Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 98

The Providence Granola Project

My friend dudeshoes told me about a nonprofit that employed refugees to make granola. My first thought was, Yay! welcoming refugees! Followed by ... Making granola? It seemed sort of out of left field.

But then I asked myself, what kind of project would I imagine that would be better? I had some inarticulate sense that the project should highlight refugees' own cultures--but that's a tall order if you're bringing together people from many different countries. You want common ground. Granola is...

frost departing

You've probably seen patterns of frost on windows. Frost on glass makes little meadows and forests, or elaborate feather patterns.

I noticed that frost also makes patterns on the concrete sidewalk blocks near here. What I saw was not the frost itself but the pattern it lay down, visible in its melting:

Flowers


ferns


pines


coral

Push it to the limit

Since I'm sharing family fun...
We used to watch the Simpsons every Sunday. Sometime in the last few years, we lost that habit, and as a consequence, I didn't know about a recent awesome couch gag, featuring Simpsons characters drawn comic-book style in a 1980s, Miami Vice-style story, set to the song "Push It To The Limit," from Scarface.

Here are some fun screencaps:

Hero Homer, who fights crime in partnership with his couch, which is sort of like the car in Knight Rider


Villain Ned Flanders, w...

A few card pairs

Just so you can see how much fun the script of Warriors of the Wind is, consider the following pairs (ETA: not all are dialogue pairs--only the third and fifth are actually exchanges between people; the other three are one person speaking):

--I never saw so much pollution
--You couldn't cut it with a chain saw [note: the people saying this manifestly do not have chain saws]

--Let's teach these insurgents a lesson in crowd control
--Drop a bomb on them!

--Are you going to boil me in oil or burn me...

a card game

In Japan at New Year's, one traditional pastime is to play a poetry matching game involving the Hyakunin isshu, a collection of 100 highly regarded poems from the classical period. I've never actually played it, but it's done by reading out the first portion of the poem and then having people compete to be the first to grab the card that completes the poem (... except when I look online it seems that maybe what you're grabbing is just a version of the poem with an illustration? ... Not sure h...

the cat's novel and the escaping flame

The cat, like everyone else in the household, likes to express himself in writing. Unfortunately, he is like the proverbial caffeine-addled college student who writes the entire exam on one line:



(Also he has a tendency to scrawl and use abbreviations, and none of us is fluent in Cat. Poor guy. He is a poorly understood genius.)

Now this candle flame. It knew its life was guttering out, so you see what it's doing? It's trying to make a break for it--out of the bottle candlestick. If ... I can j...

Post two of two: awesome headdresses

The other day I found out that the Daasanach people of Ethiopia make gorgeous headdresses using bottle caps. I've always liked bottle caps: they're pretty colors, nice shapes, and they make a great noise. I like pretty much any art that uses them, and self adornment? Brilliant.

They give a sense of abundance and joy. Here are a couple of examples:


Source

This I like because the beads remind me of acorns--a headdress combining acorns and bottle caps is fabulous.


Photo by the talented Eric Lafforgu...

Post one of two: Shadow Mountains

At this time in the morning, the shadows of the tiny bits of snow we have cast huge. It's like looking at the Guilin Mountains.

Guilin Mountains, photo by Hiroji Kubota, from this site


See?



Can't you imagine wandering there, with your sturdy pack horse carrying your porcelain tea set and some charcoal, so that when you tire, you can sit down, make a fire, brew some tea, and watch the sky and the mountains?

That thing where

You dip into a book, and the part you read happens to be an iconic part of the story.

... I don't actually know if the part I read is iconic, but I bet it is. I just bet.

The book, which I've never read, is Angela's Ashes. The healing angel has to read it for school and doesn't want to, so I said, We'll read 20 minutes tonight. (That was last night.) Then this afternoon when he got home from school, I quit work for ten minutes to read another little bit. Yesterday the two brothers had to pick u...

A few more angels

I got the idea when talking to sovay of doing a Minoan angel. When I went looking for reference images, I found some of browngirl 's beautiful pictures--your art is so lovely, browngirl !

The most salient feature of Minoan women's costumes (the open fronts) doesn't show on the angel because her arm is up, and she's in profile:



To showcase (sort of?) that portion of female anatomy, I turned one angel into a mermaid--the wing is her tail fin:



Here's what the painting supplies look like, btw:



And her...