Fair Isle -- Knitting

The first thing you have to learn in Fair Isle knitting is -- knitting!
There are two stitches in making knitwear, the knit and the purl.  You will mostly use knit in Fair Isle knitting, because you knit in the round.
There is a great video that will show you the knit stitch, and also a technique for weaving the yarn in on the back so you don't have long stretches of yarn ("floats") that catch at buttons and fingers and pull the sweater out of shape.

https://www.philosopherswool.com/Pages/Twohandedvideo.htm

Watch how Ann holds the yarn, first.  Now copy how she picks up the yarn.  It's about 1/3 of the way into the video.

Turn your right hand, palm up;
Run your pinkie under the yarn;
Now twist your wrist so that the yarn makes a ring around your pinkie;
Put your two middle fingers over the yarn;
Slip your index finger under the yarn and keep it near the fingernail;
Hold the needle between your thumb and index finger.
The yarn around your pinkie and under your middle fingers will maintain an even tension that will keep the stitches the same size. 
The piece of yarn from the needle to your index finger should be very short as the video shows.

NOW.  Put your ball of yarn on your left side and watch what Ann does in the video.  It is a very quick way to knit once you get used to it. 
Slide the right needle point under the loop of yarn and bring the point up in the middle of the first stitch on the left needle.  The right needle point can rest against the right side of the left needle and has to poke out just a little bit beyond it.
Slide the point of the right needle over the yarn, then tilt it down so it can grab the yarn.
Use that right point to pull the yarn through the loop of the stitch on the right side of the left needle point.
Your right needle will rest on top of the left needle with the new stitch around it.
Now lift the right needle and the old stitch up over the end of the left needle point.  The old stitch will be looped around the base of the new stitch that you made on the right needle.

This takes some practice but it is actually faster, when you get used to it, than the way Americans usually learn to knit. 
Continue on around all the stitches on the needle until you get back to your length of waste thread or marker, whichever you are using.  Keep doing this until you get used to it.  Don't worry about anything else because until you get this technique right, nothing else will work.  The most important thing is to learn to keep the tension even.  If your practice knitting has different sized stitches, keep practicing until they are all the same size because the different sizes come from different tensions on the yarn. 

Make sure to snug up to the needle and that the yarn is not slack as it runs over or under your fingers, or it will produce large stitches.

Or if it leaves dents on your fingers (or worse yet cuts off your circulation) you'll produce small stitches and your hand will get tired because the tension on the yarn is too high. 

Next lesson will be the purl stitch and you'll learn how to do ribbing.


© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Outdoors -- oh great!

So I promised yesterday I would let you know about today's deep freeze but it's what I learned on the radio yesterday ABOUT the deep freeze that I want to share with you.

Today's weather is thanks to the melting of arctic polar ice.

Today's weather is going to be more frequent in future as that ice continues to melt. 

When the ice melt in summer is unusually high, today's weather is more likely.  Study up on the polar vortex for more information.

The melt in summer of 2013 was the second highest value ever measured.  The year of Snowmageddon (February 2010) happened after the highest value ever measured, which occurred in 2009.

So we have to stop polar ice from melting.

There are two and only two reasons why ice melts.  One is that temperatures go up.  That would be global warming.  As the polar ice melts, it also dilutes the water's saltiness.  Dilution means the polar water has less salt per mass of water when the ice melts than when it freezes.  So as the ice continues to melt, the chances of the ice melting more increases.  So the chances of more weather like today's goes up.

Oh yeah, I promised you two reasons.  Well, the second is that the pressure on the ice rises.  The pressure is a measure of force and pouring force onto the ice is the equivalent of pouring heat onto it.

Now a question for those who don't believe global warming is real.  If global warming isn't real, then there's no reason for the polar ice to melt except that world air pressure is rising.  If you can show me scientific observations of increases in air pressure at the poles, then I will give up global warming.  If you can't, then global warming has to be taking place.

Buy long johns.  And an ice maker -- solar powered, of course.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Garden -- rain

This will be a shorty.  My yard got a couple of inches of snow last week and today it is all melting in the rain.  This is good.  November and December were pretty dry.

I'll let you know tomorrow how things are, because we'll be getting our share of the deep freeze by then.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

DIY -- Gravy

Gravy is not easy -- unless you know the tricks.

In the Salisbury steak post, I had you make gravy the quick way, with cornstarch.  Now I'm going to teach you the classic way, the French way, which also works for chicken and other meats.

Start two hours before you plan to serve whatever you will put the gravy on.  Roast your chicken or other meat and pour the drippings into a bowl.  If it's chicken, you should also boil the giblets for half an hour in at least a cup of water.  Pepper it lightly.

At least an hour before you plan to serve, make your roux.
Chop one onion and half a carrot finely and sauté in 2 TABLESPOONS of oil, margarine, or butter (I cook kosher so I would not use the butter) over 2 1/2 heat, no higher.   You can also add 4 diced mushroom caps, half a stalk of celery chopped, or a piece of green bell pepper the size of your palm diced fine.  Or all of them!

It's done when the onion starts to look transparent instead of white or yellow.

Now add 2 TABLESPOONS of flour and stir to coat the vegetable.  Keep stirring until the mixture is only slightly damp.  The roux is done.

Now add your broth made from the drippings or giblets and stir thoroughly.  Taste and add pepper if you want.  Leave the lid off and let this simmer -- bubbling slightly -- for at least half an hour.  It should be thicker.  Let it simmer another half hour.  If it isn't nice and thick -- and the quantity will be less by this point -- you can use the cornstarch mix if you want.

So why not just go the cornstarch route with the drippings and giblets and forget all this work?  It's fine by me, I'm no snob.  I'm just here to show you that you can avoid the chemicals in the canned gravy and the money you pay for the manufacturing of the chemicals, the gravy, and the packaging and get a superior product, if you DIY.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking -- Stare Decisis

Are you starting to get the drift?

First, Jewish law has many principles in common with American law. 

It has Equal Protection. 

It says you don’t have the right to touch somebody, no matter what the social status of either of you. 

It says that tit for tat is no way for a society to run.

It has the concept of battery and requires that the hitter pay damages to the hittee.

It says quarrels should be worked out in the court, not in the street.

It says that officials of the court cannot be taken to court when they are acting in their official capacity.

The rules are all there.  It took the connections of identical words to bring them all together.

This is a concept in Jewish court practice (forensic argument) called gezerah shavah.  When verses in Torah use identical words, they are related in some way, and comparisons between them will show what the relationship is.

On the other hand it is a two-edged sword.  Maybe the “your eye” and the tachat wording meant that Judaism DOES have LT.  That’s where the verse in Leviticus comes in.  It says “you shall have one law”.  How can you have one law when you use LT?  You can’t.  That’s another principle in Jewish court practice called “when two verses seem to contradict each other, if you can find a third verse it might reconcile them.”  Leviticus also has the tachat wording, and it casts its vote for damages instead of LT because that’s the only way to have one law.

Now let me point out that American law also uses gezerah shavah.  I have a legal studies degree, and I had to take a basic and an advanced class in legal writing.  One of the things we were taught was when writing a brief, you find cases that were already decided that have as many of the same facts as your case, except for the names of people and the places, dates and times.  Then you see how those cases came out.  If the majority of them came out the way you want your case to come out, and they have similar wording, then you use that wording in your own brief, where applicable, and then you give the name of that case. 

The reason you do that is another situation of fairness.  If two people do the exact same thing, and get hauled into court, how is it fair if one of them gets off and the other gets punished?

Judges like to make the same decisions when all the facts are the same except for names, places, dates and times.  It’s called stare decisis.  It means “the decision stands.”  It’s fair, and it makes people feel reassured to know they are going to get treated fairly in court compared to others who have done the same thing. 

Jewish law practices stare decisis just like American law.


Next question?

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Bit at a time Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 1:3

Genesis 1:3

ג וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים יְהִי־אוֹר וַיְהִי־אוֹר:

Transliteration: Va-yomer elohim y’hi or va-y’hi or.

Translation:    Gd said Let light exist and light existed.

Letters in this lesson: 

Vocabulary in this lesson:

יֹּאמֶר	he said
יְהִי	Let X exist
אוֹר	light

 Pop quiz:  what gender is or, light?

Right, and this was not a trick quiz.   

Get to know this first vocabulary word.  Tattoo it on your mind.  You will see it over and over.   

The root is alef mem resh.  The binyan is paal.  Normally this form would be taken as a masculine third person singular future tense. 

BUT  Biblical Hebrew is also one of those languages that has a form called the aorist.  That’s a past tense that looks as if it’s a future tense.  You will see the normal future tense, and I will point it out when we get there.  There is no more aorist in modern Hebrew. 

So now we have two types of past tense and why use one or the other?  Well, I’m never going to teach you to write Biblical Hebrew, but I will tell you what to watch out for.  

The normal past tense is used for things a long time ago or things so conclusively over that you might as well call it a perfect tense.  That’s why bara is in the past tense in the first verse.  

The aorist is for things that happened in the past, but it often gives the idea of something done immediately in the past, or quickly.  When you read about the Binding of Yitschaq (Isaac to you), you will see that when Avraham and Yitschaq get to the place, the sequence of events is all in the aorist.  It’s as if Avraham took a deep breath and did it all in a rush so he would get it over without stopping to think about it.  I can’t think of any sequence of events like that, which ISN’T in the aorist but if I’m wrong, I’ll point it out when we get there.

Now let me point something out that is probably going to scramble your brains unless you’ve had a good Jewish education, just all in English.  This is the first time Gd has said “Let X exist.”  All this other stuff exists already, but Gd didn’t say “Let them exist.”  I don’t know why that is, but what I do know is that Jews do not believe that this first story in Genesis is about the order in which the world came into existence.  They don’t believe that’s the point of the story.  The point of the story is not that it says there were six days and this happened one day and that happened the other.   

Somebody on an Internet discussion group where I hang out said a really sharp thing and I think he said where he got it but I don’t remember now.  What you have to understand about creation isn’t how long it took.  That’s irrelevant.  Most of all, it’s irrelevant to Gd.  Gd is eternal.  Our lives blink out before you would think He would notice.  At the same time, He has infinite knowledge.  He does know who we are and what we’re going through, down to the last detail.  Our lives are over so quickly from His point of view, that it’s the same thing as if He knows exactly what we’re going to do next, because we’ve already done it from His point of view.  The same thing is true for the universe.  It will blink out of existence so quickly, from Gd’s point of view, that He knows exactly what is going to happen when it is still a year, a decade, a century, a millennium in our future. 

So from Gd’s point of view, it’s pointless to argue whether there were six 24-hour periods or 14.5 billion years until the universe got to where you and I exist.  But I’ll have something to say about those six days in a future lesson.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved 

OB more definitions

This is a throwaway, we'll be back to the pages tomorrow.

Anyway if you read my summaries of my English translation of the transcript from the Mendel Beilis blood libel trial -- and you had to read all of them -- you came across the phrase "the right half of the brain isn't talking to the left half."  You could probably call it a version of the Latin phrase I also used, "mutatur nomine, de te fabula narrator" (Horace, Satires, Book I, Satire I), of which a later version is Freudian projection.

This comes up because of a recent tweet.  The message totally applied to the sender, who believed it only applied to the sendee.

Analysis:  The sender's only good point was having the courage to tweet instead of sending a message to email, but still, it was a piece of bullying, on a tweet conversation about the philosophy of a person who surely would condemn bullying.  So the sender is somebody who is only involved in the conversation to be involved in the conversation, not somebody who believes in the philosophy in the context of which the tweet was sent. 

What about you?  Are you doing this just to do it, or because you want to help people?  You can't do that on Twitter.  My niece and I agree that you can't say anything deep or meaningful in 144 characters -- especially if there is more than one person to whom the response will go, which subtracts from how many characters you have to communicate with.

It's like speed dating, you won't get anything from it unless you date the same person more than once in a non-speed way.  Just showing up doesn't count.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved