Movie Madness Monday: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

Ah, democracy.  It seems to be working out, for the most part, right?  Sure, sometimes the government shuts down for more than a week, but overall, this whole concept of representation to go along with our taxation is mostly working out.  In the spirit of democracy, I have two things for you.

First, I want to mention that Craftsy has opened their polls on your favorite bloggers in various categories like knitting and baking, two of my favorite things.  Check out all of the nominees and vote for your favorites.

Second, I have a recommendation for a classic, democracy feel-good film:

I remember watching 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington' in my high school government class.  I think we were supposed to be learning about politics and graft, but mostly I remember a lot of my fellow female students noticing how dreamy Jimmy Stewart is.  It's one of those self-evident truths that crosses generations.

But aside from that, this is legitimately just a fantastic film.  It's a simple story, not in a bad way, but in a universal way.  Smith is literally a boy scout, the good guy brought into the moral morass of D.C. unaware of the plots being hatched in the inky shadows of all of those patriotic monuments.  His idealism is played for laughs at the start, as the audience knows better than to expect politicians to be sincere.  That's even more true today, when cynicism is prized.  But I defy even the most sarcastic millennial not to be rooting Smith on by the end, and feeling a little glow of civic pride.

I'm pretty sure that part of the reason the filibuster remains a part of our system is because of the positive associations we have with it because of this movie.  Because no one wants to give up on the possibility of Mr. Smith showing up and saving the day with one.  So there's your lesson in democracy for today.  Watch this movie, vote for your favorite blogs, and then apply these same principles in something that actually matters to you.

Don't forget to check out more movie madness from Amaryllis Musings (hey, I recognize that movie!).

Inspiration Saturday: Royal baby shawls

Now, I'm not an avid royal-watcher.  I will admit to having a coffee cup commemorating William and Kate's wedding, but it's at least 50% ironic.  There's something nostalgic about having a little piece of memorabilia, it makes me think of lovely little old ladies in the UK with the full set sitting in their window on some faded white doilies.  And there's something kind of wicked about imagining what her face would look like if she saw me sipping instant coffee out of my delicate little mug.

So amongst the hubbub of the royal baby, I haven't been on tenterhooks, but I'm also not antagonistically cynical.  Especially when I saw one of the presents baby George will be receiving.  I don't know much about baby gifts, but I'm guessing that a lot of his are platinum and engraved.  At least one, though, is knit.

Apparently in 1982, William had a shawl specially designed, spun, and knit for him by Margaret Stove as his official gift from New Zealand.  The Summer 2013 issue of Spin Off has an article by Stove all about it.  For William's son, a shawl was again hand spun and knit, this time by Cynthia Read, but the design was one of Stove's:

Photo credit: Interweave

It's Filmy Fern, from her latest book, Wrapped in Lace.  It looks simply spectacular.  I don't know that I could ever attempt something like this, but I do love staring at it.  What does a baby do with a shawl like this?  I guess pretty much the same thing as me.

For more information about the shawl, there's a great blog post by Stove's granddaughter at Holland Road Yarn Company.  And as always, for more inspiration, go to Woolen Diversions.

One foot in front of the other

I feel a little ambivalent while writing this post.  On the one hand, I know that what I'm feeling is genuine, but on the other hand, I can't help that one of those feelings is a sense that they are so insignificant in comparison to the experience of others that they aren't worth typing.  But I just want to go ahead and get it out there.

Since I began losing weight, and even in previous attempts, counting my steps has always been a simple way to establish a baseline of activity that had no real limitations as far as when and where I could do it.  I have paced the length of my living room countless times, sometimes while knitting, to reach the magic number of steps at the end of a given day.

As fitness became a pursuit in and of itself outside of the means to weight loss, I took my steps to more interesting ground, from nature walks like the one I recently took at Enchanted Rock, to road race 5Ks like last year's Moonlight Margarita Run which I celebrated completion of with a cupcake.  I've run in nearly half a dozen 5Ks, and I've always enjoyed them.  There's a sense of accomplishment and camaraderie even when you participate alone, running alongside others and passing cheering spectators.  Both push me to run a little farther, a little faster.

I had been thinking about the Boston Marathon since Monday morning, when I found out that my boss' boss was running in it (he's fine, by the way).  I was thinking about how cool it would be to run in a marathon, much less one like Boston, London, or New York.  Running down Congress, passing the Paramount Theater and with the Capitol building in the background is pretty cool, but those cities would be amazing.  I was also thinking about what kind of training I might need to do to be able to get to a half marathon first.

The news broke for me when the hashtag bubbled up on Twitter, prompting me to click on some news links and turn the radio on.  My reactions included the same concern, horror, and inability to understand what motivates someone to do something like that which I expect most people felt.  But I also felt a particular twinge of empathy for these people who I admired for this particular effort, with whom I felt a bond, tenuous but existing.  A moment of accomplishment and pride was taken from them and replaced with fear, danger, and sadness.  It's not fair.  But then, it never is.

My connection to the world of runners is one mostly of admiration and aspiration.  And this may be the least important takeaway from yesterday possible, but it motivated me to make myself more of a runner.  It makes me want to join another 5K sooner rather than later.  And the next time I lace up my shoes, it's going to be one more thing that keeps me putting one foot in front of the other.

A Morning Edition of frustration

I try not to get overly political, because that's not the point here.  But this morning I experienced one of those annoyances that isn't about politics, it's just the reaction any time that you hear something that you know to be untrue.  It just happens to involve politics, so forgive me the faux pas.

I've taken to listening to NPR in the morning, taking in the day's news and generally easing into another work day.  This morning, there was, as there has been every morning since Todd Akin made his, umm, interesting comments, a report on the fallout.  The Family Research Council is one of the few standing behind him, and the head of their political action committee, Connie Mackey, came on to talk to Steve Inskeep about how partisan the media was, because while this blew up, no one had covered how Obama had said that men shouldn't be involved in any women's legislation.

Here's the thing: the comment she's referring to...I heard it.  On NPR.  It was covered, in fact it was covered in its full context rather than the extrapolation Mackey offered.  And thus, an angry tweet was born.

And just to emphasize the non-politics of my pet peeve, I had the same reaction when Michael Kors told a designer he didn't understand why he had put a turban on his model.  Michael, it was because he was in the bottom the week before, he was wearing a turban, and you told him you loved what he was wearing and that you wanted to see that style in his designs for the runway.  Did you mean 'slap a turban on your next look'?  Probably not, but don't pretend you have no idea where that came from.

See?  My irrational desire to yell at people who live in my electronic devices knows no limits.  We won't discuss last night's episode of Project Runway.  I'll just say: Ven has just as much trouble talking to/about real people as he does designing for them.  He should halt his attempts at either.

Marissa Mayer, Yahoo's new CEO (Cupcake Enthusiast/Obsessive)

For over a year now, I've been a regular listener of NPR, beyond just Car Talk and Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me.  I still love these programs of course, but they are like the dessert of public radio, and now I'm also enjoying my tasty veggies.  That might sound like a negative way to view the news, but let's not forget my enthusiasm for spaghetti squash.  So a comparison to vegetables is meant in the best possible sense.

That being said, even in the news, my mind is still on dessert.  More specifically, cupcakes.  Recently, Yahoo pulled of a kind of coup by hiring Marissa Mayer away from Google to be their new CEO.  I'm interested to see what she can do with the company, because she's the brains behind a lot of the Google features that I use everyday.  But what really caught my ear this morning as I was listening to the latest discussion of the move was the casually-included detail that Mayer has been noted for her love of cupcakes.

That's all I need to hear to go Googling.  Maybe after Mayer is done I'll be Yahoo-ing, but for now it's her former employer that I turned to to find this profile, published in 2008.  It's all about the qualities and quirks of a successful woman in Silicon Valley.  But this is all I need to know about Mayer:

Who else in Silicon Valley could report, with absolute seriousness, that she’d recently bought an array of cookbooks to study the cupcake recipes in each, created a spreadsheet for the ingredients, and then tested the recipes before writing her own? (She made another spreadsheet for frosting.)

Cupcakes and spreadsheets?  I love this woman.  Because the only thing that makes butter, sugar, and flour come together better is the excessive organization.  I've made spreadsheets for buying yarn and crafting for swaps, as well as for baking.  This makes me wonder why there's no 'Recipes' tab in Google when you search, like there is for 'News' and 'Images'.

And the application of logic to an ironically irrational level doesn't end there:

Mayer is an eager practitioner of the art herself. “I’ve always loved baking,” she says. “I think it’s because I’m very scientific. The best cooks are chemists.” In addition to creating her famous cupcake and frosting spreadsheets, she has analyzed all of the different paper linings available. “The problem with the silver ones,” she says in utter earnestness, “is that they seal the cupcake. You’ve got to go with the classic paper, which allows the cupcake to breathe.”

Because suffocating your baked goods is a crime, people!

I already knew that I wasn't the only quirky person out there.  The Sarah Lawrence campus was crawling with them, I'm always making friends with them on Ravelry, and heck, this is Austin.  But Mayer is the first example I've seen of this in the high ranks of the corporate world:

In many ways, Mayer is still that geeky, super-normal, enthusiastic girl. So it’s no surprise when we spend hours one day at—where else?—I Dream of Cake in North Beach. Mayer samples a piece of cake and says, “I’m a huge fan of frosting. Vanilla fudge is my favorite. It gives you brain euphoria.”

Granted, Silicon Valley is a little more open to 'brain euphoria' than Wall Street.  But it's still cool to see the kind of unapolagetic enthusiasm that nerdiness displays survive the real world rather than being something you have to grow out of.

Maybe Mayer is to cupcakes as Steve Jobs is to turtlenecks?  Except I don't think Steve really liked those turtlenecks all that much...