How To Make A Dowager Countess Hat

by Stephany Aulenback

The premiere of the second season of “Downton Abbey” airs on Saturday Sunday night — for British television viewers. Unfortunately, those of us on the other side of the pond have to wait for broadcast. In the meantime, here’s a little project you might want to work on in anticipation, so that you will be properly attired when you do finally get to see it. Viewing parties, anyone? Some of you might want to don something similar to the gorgeous early feminist harem pants as modeled by Sybil — they’re like pajama pants only totally not. I know exactly what I’m wearing: a purple hat like the Dowager Countess’s.

I do not know what you call a hat like the purple hat worn by the Dowager Countess. As far as I can tell, someone in the know might call it a turban or a toque or some combination of the two. All I know is that it is some hat. It’s the kind of hat that makes you sit up and take notice.

This purple hat of the Dowager Countess’s, who is played not incidentally by Maggie Smith (Julian Fellowes wrote the part with her in mind), is the kind of hat that makes you spend ages online analyzing screen shots. Among your many questions, the most pressing will be: just what are those purple lumps adorning the front of that hat? This hat is not so much bejeweled by those tumerous-looking lumps as diseased by them. They don’t look as if they’ve been affixed to the hat; they look as if they’ve grown there. This is an arresting hat, exquisite and frightening. And very, very funny. Like Maggie Smith in the role.

As they say in that old chestnut about dresses, you have to wear the hat or the hat wears you. Particularly this hat. It’s like the lines Fellowes has given the Dowager Countess — they’re amusing, yes, but it’s the way Smith says them that makes them really work. In the hat, Smith looks imperious and daunting, a force to be reckoned with. And also slightly loony. In my knock-off version, I look by turns constipated, startled and downright batshit insane. But I’m still young. Ish. I still have time to develop my imperial manner.

Every woman, or at least every woman who wishes to one day achieve the Dowager’s impressive level of self-assurance (although some might call it arrogance), needs to learn to carry off a hat like this. So here is how to make your own. You know, for practice.

1. For the base of the hat, we scored a child-sized costume pirate hat purchased for two bucks. With a little tweaking, the high front of this hat will roughly approximate the shape and size of the Dowager’s turban/toque. We found ours at the fabric store but these are widely available on Amazon or at dollar stores everywhere.

2. Next, pile a bunch off cotton batting on top, attempting to build up one end of the hat slightly higher than the other. This will probably fail but give it your best shot.

3 Then, take a swath of darkish purple cloth — ours is a hideous polyester but the Dowager’s was probably silk or somesuch — and drape it over the stuffed pirate hat. Making sure to leave enough fabric to tuck underneath the hat, cut it out in a large circle shape.

4. Next, pull the fabric tight around the surface of the stuffed hat. Then turn the whole thing over upside down and hot-glue the fabric section by the section to the inside rim of the hat.

5. Now comes the fun part. Still using the hot-glue gun, begin to affix the periwinkles to the front of the hat, attempting to approximate the naturalistic arrangement of them on the Dowager’s. Oh. The periwinkles. I forgot to mention that you must go to the beach and collect a bunch of periwinkle shells. And then, if they are not the correct shades of purple, pink and white, as mine were not — our particular stretch of ocean appears to favor periwinkles in shades of blue — you must wash them and dry them and paint them. This takes ten to twelve hours, tops, counting collecting time and paint drying time, of course. (If you don’t live near a beach that features periwinkles, you can try clam shells. If you look closely, you might be able to see we stuck a few on our version. And if you don’t live near a beach at all, you could try rocks and pebbles. Or, I don’t know, lumps of purple felt. Feel free to improvise here.)

6. Lastly, wrap a narrow length of black netting around the entire brim of the hat and drape the ends artfully over the top. When you’re pleased with the effect, hot-glue the netting in place.

Et voila! Now you get to go stand in front of a mirror, tilt your head to one side, perch the hat on top of it and stare disdainfully at yourself. Next, try to look autocratic. Domineering. Haughty. Magisterial. Condescending. Overbearing. Well done! The thesaurus doesn’t include “high-hat” with all those words for nothing.

Related: After “Downton Abbey”: 10 British Costume Dramas on Netflix Instant

Stephany Aulenback lives in Nova Scotia with her husband and two children. She blogs at Crooked House.

Donald Sutherland’s Riding-Mower Pipe-Organ Rain-Seed Gun To Be Replaced By Kilometer-High Suspended Hose And Stadium-Sized Hydrogen Balloon

“Next month, researchers in the U.K. will start to pump water nearly a kilometer up into the atmosphere, by way of a suspended hose. The experiment is the first major test of a piping system that could one day spew sulfate particles into the stratosphere at an altitude of 20 kilometers, supported by a stadium-size hydrogen balloon. The goal is geoengineering, or the ‘deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment’ in the words of the Royal Society of London, which provides scientific advice to policymakers. In this case, researchers are attempting to re-create the effects of volcanic eruptions to artificially cool Earth.”
 — Cloudbusting takes a step forward.

Happy birthday to Bilinda Jayne Butcher of My Bloody Valentine, who turns 50 today. Here is “Only Shallow,” the first track off of the album Loveless, which older readers may remember doing sex to many years ago.

It’s been quite some time since we’ve had word from the Dept. of Technical News and Notes, but at long last, we’re pleased to announce that The Awl (and The Hairpin and Splitsider) are coming to you now from their all-new home. Their tiny house, in which they all happily cohabitate as platonic roomies, is now a slightly larger and sexier tiny house, with prettier appliances and closets full of more expensive outfits. And they FINALLY threw out all that garbage that was holding them back from being pretty and successful! It’s like they all read The Secret at the same time and decided to “envision a more powerful life.” (Except then they hired a personal organizer and bought a new house, because The Secret is actually, you know, not real.)

What does this mean for you?

Well, one thing that would be great is that if you see something behaving in a totally broken manner, please drop us a note, with your system and browser info (and a screenshot too, if possible).

Otherwise, sit back and refresh and reload regularly and watch our websites not become all grumpy and hostile at 3 p.m. EST every single day.

GO ON, TRY TO TAKE US DOWN NOW WITH ALL YOUR LINKING AND SHARING.

Next week we’ll be doing some more tech stuff (for nerds: offloading our image files to a CDN), so you should see further improvements. Thanks go out to our host Datagram for their patient work with us, and to Sound Strategies for important and visionary tech scheming.

And thanks to you for bearing with our sluggishness. As long-time readers know, we’re an independently owned and solely self-supporting organization, without private investment or a corporate daddy, and these changes come slowly and sometimes painfully!

The above footage was taken in May, when director Shervin Hess strapped a palm-sized GoPro Hero video camera to the back of a horseshoe crab with two rubber bands and set him crawling into Rocky Point Marsh, in Breezy Point, on the bay side of the Rockaway Peninsula. “The camera is neutrally buoyant and had no discernible effect on locomotion,” Hess wrote on his blog, Rocky Point Marsh Makers. “After several minutes the horseshoe was relieved.”

Hess, who works for PBS’s wonderful nerd show “The History Detectives” with my friend Jen, has adopted Rocky Point as a clean-up project.

The five-acre salt marsh was filled with washed-up debris when he first visited with a National Park Service ranger last October. He’s been going out once a week for almost a year since then, picking up plastic trash, hauling stream-clogging lumber out of the reeds, and raking crap off the surface of the water.

He’s gotten a small crew of volunteers to help him out sometimes, and he has been meticulously documenting their progress and cataloguing the tidal patterns and seasonal changes and all the different types of wildlife that inhabit the place — with excellent photographs and, often, super-cool stop-motion videos. All of which he puts up the blog, which amounts to a fascinating and beautiful naturalist study of one small patch of New York that you don’t otherwise hear much about.

In June, Hess and co. built an osprey platform, and installed a motion-sensitive camera trap on it. Osprey and willet and herons and kingfishers and lots of other birds have been stopping by. Look at these amazing photographs of a tern diving for killfish! And in July, there was a particularly exciting aerial chase.

“As we raked, a large shadow suddenly sliced through the grass, drawing our gazes skyward to a massive female peregrine falcon towing a solitary least tern in hot, angry pursuit. Brass balls,’ Santos muttered. Indeed. The tern appeared less than least, roughly the size of the falcon’s tail feathers. It brazenly chased its would-be assassin around the marsh, coursing through the reeds and bashing into a tree before disappearing into the east. For want of a camera at that moment I offer this rendering”

God, I love that picture! I love everything about this blog. I spent a great deal of time looking at it yesterday.

Tomorrow, Saturday, September 17th, Hess has organized a large-scale group clean-up. Everyone is welcome. Volunteers will meet at the Rockaway Pier between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Tools and gloves will be provided, but people should bring their own food and water. Here are directions.

I have no idea what it will be like. I’ve never done anything like this before. But I’m going to go. I like horseshoe crabs.

by Eric Spiegelman

When I found out that Michele Bachmann got migraines she ceased to be this distant caricature of a crazy-eyed ideologue. The Buddhists say that understanding someone else’s suffering leads to compassion, and as stupid as this sounds I found Bachmann instantly more human simply because I get migraines too. It changed my bias. I stopped seeing her religious crap as some insidious flaw. Now I see it as a well-meaning flaw. I’ve been secretly rooting for her to win the Republican nomination ever since I learned about her affliction, ever since people started saying it somehow disqualifies her from office. Who you like in politics can be a weird and visceral thing.

The migraines I get are called “aura” migraines. I think Bachmann gets the ones where you become really sensitive to light and sound and have to go sit in a dark room for a few hours. Mine are incapacitating in a different way. They begin with a dead spot in my eyesight, like I just caught the sun’s reflection in a car windshield. Instead of fading away like an afterimage would, the spot grows, and grows, until it obscures the entire right half of my field of vision. This makes me effectively blind.

My first migraine happened during a job interview. It was the middle of On-Campus Recruiting, that period of law school when you’re quite overwhelmed with stress because you didn’t realize everything would be this difficult, and then in the thick of your panic law firms come to judge your entire career as a lawyer based only on your first year, first semester grades. It’s a time fraught with anxiety to begin with. It doesn’t help when half the interviewer’s face disappears. “So what aspect of contracts did you find the most interesting?” Answer: “I’m sorry, I think I’m having a stroke!”

After that the migraines started to show up once every few months on average, though there was a stretch last year when they showed up in strings, three over a two-day period, every week. My doctor asked if I’d made any changes to my diet and I told him I’d been cutting down on coffee after my morning intake had somehow ratcheted up to five cups. “Yeah,” he said. “I need you to not do that.” The sudden decrease in caffeine was a trigger, apparently. My prescription was like Jason Statham’s in Crank; keep my adrenaline all jacked up or face consequences to my health.

Caffeine is actually a key ingredient in many migraine treatment options. A single tablet of Excedrin Migraine has 65mg of caffeine, almost twice as much as a can of Coke. Most treatments are abortive, not preventative, meaning you can’t really protect yourself until you’re in the midst of an attack. When that happens, you have to act quickly, or the treatment has no effect. Usually the window closes a couple minutes after the point I realize it’s a migraine aura and not the afterimage of reflected sunlight. If I miss the window, I get to watch the whole thing unfold.

The actual aura itself, the blind spot, looks like a fishing wire held up to a light bulb, with a whole bunch of zig-zaggy pulsating lines coming out one side. If someone made an animated GIF of dazzle camouflage, that would be a pretty close approximation of this phenomenon. Except, the lines look less like paint, and more like the translucent ridges of a lenticular postcard. The spot eventually expands past my field of vision, allowing me to see again, but it leaves in its wake a nasty headache, followed by one or two days of crippling depression.

It’s this last bit that’s the most unnerving. Doctors call it a “postdrome” or a “migraine hangover.” It’s certainly splitting like a normal hangover, just slightly more dull, like your left hemisphere has been cleaved by a toy hatchet. And where regrets are specific during an alcohol hangover (“whose idea was the Goldschläger?”), during my migraine hangovers they’re much more all-encompassing. Waves of generalized anxiety shoot out from the toy hatchet blade. As an adult, you’re not supposed to let the anxiety win, so the idea of staying in bed to let it pass just smacks of failure. So I force myself to be social, which leads to a lot of people asking why I’m sulking. I wonder if Bachmann makes the same choice. She strikes me as pretty moody, as well.

The only people I talk to about migraines are other people who get them. We’re an ad-hoc secret support group. Most of these people are high-functioning members of society. There seems to be a correlation between voluntarily taking on a lot of stress and getting migraines, at least from what I’ve seen. And this personality type is also well-suited to not letting a migraine get in the way of anything they want to achieve. I’m not going to defend Michele Bachmann’s politics. But in at least one small way I do feel like I’m on her team.

Eric Spiegelman is a proprietor of Old Jews Telling Jokes.

Photo by Gage Skidmore.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

CASTLE

A house is an elephant I live in
I live in one room and death
is also in it like a plant
I forget sometimes to water
With time I can forget anything
Lost to me have been some lakes
What are death’s priorities
and what are mine and can
we reach a happy agreement
People have said to me in quotes
“safe as houses” and I feel
safe here but I think
my feeling is wrong
An elephant is kind but not safe
is maybe troubled
goes to drink and troubles
the water I can see it
I can see it but I do not understand
I went to steal bread and by mistake
I stole harm
Now harm is in the room
What if we eat it
In the room you are here
just a little, you relax
in your own potential form
I feed you and then I feed death
I bring you water
Time elapses, quilts us into place
This elephant we live in is rising
I think we cannot make her safe

TALK RADIO

There is only one thing in life that matters
It has to keep growing and it doesn’t need me
Those are not clues Those are laws
The thing is the sky It is blinking I think also
I must be blinking as if to say Sky
you are not the only one outdoors with autonomy
and the sky stays very quiet
It keeps blinking like it is stupid
People think when something doesn’t talk it is interesting
I am always talking and never interesting
like a pile of rocks Is that interesting
or moss wrapped up over the branch
but nature why don’t you say something
It scares people when there’s dead air

WE HAVE TO ACCOUNT FOR GRAVITY

Very large I am I am very
large for this aquarium I am
getting water everywhere and
also on my big self Do I really
have to live here forever or
could somebody please beam me
elsewhere Maybe a helicopter
Where do we purchase
the world’s largest one or
what is a new source for light
and did I mistakenly eat it
because please witness how
my incision casts on the ceiling
 — I don’t know — a glow

Heather Christle is the author of The Difficult Farm and The Trees The Trees, both from Octopus Books. A new collection, What Is Amazing, will be out from Wesleyan University Press in the spring of 2012. More information is at heatherchristle.tumblr.com.

It is almost astonishing, the sheer amount of additional poetry available right here, in The Poetry Section’s vast archive. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

Sunday, September 18

At New Orleans -6.5 Chicago
Week One the Saints played
Like a “Treme” episode.
They almost got good. PICK: SAINTS

At Detroit -8 Kansas City
The Chiefs crushed at home
by the Bills. That’s like Ron Paul
beating up Tyson. PICK: LIONS

At NY Jets -9 Jacksonville
Jags QB McCown
is a giant McUnknown.
Don’t throw near Revis! PICK: JETS

At Buffalo -3 Oakland
The Bills quarterback
Was smart enough for Harvard.
Raiders attend jail. PICK: BILLS

At Washington -3.5 Arizona
Redskins were not bad
Week one. Too bad their nickname
is pretty racist. PICK: CARDINALS

Baltimore -6 At Tennessee
Ravens beat Steelers
In a blowout, which is tough
even on Madden. PICK: RAVENS

At Pittsburgh -14 Seattle
Seven turnovers
In Game One. Steelers need some
really crazy glue. PICK: SEAHAWKS

Green Bay -10 At Carolina
Packers look awesome.
But my fantasy team is
starting Cam Newton. PICK: PACKERS

At Minnesota -3 Tampa Bay
I wouldn’t watch this
game if you paid me McNabb’s
whole big salary. PICK: VIKINGS

Cleveland -2.5 At Indianapolis
Without Peyton M.
The Colts look like Rocky right
before the montage. PICK: COLTS

Dallas -3 At San Francisco
This used to be a
great match-up, but the ’90s are
over and Pearl Jam sucks. PICK: 49ERS

Houston -3 At Miami
Dolphins let the guy
in the Uggs commercial throw
for 500 yards. PICK: TEXANS

At New England -7 San Diego
When the Chargers come
to Foxboro they might get
turned into chowder. PICK: PATRIOTS

At Denver -3.5 Cincinnati
Either play Tebow
at QB or he might float
right into heaven. PICK: BENGALS

Philadelphia -2.5 At Atlanta
Battle of the birds!
In the dome, on the turf they
might both score 50. PICK: EAGLES

Monday, September 19

At NY Giants -6 St. Louis
The only good thing
Manning might do this year
is car commercials. PICK: RAMS

Last week’s Football Haiku Picks went 6–9–1.

Jim Behrle tweets at @behrle for your possible amusement.

“[I]n a few years, the government will require electric cars and gasoline-electric hybrids to emit some type of noise at low speeds, when their battery-driven motors usually run silent. The promised rules — aimed at making the vehicles safer for vision-impaired pedestrians and others who rely on aural cues — have launched auto makers on a quest for the perfect sound. Among those considered: noises reminiscent of jet engines, bells, birds, flying saucers and revved-up sports cars.”
 — They probably haven’t considered this because it seems so obvious, by why don’t they just go with a smug, NPR-type voice that repeats, “Look how virtuous I am” over and over?

Here is a nice black-and-white video for the song “Wichita” by the young rapper XV, who is from Wichita, Kansas. The song is good, though I wish XV had done a little more with the chorus. The star producer Just Blaze, who is most famous for his work with Jay-Z, constructed the beat for XV’s song using samples of the classic pop standard “Wichita Lineman” as recorded by Johnny Harris and the Dells.

Jimmy Webb wrote “Wichita Lineman” for Glen Campbell, who made it into a no. 1 hit in 1968. It’s about a powerline technician who’s been working hard and misses his sweetheart. (I can never help but think it’s about a college football player, like the beginning to Lou Reed’s “Coney Island Baby.”) But it’s been recorded a million times since then, by everyone from Sammy Davis Jr. to Ray Charles to Johnny Cash to Kool & the Gang to Sergio Mendes.

Willie Hutch and Dennis Brown and R.E.M., too. And Urge Overkill, who’s version might be my favorite.

And Freedy Johnston.

The opening chords that Freedy strums there offer a glimpse into how the tune has crept into lots of other songs over the years. Don Henley’s “The Heart of the Matter,” for example.

(I am embarrassed to admit how much I like that song. It is disgusting in so many ways, I know, starting with the fact that it is by Don Henley. I can’t help it. I love it. The melody of that chorus is just a killer.)

And Prince’s “The Cross,” which, of course, no one ever need be ashamed to absolutely worship. (Watch that clip quickly, as it is totally mind-blowingly awesome, and Prince videos never stay up on YouTube for very long.)

And Just Blaze is not the first person to sample “Wichita Lineman” in a rap song.

Ghostface Killah’s “Pokerface,” produced by K. Flack five years ago, used a sample of Sunday’s Child’s 1970 version.

Wow! Now that I’m listening to it, I might like that Sunday’s Child version even better than Urge Overkill’s take on it.

I swear that dramatic repetitive break from Johnny Harris’ version has been used somewhere else I know very well, too. But I can’t put my finger on it.

Great. Now I’m tortured for the rest of the day.