Making Kitchen Knives – Part 21 – The Last Six Knives

There is not much to say about these, they are all made from one partially rotten palette. Therefore I do not know precisely what kind of wood it is. I suspect it is birch because one of the boards had still a bit of bark on it, but the palette was obviously made from scraps, so there could be several species involves. So other realistic possibilities are poplar and beech.

Since it was from planks, I had no control over grain direction, but I have at least paired the slabs to the best of my ability so they are of the same species – they varied wildly in coloration – and in three cases, I ended up with pairs where one slab had more interesting grain. And, in those cases, I have given this slab on the right side of the knife, where the signature is.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

These three are those with more plain-looking handles, besides rich brown color from the ammonia fuming there is not much to see here. I have no idea why the logo etched so strangely on the second one, it just did. Maybe the metal was a bit dirty so it etched only on the edges, where there is stronger current? I did wipe all blades with acetone, but maybe not enough.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

This one has a nice dark stripe of ever so slightly more decomposed, but still hard, wood running down the middle. The placement of the pins is purely coincidental, at least I do not remember consciously putting the holes exactly into the stripe.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

This one has a knot in the wood. Unfortunately, it is so dark, that I currently cannot make a good photo of it without overexposing everything else. The blade on this one is one of those that curled on the edges, so I had to re-grind it into narrower shape.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

And lastly a piece with extremely beautiful grain, almost like a burl. This one piece really shows that half-rotten wood is not necessarily only fit for burning.

If Sex is Real, How Come I Haven’t Had Any in Ages?

Wordcloud with keywords from the text like "words, how do they work"Of course, you can all see what I did there. Instead of using the meaning “collection of properties of the body usually labelled “male” or “female” ” I used the meaning “having sexual intercourse” and made a bad joke about it, swapping one flawed and socially constructed meaning for another, and everybody got the joke, even if you don’t find it funny. Yet many transphobes suddenly act like language works in a completely different way once we’re talking about sex and gender, insisting that while gender may be socially constructed, sex isn’t, and that people who are saying that sex is socially constructed as well are claiming that sex isn’t “real”.

Now, I could forgive that confusion in somebody who has never thought about how language works. For somebody with little or no background in the relevant fields it’s kind of intuitive: we can easily see how “femininity” and “masculinity” change through place and time and therefore accept that gender is socially constructed, but dicks and pussies are basically the same and babies are made the same way across the globe (except, of course, when they aren’t but bioethics in repro medicine is a topic for another day) and conclude that sex is biologically constructed. But it’s also intuitive that the sun moves around the earth because that’s what i see every day.

It’s of course much less forgivable when the people spouting such nonsense are college professors, journalists and authors, i.e. people whose jobs are words. Words do have meanings, precisely the ones we agree upon as a society. 19th century British people had a different agreement on what “gay” means than we have today, which confused the hell out of  your resident non native speaker when reading Frankenstein in college. At one point I had to admit that I was mistaken about at least one thing: either early 19th century Brits were really cool with homosexuality and the history books had lied to me, or that the word didn’t mean what I thought it means (inconceivable!).

You won’t get a biologist and a farmer to agree upon what a berry is, but transphobes want us to believe that “male” and “female” sex are two immutable definitions set in stone at the dawn of time (by whom exactly?) with no input from pesky humans with their flawed reasoning and changing horizon. Now, I won’t go into the historical construction of sex (just as a spoiler: the Christian worldview used to be very occupied with souls, regarding the body as a mere temporary vessel), but usually when pressed on the point, transphobes will say something about “chromosomes”, which most of us don’t know anyway, or organs like penises and vaginas and uteri, which most of us do know, but if that was all there was to the construct “sex”, then we wouldn’t need it (spoiler, we actually don’t need it) because then saying “this person has x genital” would be enough, though usually seen as a tad impolite. But then there’s this bazillion of other things that get typically lumped in the category of sex, like the shape and the size of tits, beard or no beard (my gran’s care timetable had a timeslot for “shaving”…), to such inconsequential things like “jaw shape”. And from what I know, trans people are very acutely aware of all those physical properties of their bodies. None of them denies having a certain physiology (though it’s really, really creepy how obsessed and intrusive transphobes are when it comes to the genitals part). But that physiology can be more accurately described with the more precise words. Because the word “sex” is not. It often includes things that are inconsequential (jaws, shoulders), or vary greatly within the population (tits, beards, height), have many variations (intersex folks) or are simply not observed (chromosomes). Sure, it serves as a handy shorthand, and in colloquial talk it will often be enough, but as soon as we are having deeper conversations, the terms need to be defined more precisely. So no, sex isn’t real, just like unicorns, but bodies are, while magical white horses with horns are not.

Jack’s Walk

©voyager, all rights reserved

I apologize for being a bit absent lately. The past few weeks have been… challenging. My scoliosis is getting worse and I’ve developed pain along the bottom ridge of my right ribcage that has been stubbornly refusing to get better. Just before the pandemic, I had a spinal x-ray taken that diagnosed my spine as a collapsing S-curve and what’s happening is that I’ve twisted so that my bottom right ribs are rubbing on the upper edge of my pelvis. Normally, I see my pain specialist every 3 – 4 weeks for injections along both sides of my entire spine, but I haven’t been since early February because of the pandemic, and, well, I waited a bit too long. Finally, late last week, I donned my mask and went to see my Dr. in the big city down the road and today I’m feeling a bit more human.

Jack and I even managed to get out to our wee little forest for a walk, today. We went slowly and watched the fairies flit for a while and then we paid a short visit to Gnorman, who was out plowing with a team of voles. The trio joined us for a cold drink of water before getting back to their work. It was a most pleasant day filled with the cheerful, company of friends, glorious sunshine and the quiet beauty of our native woodlands. It even came with a pretty reminder to stay safe and wash our hands… lots.

©voyager, all rights reserved

Making Kitchen Knives – Part 20 – Three Finished Knives

Works on this project are finished, so today I will share three more of the resulting products with a bit of commentary about the lessons learned with each.

First a knife with handle from larch.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

This single piece is one of the biggest reasons why I have lost a lot of time with the finishing of handles. Larch wood, as it turns out, is pretty, but it is really shitty for knife handles. It is softwood, but that would not necessarily be a problem in itself. The problems are two: 1) It is stringy, so it has a tendency to tear-out, burning, and gumming up belts. 2) The late-summer-growth is significantly harder than the spring growth and that causes all kinds of problems when trying to shape it to anything other than a plank.

Further, the ammonia fuming did nearly nothing to it, except perhaps making it a bit darker.

I suspected that it is probably not a very good wood for this purpose, and my suspicion was confirmed. I won’t use this wood anymore unless perhaps stabilized with resin. I only used this one piece because it was a gift by a former colleague, who is in turn the intended recipient of this knife. The result is not ugly, but it is much more work than it is worth.

Next is jatoba.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

This was commissioned, so this is the only blade that will be sold (for a very moderate price). Part of the order was the etched star on the left side. I am a bit anxious about how the knife will be perceived. This customer too was warned that they cannot expect perfection, because I am still learning, but you never know. If they toss it on my head, I will have to deal with it.

I probably will not bother with treating jatoba with ammonia in the future, not in big chunks. It only makes the wood significantly darker and it is prone to develop cracks in due course, nothing else. It is not ugly – otherwise, I would toss it away – but I personally do not think it is worth the hassle. What untreated jatoba looks like you can see here.

And last today cherry.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I am a bit ambiguous about how this turned out.  I love the look of untreated cherry wood (see here) and I was hoping perhaps, that the orange color will become richer and deeper. Instead, it has turned into chocolate brown. Not ugly brown, mind you, but brown all the same. Cherry wood is also very prone to develop cracks, but these two pieces almost miraculously were crack-free, I suspect that the strictly perpendicular and straight grain orientation has played a role (they were split from a log, not cut). I will perhaps do the fuming for cherry in the future for thinner pieces with straight grain to use them as a contrast with untreated cherry for intarsia, spacers, inserts, etc. The wood is a joy to work treated as well as untreated, I would use nothing else if I had enough of it.

I have messed up the etch of the number, you can see the straight line where I have accidentally run with the etching graphite rod over the edge of masking tape. But nobody is going to complain about this, because I am keeping this knife for myself.

There will be one more post with the remaining six knives and then we shall look at the time-analysis.

People who Menstruate: Or why the transphobic insistence on “women” is both creepy and wrong

As you have all heard by now, beloved children’s book author who wrote a whole series without any gay characters but a whole industry of rape drugs has firmly put her foot into her mouth over the weekend  by throwing a hissy fit over the term “people who menstruate”:

‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?

 

Now, there’s two immediate and obvious points: First of all, the article does actually use the word “women”, as one sort of people who are affected by menstruation and need access to hygiene. Second, there’s a pandemic going on, her own government failing its people so badly that now the number of daily deaths in the UK are greater than in all 27 EU countries combined and a world on its feet to protest racism and police brutality but you have to scroll a long way down on her Twitter feed to find one single Tweet about Breonna Taylor. If the phrase “people who menstruate” gets more outrage from you than the killing of black people and your whole population being failed by the government we see you in your socially distant and probably well protected mansion. That’s not even the dog that didn’t bark but a whole pack of wolves that has suddenly gone silent.

I’ll explore the misogyny of this argument from a cis perspective. Others have written more and better from the perspective of trans men and non binary folks and I’ll leave some links below. Check out their words, they know better.

But now for the larger point: Transphobes like Rowling insist that people who menstruate are to be classified as women. While most of them will gracefully allow that not all women menstruate (though I have seen the occasional transphobe insist that post-menopausal women are no longer women), they insist that all people who menstruate are women, adult human females (long ee as in bee), to use their favourite “definition”.

If you know me you will probably guess already where I’m going. The crowd who insists that their definition of “woman” is pure science and absolutely rooted in nature starts out with the word “adult”. Can they please define what adult means? Here’s a little story: my mum got married at 18, only back then you became an adult at 21 and therefore my grandparents basically signed over their guardianship to my dad, which is creepy as fuck if you think about it. But in the year my mother turned 21, the age was lowered to 18, which poses a few interesting questions:

Was my mother a child bride between the ages of 18 and 21, but then became retroactively not a child bride when the age of adulthood was lowered? If we change the legal definition of “adult”, does that change the biological reality? Obviously not, so what unchangeable definition of adult do transphobes use? Given that they insist that all who menstruate are women, and declare that’s “basic biology”, the only other option is the onset of menarche. We have that creepy notion in a lot of popular culture. We call it “becoming a woman” when a girl has her first period. And for ages that has been and often still is the point at which a girl is considered old enough to get married and have children. I was never a big fan of Game of Thrones and got bored somewhere in the second or third season, but I remember that one scene where Sansa Stark wakes up in some bloody sheets and now everybody is excited because that means she can now marry the king and have his babies. Except for the poor girl, of course, who is terrified at the prospect of being raped by a psychopath.

Insisting that people who menstruate are all “women” means to include literal children as young as nine or ten into that category, declaring them adults. Again transphobes take the worst and oldest definition of “woman” as “baby making machines” and run with it, declaring their nonsense to be “rooted in science and biology”, just as men have always done. They reinforce the notion that girls become “mature” at an early age and that fertility is some defining element of womanhood. In short, they reinforce ideas that leave girls vulnerable to sexual predators and without protection from a society that declares them responsible for their own rapes. Of course, Cis Feminist transphobes will be abhorred by those ideas. They will be genuinely upset when a judge says a thirteen years old girl looked very mature, what should that poor adult man have done? Or declare that a teacher didn’t abuse his position of power because that girl dressed very sexy, but in fact they are sharing the same cis sexist and heteronormative mindset that dictates that cruel realty of cis girls’ lives and bodies. Yet they are too invested in hurting the small percentage of people who menstruate who are not cis for them to actually and adequately support the huge percentage of cis girls who menstruate and whom they claim to protect from the evil trans cabal.

 

Links:

Twitter thread from Jay Hulme about transphobic assault for being a trans man on his period

Article by a non-binary activist on their first period and that fucked up notion as a gate to “womanhood” I mentioned above 

Article about an initiative in Australia that provides period products for homeless people and that had to cope with backlash for being inclusive. Yes, those people prefer to actually attack a young cis woman who started her own fucking charity in her teens, jeopardizing said charity and thereby access to period products for poor cis girls and women just to hurt trans folks.

 

 

Black Lives Matter Worldwide: From a not so small protest in a small place

©Giliell, all rights reserved: My BLM mask, specifically made for the protest

Yesterday and today there were BLM protests in my neck of the wood and since I was busy yesterday, my dad and I went today. The idea was to have two days so people could space out more, and given that there were a lot of us, that was a good idea.

Now, I must tell you, I haven’t gone to a protest that worried in a while. I didn’t bring the kids. I’m not generally against “bringing kids to protests”. For one thing, kids do have opinions, for another, it teaches them to stand up for what they believe. But with the scenes we’ve been seeing from around the world and also from Munich and Berlin, I wasn’t comfortable bringing them. All those water throwers that all seemed to be out of order when fucking Nazis and conspiracy theorists were violating all Corona rules and literally chasing cops over the Alexanderplatz are apparently back in good condition again. Because who will decide if we are behaving well at a protest against police violence? Right. Spot the problem.

And for sure they were ready in their riot gear. They didn’t get to use it and I hope they sweated sitting in their black gear inside their buses.

One really good thing was that this protest was organised and let by black people, predominantly black women, and not some well meaning but ultimately problematic white allies. They recounted their experiences with everyday racism from an early age. They told the cops that they are responsible for their bad apples unless they want to get tarred with the same brush, that to be silent is to be complicit.

And it’s more necessary than ever, because just yesterday there was an attack on a young black man, who told us about the guy who attacked him with a knife, yelling “you’re black, you must die!” It was heartbreaking to hear him, to see him, shaking and searching for his voice, reliving his trauma. Thankfully the attacker was caught and look and behold, they are indeed suspecting a racist motive.

In the end we sang “Happy Birthday” for Breona Tailor and Tamir Rice, and Amazing Grace, which the moderator mentioned to probably be the first instant of cultural appropriation as it was written by a slave owner after overhearing his slaves sing.

Whom I though was missing were other migrant groups. With a few exceptions I didn’t see any non black people of colour. I don’t know if it was the shortness of time, but I missed the other migrant organisations.

I also met a pupil of mine who was very embarrassed to see me there. He’ll live. And he’ll still have to do Maths with me tomorrow.