Great for kids (doh!) and the kid in you! (woohoo!)

Our literary magazine will soon be fully operational, just like the Death Star. Only it will be a literary magazine.


I went to a yarn store today and bought some 100% Mercerized Marled Cotton Chinese Red yarn (yum yum yum yum) but as I pulled up to turn into my neighborhood ("neighborhood" -- combination neighborhood with real houses and then the townhouses-for-rent) and could not, alas, because the road was blocked by


a) a maroon minivan, next to which was

b) a police cruiser, several feet away from which was

c) a white car, on the ground outside of which and sitting against was

d) chubby white guy with his hands in the air because about two feet from his face was

e) an angry cop pointing a gun between his eyes.

"Marvelous," I thought. "I'll just go sit in the Arby's parking lot until this situation resolves itself." Of course at that second it started pouring. "Marvelous," I thought. This time I was being sarcastic.

The cop with the gun in my "neighborhood" incident follows closely on the heels of another incident, further away but still disturbing in which I and several other people in cars witnessed a fight between 3 people, one of whom was on a bike, that took place in the middle of an intersection. Where cars are typically driving. For 3 cycles of the stoplight. It was funny to watch a big woman pull her scrawny companion off of their sworn enemy, bike guy, only to get all up in bike-guy's face herself, but also frightening, because if these people are crazy enough to fight in the middle of an intersection, what might they do to the innocent people in the surrounding cars?


Does spring do this to people?

perhaps if our resolve were stronger...

Some new links:


Ready Made magazine: Ideas about what to do with stuff that you could probably throw away, but because you love the environment, you know better. They have project ideas (some more realistic than others) and challenges to come up with ideas for what to do with otherwise-disposable things. I'm thinking about sending in my idea for Free AOL Disk Coasters.


American Apparel: Sweatshop-free clothes. Manufactured in Los Angeles.


Green Glass: Glasses, votives, vases, goblets, etc. made from refurbised wine bottles.

I could barely muster up the energy to say 'fuck it.'

Why do I like knitting so much? Sadly, the answer is probably "pretty colors." I like pretty colors.


I bought this book, Stitch 'n Bitch, a couple days ago and want to make a baby blanket from a pattern in here. But I balked -- actually balked -- at the price of the quite lovely yarn that it calls for. $10.50/skein! And you need 8 skeins! That would be $84! For a baby blanket that you still have to knit yourself!


So, I'm checking out the discount sites, but haven't turned anything up yet.


But as I read earlier today, I guess you're not supposed to wash wool a whole lot, and especially not in anything remotely warm. Lukewarm is the max. Apparently putting wool in anything hotter than lukewarm is actually a technique to drastically change the finished product. And this is a baby blanket. A baby blanket. A baby blanket that would probably be best off dry cleaned. Am I supposed to say, "hey, here's an $84 baby blanket that I hand-knitted myself, but please don't wash it."?


Oh, but the yarn is so so pretty.

Also, why is there no other type of yarn than 100% acrylic or acrylic/cotton blends within 300 miles of where I live?

A: If you've made a decision, but then get new information that bears on the decision, it is not admirable to stick with the decision just because it happens to be the one you made. You are not a wimp if you change your mind based on new evidence. The word is "flexible."


B: You cannot blame your inaction on the lack of explicit information detailing planned attacks, because unless you interpret vague information as indication that you need to go find more explicit information, you will never get it. Nobody's going to tell you that you need to act; you should just assume that you probably do.


C: You cannot blame your ignorace of facts for your inaction, because it is your job to avoid ignorance. You are supposed to pursue knowledge. You are supposed to demand information and punish people if they do not give it to you.


I am sick of the president using his own stupidity and ignorance as an excuse for his failures. You didn't know? It's your job to know. You have failed.


The basic working assumption that people have is that he's incredibly reliant on his vice president, that he doesn't know or even care that much what the hell he's talking about. Although accurate, this assumption is leading people to excuse him from responsibility from his massive failures.

"kind-hearted kidding! ... good-natured ribbing? ... affectionate teasing!"

Diaspora!

Poor my dog. He has a cut that he won't leave alone and has to wear a big plastic collar that makes him look like he stuck his head into a megaphone or satellite dish. It's probably pretty loud in there. The vet said she'd seen a dog one time refuse to contract a muscle if he was wearing the collar -- he just laid there, limp, for a whole day. Others have pitched fits that lasted for hours. StinkDog, though, has very much a martyr mentality, and we were pretty sure he'd handle it okay. We were right that he wouldn't fight it too much, but we understimated the power of StinkDog's pathos.


He's SO SAD. Doleful eyes, posture, movements. It's like he's a basset hound all of a sudden. Poor, poor StinkDog.


We're past the 24 hour mark.

not especially terribly un-normal

An open letter to journalists:

Dear Journalists,

I know, as does everyone else in America 17 times over, that Americans are easily bored, that there are 8 million potential sources for information other than yours, etc. etc. However, the practice of describing politicians and public figures who "blast" or "slam" ideas, policies, and each other is both growing in popularity and stupid.


WWF wrestlers and hockey players "slam" each other. Exploding bombs "blast." Politicians and public figures criticize, excoriate, castigate, lambaste, denounce, and/or disparage. These are verbs that describe speech.


Please please please stop it.


Sincerely,
Dr. Mario

my smiley faces look demented

My students told me several classes ago that kids these days (they know, they explained, because they have little brothers and sisters) don't have to be as creative as they did. I am normally skeptical of such claims, because of course it'll always look like that, but then today I went to a popular midwestern craft store and was bowled over by the amount of stuff geared toward kids. "Everything comes in kits now," my students had said. "They have play-sets. We just had toys." I had kits, too, although they were more along the lines of "Hey! Here are some little plastic tubes and a patterned tray! Go get an iron and go to town!" (I cannot for the life of me describe what I'm meaning well enough to turn it up on google. Does anyone out there remember those little white trays with the little spikes that you would set little colored plastic tubes on and then iron so they'd melt together? Once, as an April Fool's Day joke, I hid some of those spiked trays in my brother's bed and then encouraged him to take a running start to jump onto the bed. Hilarious!)


At any rate, the paint-by-numbers section was bigger than my house.


And aside from the vast wasteland of colorful make-stuff kits for kids, I had a disturbing experience at said midwestern craft store. Now, I'm no anatomist, didn't even take anatomy in high school, but I'm pretty sure that the main job of skin is to keep all your important body elements on the inside of the body. Maybe I'm glossing over some finer point like temperature regulation or prevention of infection, but it seems to me like the biggest problems with the skin start when it's no longer doing the job of holding everything in. (As my brother once said, in a panicked tone, "MY BLOOD IS ON THE OUTSIDE!!!" I'm pretty sure this was not after the aforementioned spikey-trays-hidden-in-the-bed joke... but it could have been.) Well, when the temperature gets above about 55 degrees F, my hands are perfectly fine. And as it has been, like, 70 for the past several days, I got lax in my hydrate-round-the-clock routine and the temperature dropped to the mid-30s and of course my punishment is to spontaneously bleed from the hand in the middle of said midwestern craft store. Normally it's like, hey, my hand hurts, oh look, my skin has cracked and you can see layers of skin you don't normally see -- look how pink! But today it was like, ahh, there's blood all over my hand! It sucked.

welcome to the weekend of our discontent

After staying up until 5am and then getting up at 10:30 the next morning, we laid down around 9:30 last night, slept until 3am, regrouped and got up at 10:30-which-is-really-11:30-thanks-to-that-goddamn-daylight-savings-time this morning. We have not done ANY work. NONE.


In other news, my computer has decided that it would be cool to have Emergency System Shutdowns every once in a while. Also, Norton tells me about every week or so that it has detected and removed the W32. blaster worm. Um... shouldn't that never happen again then? Also, my e-mail program seems to have decided that it cannot possibly get my mail. All of these things are adding up to some concern, but as I have no idea how to begin to fix any of it, I shall go blithely on until I am literally unable to use Microsoft Word to write my thesis. At which point I will freak out. Microsoft Word itself seems to be having lots of problems - some of which seem to facilitate Emergency System Shutdown status.


Also, Jane Dog seems to want something, but she doesn't talk (in words), so I don't know what.


My world is confusing today, but I am well-rested.

For one thing, he says "shinizzle"

Yesterday night we stayed up until about 5am. Somehow, this was EXACTLY what we needed, although I have no idea why. Maybe it was important to know that "Grace Under Fire" comes on at 4am. Maybe this information will save our lives someday. Other had the revelation, after watching an episode of "Drew Carey" and then "Cheers," that there is a finite number of plots for typical sitcoms and we have already reached the end of them. However, only one of these episodes managed to feature the guy who played The Fonz in a gigantic turtle costume. Points for that.


If you tap on the screen of a computer monitor with the tip of a metal 6 gauge knitting needle, it makes a cool electronic echoey sound.