Back in October I mentioned my old friend Ramón Rojas in Spain. After re-establishing contact with Ramón and acquiring a new Spanish-speaking friend of Seppalas in Arizona, I became fired with enthusiasm to strengthen the interest and bonds between the SSSD Project and Spanish-speaking mushers. The Project was born in Spain, actually. Isa Boucher and I spent three years with Dreama, Hurley, Kidron and Norde, our founder generation dogs this time around, on a lovely old farmstead called Masía Maurí in the Prepirineo region of Catalunya, in the northern part of Spain. The Catalan mushers were extremely friendly, cordial people. Isa and I still remember our sojourn there with longing. There exists no such esprit de corps and collegiality among Yukon dog drivers, unfortunately; our road has been a lonely one since returning to Canada.
Of course the Spanish are ignored by the US racing mob as being beneath their notice. The ISSSC has no interest in Ramón or his forgotten Seppalas; they probably would not even consider them Seppalas due to their Solovyev Russian bloodline content. Ramón's road has probably been as lonely as our own in recent years. So it's time to do something about these geographic solitudes.
An experimental new section of the SSSD Project website was just uploaded tonight, entitled "Séppala Hispánica" -- a website within a website, a place for Spanish aficionados of Seppalas to come for information. As yet it is mainly a kernel, a newly-sprouted seed; half of the pages are only place-holders with their content yet to be translated and formatted. With the help of my friend in Arizona, my rusty Spanish should be decently readable.
This development is also a forerunner of major improvements for the main SSSD website, though, because the new pages are styled and formatted with CSS -- look, ma! no tables! If there are no major glitches in these, then the other core pages of the website will soon be uploaded in CSS formatted versions, to be followed slowly by a gradual reformatting of every page in the entire site. It won't happen overnight, not with two hundred-odd pages to hand-code. That's right; I'm not doing this with anybody's web-design software. My old app doesn't support CSS and I can't afford Dreamweaver. Besides, this way I'm forced to learn to do it right.
One way or another, we are going to forge a worldwide Seppala network. The ISSSC have proved to any reasonable person's satisfaction that they care nothing for unity or inclusiveness. So, since we cannot do this thing with them, we shall do it without them, just as they would apparently have it. I'll take the society of polite people like Luis Till and Ramón Rojas any day, over that of the self-styled "movers and shakers" of ISSSC's omnipotent Board.
One lady who had flown in from Outer Slobbovia and didn't understand Slobbovian knitting politics too well said to the Upper Slobbovian lady, "What on earth were you trying to do there? You could have killed our dear leader, you know!" The representative from the Cleverclogs Knitting Company took the Upper Slobbovian lady gently by the arm and whispered reassurances in her ear. Then he took her to lunch and persuaded her that everybody could knit together for his company, since the company didn't really give a damn about patterns anyway.
When the meeting resumed after lunch, the heavy-set woman gave a short pep talk promoting the International Upper Slobbovian Ladies' Knitting Circle. She explained that one of its attractive features was that ladies from Upper Slobbovia could not become members, since the Cleverclogs Knitting Company had legal issues in Upper Slobbovia. Finally she raised her fist in the air, told everyone, "The Slob Mountain Inner Circle is omnipotent," and sat down. Then her pretty little girlfriend stood up and chirrupped, "Now, then! Who would like to join the International Upper Slobbovian Ladies' Knitting Circle? Please raise your hands!"
And lo and behold, out of the entire crowd at the symposium only one confused little man raised his hand (and he was the official hairdresser to the Slob Mountain Inner Circle anyway)!
Moral: If you already have authentic patterns, tend to your own damn knitting and stay far away from Slob Mountain.
The Upper Slobbovian lady then stood up, holding a sweater that featured one of her own family patterns, which she had taken from the souvenir stand. She said to the group, "But this sweater from your circle clearly shows one of our own unique Upper Slobbovian patterns! Also, the Upper Slobbovian Ladies Knitting Circle is still active, and we were knitting these patterns years ago when nobody else was interested in preserving them. This pattern even came from our website!" Whereupon the heavy-set woman from Slob Mountain jumped up and shouted, "Where did you get that pattern! That's stolen property!" She charged straight at the Upper Slobbovian lady, ripped the sweater from her hands, threw a punch and knocked her sprawling. The heavy woman's girlfriend quickly stood up and chirrupped, "this meeting is now adjourned for lunch."
The Slob Mountain Inner Circle sat at a table in front of the group, looking powerful and forbidding. There was also an important representative present from the Cleverclogs Knitting Company, who spoke about the advantages of knitting under his company's contract, and presented the International Upper Slobbovian Ladies' Knitting Circle with a fat cheque to encourage people to knit the new Ugly Patterns.
One tall, heavy-set, Lower Slobbovian woman at the front table, who had more than a suggestion of a beard, was a very loud advocate of Ugly Patterns. She seemed to be the real leader, although she allowed her pretty young girlfriend to act as chairman of the meeting. The older woman gave a speech before the group, saying, "While it is true that traditional Upper Slobbovian patterns once came from Upper Slobbovia, we have it on good authority that all the ladies in Upper Slobbovia are dead. If they aren't, they certainly should be. What's more, this crap about a new pattern from Old Slobbovia is a fraud! Everybody knows the authorities in Old Slobbovia prohibited knitting years ago. So Slob Mountain is now the only true center of Upper Slobbovian knitting traditions, and the International Upper Slobbovian Ladies' Knitting Circle is the guardian and keeper of those traditions." And nodding toward the Upper Slobbovian lady, she continued, "You Upper Slobbovian ladies are history now. You're a thing of the past -- you never really knew how to knit, anyway. Your achievement is insignificant. You might have passed on a pattern or two, years ago, but our Ugly Patterns are the only ones that count now." And she continued with a discussion of all the many Ugly Patterns which she and her Slob Mountain Inner Circle had invented.
The Upper Slobbovian Ladies' Knitting Circle representative made her way to the Slob Mountain symposium, which was very far away, bringing with her all of the best examples of traditional Upper Slobbovian patterns as well as the new Old Slobbovian pattern, along with some strikingly beautiful combinations of Upper and Old Slobbovian patterns. She came prepared to share her patterns and to discuss the unification of the Upper Slobbovian Ladies' Knitting Circle with Lower Slobbovian knitters who wanted to do traditional patterns.
She was rather surprised when the Symposium actually turned out to be all about presenting the International Upper Slobbovian Ladies' Knitting Circle as the one and only legitimate source of Upper Slobbovian family patterns! And quite a show it was, this symposium. There were souvenirs, booklets, teeshirts, sweatshirts, and coffee mugs, all featuring traditional Upper Slobbovian family patterns, mostly downloaded from the old website in Upper Slobbovia! There was even an Upper Slobbovian Knitting Manual from the new website, half of which was copied from an old manual published by the Upper Slobbovian ladies many years ago, but the other half was composed of bizarre new instructions made up by the Slob Mountain Inner Circle, including one strange one that said, "it is a distinguishing feature of Upper Slobbovian knitting that the patterns must be as ugly as possible."
Nobody paid the slightest attention to any of this for seven years. Then one fine day there appeared on the WorldWideWeb a new knitting website, called the "International Upper Slobbovian Ladies' Knitting Circle." It was a cheap, knock-off sort of a site, but it had cheerful jingly music on its home page. And lo and behold, there on the new website were the old, traditional Upper Slobbovian patterns -- but they had been thoroughly mixed up with patterns from Lower Slobbovia! Some of them were actually mostly Lower Slobbovian patterns, although they had the same names as the traditional Upper Slobbovian ones. There was no sign of the new pattern from Old Slobbovia, though.
The Upper Slobbovian Ladies' Knitting Circle thought all that was distinctly odd. They had once had a fine website of their own, years ago, which had featured all the traditional patterns as well as the new one; but they had hosting and maintenance problems and took the website down. (When they did, a few sly troublemakers said, "The Upper Slobbovian Ladies are dead!") Before they could decide what to do about any of these events, they received an invitation for one of their Circle to speak at an "International Upper Slobbovian Knitting Symposium" to be held at Slob Mountain in Lower Slobbovia, supposedly for the purpose of "discussing the unity and uniqueness of Upper Slobbovian Knitting Patterns."
Once there was a Ladies' Knitting Circle in Upper Slobbovia. It had very few members, all of whom tended to their own knitting, which was of old, traditional Upper Slobbovian family patterns. The original patterns had come from Old Slobbovia almost a century before. Nobody was quite sure whether the Old Slobbovians were still knitting those patterns in the old country. Also, because the patterns had been copied and repeated often over the years, no one could be entirely sure that those were quite the same as they had been a century before, either. Then one day someone brought a handsome pattern back from Old Slobbovia! It was very similar to the oldest traditional Upper Slobbovian patterns, so the Upper Slobbovian Ladies' Knitting Circle used that pattern in their knitting and carried on, pleased at how well the new pattern fitted in with the ones they had always used.