it's getting hot in here... so take off all your penguins

You know, it's hard to get psyched about knitting a sweater in January when it's 50 degrees and sunny outside. There are tulips - TULIPS! - coming up outside my office building. Now, I like nice weather as much as the next person, but I'm a little concerned about the melting polar ice caps and everything.

The news this week on global warming has been very, very bad. Apparently 2005 was the hottest year on record (yes, even hotter than 2004). The polar ice caps are melting faster than scientists had predicted, meaning that tropical island nations are going to disappear faster than we had once thought. The penguins and the polar bears are getting aggravated, and I really can't blame them.

It's hard enough to know that I'm one of the greedy first-world energy abusers driving around all the time causing this mess, and that my government could care less about public policy to DO anything about it. But it's such a dang slap in the face to see one of my fellow Americans motor past me in a Hummer (on the way to the gym, where they will pedal a stationary bicycle and walk on a treadmill). Or really any other big car, it's just that the Hummer seems to be the most graphic (and sickening) symbol of our blatant disregard for the rest of humanity.

I think I want to run away to France and join the Dégonflées. They're the nutty wonderful activists who let the air out of the tires of big SUV's. Here's a quick quote from a London Times article:

The continental groups compete to see who can let down the most tyres in a night. In December 14 Belgians deflated the tyres of 137 off-roaders...

A spokesman for a Paris group, who calls himself Sub-Adjutant Marrant (Joker), argues that drivers of 4x4s do not care that their vehicles emit disproportionate amounts of carbon dioxide, and that politicians are scared of the car lobby. “We emphasise the comic, the burlesque side,” he said. “It would be hard to take us to court. We don’t slash tyres; we deflate them. Air doesn’t cost anything.”

The worry-wart Brits raise legitimate concerns about people needing their cars in an emergency and finding them with the tires (or tyres) flat. But what a paltry little worry, when we're frying the whole damn planet, starting with penguins! It's fun to hate on SUV's, but really, we ought to be letting the air out of all our own tires. Not our bikes, though! Penguins love your bike.

I want to get all fired up about the Alito confirmation today, because I think that flushing sound I just heard were my reproductive rights going down the toilet... or was it the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? But instead I'm feeling a little too deflated about the Big Picture to focus on any one evil weasel and his ascension to the Supreme Court.

I don't get why nutty fundamentalists threaten heathens with perishing in the eternal lake of fire when we're creating it for ourselves right here on planet earth. We've got it all here, folks - both the eternal paradise and the eternal hellfires - whatever we choose to do with it - right on our little earth. So excuse me please, I'm off to gather me rosebuds while I may, which I guess is in the middle of winter now.

my violin wails for you

this is not me. this is joshua bell, hottie violinist numero uno.

Oh, Sew Fast / Sew Easy! How wrong we have been, to bristle at your harassment, when in truth it is you, YOU who are the victims!

Please peruse the inspiration of my lament, a press release from SFSE, addressed to "members of the sewing, knitting and crochet community," (that's us, y'all!). Marketing director Gregory Garvin (some of you may remember him better by his alias, Marketing Toady), has bemoaned the shoddy treatment his employers are receiving at the hands of angry wimmin with sticks, just because they tried to have all our online forums shut down. [Update: the letter has been removed from the SFSE website. Thanks to the Geeky Knitter for preserving screenshots. Read here.]

How misunderstood! How victimized!

The new strategy: divide and conquer.

The real villain here is not the Evil Seamstress Overlords! It's Debbie Stoller, (a.k.a. "Miss Stole-It" in Evil Seamstress Overlord lingo - I think they must be trolling our blogs for funny ideas), who un-feministly "steals" our ideas for her rip-off books! Geez, when I submitted that profile of my knitting group to Debbie, I had no idea that she'd exploit us so shamelessly by printing our picture in her book and letting us describe ourselves in our own words. The nerve!

So, new story, everyone is mean to them, Debbie Stoller is a big fat liar and idea-stealer who unfairly victimizes knitting groups, and everyone is welcome at Evil Seamstress Overlord Web Forums as long as we don't say anything mean about anybody, because it's wrong to be mean. And by the way, here's a cease and desist order for your blog.

Okay, that last part hasn't happened yet, but I'm waiting. Meanwhile, if you just can't hate enough on Sew Fast Sew Sleazy, check out the great new Stitch & Bitch timeline over at Free to Stitch, Free to Bitch, and more legal analysis of the trademark question (plus some gossip) over at the Girl from Auntie.

==
And finally, the "4 Things" meme. Saun always hips me to the internet bandwagons. And I always jump.

Four jobs in my life (these are all more interesting than my current job, which I love):
1. Guard of beach chairs in Margate, NJ (on average I read one whole book every day at this job)
2. Karaoke DJ at a crappy boardwalk karaoke stand
3. Tutor/babysitter to insanely bratty Austrian child, Ingrid (this is a story I must one day share).
4. Cheerleader/cowgirl/beer party hostess for Coors European marketing strategy

Four movies I could watch over and over:
1. A Room With a View (believe me, I have)
2. Playtime (Jacques Tati)
3. ....
4. (I don't like watching movies over and over).

Four places I have lived:
1. Charlottesville, VA
2. Vienna, Austria
3. Carrboro, NC
4. Pomona, NJ

Four places I have been on vacation:
1. Budapest, Hungary
2. Paris, France (oh la la!)
3. Acadia National Park, Maine (just last fall)
4. Zion National Park, Utah

Four websites I visit daily:
1. Environmental Health News
2. Bloglines
3. NC Conservation Network blog
4. Flickr

Four of my favorite foods:
1. Hot Thai curries with tofu
2. Malai Kofta
3. The sampler platter at Neomonde
4. Is tea "food"? If so, then a big pot of Darjeeling with lots of milk and a little sugar.

Four places I'd rather be right now:
1. On my couch knitting and listening to archived episodes of This American Life with Simon in my lap
2. Hiking in the Shining Rock wilderness area with HWWLLB
3. Value Village with Miss Bugheart
4. Protesting outside Sew Fast / Sew Sleazy's NYC headquarters

Tag, you're it: Bugheart, Angelia, Jenn, and Kristy (this is my frail attempt to get Kristy to post something again soon). What's yer four things?

get into happy feet

For those of you who might not yet be sock-knitting zealots, let me put it to you straight: sock knitting is about the most satisfying knitting project in the universe. Here's why:

• Price. Even the most luxurious pair of socks is a relatively cheap project. On the low end, you've got my green self-striping socks here, made from KnitPicks Parade. Project total cost: $4.98. On the high end, maybe some breathtaking hand-painted merino action from Claudia Handpainted - you're spending about $22. Now, when you think about most of your knitting projects, even $22 seems pretty reasonable, dontcha think? (Try not to think about the fact that it's $22 for a pair of socks - think $22 for a great knitting project, and kabam! very reasonable).
• Luxury. Who wouldn't be tickled by wearing a pair of perfectly-fitted socks, hand-knit with care from lovely natural fibers? Think about socks these days: even the cool looking ones are just lycra with Hello Kitty on them. The bad ones? Ugly white Hanes Their Way. A hand-knit sock is a rare luxury - and pretty dang snazzy-looking, too.
• Portability. This is a tiny little project! Just stick it in your purse and whip it out whenever you have to wait in line at the Post Office or the DMV. You don't even have to remember to bring a project if you're going someplace like that. I know of some sock-knitting fools who keep a pair of socks-in-progress in their purse the way some people keep breath mints.
• Sex! Well, not sex really, but... if you use the Magic Loop technique, then you get to use Addi masTurbos. And even if you're still with that sweet but frumpy bamboo, the DPN's shape themselves into a configuration that looks like some kind of wicked ninja weapon - very intimidating. Could be helpful at the DMV.

Friends, that's my weekend advice to you. Go spend 5 bucks and learn to knit some socks! You'll thank me for it, I promise.

roarin' leos

Simon's a Leo. I'm a Leo. And for whatever reason, it seems like just about everyone* who reads this blog is a Leo, too. Or, as someone at Stitch & Bitch pointed out, maybe it's just that only the Leos leave comments. I don't know which - all you Leos can leave a comment and tell me what you think.

We know this because this is the kind of vital information that Blogger collects about people. Whenever you click over to someone's profile, the first thing you see is their astrological sign. What's the deal, Blogger? Are they selling star charts on the side? Are they keeping statistics on which signs leave the most comments? Which lurk the longest without revealing themselves?

At any rate, it seems like any time some cute new person leaves a comment and I go investigating to see who they are, they are a Leo. Is this a personality trait, or just how the stars align on this particular location?

Knitting-related update: My green striped socks love the magic loop. I'm a little worried that my warm, stable relationship with bamboo knitting needles is being displaced by a passionate affair with some hot Addi Turbos. They're sexy and metallic, expensive and a little bit dangerous... and I can't stop knitting with them. I brought them to work today and I'm having a hard time concentrating on writing a grant proposal with those slinky Addi Turbos sitting just inside my bag, begging to be picked up and stroked - uh, knitted with. (cough).

*Everyone, meaning, everyone who isn't reading out of friendship-related compulsion. I know y'all aren't Leos - if you were one of our giant egos would have rolled over and crushed someone to death by now.

little pink ribbon

I think we need to make this ribbon green.

According to a new study released this week by the Breast Cancer Fund and Breast Cancer Action, half of all breast cancer cases are caused by environmental exposures. A large-scale survey of recent breast cancer research revealed that only about half of cases can be explained by things like genetic susceptibility or lifestyle risk factors. The rest are a mystery.

Except they're not. Despite the chemical industry's vociferous statements to the contrary, numerous environmental contaminants have been linked to increased breast cancer risk.

From a story in today's Oakland Tribune:

"You just can't blame it on lifestyle factors, like when you have children, or if you have children," said Nancy Evans, health science consultant for the Breast Cancer Fund and the report's principle author. "Half the cases are not explained by genetics or the so-called `known risk factors.' There's something else going on."

Environmental risk factors include exposure to things like pesticides, plasticizers, and radiation from - of all things - early mammograms.

This year, over 200,000 women in the US will be diagnosed with breast cancer - one out of seven women will be diagnosed in her lifetime. That's triple the rate of breast cancer in the 1960's. Only one in ten cases of breast cancer occur in women with a genetic predisposition for the disease.

I applaud all the walks for the cure, rides for the cure, knits for the cure, and the noble efforts of cancer researchers. But it's high time this country gets serious about going green for prevention.

historical fiction

I am more than a little annoyed at the Evil Seamstress Overlords (as you might have noticed). But before I start bashing on them, I thought I'd hip you to the great new website set up by angry wimmin with pointy sticks, freetostitchfreetobitch.org, where you can read all about the evil company that shafted us, get cute graphics & buttons for your website and learn about friendly independent retailers of crafting supplies. So click on over there, I don't mind. The rest of this post is just a rant anyway.

So here's what I'm ranting about. It's this little bit of historical fiction from the Evil Seamstress Overlord website, under the heading, "Recent change to the Stitch & Bitch Cafe":

Stitch & Bitch started before 1997 when students of Sew Fast Sew Easy, Inc. gathered together for Friday Evenings of sewing, knitting and crochet fun. It was an idea of Elissa Meyrich the creative director of Sew Fast Sew Easy, Inc. In 1998, it became the Stitch & Bitch Café forum and linked to the website Sew Fast Sew Easy, Inc.

Stitch & Bitch Café is a brand name under Sew Fast Sew Easy, Inc and has been trademarked since 2001. No other usage of Stitch & Bitch ever occurred before the first Friday evening gatherings at Sew Fast Sew Easy [emphasis added] in it's first location 147 West 57th Street and Stitch and Bitch Café was one of the first online forums of its kind. We at Sew Fast Sew Easy decided it was time to convert our original trademarked online board into a forum. We also continue to hold our Stitch & Bitch nights at our current address 237 West 35th Street . Those nights are announced to our students and customers.

People, PLEASE?!? Who do they think they're fooling? Wimmin have been using the term "stitch and bitch" a loooong time. Even if their little creation story has any basis in actual events, the "no other usage" statement is pure fantasy!

Okay, here's my own factual example: last year I read Barbara Kingsolver's 1990 classic, Animal Dreams. I love this book, by the way. Anyhow, one of the big crises in the book is resolved by the Stitch & Bitch Club (yes, that's what she calls it), who use their crafting skills to save the town from a huge polluter. I partly loved this book for the stitchnbitchers. Check it for yourself, I'm sure it's available at your local library. That's just one example of how the Evil Seamstress Overlords are fallaciously claiming to have invented an important piece of women's history - and I'm sure that Barbara Kingsolver didn't invent the term, either. Someone should ask her where she first heard it.

So what's in a name? It's not just about sewing and crocheting and having fun, all right? The Evil Seamstress Overlords totally miss the "bitch" part of the story. In Kingsolver's book, the Stitch & Bitch Club use their cute little crafts club to promote their native art and raise money for a legal fund to kick a big corporate polluter out of their town. At our very own Stitch & Bitch group, we have hatched revolutionary activist ideas like the Keys of Resistance, and held fashion show fundraisers to get more women elected to public office. That's the BITCH part!

At Evil Seamstress Overlord headquarters, Stitch & Bitch is just a cute name to promote their products and services. But out here in the real world of women's networking and skill-sharing, we use it to create a space for new ideas and projects - not knitting projects, but smashing injustice projects. Knitting is just the excuse to get together. In many cultures sewing, knitting or crafting is a clever cover for women's gatherings that would otherwise be forbidden.

Another example: a colleague told me about a project she had worked on with the Latina community in East Los Angeles in the 1970s. Domestic violence was (is still?) a large problem in that community, compounded by a very macho, patriarchal culture and taboos against talking about the issue. She wanted to get women together to talk about it, so that they could start to seek help and quit getting beat up, but their husbands wouldn't let them go out to meetings. So they started a sewing circle. The idea was to get together and sew Quinceañera dresses to raise money for themselves. That was no problem for the husbands - they gladly let their women go out to sew together and raise money. But what do you think they talked about in the sewing circle? They bitched and bitched about getting beaten by their men, and they started to do something about it. They didn't call themselves "Stitch & Bitch," but they sure did do that, in the full sense of the term.

So that's why I'm so ticked about these greedy fools co-opting the name. If you needed me to explain. Now I guess I ought to quit bitching and start a revolution. Or at least design some bumper stickers.

horror, magic and bandwagons

Here's the horror-inducing picture I promised: the wallpaper in our dining room. Miss Bugheart is right, it clashes with everything in my house - even the cats.


aaaaahhhhhh! i hope there are no small children reading today.

So you can probably see why I'd give my left big toe to take this stuff down. I swear, my portable compact steamer has nothing to do with the way it's peeling off the wall. I swear!

I had a great weekend knitting myself some socks with the Magic Loop technique (dreamy!) and scheming with fellow stitchnbitchers about evil things to do to Sew Crass/Sew Sleazy. Next I must learn this two-at-a-time sock thing. One set of directions I have is for two-at-a-time, toe-up. I don't think I want to do toe-up. I like ankle-down (or calf-down, as the case may be) and I'm afraid that if I reverse them then the water will start spiraling the wrong way down the sink and I'll have to move to Australia (which is what I said I was going to do after the 2004 elections anyway).

So... I've given a lot of thought to the knitting olympics... it was a struggle mainly over whether I really wanted to rush through a challenging project in just 16 days. Why F*** up a good project by rushing? And then JenLa persuaded me further with this great button:


really makes you want to warm the bench, doesn't it?? if i could just find that hat...

Despite the fact that the alternative is a hideous red, white & blue Team USA button, I think I can't reist the challenge. Plus I just can't help jumping on the bandwagon.

So I've chosen a kid's sweater, Wendy's Girlfriend Swing Coat Sweater, to which I'm going to add some openwork on the sleeves and bottom hemline. Not impossible, but a real challenge for a somewhat pokey ADD-knitter and perfectionist like me to knock out in 16 days. Better start gauge-swatching! The casting-on ceremonies are only twelve days away!