Knitting -- V-neck in houndstooth in the round

So before I get to the last two buckets on my list, here's one that doesn't require any new techniques.

Here's a houndstooth chart; there are others on the web. According to my research, they all seem to be flipped right to left compared to commercial fabric designs; so sue me, at least I'm not violating a corporate trademark.

Get two colors of yarn with high contrast that don't actually make your eyes bleed, and do a swatch to see how this works. Start with worsted, then do another swatch in a lighter yarn to see which you prefer. This can be worked using Fair Isle weaving-in techniques so it can work in the round. You'll want to block it carefully; remember those dimples in my first Argyle attempt?

This chart will fit 4 times each, front and back, on 192 stitches. However, using Fair Isle weaving in to avoid floaties, there will be less give. Cable on at least 208 stitches, which makes 13 per side of the little 8 x 8 motifs, and then make sure to center one of the motifs on the front.

If you're making a vest, use the dark or neutral color for the edging of the V, the armholes, the hem ribbing, and the neck.

If you're making a coat or jacket in bulky, I would say do houndstooth on the sleeves but if you're making a pullover, do just the body. You can do steeking across the armholes of a pullover but I would work them without steeking in a coat or jacket.

When you get to the armpits, for a vest, work the armholes like you did for the sleeveless top, except that you want to work them, not in houndstooth, but in your neutral or dark color. Do the back first and get that out of the way so you can concentrate on doing the front correctly.

First run a yarn from outside to inside in the middle of the front. Now work the first 30 rounds with the selvaged armholes, drawing your marker with you so you don't lose track of it. End on a purl row.

Now on the knit row, do the armhole, then knit toward the center marker. Stop 7 stitches before it. Do slip 1/k1/psso, then work the edging as p2/k3.

Turn, work the edging as k2/p1/k2, then slip 1 purlwise/p1/psso, and work back out to the armhole. Keep going like this to the shoulder and stop decreasing when you have 25 stitches counting the armhole but not the vee edge stitches.

Turn inside out and knit together the edging of the armhole and the shoulder up to but not including the edging of the vee. Put the edging stitches on the holder where you have the stitches from the back with the active edge. Finish the other side of the front and do the other shoulder the same way.

Now you have 5 stitches of the vee edging from one side on one needle, and the active back stitches and vee edging from the other side on a different needle. We're going to work with this second needle first.

Use the technique for attaching a border to a live edge of lace. Cast on 5 stitches to the needle with your back stitches, work k3/p1 back to the active stitches at the neck and p1 into the stitch.

Now flip this up, knit into the next active stitch and k1/p1/k2 out to the end of the vee. Turn and work k3/p1 back, and so on.

Keep working back and forth, picking up each active stitch of the neck in turn, until you've worked together all the stitches of the back. Now sew together the edging of the neck on each side with the edging of the vee.
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When you're done, take a couple of stitches at the base of the V to stabilize it. If you made a vest, do the same at the bottom of the edging for the armholes.

So here's my dove-and-red vest in worsted with dove around the hem, armholes, V and neck. And yes, the bottom rib is flipped up in this photo.

And so another classic clothing pattern goes in the books for knitting yourself tops, scarves, socks (if you dare) and even coats if you use a bulky yarn (and make it a Superwash while you're at it).

Fact-Checking the Torah -- vivid, action-packed

Back to Olrik’s definitions, standards, and principles.

Olrik realized that oral narratives cannot survive if they overly stress the narrators’ memories, and therefore they have to be expressed in ways easy to remember.  This is the basis of the Epic Laws and strictly delineates orally transmitted material from what originates in writing.

First, oral narratives at their fullest have a pictorial quality that isn’t necessary for written narratives.  Written narratives survive as long as the medium, and the tale can be put aside and returned to many times before the reader finishes with it.  An oral narrative stresses the audience’s attention, and the narrator’s voice, and has to be wound up before everybody falls asleep or the narrator gets a sore throat.

So it has to be brief and active, not long-winded and descriptive.  Oral narratives have to be told during the short time that the listeners can spare from subsistence activities and sleep.  The narratives involve behavior related to the culture, and thus record actions.  As the culture shaped the narrative to satisfy the audience, it imposed the audience’s expectations on the story.  A character in an oral narrative always acts in culture-specific ways, an example being Gd obeying due process after Adam and Chavvah disobey a negative commandment which has the death penalty attached to it.

This feature coordinates with SWLT Rule 1 which says that a culture shapes its language to service the culture, and shapes its behavior around the expressions it uses.  The Gan Eden story not only embodies the principle of due process, it teaches the audience that due process has an ancient history and applied in the ancient past just as it applies “now” when the story is being repeated.  The term mot yumat (and its variants) is the key to this commonality.  It is a narrative illustration of the stare decisis beloved of judges, apparently thousands of years ago as well as now. 

Olrik refers to the Fjoort of Africa holding meetings where traditional stories are told.  Abrahams extends this to say that the Fjoort tell these stories when the meetings seem to be dealing with court cases, and Abrahams couldn’t understand why. 

What neither one seems to have realized is that if such stories are long-standing survivals, they embody cultural values that bear on the court cases.  Thus a story-telling session is a way of teaching and reinforcing values to be used in deciding the court cases. 

So oral narratives are short, vivid, almost pictorial, and embody ideas critical to the culture, acted out by characters who, sometimes in superlative degree as with heroes, embody the features the culture finds important enough to transmit.  Since they have to be short, oral narratives have to get to the point quickly and avoid anything that doesn’t influence the plot.  Besides, these details take up memory and don’t necessarily interest the audience, so both narrator and audience cooperate either to stop telling them or to stop demanding them, or the details get shunted off into another story that may then take on a life of its own.

But over the passage of time...

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Food for humans

Genesis 1:28-29

כח וַיְבָ֣רֶךְ אֹתָם֘ אֱלֹהִים֒ וַיֹּ֨אמֶר לָהֶ֜ם אֱלֹהִ֗ים פְּר֥וּ וּרְב֛וּ וּמִלְא֥וּ אֶת־הָאָ֖רֶץ וְכִבְשֻׁ֑הָ וּרְד֞וּ בִּדְגַ֤ת הַיָּם֙ וּבְע֣וֹף הַשָּׁמַ֔יִם וּבְכָל־חַיָּ֖ה הָֽרֹמֶ֥שֶׂת עַל־הָאָֽרֶץ:

כט וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֗ים הִנֵּה֩ נָתַ֨תִּי לָכֶ֜ם אֶת־כָּל־עֵ֣שֶׂב ׀ זֹרֵ֣עַ זֶ֗רַע אֲשֶׁר֙ עַל־פְּנֵ֣י כָל־הָאָ֔רֶץ וְאֶת־כָּל־הָעֵ֛ץ אֲשֶׁר־בּ֥וֹ פְרִי־עֵ֖ץ זֹרֵ֣עַ זָ֑רַע לָכֶ֥ם יִֽהְיֶ֖ה לְאָכְלָֽה:

Translation: Gd blessed them, Gd said for them fruit and multiply and fill the earth and take control of it and subjugate the fish of the sea and the flyer of the sky and all the wild animals that creep on the earth.

Gd said Now I have given you every plant making seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree that has fruit making seeds, it is yours for food.

Notice that instead of lemor, the purposeful speech, Gd simply says to people that they have everything that makes seed for food.

Well, what plant doesn’t make seed?

That depends on your definition of plant. In Blackman’s commentary on Mishnah Brakhot 6:3, he says that the phrase “growth is not from the ground” means, among other things, mushrooms. So you make a different blessing over mushrooms than over grain products, tree fruit, and vegetables. R. Blackman does not cite to Talmud or Mishneh Torah in saying this and so I have no clue how early Jews realized that mushrooms are not plants, but the Iyun Daf ha-Yomi site helped me find the citation in Babylonian Talmud Brakhot 40b. It is attributed to “rabbanan” which means it was of long standing by Talmudic times.

That was millennia later than this story.

Basically the permission applies to angiosperms, and to gymnosperms like the stone pine which has been used for food since Akkadian times. The provenance of the creation story might be in proto-Semitic times.  (If you want to argue Documentary Hypothesis, you need to see my blog first. Don’t want to? Blog your opinions on your site and send me a link.)

Science tells us, however, that the idea that humans originally ate only plant food dies a horrible death when you realize that a number of non-hominid primates eat animal food. Chimpanzees even hunt down animals cooperatively, much as the australopithecines probably did. Humans cannot make their own vitamin B12, unlike herbivores such as cattle; animal food is still our only bioactive source of this essential nutrient, which prevents dementia. Humanity’s most concentrated source of bioactive iron is also animal food, and it is essential to the health of breeding females who lose iron during menstruation.  (Only bats and elephant shrews menstruate; except for nectar/fruit bats, they eat animal food.)

We are not in the Garden of Eden yet, at this point in Genesis. 

Knitting -- ditching the plastic, saving the earth

Being a Jewish Princess, I got annoyed when I couldn't count on my local store to have the right color sponges for my kosher kitchen. So I decided to ditch the plastic sponges, the way I ditched paper hankies four years ago.

We color code our kitchens to make sure we keep them kosher; the colors help us avoid mixing meat and milk, and we always keep some dishes free of both meat and milk residue for flexibility. My bread-making utensils are in this last class.

So I'm knitting all-cotton dishcloths.

My color choices are going to make you nuts, though, if you keep kosher.

The yellow is standard for the neutral dishes.

But my meat dishes are Corell with a green pattern so I made green for those.

And instead of using the standard blue for dairy, I used red which is standard for meat. I was using pink because my every day china has a pink rose pattern, but my fancy English bone china is Royal Doulton Old Country Roses, with red roses on them.

Anyhoo.  Use a 100% cotton yarn for dishcloths; there are free patterns online. I used Dishie, which is worsted weight.

I picked a bunch of textured patterns hoping they would help with light scrubbing. Then I wove my free ends into the corners to use on intermediate scrubbing. I have steel wool pads for the hard stuff.

It took about 3 hours to knit a dishcloth. I bought 3 190-yard skeins in each color. Different patterns use different size needles, but with size 7 straight needles I got 5 stitches and 5 rows per inch, so on a 10 x 9 inch dishcloth, there are 51 stitches x 58 rows or about 2,960 stitches per dishcloth, nearly 6,000 stitches per skein. The point was to have 6 cloths, one for each day of the week, leaving plenty of time to wash and dry them. I don't wash dishes on Shabbat.

Dishcloths are a great way to learn knitting. The first pattern I used started out with five rows of knitting, then a row of mostly purl stitches. One of the things I did with this pattern was improve my ability to purl with the yarn in my left hand, continental style.

For towels, use Dishie with designs that have limited patterns of lines, or texture, or are flat and plain.

Use size 4 needles for 7 stitches and 7 rows per inch, 15 x 27 inches, 105 x 190 stitches. Work the selvage as for a sleeveless tee and do k1/p1 rib at each end.   Or use size 3 needles with a 100% linen or 50/50 cotton/linen fingering or DK yarn.

With the lighter yarns, you could take advantage of Mary MacGregor's Fair Isle Knitting Patterns, with reproductions of scores of 1920s motifs collected by Robert Williamson; work the motifs in the central 95 x 188 stitch space. The weaving in will make the towel thick and less flexible than a plain or textured pattern.

Don't use Dishie with Fair Isle motifs. Fair Isle works with worsted wool like Wool of the Andes, because it's soft and lofty -- and remember, I said, my Fair Isle tops are a more solid fabric than when I knit plain or argyle, without that weaving in.  Dishie has no loft at all.

So this goes with my switchover years ago away from paper products. I'm not killing trees by switching to cloth hankies (only the box is made of recycled paper) or by using paper towels to dry dishes or my fingers.

Now I'm cutting back on plastic by not buying commercial sponges to wash dishes.

Yes, you have to wash dishcloths and towels and hankies every time you use them and you need to boil them out once in a while. Then you let them air dry. Remember, I can hang them out on my portable umbrella clothesline like my mom did when I was little.

I have to toss sponges after a month, even though I let them dry thoroughly between uses so they don't smell skanky. They toughen and eventually so much dirt gets into the nooks and crannies that they stop being safe to use.

My hankies have worked just fine for four years now and the dishware will do the same. Once the dirt won't come out of them any more, I can downgrade them for other uses like scrubbing floors or polishing the car. In the meantime, there are other projects to accomplish.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Samaritan sources

Samaritan Pentateuch is a beautiful candidate for E due to the timing of Hoshea’s death as well as the geographical situation of the people who preserved it. But that means it should have elohim everywhere and the Tetragrammaton nowhere.

From working with Walton’s version in the Gezer script, and von Gall’s version in the square or Aramaic character set used by modern Hebrew, I can see that almost everywhere (two examples to the contrary) that Torah has the Tetragrammaton, so does Samaritan Pentateuch. Except for places (plural) where SP replaces elohim with the Tetragrammaton, which should NEVER happen in E; it should always go the other way.

SP also imports into Genesis and Exodus material that shouldn’t be there, if DH is correct; Jewish Torah has it in “D”, which only existed in Judea, or it’s part of “P” which “was invented” in Babylon. DH has no way to explain why SP has this material. It could not happen at the time when DH says the material was invented. The original barrier was the Assyrian iron curtain, the later one the enmity between the Jews and Samaritans from the time the Jews returned to the Holy Land. This enmity is expressed in Samaritan “Chronicle,” as well as in Tannakh.

It is possible that the DH scholars of the 1800s did not know about Samaritan Pentateuch. Walton’s work from the 1600s probably disappeared into English university, church, and museum libraries and much of the original work on DH was done in Germany. Bruell did not publish his Aramaic-letter Samaritan Targum until 1875, after Graf ordered DH to isolate itself, and von Gall published his Aramaic-letter collation of Samaritan manuscripts only in 1918.

It’s impossible for two traditions from the BCEs to be invented with features in common, in a climate of political isolation from each other, and yet have the same narratives and 90% of the same words, when one of the populations originated speaking a different language. That’s a figment of somebody’s imagination.

But when a set of story-telling patterns used in oral narratives all over the world, shows up in the literature of two cultures, who also share 100% of the same narratives in what looks like the same language for the most part, and all the ancient literature in both cultures says “we have the same roots”, then the simplest explanation of what happened is that the cultures transmitted their norms orally when they were identical, and the literature changed in oral transmission after they parted ways.

And now back to stating Olrik's principles instead of applying them.

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- vocabulary review 3

Remember, what's above the line are the most frequent words from this set of lessons.

Vocabulary Review 3

בְּהֵמָה	Domestic animal
אֲדָמָה	Earth, dirt, land
וַיִּתֵּן	He put
אֹתָם	them (direct object)
יְבָרֶךְ	He  blessed
לֵאמֹר	saying
פְּרוּ	Be fruitful
רֶמֶשׂ	Creeper
יִרֶב	Multiply
מִלְאוּ	Fill
יִּבְרָא	He created
תַּנִּינִם	Serpents
גְּדֹלִים	Big, great, large
רֹמֶשֶׂת	Creeps
כָּנָף	Wing
יִשְׁרְצוּ	they shall swarm
שֶׁרֶץ	Swarm
נֶפֶשׁ	Soul
חַיָּה	wild animal, living thing
עוֹף	flier, bird
יְעוֹפֵף	fly (v)
רְבִיעִי	Fourth
לִמְשֹׁל	controlling
נַעֲשֶׂה	It is decreed to be made
אָדָם	Man, people
צֶלֶם	Image, form
דְמוּת	Likeness, similitude
יִרְדּוּ	They shall subjugate
דָג	fish
זָכָר	male
נְקֵבָה	female

Garden -- lessons learned

I've done a lot of preaching about gardening. Now it's time for some lessons from the last 18 months or something.

As Mike McGrath has said many times, trees should not be planted in spring or summer.

I know somebody who planted trees in spring. The cicadas ate them up.

I know somebody who planted trees in summer. The sun burned them up.

Second, just say no to drive-by services. Actually, this is true for all services, but here's how it applies to gardening.

Find the website for your state extension service. Look at their licensing programs.

Also find the website for your state Department of Natural Resources or whatever it's called. Look at their licensing programs.

In Maryland, the extension service has a Master Gardener certificate program. The DNR has a Tree Expert license program.

Ask any drive-by service provider for their certificate or license. If they hesitate for so much as a second, just say no. You should say no anyway, but this way you scare them off and your neighbors might not have to deal with them.

Third, make sure every service provider knows what they are doing even if they are long-established.

Mike McGrath documented a service provider that serviced a lawn illegally. Six times a year they charged the poor homeowner for feeding the lawn. It put illegal amounts of nutrients on the lawn and ruined it into the bargain. It may have also put down nutrients which are illegal in any amount but we can't tell now. 

Ask your service provider what they are putting on your lawn and how much. In Maryland, potash (potassium) and phosphorus are illegal on lawns and there are strict limits on nitrogen. You should also say no to Roundup which contains the carcinogen in Agent Orange and to Bayer bee-killing products. (Both of these are illegal in two towns in Maryland; start a movement in your town.)

Also, any time your service wants to plant something, ask them if it's deer-proof. If they hesitate for a minute, fire them.

I know somebody who paid a service to plant hydrangeas. The state extension service has posted online that deer will browse hydrangea.  Need I say more?

Cheating yourself or paying for illegal products is one thing. Paying somebody to do something illegal or ruin your lawn is crazy.

Know what you're doing. Know what they're doing. And sometimes, you will have to just say no.