Showing posts with label Knitting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Knitting. Show all posts

Feb 15, 2011

The Last Ball of Red Wool - Revisited.





I once wrote a very bad book called The Last Animator.

The book was about a chap (our hero) who was locked in a cell with a fellow named Newton. Newton had this habit of banging his head against the cell bars incessantly - and when I say incessantly I mean incessantly.

 Day in, day out. Minute after minute, hour after hour. Incessantly he banged his head. Adfinitum. Circum maximus nauseum, bigtimeus.

Eventually our hero, whose one heroic quality was that he could make wonderous fantasical animations with his mind, was driven mad by the constant 'boink, boink, boinking' of Newton's skull against the iron bars.

It was a sad book. A bit like 'War and Peace' meets 'Dr Zeus'. 







Sad or not, I'm sure it might have been a best seller had any of the fifty six publishers I sent it too been intelligent enough to have to published. It was a cutting edge novel that would have sent people to the shrinks in droves. The novel would have boosted the  global economy like a ripe progesterone inflated hen sitting on a small New Zealand geyser - and we would not have had the stockmarket crashes of 1987, 1991 and 2006.

But all jokes aside, writing  that book for me was either cauterizing, cathartic or cathetizing - depending on your viewpoint.

But one thing the book was most defintely not - was a 'coif'.







Now 'coif' is an interesting word.

"Coif' may sound familiar because it sounds like "coiffer' - like in hairdresser - partic. usage:  "to be coiffed" per example: "I was coiffed nicely at the ball by Roger de Vanderbongl".

As you can see it's sort of French, and oddly enough is the thing that circa 1066 the Norman's put on their heads before doing their 'thing' at the Battle of Hastings. Consequently it was usually made of chain mail. Along with their hauberk and chausses, the coif was 'de rigger' in medieval combat.

But how does that fit in with my novel?






Well it fits in in all three ways!

Obviously a coif in itself, being a prophylactic device ( prophylactic def:  acting to defend against or prevent something)  was a type of anti-cauterising object - in that it negated the need to be cauterised because if you were lucky you didn't get any head cuts.

Also in it's way it was cathartic, because it helped heal old emotional wounds, expecially if you were the Duke William  of Normandy whose feelings had been hurt by the nasty English who didn't want to give him their throne.

As for 'catheterizing"? (def: to introduce a catheter into a body cavity.) For that we must turn to the English side. So in King Harold's (the English King's) case, you can say he was cathetrized orbitally with a Norman arrow. The Normans were the 'catheterizes", King Harold was the 'catheteree" and, finally, the arrow was the 'cathetererer". And in a way Harold was also cauterized.

Consequently, it all fits together. Catheter, cauterise and catharsis - especially if you know anything about the Battle of Hastings.

 If you know nothing about it, well you probably think I am raving on.

Now, while we are on the subject, another thing a 'coif' is not is a 'sweater."








So, though the Illustration Friday prompt this week is "Sweater' and though these dwarves appear to be knitting sweaters, they should in fact be disqualified because they are merely knitting 'coifs".


I guess the caption is something like:

"It was a bad night, the night of the fifteenth, when Gerald Drawblehood, Captain of the Dwarven Knitting Association (Men's Division) announced to his half brother Cedric, that they were down to their last ball of red wool."













Thank you for looking. I will come visiting tomorrow promise. As soon as I have seen my shrink. :_



Happy Tuesday. Err I mean Wednesday. And I apologise to all those people who have visited to see this post already, to find it vanished. :(


Oh and check this site out! http://martavicente-dibujos-pinturas-objetos.blogspot.com/


Which I found through Don Roberto's blog.