Demonic Progress

6 Weird Things About Me

Petula tagged me with this.... :D

Hmmm, 6 weird things about me... god, I barely know 6 *things* about me, heh heh. Let me think.

Okay.

1. My fingers are double jointed and can bend backwards.

2. My two favorite spectator events to watch live, in person, are opera and hockey.

3. I learned to program in Fortran in the late 70's. I made a program that caused a printer to print an ASCII version of a Playgirl magazine centerfold. You can see similar ones here. (It's under "People" in the menu on the left.... in the category "Naked Women".) The instructor liked it. (Sorry to any of my family members who may be shocked at this, heh heh :::blushing:::)

4. I hand coded all the html for the Unique One website (not the catalog part).

5. Two of my hobbies besides knitting (which is, I guess, not really a hobby anymore) are geology and astronomy. I especially love graptolites and was excited to learn my hometown of Portage is in a critical graptolite area. There used to be a certificate hanging in the town office stating so. And, I own a dee-luxe Meade ETX125 reflector telescope as well as a sweet pair of Bushnell binoculars that my husband gave me for Christmas.

6. When I got out of high school I wanted to join the Navy, but they wouldn't let women on ships back then. I thought, what's the point??? heh heh

Hungry?

You may have been told, when young, not to play with your food. Now, where's the fun in that??? Here are a couple of fun food links... food is fun!

• Click here to see a list of 14 Odd Deep-Fried Foods! There are both savory choices, like deep-fried macaroni & cheese and deep-fried pickles and (major yuck) deep-fried cicadas..... and sweet choices, like deep-fried Coca-Cola (note to Tracy TTB: I bet you could do it with Dr. Pepper, too), and deep-fried cheesecake. Yum yum!

• Once you have recovered from the above, you can learn How to Calculate Pi by Throwing Frozen Hot Dogs! Hmmm... this is not only fun, but also useful. You can also substitute any long, thin, straight food like celery sticks, if you are on a diet! Or use knitting needles if you are fasting! Fun, fun, fun!!!

Yarndemon, bringing you sometimes useful information nearly daily (stop laughing) since 2004!

If You Hate Gnomes, Keep Reading

Some people just do not have enough to do.....

How to Kidnap a Garden Gnome

Learn the art and technique of "gnomenapping" a garden gnome from your friend's home or garden.

Who Is Hubert?

Here is today's mystery:

I found this little guy out on the internet and he followed me home..... he doesn't say much. But he lives here.

Dang. I already broke Rule 1. *sigh*

Extreme Crochet

Carol Hummel has crocheted a tree cosy:

(Thanks to Robyn Miller for this pointer, on his blog.)

The Sheep Market

Well this is kind of interesting, in a "why?" kind of way.

You can click here to visit "The Sheep Market". Move your cursor around the ten thousand miniscule dot-like things in the bottom half of the page, which prove to be ten thousand highly-miniaturized sheep drawings. When you find one you like, you can click on it to select it. Then, you can watch it being drawn in the box at the top of the page. If it really is the sheep you want, you can buy it as part of a set of "collectable" adhesive stickers. Or, you can send it to someone, by email I presume -- although I couldn't get that feature to work (I'm using Mac OSX and Safari; I suspect it works in Firefox or on a PC).

I picked sheep #8655. He's my best buddy, now:

Oh, and by the way -- I took the Unique One Spring Newsletter to get copied today, so it will go out in the mail on Thursday or Friday! Look for it soon! E-mail me (look at the upper right corner of my blog, there ya go) if you want to be added to the mailing list. By Friday I should also have the online version available for you to read on the Unique One website (click "Our Current Newsletter" when you go to the Unique One web site.)

But Is It Art???

We all grew up with those cool paint-by-numbers kits, right? Nasty-smelling little pots of oil in mostly ugly colors, with maybe that one pretty turquoise or bright red whose use in the picture was never demanded as often as we would have liked. Remember having to stir up the paint, getting all that odorific oil blended into the pigment? Yeah, those were the good old days.

Kids today, though, they do things different. Here's a link to a place where you can order a Chew By Number art kit -- instead of painting or coloring in the picture, you chew different flavors of gum and then spread the gum around in the numbered spaces to create the picture. The website also has a handy list of Top 10 Reasons to Chew Gum. A quote from the web page:

"These kits allow kids to create vibrant artwork by chewing tasty wads of gum and spreading the chewed gum onto the ChewByNumbers art board. Each kit teaches project planning skills and helps develop fine motor skills, concentration, and creativity. Meanwhile, kids enjoy every step of the artistic process. Art has never tasted this good.

Chew and spread gum for fun by trying a ChewByNumbers GumArt kit today!!!"

Okay, so I am going to invent a Frog-by-Numbers Kit, where you unravel a Kaffe Fassett sweater that is making you unhappy, and use all the many colors of crinkly, wrinkly yarn to re-create The Last Supper. And I'm going to make a Top 10 Reasons to Unravel Projects You Hate, as a little extra for Frog-by-Numbers shoppers. :)

Re-arranging the Furniture

I've been moving stuff around on the blog. As you may have noticed over on the left margin, I've gotten rid of the "On My iPod" list in favor of a list of my favorite songs, constantly updated courtesy of Pandora.com. Under the list of songs is a link to Yarndemon Radio, which is a station I created on Pandora and which plays music that I like. Ostensibly. (Some of the artists I chose; some of the music played on the station is chosen by the Pandora software, based on the analyses of the Music Genome Project. You can make your own radio station. It's easy! and fun! I did it; you can too.

I think it's cool.

Thanks go to Stacy, who Must Get a Blog SOON since I appear to be talking about her all the time and could be linking to her.

So, unrelated to the entire rest of this post--
From the Off-the-Wall Department....here's a list of my 5 favorite things today:

1. Pandora.com.
2. Cute Bento boxes.
3. Camilla the Hen.
4. Wearable Animal Heads.
5. Food Sculpture.

Outknit Saddam!

.....from the Department of This Is Just Plain Weird:

You know how web pages have these interactive "games" that are really click-through ads? Usually they're something like "Shoot the rubber ducky and win a FREE IPOD!!!" or "Outrace the Lone Ranger and NEVER PAY INCOME TAXES AGAIN!!!". Usually I ignore them; they've become so ubiquitous, such a common site on the internet that they're not even visible to most of us, anymore. Until I saw this one:

I must say, it caught my attention. I did not click on the giant red "knit" button to try to outknit Saddam and win a free ringtone -- I have a hard enough time as it is, recognizing my ringtone as my phone, and I don't want the extra spam I'm sure I'd get by clicking through -- but I must say it was tempting. I would love to get one-a them dandy "KNIT" buttons, though. I'd get a lot more done if I had one!

Regarding the ad image: I can understand the Granny stereotype. Knitting will probably never be able to kick that one, despite some knitting blogs coming up in Google searches for phrases like "sexy ebony butts". But what the heck -- pairing up knitting with Saddam? Where did that come from? The designers must have been knitting with hemp yarn that day.

(ducking from Tracy & Tom)

(Seriously, hemp yarn is wonderful to knit with. We sell it at Unique One! You should knit with it! Make sure you outknit Saddam.)

:)