Our Own Little Fashion Week

For Fashion Words, that is!  Today's word is:  flange.  In my innocence I have been erroneously referring to those extension-thingies on the backs of cars as 'flanges'.  Turns out they are spoilers. Anyway, isn't 'flange' a great word?  In the fashion world it can be applied to a collar, if the collar is 'spread out like a rim', or to the heel of a shoe if the heel flares out at the bottom.  Are we sensing a pattern?  Prepare for a 'spoiler'!  A flange shoulder has a pleat that extends out over the top of the sleeve.  Didn't see that one coming!  It's all so exciting!  What word will tomorrow bring?  I know, flange will be hard to top.  But I'll try.

Source: The fashion dictionary; fabric, sewing, and apparel as expressed in the language of fashion

Make It All from Polymer Clay

Jewelry! Coasters! Dolls!  Rocket Ships!  Fuzzy Slippers!  Guess which ones I lied about?  You could make, like, tiny rocket ships and fuzzy slipper charms, so maybe I wasn't lying at all.  Did you think of that?  No. Polymer clay is the modern crafter's wonder stuff.  Ahem.  "Polymer clay is made of tiny particles of polyvinyl chloride suspended in a plasticizer, which keeps it pliable until heated, when the particles fuse into a hardened, durable plastic."  OK then.  FIMO, one of the best-known brands, takes its name from the daughter of the inventor. Sophie Rehbinder-Kruse worked with her father Kaethe's clay, using it in mosaics, miniatures and other creations. The original moniker was FIMOIK, a combination of Sophie's nickname (Fifi), modeling clay and mosaic.  No explanation as to how a German girl got a French nickname.  Some questions just can't be answered.

Polymer Clay Craft Books
Source:  Polymer Clay A Modern Medium Comes of Age. 

Ornament, 2011, Vol.

as accessed through EBSCOhost.  DMPL card and PIN required for access.

34 Issue 4, p38-45,

Ice Fishing

Ice fishing!  I thought you got ice from the freezer.  Ha!  Comedy.  Someday it will get really cold and the lakes and rivers will freeze over and the wooly mammoths will return from the north and take all the fish.  Wait a minute!  Mammoths don't eat fish!  More for you.   Apparently you need a 'flasher' in today's ice-fishing milieu, which on the face of it seems farcical.  Then I discover that this flasher is a sonar-utilizing device.  It can tell you where the fish is, if it likes your lure, whether or not it has father issues...  Cheating or gadget-enhanced fun?  Who am I to judge?

Ice fishing : the ultimate guide

We Are Closed Today, but they're happy in Canada

All six locations of the Des Moines Public Library are CLOSED on Monday, October 10 for a Staff Inservice Day.  On the other hand, today is Thanksgiving in Canada.  So if you lived in Quebec you'd be sitting around a table eating Pissaladieres, tarts stuffed with onions, olives and anchovies.  Pay attention to your food when eating because you do not want these to sneak up on you.  Gougeres, home-made cheese puffs.  Yum.  Eat them while they're still warm.  Roasted Cauliflower Soup, not sure you'd like this?  The presence of lots of garlic and heavy cream might change your mind.  They're French, they're Canadian, and just like us they enjoy a big heavy meal on Thanksgiving. Good thing our Thanksgiving is coming up soon.  It will keep me from obsessing over the Gougeres.

Simple French recipes for the home cook
French food at home
Around my French table : more than 300 recipes from my home to yours

Licensed to Daydream?

Scientists say daydreaming is good for your brain.  See, I haven't bee wasting time.  I've been activating two vital brainage networks.  One aims the brain work toward goals, the other is more personal but can be goal-related because it's in charge of picturing yourself in the future, which is Very Important. According to an article in Discover magazine "The French mathematician Henri Poincaré once wrote about how he struggled for two weeks with a difficult mathematical proof. He set it aside to take a bus to a geology conference, and the moment he stepped on the bus, the solution came to him. It is possible that mind wandering led him to the solution." (Italics mine. I've always wanted to say that!)  Your brain does even better if you are so far gone that you are unaware of your surroundings!  Don't try this in the car, kids.  Because we are also more prone to make mistakes while in this state.  We're looking for the Aha!, not the Oops!.

Source:  The Brain.  Author:  Zimmer, Carl;  Discover; Jul/Aug2009, Vol. 30 Issue 7

It's a Crime!

We have more true crime books than you can shake a shovel at.  Do you know how many titles we have written by Ann Rule, the queen of the genre?  Well?  Do you?  Two dozen at least.  So you can pretty much wallow in Ann Rule should you so desire.  We have true crime books by many other authors as well!  Diane Fanning is off to a good start with four titles.  Now there is a book about the crime that Iowa write Susan Glaspell made famous.  Midnight assassin : a murder in America's heartland / Patricia L. Bryan & Thomas Wolf, is all about the axe murder of  Indianola farmer John Hossack.  If you're interested in more of an encyclopedic approach, you have: The most notorious crimes in American history, and the granddaddy of them all,  Bloodletters and badmen by Jay Robert Nash.

Other possibilities:  books in St. Martin's True Crime Library

But What Else Can I Do With That?

We have a nifty new book entitled Real simple : 869 new uses for old things.  It's fun to browse! You can look up any Old Thing.  An odd use for dryer sheets:  if you have baked-on crud in your pan slap on the old dryer sheet, soak overnight and wipe out!  Another: if you have crud on the surface of your iron you can iron a dryer sheet on a low setting and remove said crud.  It's the crud-master! Did you forget to clean out that vase once you removed the old flowers and icky water?  I know I did! Antacid tablet to the rescuuueww- pour water in that vase, drop in the tablet then swirl it around after a few minutes and rinse.  Dental floss - pull it tight and push it through to cut cheesecake or soft cheese.  For all those times when you have cheesecake and floss but no knife.  What will they think of next?  Do I shudder?  Maybe.

You Too Can Know Jack

Have you met Jack Vance?  As far as I'm concerned, Science Fiction writer Jack Vance has more imagination in his pinkie than most writers do anywhere in their whole entire body.  Ear lobes, love handles, second-to-biggest-toe, you name it.  Not there.  Imagination-free zones, they are.  In the Blue World of vast oceans people live on floating 'islands' made of enormous rush mats and the only metal they have is copper they boil down from blood!!!  Vance is funny too - Cudgel the Clever  is not only anything but clever, he is an extremely unreliable narrator.  Cudgel's not stupid, just deluding himself.  Then there's the Dying Earth, one of SF's most original constructs.  Set so far in the future that the sun is fading, these stories center on the return of magic and on cultures fleeing into decadence.  Pick your Vance.  Take a chance on Vance.  Ask Vance to the dance.  Well, now I'm just being silly.

Jack Vance books

Icky Science Experiment

In my day if you needed a science experiment you grew a plant from a seed and drew a poster that charted the growth.  The experiment (mwha ha ha) I share here is new to me and almost as cool as mixing up your own Blob.  Make a paste out of cornstarch and vegetable oil then put some on a spoon and put the spoon next to a balloon that you have rubbed on your noodle until the balloon is nice and static-y.  Start to pour the goop out of the spoon and it will reach for the balloon like a tongue!  Super Revolting! The cornstarch mix gets thicker too.  There must be some way to work this into a Haunted House.

Source:  Spectacular science : exciting experiments to try at home
The Blob