujas etc.). This was originally hand-printed, but after they sold out I resurrected it as a print-on-demand book.

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I still make books by hand as well as an annual calendar. I have a Vandercook #1 press in my laundry shed. Hush Little Baby is a version that I used to sing to my kids in semi-improvised variations to get them to sleep. For a model of parent and child, I was able to turn to my nephew and his new daughter. I have also used the press to make an annual calendar since 1999. It began as the Bestiary Calendar and has evolved over the years to have such themes as the French Revolutionary Calendar, dancing, masks in the first year of covid, and people embracing in covid’s aftermath. This year’s theme was going to be birds you can see from my garden, but I broadened it to Puerto Rico in general to get some more striking birds other than the ones that visit me.

For the calendar, my daughter, now an adult, contributed three of the prints including the hummingbird.

The print-on-demand books are available at Amazon, which has a de facto monopoly on the kind of self-publishing I do, sigh.

Info about my hand-printed books and calendars can be found on my website.

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Artists in Our Midst – Knitting Magic

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After seeing the drawings of Steve that Avalue crated for for the blog’s 20th anniversary, and seeing the pie filter images she made for us, like PupCake and the Sea Lion Chow, and now seeing her knitting, I have to wonder – is there anything creative that Avalune can’t do?

More Classicspupcake pie filter

Let’s give a warm welcome to Avalune!

Knitting Magic

by Avalune

I didn’t have occasion to visit my great-grandmother much outside of Thanksgiving and Christmas, when my parents, while they were still together, would do the obligatory shuffle from grandparent house to grandparent house for holiday dinners. She had a cramped little house at the end of a street in what was generally considered a bad neighborhood. The surface of every piece of wooden furniture was covered in starch-stiff crochet doilies. Every couch and recliner was festooned with colorful chevron afghans. Three framed pieces featuring nature scenes built from the most delicate spiderwebs of white cotton material hung from the walls in the dining room – these were her pride, all blue ribbon winning pieces her children squabbled over when she passed away.

 I wanted to make pictures from strands of cotton like that. But I rarely had access to her and she didn’t think I was very serious about wanting to learn. I think she’d probably also more or less quit doing it by then because of the rheumatoid arthritis that made knots of her fingers.

 I never stopped thinking that it was a kind of magic and one that I wanted to recreate. As it turns out, it was probably for the best that she never tried to teach me crochet. I could never take to it but circa early 2000’s, at the height of YouTube’s DIY atmosphere, I was determined to teach myself to knit.

 My great-grandmother Venice was still alive and living in her cramped little two-story on a dead end street in Springfield, Ohio (yes, that one) when I finished my first knitted lace pieces and entered them into the local fair.

While most of the folks around me were knitting with needles that looked like those miniature baseball bats you’d get as souvenirs at a ball game, I preferred the toothpicks and most delicate yarns and intricate patterns – as if I were trying to recreate the things I remembered from my childhood.

I was especially infatuated with Estonian lace for a time. The gentle sway of the bubbles called Nupps (pronounced to rhyme with hoops) reminded me of the deer in the grass in the picture frame. Did you know machines cannot produce Nupps? Take that automation!

I loved the challenge of lacework but there were also so many other ways to play with shape and color. While Venice’s chevron afghans were nostalgic and colorful, I wanted a more modern and diverse take.

 Solid colors with interesting textures where the design really stands out.

Or a rainbow of color.

Or a sort of knitted take on traditional quilt blocks.

 By changing the order in which you worked a row of stitches, you could create twists of cables.

 While it was common for a cable to run from end to end, it was also possible to close cables and create cables out of thin air to get something that looked more like Pictish art.

Artists in Our Midst – Is there anything Avalune can't do? 6

 Clothing that is expected to fit was a little daunting – how many stories exist where someone knit a sweater or hat that was too big or too small for the recipient? But now that I’d accomplished my original intent, to honor and follow my great-grandmother, I wanted to try my hand at clothing, like this piece reminiscent of old military issue with patches and shoulder caps.

 I liked solid colors, or intentional colorwork. None of that “I made this!” “Uh yeah you did…” look that too often came with hand knits. I wanted the features and details to stand out – not the wildness of my yarn choices.

But not all of my work is so traditional and restrained.

Sometimes I knit very tiny things bigly (couldn’t resist) like this little roly/potato/woodlouse.

 Sometimes I knit big things very, very small.

 This may be the first year in many that I do not expect to make a dozen or so 1.5in snowmen to give away at Christmastime.

 Sometimes I go weird, like my faux taxidermied friend who presides over the dining room table. I fell in love with Highland Cows while visiting Scotland.

 Or my rat friend, Ratty Arbuckle, who watches me work and startles everyone who comes by my office, thinking his proportions are a little too realistic.

 Sometimes, I even do “knitivism” – like this angry little womb pin for women’s reproductive rights.

 Though there are some exceptions, I primarily knit for close family and friends, who I know will take care of handknits which can be a little more fiddly than fast fashion. I already have a job. I emphatically resist the idea that everything needs to be a “side hustle,” in part because I knit too slowly meticulously and in part because too many people want handknits in quality fiber for Dollar Store prices. Keeping it close maintains the connection to my great-grandmother and the magic and charm that initially drew me to the art in the first place. It certainly isn’t the only art I practice – I’m a bit of a dabbler – but it is still one of my most favorite.

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Dan B – An Artist in a Different Medium!

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Let’s give a warm welcome to Dan B!

Dogs to Weddings!

Sometimes I had an urge to drive off when I first visit a new client’s home.  I’m glad I didn’t.

This couple’s  residence was on the boundary between a sketchy high crime neighborhood and an exclusive neighborhood.  There was regular car vandalism and they wanted a circular drive in their narrow front lot so they could get their cars off the street.  This would have turned the entire front yard into a driveway with narrow shrub beds and having two curb cuts would have violated code.

And the back was a “critical slope” so steep it would likely fail.  The front, right on the street, was their only level outdoor area but they couldn’t imagine it as a place to relax and enjoy.

Dan B - Dogs to Weddings! 5

The house was a classic mid century modern that had the unsurprising single arborvitae planted in front.  It was obstructing the simple, but classic, lines of the house.

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Susan Tate – Emerging Artist, A Short Essay

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Let’s give a warm welcome to Susan Tait!

Emerging Artist, A Short Essay 

by Susan Tait

I remember the day when I picked up a tube of ultramarine blue paint, and thought, “If I buy this, I’ll have to eat soup for a week.” 

I did eat soup for a week. Didn’t regret it. I needed to paint what I saw in my head as I plowed through novels—The Word for World is Forest by LeGuin inspired me to paint a forest a night, firelit under the stars. I was ten, and art was already my Imaginary Friend, but made visible each time. 

As a young adult, I thought art as a profession was for people in art school. My art was just how I dealt with the chafing of daily life. 

A few decades go by. I spend COVID drawing and painting. By 2023, the stack of notebooks and canvases and photos in the garage had gotten deep enough to require floor-to-near-ceiling racks. My friend Matt said to me, “What are you doing to do with it all?” 

“Um, I’ll let my son deal with it after I’m dead?” 

“You’re an asshole,” he said, not unkindly. 

I laughed. I couldn’t deny that if I didn’t think I was any good, no one else would ever have a say in the matter. Did I have the courage for that? Was it enough that sometimes I liked my own work? I didn’t know. 

Two weeks later, the county announced its biennial Call for Entries for artwork to display in the library system.  

I’d spent three years studying Abstract Expressionism in life drawing and painting. Did I dare submit nudes?  

The first staff member I asked looked at me as if I’d suggested hanging porn. Her eyes dropped and she mumbled something about speaking to the exhibition manager.  

I sent four landscapes and a nude, and got a qualified “we’ll let you hang one [nude].” Meanwhile, MAGA is trying to ban books and close libraries, there’s switching going on in the stacks, a guy in a MAGA hat keeps showing up to test tolerance. I decided none of us needed the aggravation. I just sent the landscapes. Just get some things in without making trouble the first time, I told myself. If they like these, and me, I’ll get another chance. Maybe. 

And then I twisted an ankle and discovered a bunion. The day before the installation, my mother died. 

Two other people hung the work while I zoned in and out. 

White wall, from left to right: Prairie Schooner, Boat at Hagg Lake, Dogwood Hill, and TV Nature Park (looking south). Collectively known as “Hymn to Summer.” BJ stealth commenter The Lodger is standing at the far left inspecting the hang. We thank Emily Craft, of the Washington County Library System, for her help. 

Introducing the Works 

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PhaedrusOnBass – Murdering the Classics!

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Let’s give a warm welcome to PhaedrusOnBass!

Hello! This is PhaedrusOnBass (Ethan McCaffrey), inveterate lurker and occasional commenter on this wonderful site. I’ve been invited to share details on my music project’s latest release, so here they are.

Audiot Savant grew out of several bands in the Sacramento CA area in the late 1990s-early 2000s. In 2006, my vocation took me away from home often, so I had to give up the bar band thing. A couple of years later, my guitarist friend Chris Plescia and I started messing around recording songs in Chris’s garage. By 2010, we had enough material that we decided to self-publish a CD called “Work in Progress,” an all-instrumental album.

We worked through the 2010s producing more music, learning the techniques of record production and getting better at songwriting. We enlisted the help of a few friends as well to round things out. The biggest change for us was going from working together to always working apart, since I moved away from California five years ago. We now use Dropbox and Zoom to collaborate, and still create good music (at least we think so). “Murdering the Classics” is the fifth release from this project, released March 1, 2024.

Our musical influences are all over the place, and Chris and I are different enough that the music draws from both our eclectic tastes. We don’t do this for money. We just want to learn more about music production and continue to have fun exploring songwriting and playing music. We are not a “playing” band* due to our separation, but we still have a good time.

You can find our music on all major platforms worldwide. Here are a few links:

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/5QAa43IB5QqfweFFI4B2q7

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3h4qUIkfBTPBClQpDn6jxA

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/music/player/artists/B00D3HX8II/audiot-savant

Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/audiot-savant/655153810

Website: https://writeethan.com/music/

If you subscribe to Spotify, Amazon, or Apple, the music is included with your subscription. YouTube plays are free to all. Yes, I did say we don’t do this for money, but if you feel inclined to throw us a few shekels, you can purchase the full CDs on Amazon or Apple.

Please check us out, and we hope you like what you find!

* Well, we did play one gig…with the help of some friends…in 2017…in another friend’s backyard…

 

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