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I haven’t been knitting much lately – the odd Band Cuffs here, working my Calista’s McQueen Knock-Off there.

What I have been spending most of my time doing is thinking about and reading Harry Potter and playing my PS2. I finally finished Kingdom Hearts II and started playing GTA: Vice City and God of War. Gotta go to top up with caffiene and kill some more denizens of Hades.

Indy

• Affectionate
• Playful and energetic
• Mr Fluffy Pantaloons
• Cuddlebunny
• RSPCA adoption
• trusting and forgiving
• Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
• Greedy
• My shadow and bff
• Boofhead
• Ambassador for felines

Yarn: Cleckheaton “Country 8 ply” 100% wool and Spotlight Basics 100% wool
Pattern: Band Cuffs
Yardage: 95M
Needles: 4.5mm

These are quick, fun and effective. I made them for the same Harry Potter Swap that I made the Gryffindor Lap Blanket for and again I am really happy with the end product. I rolled them up and sent them off in these little star containers I painted, decoupaged and varnished.

Yarn: Spotlight Acrylic
Pattern: Based on Sock Monkey Baby Blanket from The Happy Hooker
Yardage: ?
Hooks: 5.5mm & 6.5mm

This small blanket took me soooo very long to make due to the fact that I had to learn it all from the beginning as I have never crocheted anything more than a chain before. As well as constantly referring to the pattern, I had to keep on looking up how to make a certain stitch or terminology I had never seen before or just make sure that I was doing it right. But I am very pleased with how it turned out, even if the tension on the solid colour squares is a lot looser than those of the mixed colour squares.

Rupert

May 20 2007

Joss Whedon post on Whedonesque.
http://whedonesque.com/comments/13271#more

Let’s Watch A Girl Get Beaten To Death.

This is not my blog, but I don’t have a blog, or a space, and I’d like to be heard for a bit.

Last month seventeen year old Dua Khalil was pulled into a crowd of young men, some of them (the instigators) family, who then kicked and stoned her to death. This is an example of the breath-taking oxymoron “honor killing”, in which a family member (almost always female) is murdered for some religious or ethical transgression. Dua Khalil, who was of the Yazidi faith, had been seen in the company of a Sunni Muslim, and possibly suspected of having married him or converted. That she was torturously murdered for this is not, in fact, a particularly uncommon story. But now you can watch the action up close on CNN. Because as the girl was on the ground trying to get up, her face nothing but red, the few in the group of more than twenty men who were not busy kicking her and hurling stones at her were filming the event with their camera-phones.
There were security officers standing outside the area doing nothing, but the footage of the murder was taken – by more than one phone – from the front row. Which means whoever shot it did so not to record the horror of the event, but to commemorate it. To share it. Because it was cool.
I could start a rant about the level to which we have become desensitized to violence, about the evils of the voyeuristic digital world in which everything is shown and everything is game, but honestly, it’s been said. And I certainly have no jingoistic cultural agenda. I like to think that in America this would be considered unbearably appalling, that Kitty Genovese is still remembered, that we are more evolved. But coincidentally, right before I stumbled on this vid I watched the trailer for “Captivity”.
A few of you may know that I took public exception to the billboard campaign for this film, which showed a concise narrative of the kidnapping, torture and murder of a sexy young woman. I wanted to see if the film was perhaps more substantial (especially given the fact that it was directed by “The Killing Fields” Roland Joffe) than the exploitive ad campaign had painted it. The trailer resembles nothing so much as the CNN story on Dua Khalil. Pretty much all you learn is that Elisha Cuthbert is beautiful, then kidnapped, inventively, repeatedly and horrifically tortured, and that the first thing she screams is “I’m sorry”.“I’m sorry.”What is wrong with women? I mean wrong. Physically. Spiritually. Something unnatural, something destructive, something that needs to be corrected.
How did more than half the people in the world come out incorrectly? I have spent a good part of my life trying to do that math, and I’m no closer to a viable equation. And I have yet to find a culture that doesn’t buy into it. Women’s inferiority – in fact, their malevolence — is as ingrained in American popular culture as it is anywhere they’re sporting burkhas. I find it in movies, I hear it in the jokes of colleagues, I see it plastered on billboards, and not just the ones for horror movies. Women are weak. Women are manipulative. Women are somehow morally unfinished. (Objectification: another tangential rant avoided.) And the logical extension of this line of thinking is that women are, at the very least, expendable.I try to think how we got here. The theory I developed in college (shared by many I’m sure) is one I have yet to beat: Womb Envy. Biology: women are generally smaller and weaker than men. But they’re also much tougher. Put simply, men are strong enough to overpower a woman and propagate. Women are tough enough to have and nurture children, with or without the aid of a man. Oh, and they’ve also got the equipment to do that, to be part of the life cycle, to create and bond in a way no man ever really will. Somewhere a long time ago a bunch of men got together and said, “If all we do is hunt and gather, let’s make hunting and gathering the awesomest achievement, and let’s make childbirth kinda weak and shameful.” It’s a rather silly simplification, but I believe on a mass, unconscious level, it’s entirely true. How else to explain the fact that cultures who would die to eradicate each other have always agreed on one issue? That every popular religion puts restrictions on women’s behavior that are practically untenable? That the act of being a free, attractive, self-assertive woman is punishable by torture and death? In the case of this upcoming torture-porn, fictional. In the case of Dua Khalil, mundanely, unthinkably real. And both available for your viewing pleasure.It’s safe to say that I’ve snapped. That something broke, like one of those robots you can conquer with a logical conundrum. All my life I’ve looked at this faulty equation, trying to understand, and I’ve shorted out. I don’t pretend to be a great guy; I know really really well about objectification, trust me. And I’m not for a second going down the “women are saints” route – that just leads to more stone-throwing (and occasional Joan-burning). I just think there is the staggering imbalance in the world that we all just take for granted. If we were all told the sky was evil, or at best a little embarrassing, and we ought not look at it, wouldn’t that tradition eventually fall apart? (I was going to use ‘trees’ as my example, but at the rate we’re getting rid of them I’m pretty sure we really do think they’re evil. See how all rants become one?)
Now those of you who frequent this site are, in my wildly biased opinion, fairly evolved. You may hear nothing new here. You may be way ahead of me. But I can’t contain my despair, for Dua Khalil, for humanity, for the world we’re shaping. Those of you who have followed the link I set up know that it doesn’t bring you to a video of a murder. It brings you to a place of sanity, of people who have never stopped asking the question of what is wrong with this world and have set about trying to change the answer. Because it’s no longer enough to be a decent person. It’s no longer enough to shake our heads and make concerned grimaces at the news. True enlightened activism is the only thing that can save humanity from itself. I’ve always had a bent towards apocalyptic fiction, and I’m beginning to understand why. I look and I see the earth in flames. Her face was nothing but red.

Go to Equality Now

Watch this speech.

I have been crafting away for the last week or so but because it is for a Harry Potter swap I can’t show you or even tell you what I have been/am making. I have really enjoyed the brain-storming part of this swap as well as starting to make something that required me to learn quite a few new skills. I am quite proud of what I have been/am making and really want to show off my FOs and WIPs…

I have written this rather boring and uninformative post just because I didn’t want my blog to lie fallow for too long.

I knit and I knit and I knit and I knit (and occassionally unknit) but I just don’t seem to be getting anywhere with my Calista’s McQueen Knock-Off! This sweater is going to take me forever and I have started to get a roaming eye… maybe I should do a Rusted Root instead, or maybe a Molly Ringwald, or even start on my Rogue…

Here is what is left of my first ball of Bendigo Woollen Mills Alpaca. It seems both the sweater and the yarn go on forever.

Yarn: Noro Silk Garden #8
Pattern: Basic Cable Beanie - Stitch n Bitch Nation
Yardage: 100M
Needles: 4.5mm & 5mm circular; 5mm dpns

Not much to report with this very quick knit. The reason why I started knitting it is because I found that I had made a rather ugly mistake in my Calista’s McQueen Knock-Off and needed frog back quite a few rows. In an attempt to keep alive my love of the Calista’s McQueen Knock-Off, I decided to take a deep breath and knit something else for a little while. This Basic Cable Beanie took less than a day and it was a painless and relaxing process knit entirely while watching season 2 of the U.S.A. version of The Office.

The colours, oh the colours! The camera distorts all of the colours quite a lot, even with the flash off (as in these photos). Here is the most accurate photo that I could find on the web courtesy of Theresa at spellingtuesday.