MonthAugust 2007

An Eggscellent Idea

Knitted fried egg in a frying panKnitted fried egg in a frying pan

Earlier this afternoon, someone on our recycling blog Recycle This suggested using old frying pans to make fake food art.

I thought “hey! I’m THAT COOL too! I could do that!” so here is my knitted fried egg. John wanted to plastinate a real one but I thought knitting would be more fun. I used leftover white wool from knitting booties for John’s niece and the yellow wool is leftover after I knitted a stripey “bumble beeanie” hat for the man himself a few years ago. I used stuffing from an old cushion and the cardboard for the egg’s base is from a cereal pack.

The egg (which works as a really good frisbee because of the cardboard base) is just sitting in the pan at the moment but I’ll stick it in when I’ve got some velcro — and when I’ve knitted the accompanying sausages. Now, I just have to figure out how to do the beans…

(Click the close-up shot for a bigger version)

Quick tip for checking through your email spam folder

I thought this was quite a given way to do it but John seemed surprised by it when he saw me doing it once so I’ll document it here in case he’s not the only one who hasn’t thought of it yet:

When checking through your spam folder for false positives, sort by the Subject rather than the date or whatever – you can then instantly eliminate huge groups of the messages that have the same subject line or that all start with the word ‘Viagra’ etc. Makes it a lot easier to browse through and find those pesky real mails.

Films we’ve enjoyed recently

Everything's Gone Green posterEverything’s Gone Green
I used to love Douglas Coupland’s books, lu-huh-va-hah. I’ve passed the house’s “#1 Coupland fan” badge to John now but I still like some of his stuff, particularly his earlier books. He wrote the screenplay for Everything’s Gone Green and there are quite a number of Coup’ moments in the film – ones that just evoke the feeling of the books and things that seem to be directly borrowed from them.

Like in most of his (particularly later) books, the story of Everything’s Gone Green isn’t the best feature (it’s rather cliche in fact – nice boy gets seduced by the dark side but gives up the evil power for a girl) but the telling is great. Humorous scripting, fun characters and random asides that work well.

The photographs and colour tone of the film, along with the indie soundtrack, also help to create a wonderful texture – and we really, really want to go to Vancouver now.

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