Culture shock
Filed Under Life, Knitting, Daleks, Dancing
In the past week, I experienced two sharp moments of culture shock.
The first occurred at a wedding. Each place setting had a Christmas cracker. Before we were seated, the DJ wove through the crowd, informing everyone of the timing for pulling open the crackers (when the bride and groom were announced), the request that we all wear the paper crowns (duh)—and, shockingly, a basic explanation of Christmas crackers.
It may bear mentioning that in recent generations my relatives who did not come from North Wales came from Liverpool, so I undoubtedly had a more Anglo-centric upbringing than most. I absorbed Doctor Who years before Star Trek, and my impressions of the veterinary profession were formed watching All Creatures Great and Small. When I was a kid, we’d take an early winter day trip to Ontario for shopping. Along with other UK themed yummies, we’d buy Christmas crackers for dinner on Christmas Eve.
So I expressed my shock to Larry; while he is better acquainted with Christmas crackers than your average Jew, he didn’t have any difficulty understanding how some people might not have encountered them. And indeed, an informal survey of a few guests (and random folks in the past several days) confirms that intelligent and generally well-informed adults can be ignorant of this particular cultural artifact.
The second shocking thing occurred when I brought my knitting to the Hogmanay recovery party. Several people asked what I was knitting, and I simply said “A Dalek” and showed them the picture on my printout of the pattern. A subset of those people asked if it was going to be a tea cozy.
Even my public knitting tends to take place in informal settings, and I am used to people recognizing a Dalek. This isn’t so much the Anglo-centrism as geek-centrism. I am always a bit surprised to find such glaringly imperfect overlap of geekdoms.
Though I will admit, in the picture the stuffed Daleks do kind of look like tea cozies.
The year so far
Filed Under Life, Knitting, Dancing
Not much has happened in 2008. Some good stuff happened at the end of 2007, and I have chosen to attribute those things to 2008. There were many happy socialization opportunities in recent weeks, people visited from out of town, Hogmanay was a lot of fun, there was a lot of good music (formal and informal), and I discovered I’d messed up my first batch of bobbles so they’re much easier to deal with now.