[weekend poll] most enjoyable dance styles

MID-POLL REPORT IS UP

My goodness, for this week's weekend poll, the first thought was sexiest countries to live in - way too many! Then sexiest cars - that was worse! Finally - most enjoyable dance styles but with only ten choices, it was near impossible. I've done what I can, long-suffering reader and here they are for your delectation:


1. Salsa


2. Ballroom


3. Lambada


4. Ska


5. Afro-American, hip hop, rap


6. Modern dance troupe


7. Ballet


8. Ice dance


9. Jive, rock 'n roll


10. Ritzy,tap, Michael Jackson

I know that Riverdance and various ethnic styles didn't get in to the ten and maybe that can be at a later date. Anyway - choose which three you like best and vote in the right sidebar if you would ...

MID-POLL REPORT IS UP
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[before we kill the muslims] let's be sure who's to blame

Some time back, I became involved in an Indonesian sub-community [as longer-term readers will recall] and in the light of that experience, this statement in the Telegraph seems true enough:

Indonesia is the most populous Muslim country in the world and most Indonesians are generally seen as following a moderate interpretation of their religion. The country recently held peaceful presidential and parliamentary elections in which Islamist candidates did not do well.

The interesting thing is that I became involved, not with the moderates but with the hardliners and what they had to say about the corruption in today's society and so on seemed valid and logical. To get society back to a sort of sanity is what this blog has also been on about for a long time now.

There were only a few giveaways which showed that the other side - the intractable, kill all the infidels attitude - was lurking behind the 'love the people' stance but those couple of incidents were enough to sour me. Let's face it though, the majority of that country would not be motivated to bomb and batter people - that's the province of the religious nutter.

Or is it?

Quite frankly, we can't trust Them and there are enough cases on file to show how their agents provocateurs are in world troublespots they feel need destabilizing. Remember that 'execution' of the American hostages when the hooded figures couldn't even get the Koran right?

If you start down this path though, this line of thinking, then 911 and 7/7 also come into the spotlight. Also Diana. Diana has the most anomalies to it and no enquiry has addressed those yet.

Whatever the truth, there are sufficient Muslims, particularly youths, angered enough to hit out. The Palestinian rockets are sufficient proof of that. I'd like to read what the average Muslim has to say about these things and how he/she explains them away.

What is quite worrying is that our emotions are seemingly being 'directed' by means of outrages and by how the MSM hypes them up. Don't know about you but I don't like being played like a violin and so I've tended to look at something like these bombings and say - hang on a minute, let's be sure that it was actually Muslims who did this.

Meanwhile, people are continuing to die and to be maimed.
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[quick poll] result on jason bournes

Had to remove the little overnight poll because the regular weekend poll is coming up at 10:30 or thereabouts today.

The overnight poll was on whether or not the CIA does, in fact, have Jason Bournes in its midst. 4 thought yes and 1 thought no.

[invective] entertaining most times

Lord William Gruff on the whole sorry crew:

Given what we know already about documentary sex it is pleasant to consider that the war criminal Blair has no more than ten months to find a safe haven for himself, his duck faced bitch of a wife, the arse licker Campbell and that artful bugger the ignoble paedophile Lord Moldevort.

My lily-livered reply on Mandelson:

The day he, Blair and Brown are led up Tyburn Hill will be a sweet one for the nation.

Lord Gruff’s retort:

Tyburn?

Higham you are far too lenient.

Mandelson deserves nothing less than a red-hot poker (not Kniphofia) in 'that place posterial', in precisely the fashion of Edward II.

Brown is destined to be flogged naked round the kingdom of England entire, blinded in his one good eye, battered bloody and senseless with pick axe handles and then, following hanging, drawing and quartering, to be decapitated so that the London mob may play football with his head, much as they did with the exhumed skull of Oliver Cromwell, another dour religious dictator, albeit an English one and not an Anglophobic foreigner.

Blair? He could serve as a urinal at a motorway service station for the rest of his miserable life.

Now, you have to admit that could almost lead the competition in the Invective Stakes. However, this by the master, Mr. Eugenides, is also hard to go by, on the subject of Jack Straw, Chris Grayling and the whole sorry crew:

Straw is exactly the sort of greasy, careerist dickwad who would get his rocks off from striking bodybuilding poses over the prostrated body of an emaciated pensioner. But wouldn't it be wonderful if, just for once, our lords and masters were subjected to the same quotidian humiliations that they are so keen to visit on their constituents?

And yet almost every MP that has stolen from us intends to remain in situ until the next election, spending my money on vats of asses' milk from John Lewis in which to bathe their wives/diary secretaries, when in any civilised country they'd be breaking rocks in a fucking quarry under the watchful eyes of a horsewhip-wielding Klingon guard.

I've really had enough of these parasitical mouth-breathers. Words can't express my contempt, however hard I try. Time to cut our losses, people. Put out a couple of troughs of baked beans in the Commons canteen and make them sleep in rusting iron beds on a fucking Titan prison ship moored off the Isle of Dogs. I hate these people more than rotting broccoli.

Sigh. Such prose in the hands of the masters – isn’t the blogosphere a wonderful place?
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[melancholy] can soothe the savage breast

[the art of lace making] brugge and surrounds

Old Flanders Milanese Style

This post draws on two articles, here and here.

Flemish lace

Lace came into existence as a decorative edging for the clothes of the rich and was designed to replace embroidery in a manner that could with ease transform dresses to follow different styles of fashion. For unlike embroidery, lace could be unsewn from one material to be replaced on another.

Flanders grew it's own flax which was one of the reasons it was here that lacemaking blossomed. Many lace types developed in this area including Mechlin, Flanders, Brussels, Binche, Lille, Bayeux, and Duchess.

From the sixteenth century onwards, bobbin lace making was taught in private schools and orphanages. In 1717, a time of great poverty and distress, the bishop of Bruges, a certain Mgr. Van Susteran, thought that lacemaking would provide a modest income for the poorest families.

The job of teaching this delicate art was given to three nuns from Antwerp and the Congregation of Apostoline Sisters and such was its success that the lace school soon moved to larger premises. Even when Joseph II shut down 13 convents and religious houses in 1783, the Apostoline Sisters were allowed to continue with their teaching.

C17th Flanders lace

After the Napoleonic wars, the demand for lace dropped drastically and it was at this time that the inventive ladies of Bruges began developing their own lace with heavier thread that could be made more quickly. Bruges lace is a simplification of Duchesse without the heavier gimp thread.

It is generally not a lace used in lengths of trim for clothing as that fashion had almost died. It was most commonly made up of "motifs" used as appliques and doilies.

By 1860 the students numbered more than 400 and the school had become famous for its speciality, ‘Binche’ or ‘Point de Fée’ – the Fairy Queen stitch.

This lace was snapped up by the burgeoning tourist trade, of the new middle class. This saved the area and kept Bruges the lacemaking centre of the latter half of the 19th and the 20th century. It still maintains a lacemaking school know as Kant Centrum (Lace Centre).

In Bruges today

Today, Bruges lace is popular with beginning lacemakers as it is easier to learn than most lace and is worked with very few bobbins comparatively speaking.

The finest of the Bruges lace though is made with between 300 and 700 bobbins. It is composed of freely flowing trails of narrow clothwork. These trails form scrolls and connections between the flowers and leaves. This is all kept together with "braids" or narrow bridges between design elements, much like the leadwork in stained glass windows.

Royal Lace, Belgium

Bobbin lace is worked with many threads; each wound onto a separate bobbin. The pattern (pricking) of pinholes is marked on stiff card and is fastened to a firm pillow packed with straw – although nowadays a piece of polystyrene is often used. The threads are fixed at the start of the pattern, although more can be added, or removed, as the work progresses. All the stitch involved two pairs of bobbins, i.e. four threads.

Once the stitches have been made they are held in position with pins pushed through the pinholes in the pricking into the pillow. The pattern motifs, which can be outlined with gimp (a thicker thread), are usually worked in cloth stitch or half stitch but more elaborate filling stitches are also used. Bobbin laces can be worked in two different ways.

In straight laces the motifs and ground of meshes or bars are made in one continuous process. In part laces the motifs are made separately and then joined with bars or a mesh ground. Once the lace is finished it is released from the pattern by removing the pins.

Two main techniques are practised in the Flemish provinces of Belgium. The first, a needle lace, is still manufactured in the region of Aalst. It is called Renaissance or Brussels lace because it is largely sold in Brussels. The second type, the bobbin Lace, is the speciality of Bruges, is non-commercially produced and expensive. Bruges lace is typified by its flower work and can be made with a thick or thin thread.

Below you can see lace being made in Bruges.