Mannequin Monday

I am going to miss these ladies. Although tempted, I am going to resist going in and asking if the "everything must go" sale includes the mannequins.

They are a few of a cast of many that I like to keep an eye on for fashion ideas. There are some who live with mannequins, I just stalk them.

This picture (below) is for Seventh Heathen who like me, finds that some of the mannequins can be disturbingly hot.


The Amazon informed us that she had never noticed the enticing powers of these statuesque sirens of shop windows.



Is there a mannequin that has caught your eye? Send me a picture (I might post it) and add a few words to describe what you find alluring about her or him. Send it to woodsy.nymph@gmail.com

RNDP 29: Dating with Technological Assistance

Missing the Chinook

Know first that I detest wind.

But yesterday's sodden nearspring snowstorm in Ottawa reminds me that I still miss Alberta's Chinook. Another name, Snow Eater, is disputed, but it's apt. A Chinook shrieking from its characteristic arched mouth of clouds on the western horizon devours snow. Somewhere into a third week of unrelenting hundred-kilometre winds, when your eyes fill with dry grit, you feel as if it gnaws your brain, too.

But I remember standing one year in a late January field, after weeks of singing, minus-thirty cold, feeling my lungs crack with each breath, when the crystallized air changed. The arch opened over the mountains, iciness suddenly softened.

I stood still, in stillness, feeling warmth begin to breathe around me for three-quarters of an hour. The temperature rose a degree a minute. The last moments, I could hear water starting to run under the snow. When the banshee wind finally pounced, the air temperature was well above zero.

I detest wind. But that dead of winter memory — less than an hour of moistening, warming, impossibly tropical stillness, is magic I hold close.

Image: Ann Kelliot's Photostream on Flickr

Time to publog the parliamentary dining room...

Senator Céline Hervieux-Payette has gleefully tweeted that the Parliamentary Dining Room will, for the first time, soon serve up seal on its justly-renowned silver platters.

Publog time! One simply can't turn down such an obviously-patriotic opportunity!

But in the spirit of full disclosure, one must warn fellow ESIs that one has actually eaten seal on occasion. As a practiced connoisseur of portable, potable furballs, I hafta say that, PETA-ensnaring terminal cutes aside, it is stringy, oily, dark, and more than kinda fishy-tasting. Maybe why they're doin' it sometime around the Ides of March.

You have been warned. And I hope the decadent mounds of chocolate-y desserts are especially good that day. . .

We're not the only ones creeping out bloggers!

Yesterday, local blogger DaniGirl of Postcards from the Mothership reported that she was freaked out and felt violated that her blog along with 7 others had become the subject of a master's thesis, “Works in Progress: An Analysis of Canadian Mommyblogs by Heather Lyn Fleming.

According to DaniGirl, Fleming made "egregious assumptions" about the bloggers and was unethical in not contacting them or getting their permission before writing or publishing.

I'm don't know what the "egregious assumptions" were. They might be mentioned somewhere in DaniGirl's original posting on the thesis, but I don't want to take the time to go through the 97 comments on the off chance they are mentioned. I think I'll just assume that I wouldn't find them to be any worse than assumptions I've made when reading other people's blogs.

In Today's followup, DaniGirl seems to be less freaked out and has backed away from her original position, but not all the way:

I can’t say that I regret my original post, because I wrote it in good faith and I think it resulted in a truly fascinating conversation. I haven’t changed my mind about thinking that Theryn crossed a line in her assumptions, and that she took my work out of context.

Of course, Fleming is also a blogger. She seems to have taken the criticism in stride:

#creepythesis

February 22, 2010

I woke up yesterday morning to find my thesis had its own twitter hashtag.

I’m not going to launch into a defense. Readers are free to think my writing is crap, skim it, interpret it differently than I intended, etc. That’s the nature of writing. I just wanted to acknowledge that I’ve seen the reaction.

On the bright side (!), more people probably read my thesis yesterday than read most people’s theses ever

For more commentary:

• Dani is feeling indignant at Coffee with Julia
• #creepythesis on Twitter
• "Me, " the Subject of a Master's Thesis...?
• Creepy Thesis? by a subject who didn't find it all that creepy