Re-Perspectivizing

While completely blaming the media for skewing the perspective of the general populace, with your help, I will now take it as my responsibility to try and put things back in their proper perspective.

Pop Quiz
Put the following events in order of worst to least worst:

1. Clinton getting caught getting head in the oval office.
2. Vidder having sex with prostitutes even though he's married and espouses family values.
3. Vick conducting dog fights and killing dogs that don't perform.
4. Craig propositioning a cop in an airport men's room.
5. An illegal alien shooting Newark, NJ high school students.
6. Bush starting a war in Iraq.
7. At least 70,000 (and up to 400,000) people killed in Darfur.
8. Over 3,000 still displaced households caused by Katrina
9. Shoddy quality control on Chinese imports kill pets and threaten childrens' lives with lead paint.
10. Barry Bonds takes enhancement drugs to help his homerun record along.

Again, I get tired or seeing/reading/hearing about supposed "news" events that have little or no significance, whle truly heinous things are happening that get no news time at all because they aren't sexy.

Current Knitting
Having enjoyed the accomplishment of finishing two pairs of socks on size US1.5 needles, I thought I might want to try my hand at the hiking socks in Kristin Spurkland's The Knitting Man(ual) which use US7 needles.



The colors I chose look a little Christmassy in the picture, but they're a little more earthy/tweedy colored than they seem. I love the pattern. I would highly recommend this pattern for a newbie making socks. It uses classic techniques, has multiple sizes, and walks the knitter through each step of knitting a sock. The resulting sock is comfortable, fits well, and looks great too. I will be making the matching socks for each of the socks pictured over the next few days.

Readers' Comments/Questions
Concerning the men's knitting booklet from the 1950's, Carol writes, "Now I must ask you to elucidate: when you say the models will "give [you] joy for a long time to come", exactly what are you inferring? Is that magazine going to take the place of the Patternworks catalog as your preferred bathroom "reading"?"

No, not the "Larry Craig" kind of joy...the doofy pictus of men about to go yachting or smoking a cigarette and making themselves a martini kind of joy.

Concerning the same booklet, Elizabeth notes, "I think that cover sweater on Men's Sweaters has potential. It just needs to be longer in the torso."

Yes, that's true, and you'd have to add a lot more ease than they allowed for even the largest sizes.

Fredda (of The Knitting Vault fame) asks, "The socks look great! What is "kitchener-like"?"

Kitchener stitch is used to graft two rows of active stitches. I use a similar technique to bind off a single row of stitches so that it still has stretch to it.