We went to the Renaissance Festival last weekend. For me, the best part was seeing glassblowing and lampworking (using a torch to heat and work glass) demonstrations. A couple years ago, I took a glass bead-making class–basically lampworking on a smaller scale. I haven’t practiced it much since, for lack of a […]
This guy is getting sympathy from various quarters, because of the execrable teaching he received as a chemical engineering student, but to me it sounds like he wasn’t cut out to be an engineer:
Reader, let us not dwell upon the endless problem sets, the wretched grades, and the weary nights spent screaming at my inscrutable […]
My first knitting needles were two broken Tinkertoy sticks. No wonder I am still making knitting needles from dowels and sticks. A quarter-inch dowel is the same diameter as a Size 10 knitting needle; a bamboo chopstick is about a Size 8. I need a longer pair of Size 10 needles for […]
We are big Apprentice watchers. We were going to watch the Martha Stewart Apprentice on Wednesday, but everything after the first glimpse of the Pastel Empire was pre-empted by local thunderstorm and tornado coverage.
So we just watched the Donald Trump one last night. A new twist this time is that the project manager […]
Thomas Sowell had some interesting comments on education a while back:
Let’s face it: Most of the teachers in our public schools do not have what it takes to develop high intellectual potential in students. They cannot give students what they don’t have themselves.
Test scores going back more than half a century have repeatedly shown […]
I was reading Who Stole Feminism? by Christina Hoff Sommers at the Rendezvous. Obviously I am a few years behind on my reading; I usually buy used books. This part is worth quoting:
The traditionally religious women of today, be they Protestant Christians, Orthodox Jews, or observant Catholics–emphatically do not think of themselves as […]
Ann Althouse discusses staying home to raise children:
I wonder whether the decision to become a one-earner family is more available to those at the highest income level. Maybe not. These people may be the most likely to get addicted to the money. And surely, they are most able to pay for nannies and other child […]
We spent most of this weekend playing Voyageurs at the North West Company Fur Post Fall Rendezvous re-enactment in Pine City. We decided to go only a few days ahead of time, and skipped the first evening and morning.
The best part was getting to see MFH in his cute Voyageur costume.
Our tent […]
Here they go again, with their silly belief that a fetus isn’t a baby or a person until it’s all the way out so the Humanity Fairy can properly tap its head with her magic wand and say, “Congratulations! You’re a real person now.”
Ew.
I’m reading Hand Knitting: New Directions, by Alison Ellen. My level of knitting skill is somewhere around “intermediate,” and I found many technically interesting things in the book that I want to try out.
One of them is to learn to knit both right-handed and left-handed; this makes it easier for patterns […]