I love Pepe Le Pew.

He's a skunk, and skunks are cool, but it's more than that.

Pepe first appeared in 1945, with a Mel Blanc voice inspired by Charles Boyer. He was a regular in Warner Bros.' Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons and won an Oscar in 1949 in For Scent-imental Reasons (written by Michael Maltese). Johnny Depp is reported to have based his Pirates of the Caribbean character Captain Jack Sparrow not only on Rolling Stone Keith Richards, but also on the urbane Le Pew. But it's more than that.

Pepe's self-esteem is made of solid stainless steel. 'E pursues zee beeyootiful laydee, and eet does not matter eff she rebuff heem. But not in a yucky, date-rape, Pepe-needs-to-learn-that-no-means-no kind of way. He's just totally sure that he's fabulous, and if the object of his affections will just get over the whole vile stink issue, zey can mek zee beeyootiful music together, eh, oui? Being a skunk, he lives in a virtual tuxedo, so he's always elegant. And the fluff of the tail--gotta love the flourish there. But really, it's the confidence that makes him so captivating. There's a line between revolting arrogance and charming self-assurance, of course. Probably different people draw it in different places (I adore Russell Crowe, for instance. Other people maybe don't so much.). But Pepe's got the magic, I say.

Of course he's a French guy. That probably has something to do with it, even if he's not a French guy named Jacques (my favorite kind). 

More on the joys of French guys in the next post.

I 'ope you all 'ave zee fabulous day, mez amies!

To Begin With...

For those of you whose homes are not (yet) stuffed with wool, (Wool is an excellent insulator, did you know? And self-extinguishing. It will burn as long as it's held in a flame, but when the flame is removed the wool stops burning. So really, if your house was full of wool, it would be more energy-efficient and better protected from fire. But I digress. Won't be for the last time.)

For those of you whose homes are not (yet) stuffed with wool, let me begin by explaining the joys of the Spit Splice.

I'm knitting. I come to the end of a ball of yarn. Gotta add more. I could leave tails of the old and new strands of yarn hanging, but then at the end of the project when I'm ready to be donedonedone I have to go back and tediously weave the ends in so the work won't unravel. Okay, but well, as indicated, tedious. I suck at tasks that strike me as tedious. Though I recognize that one man's tedious is another man's hand-whipped meringue.

Or I could knot the new yarn onto the old. But that leaves a knot, which might be evil enough to work its way to the front of whatever I'm making, and will at the very least make a nasty detectable lump in my fabric. So I'm not loving the knots.

Enter my hero, the Spit Splice. I take both ends of yarn, the old and nearly-run-out, and the new, and untwist the plies, and kinda mush them around each other. Then I get the whole intertwined-ends area good and wet with spit (this is the "slightly indelicate" part), and rub the joined ends furiously between my palms. Presto! The wool felts, the yarn is permanently and nearly imperceptibly joined, and I can carry on knitting with no knots, no ends to weave in later, and a pleasant sense of my own resourceful cleverness.

Some people think the Spit Splice is gross, because of, y'know, the spitting part. Some refined souls suggest that the maneuver should be performed with tap water, to avoid the gross factor. But I'm not going to haul my lazy ass out of the chair and shlub myself and my knitting over to the sink for the fraction of a tsp. that's involved. And what if I'm knitting in a place where plumbing isn't handy, eh? If my mouth is so dry that I can't produce enough saliva for a Spit Splice, I'm probably not knitting anyway. Plus I'm quite convinced—don't ask me for the lab results on this, though—that the enzymes and stuff in spit make the whole wool-felting process work better than plain old water.

That's a Spit Splice. You could say that it's an alter-ego: That tag line about "clever, slightly indelicate, works for wool" may be as much about your faithful (if immodest) correspondent as it is about the knitting technique. But it's also the standard for what I want to write about here: stuff that I like. That makes me happy. I spend a lot of my time being pissed off, and indulging myself in glorious rhetorical harangues about how the world would be different (and the miserable cretins who would suffer the torments they so richly deserve. heh.) if I wielded the absolute power for which I often and uselessly yearn. (Bad! Bad totalitarian impulses! Must. Stop.) It's a habit of long standing, but I'm not sure it does all that much for the general joyfulness of my life.

So Spit Splice, the blog, is going to be a place for me to get happy. To be full of approval. About anything from car design to three-year-old cheddar. Not in a sappy way, but in a "damnthat'sclever," "aren'tyougladsomeonethoughtofthis" kind of way.

I'm a yarn junkie, and I'd confess to being a foodie if I didn't hate the word so desperately, so there's likely to be a lot about textiles and cooking to come. But I'm hoping to range pretty widely over the terrain of my particular delights. Y'all come back, and we'll talk about what's good.