[drpeter]

My guess is lambswool and silk, probably less linen if at all. But it's hard to say without having the jacket in one's hands. I think there might be a clue, though: WO/SE/LI on the tag, could be Wool/Silk/Linen as you say. SE could be for Seta which means silk in Italian, but then why not the other two fabrics in Italian as well?

I'm impressed, Peaks. You can alter the jacket with four sizes in the chest and two in the hips? That is amazing unless you are a tailor by profession.

 

[drpeter]

I got my silk/linen fabric in the mail. This is always the most exciting part of any custom project for me, a roll of fabric revs up my imagination.

The end result is usually never as fun as what our heads can cook up.

I take it you have a tailor to make this up into a jacket. Or are you too an amateur tailor?

 

[drpeter]

Not too fond of the phrasing.
The guy who works on my truck, can fix anything you bring him, which would be fully formed vehicles gone amiss. I do not think if him as an amtateur even though I doubt he knows how to build a truck from scratch or has any interest in doing so. Which would be me as pertains to clothing.

I did not mean to imply that you or anyone else engaged in tailoring for the fun of it, or because you liked it, was any less skilled at what you do. After all, there are two meanings to the word amateur. The root is amator in Latin, which means lover; and it went to amateur in French and then into English. So the original meaning was based on love of the activity.

I think it's most unfortunate that this original, earlier meaning of the word amateur (someone taking part in an activity for pleasure, not money) has taken on the negative connotation of someone who is incompetent at performing the activity. I tried to downplay the second meaning by asking @delicious_scent, if he was an amateur tailor (implying a non-professional one).

I suspect that the second meaning was foisted on the word by professionals, who wanted to downplay the skills of anyone who did not perhaps belong to their guild -- tailors, mechanics, etc. It also seems to imply that once you started getting paid for an activity, that automatically implied you were especially skilled at that activity. Nothing could be further from the truth! We all know professionals who are simply bad at their job, just as there are those that are superb at theirs.

By the way, in French the word is more positive if I recall correctly. It is in English that the negative connotation is clearly present. Also, we make an exception for sports: Amateurs in sports events are just as honoured as professionals (for example the Olympics, which is basically for amateurs, although in recent times that distinction has become blurred).

So the upshot, my dear Peaks, is that you should be proud to be an amateur tailor (or your friend an amateur mechanic) because your love for these activities is pure and unsullied by the entry of money (lucre, to use a negative term for that clinky-clanky stuff) into the practice of your avocation. LOL.

 

[drpeter]

^
I have learned something. As I almost always do from your posts. Too bad ice cream cakes melt in the mail so I'll just thank ye here..

Gee thanks, Peaks. It's the thought that counts -- I am about to have some French vanilla ice cream, it is around 92 degrees in the tundra here.

And I continue to learn from you. Some of your lines are priceless, maybe you can start writing humorous fiction.

 

[drpeter]

Congratulations, my friend. That's one more step in the right direction. I hope it gets to you safely.

I have long been nervous about packages in the post: USPS have, over the years, utterly destroyed many things shipped to me, and always offered a mere $50 in compensation. Enquiries about damaged or lost stuff go nowhere. It's the way we live now.

 

[drpeter]

I have been lucky in that regard. My mail person is a woman and I ply her with whiskey on a regular basis so not only is my stuff placed neatly in my giant rural mail box, but she often places other folks' packages there as a kind of thank you.

That reminds me of a cat I once had who slept at the foot of my bed, then went out, killed a bird and brought it to me as an offering. Sharp cat, that.

 

[drpeter]

You live in an interesting part of the country, Peaks. No internet, but plenty of frisbee-playing hamsters. Plus Lucifer-empowered mannequins. I am beginning to wonder...But do not worry -- we can arrange for a rabbi to convert you, if you so desire. As your name implies, you may "dwindle peak and pine, though your bark may not be lost." Great new film version of Macbeth out, by the way, and it's directed by one of the Coen brothers.

 

[drpeter]

No. You are categorically wrong and what's more (to appropriate a Jeremy Bentham expression) wrong on stilts.

A Swedish actor in Hollywood (Nils Asther) once played the eponymous Chinese warlord in The Bitter Tea of General Yen. A distinguished English actor played Othello (Laurence Olivier) -- you know, that dark-skinned Moor. He also played The Mahdi in Khartoum. Sir Alec Guinness played the Indian rabble-rouser Professor Godbole in A Passage to India. And on and on and on -- I could cite dozens of such cases. White people have played all sorts of characters with every skin tone on earth imaginable. And you say a black actor cannot play Macbeth? Come now, Peaks. I thought you were rather more perspicacious than that. You state that you are not being racist, but I worry that you are, unwittingly, on the dangerous edge. Did you ever consider the possibility that there was a larger point to be made, perhaps, in selecting a black actor to play Macbeth? And Macduff too, and members of his family as well? You see, verisimilitude is not the ultimate aim in casting -- at least, it need not be. In any case, you might concede that turnabout is fair play, LOL.

And of course, we all know that Romans were routinely played by British actors with plummy English accents and Jews were played by Americans with not-quite-plummy Brooklyn accents in those blockbuster Hollywood epics of the last century. Acting goes beyond things like skin colour and ethnicity. I think it is a credit to an actor's skill that he or she can transcend such boundaries. Olivier played the unyielding Jewish merchant in The Merchant of Venice, by the way, and I don't think Olivier was Jewish. Meryl Streep did a Nobel-worthy performance as a Polish emigre in Sophie's Choice. You think a Polish actress would have done any better? Hell, we even have gender boundaries being transcended these days: Judy Dench played the title role in King Lear in the West End and Broadway recently to great acclaim - and don't forget, she played Sir Miles Messervy (M) in seven Bond films.

Footnote: You probably already know that race is a meaningless term biologically. I prefer ethnicity. But I understand the accepted use of words like racism (which used to be racialism in Britain). Race is a social construction. And the tropes of racism we see all around us, which comfort many people and reassure them, are exposed as nonsense when you consider the far more biologically viable facts of population genetics. But we live in what I like to call The Age of Unreason (to parody Thomas Paine). Race and racism have become our dangerous reality (I have had personal experience of this recently), and the fact that they are meaningless is of a piece with the general lack of contact with reality we see in our social, political and cultural life in this country and in many others. We are regressing at a rapid clip all the way back to the fourteenth century. And as Barbara Tuchman reminds us, that period holds a distant mirror to the twentieth century, and I might add the twenty-first. As always, if we don't learn from the lessons of history we are condemned to repeat it.

 

[drpeter]

The aim of acting is to play, and to play at or as someone you are not. I get that part. But let's not push it. I am not keen on seeing American actors portray Shakespeare, let alone black ones. Washington is a fine actor whom I've admired in many roles. If he wants to play doomed nobility, he can try his hand at O'Neil's Emperor Jones.

You have broadened a very specific remark into to a wide range of even more specific examples, many of which I'm familiar and would agree with you. But I wasn't taking about them. I was talking about Denzel Washington playing Macbeth. Blah to that, go home, Denzel.

This is the May purchases thread and we are both to blame for derailing it. You tossed out bait you didn't know was bait, forgiven, and I took it. Forgive me.

All right, you're forgiven. Let's bury the hatchet, agree to disagree on this. No issues, we're cool! And other familiar expressions...LOL.