Lord Whimsy is looking for a picture of a greyhound:
I need a relatively hi-res image of a greyhound. It cannot be an image protected by trademark or copyright, as it will be used for reproduction.
I don’t know that my readers are more likely than his to own or know a gazehound, but I think it may be a possibility. You can email him at email -at- lordwhimsy.com – tell him I sencha.
I’ll have one of these:
*
and one of these:
*
and one of these:
*
Semi-seriously, I wonder how expensive the bell jars are.
via Making Light.
Also – do not miss the most recent Curious Expeditions post – Austrian/Bavarian hunting charms. Fantastic!
You just never can tell. Sometimes the most inauspicious starting point doesn’t matter – great things happen anyway. I offer, as an example, one of my favorite Who albums: Quadrophenia. Strike one – rock opera. Strike two – joined at the hip to an attempt to market a conceptually valid, but technically unfeasible, package of hardware and content: quadraphonic sound. What should have been a gimmick turned out to be great stuff. Per Pete “Tear my nails off windmilling” Townshend:
Pete Townshend now looks back on the album with great praise. “The music is the best music that I’ve ever written, I think and it’s the best album that I will ever write.” *
Why post on The Who now? VH1 is going to show a Who documentary this Wednesday: Amazing Journey: the Story of The Who. Seeing the promo pictures got me thinking about them again – especially poor, self-destructive Keith (I looked at the photo credits, just in case).
One major quibble w/ the youngsters at VH1 – they describe a bit of Who iconography as, “classic The Who target”. Sorry, whippersnappers, my understanding is that the ‘target’ is more appropriately called an RAF roundel.
I ride a G S scooter with my hair cut neat,
Wear my wartime coat in the wind and sleet.
Like I said – World War II was still echoing loudly in 1960s Britain…
“Yes. Your breath and a buffalo fart.”
With that bit of juvenilia, we kick off a feature I’ve had rattling around in my head for some time now. Out in the world of stuff, there are objects that go together perfectly and create mental images more interesting and exciting than one would expect from simple addition (n.b. – with all due respect to Bucky, I refuse to use the s-word).
Because of the time I’ve spent recently in the southern edge of the great circumpolar boreal forest, I’m going to start with two things that mean north woods to me:
The crooked knife.
*
I don’t remember where I first encountered the crooked knife – maybe McPhee’s Survival of the Bark Canoe – but since then I’ve run across them in places that make me think of cedar swamps, balsams, sphagnum, and tussock-hopping. The Hudson’s Bay Company museum in Montreal has a couple nice examples, I saw one in Old Town, but – sad to say – I don’t have one yet. If you want to know more, Mocotaugan: The Story and Art of the Crooked Knife is available on line.
Tumplines.
*
Tumplines are not unique to the north woods; people all over the world use them for carrying burdens. That being said, for me they mean one thing – portaging. You can rig them on canoes – especially useful if you are paddling an old wood and canvas canoe which may not have perfectly placed thwarts (the builder assuming tumpline use anyway) – wannigans, pack baskets, barrels, you name it.
There are other things that go along with this dynamic duo: a decent axe, a pole, the afore mentioned wannigan and packbasket, a freighter pack frame (with a fresh moose rack and cape on it), a reflector oven with a pan of bannock cooking away. Woo-hoo – still plenty of time to go canoeing – the water around here isn’t close to freezing over.
