Of socks and fake deaths…
This is nuts. You think my Knitters Guild drama is silly? The knitting universe was ROCKED ten days ago by the revelation that yet another sock designer had faked her death. I’m not even joking. (The previous instance.) The MO seems to be to set up a business selling yarn and patterns, fleece a whole lot of people, disappear with the cash, and have a “friend” post an obituary for you. Bonus points if you come up with a rare yet believable disease and manage to get people to donate cash to your grieving family.

And you thought we just liked to play around with yarn.

T-Mobile Advert Spoof Closes Train Station. Ha! That’s pretty brilliant. I mean, the original flash mob was brilliant. The copycat event that closed down the station later was lame. That’s my whole problem with flash mobs, really. You can expect every creative and original idea to get run into the ground a zillion times afterwards. But still, I’ve would’ve loved to have been there when the original one was filmed.

An Awesome Book
I got an email recently from Dallas Clayton. He wrote an Awesome Book that he thought I would like. It’s neat! Thanks, Dallas.

Thanks to a post on Grab Your Fork, I just discovered that we’re getting a Taste of Sydney Festival! (And it’s on my birthday!) I used to love going to the Taste of Chicago. Unfortunately it looks like our version it going to be ticketed. I guess it will cut down on any insane crowding, but it does increase the expense quite a bit.

Weekend Update: Mostly we just hid in the house to escape the heat. We watched the first half-dozen episodes of Battlestar: Galactica. I made some good progress on the sleeves I’m knitting. I went for a run on Sunday night once the weather started to change. There were several more developments in the ongoing Knitters’ Guild saga – including some humorless busybody dobbing me in for using Ann Westren’s name in a joke on Ravelry, to which I responded by calling Ann, telling her the joke, and thanking her when she laughed and laughed – but I’m going to try to disengage from that drama for a while. There are more important things to worry about.

More than 100 people are now dead in the Victorian bushfires. It’s the worst natural disaster in Australia… ever. There’s really just no way to process that. Firemen have likened the scene down there to a war zone, or the post-apocalyptic landscape from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Though there were a number of fires in New South Wales too, thankfully we were spared the worst of the hot weather and no one was killed.

Updated: The death toll is now 128 and expected to rise. Good god.