Australian Idol
I can’t help it. I’ve been sucked in again. The guys on Sunday were pretty boring though, with the exception of crazy-ass Husny. The girls were a lot better. Tarisai and Cheray were my favorites, but I thought Lana did pretty well too. (I’m hoping Cheray will make it as a wildcard.) Tonight my favorites were definitely Ben the Emo Kid and Marty the Hot Surfer. (I’m downloading Marty’s song as we speak.) I may even have to throw them some votes…

I just peeked out the door to see the lunar eclipse. Contrary to the naysayers, it was still perfectly visible from our apartment in the light-polluted city. Now I’m waiting for my latent mutant powers to emerge…

Michelle knitted Trogdor. That is too cool!

America’s Worst Colleges. I’ll admit that the Domer in me had a good laugh at Michigan State’s prominent placement.

Cat. Stew. Ew.

Finishing the Bryson book last week put me in the perfect mood for the Fifties Fair yesterday. The Snook and I caught the train to Turramurra and then the shuttle bus over to the Rose Seidler House. Luckily we’d followed advice and gotten there relatively early, so we didn’t have to wait long to get in. We ran into Morgan and some of the other Sydney photobloggers pretty quickly. After delivering the tea cosies to the Snook’s aunt’s stall (as pictured), we set off to see the sights. I’ve put a few photos up on Flickr. Yeah, there were a lot of dressed up hipsters. Some of the costumes were great, though a lot of the tats and hair colours were pretty anachronistic! We also met up with Amy and Bex (who has a sadly unflattering photo of yours truly here). I’m sure there’ll be more photos popping up soon…

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
I needed a pit of a pick-me-up after the nightmare that was American Psycho, so I cracked open Bill Bryson’s latest book, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. It was just what I needed. (Not quite a unicorn chaser, but pretty close.) It’s basically just Bryson talking about his childhood growing up in the 50’s in Des Moines, Iowa, a place and time that are now so remote to us that Bryson can approach it like one of his other travel books. Since we saw the author in person earlier this year, it was as if I could hear his actual voice reading this one out loud. My favorite part was his several-years-long struggle to get into the “stripper tent” at the Iowa State Fair. His friend Stephen Katz (from A Walk in the Woods) makes an appearance towards the end. Overall it was a quick and pleasant read, though I’d still rank Down Under (known as In a Sunburned Country in the US) as his funniest. (And that’s not because I live here; I read it while we were still back in England.) If you’re the type of person that enjoys the gentle, nostalgic humor of A Christmas Story, then you’ll like this book.

DUDE! I was just googling for a particular knitting book online, and I found a UK shop called HCS Crafts. Um, notice anything familiar about that site? They completely ripped us off. (I saved a screenshot for posterity.) As you might imagine, I immediately fired off a rather terse e-mail.

As I see it, there are three main problems here. The first is website design theft. They’ve copied the way part of our site looks in a really obvious way. (Also, RANDOM. They’re in the UK but there’s an embroidery of the Sydney Opera House? Did they even look at what they were doing?) This isn’t really a “crime” that you can do anything about, other than naming and shaming. (Hence this post.) The second and third issues are a bit more serious. That header with the embroidery and the wool and the red rick-rack? That actually comes from a printed advertisement that we’ve been running in Sydney hotels for a number of years. A printed advertisement that is copyrighted and which we never gave any permission for anyone else to use. Lastly we have the fact that they’ve taken our shop logo, the actual trademarked image that we have on a sign in front of the shop, and simply replaced the words “Tapestry Craft” with their own. Yeah. You’re really not allowed to do that.

So of course this is all very flattering, especially since I’m the crappiest website designer ever. But hey! Now that I’ve been ripped off, I’ve got industry cred!

Update: They seem to have taken it down now. Evidently naming-and-shaming works!

Mary-Helen asks: “How hard is knitting, really?” I agree with a lot of what she says, even as someone who teaches the occasional knitting class. When I teach, one of the biggest messages I try to get across to my students is This is easy. You can do this. It seems that a lot of women* I meet don’t rate themselves very highly. They think that because I’m knitting socks, I must be cleverer or more talented than they are. This is bullshit. It’s all in the level of self-confidence. For better or worse, when I try to pick up a new skill, I usually start with the expectation that I’m going to be good at it. Otherwise why bother? And people were knitting long before there were knitting books and podcasts and Ravelry and all that other junk. It’s just sticks and string. How hard can that be? If you can follow directions and pay attention for more than ten minutes at a time, you can learn it.

* Possibly Sexist Digression: Sadly, it really does seem to be mostly women that have this attitude. I’ve never once heard a guy – whether a knitter or not – express a belief that knitting is hard. They may think it’s girly or beneath them, but they’d never say they weren’t smart enough to do it. Guys seem to figure that if other people have worked it out, they can too. WOMEN NEED TO ADOPT THIS ATTITUDE.