Scratch (horse)

Scratch, also known as Scratch II (foaled 1947) was a French Thoroughbred racehorse and sire best known for winning the Prix du Jockey Club and the classic St Leger Stakes in 1950. Scratch won the Solario Stakes in England as a two-year-old and emerged as one of the best of a very strong generation of French-trained colts in the following year. He won the Prix de Guiche and Prix Greffulhe in the early part of the year and then defeated the year's outstanding three-year-old colt Tantieme in the Prix du Jockey Club. In the autumn of 1950 he won the St Leger by defeating Vieux Manoir, who had beaten him in the Grand Prix de Paris. He won the Prix Jean Prat as a four-year-old before being retired to stud where he had an unremarkable record as a sire of winners in Europe and South America.

Background

Scratch was a chestnut horse with a white star and a white sock on his right hind leg bred by his owner Marcel Boussac. He was sired by Pharis, the undefeated winner of the 1939 Grand Prix de Paris. Scratch's dam Orlamonde was an unsuccessful racehorse but produced several other winners including Damno, who won the Prix d'Arenberg. Orlamonde's dam Naic was a half sister of the Prix du Jockey Club winner Ramus and also produced the Grand Prix de Deauville winner Jock. Scratch was sent into training with Charles Semblat at Chantilly.

Scratch monkey

Scratch monkey is a term used in hacker jargon, as in "Before testing or reconfiguring, always mount a scratch monkey", a proverb used to advise caution when dealing with irreplaceable data or devices. It is used to refer to any temporary configuration changes to a computer during any risky operation, which include a replacement for some precious resource or data that might otherwise be destroyed.

The meaning is based upon the use in the 1970s of a scratch tape or other storage device, which was available for temporary use, to temporarily store a copy of valuable data or provide extra storage space in case a program required that space. If a problem occurred, the valuable data could be recovered from its sole remaining copy.

The phrase "always mount a scratch monkey" originated from two tales by technicians about maintenance that was performed on computer equipment. The technicians were unaware that the computer was connected to five laboratory monkeys, and the routine maintenance procedures caused the death of three of the monkeys.

Gobots

GoBots was a line of transforming robot toys produced by Tonka from 1983 to 1987, similar to Transformers. Although initially a separate and competing franchise, Tonka's Gobots became the intellectual property of Hasbro after their buyout of Tonka in 1991. Subsequently, the universe depicted in the animated series Challenge of the GoBots and follow-up film GoBots: Battle of the Rock Lords was established as an alternate universe within the Transformers franchise. While Hasbro now owns the fictional side of the property (character names, bios, storyline), the actual toys and their likenesses were only licensed from Bandai in the 80s, were not covered by the Tonka acquisition, and are not available for Hasbro use.

History

The Gobot toyline was based on figures produced by Popy of Japan (later Bandai), named Machine Robo. In another similarity to Transformers, Tonka decided to make the figures sentient robots, rather than human-piloted mecha as they had been in Japan, and divided them into two factions – the good Guardians and evil Renegades (although early figures were simply described as ‘Friendly’ or ‘Enemy’ on the packaging). The figures were all given individual names, in contrast to the simple designations they received in Japan.

Hem

A hem in sewing is a garment finishing method, where the edge of a piece of cloth is folded narrowly and sewn to prevent unravelling of the fabric.

Methods

There are many different styles of hems of varying complexities. The most common hem folds up a cut edge, folds it up again, and then sews it down. The style of hemming thus completely encloses the cut edge in cloth, so that it cannot unravel. Other hem styles use fewer folds. One of the simplest hems encloses the edge of cloth with a stitch without any folds at all, using a method called an overcast stitch, although an overcast stitch may be used to finish a folded "plain hem" as well.

There are even hems that do not call for sewing, instead using iron-on materials, netting, plastic clips, or other fasteners. These threadless hems are not common, and are often used only on a temporary basis.

The hem may be sewn down with a line of invisible stitches or blind stitch, or sewn down by a sewing machine. The term hem is also extended to other cloth treatments that prevent unraveling. Hems can be serged (see serger), hand rolled and then sewn down with tiny stitches (still seen as a high-class finish to handkerchiefs), pinked with pinking shears, piped, covered with binding (this is known as a Hong Kong finish), or made with many other inventive treatments.

Hem (disambiguation)

A hem is a sown edge of cloth. Hem may also refer to:

Creatures

People

Places

Codes

Initialisms

HEM can stand for:

Hem (knitting)

A hem in knitting is the edge of a piece of knitted fabric that is parallel to the rows of stitches, as compared to a selvage, which is perpendicular to the hem and rows of stitches. Hems can be made in several ways.

The simplest approach is to bind off, possibly with decorative elements such as picots. This approach adds no extra thickness at the hemline (which is sometimes desirable).

Another approach amounts to a tuck: the fabric is folded over and the stitches are knit together pairwise with the stitches of a previous row. In this approach, the fabric is doubled along the hemline.

References

See also