5KCBWDAY3: Wednesday means the week is only half-baked

Experimental Photography And Image Handling For Bloggers.  Refresh your skills at creating attention-grabbing pictures.

For more 'Experimental Photography' posts from day three of Knitting & Crochet Blog Week, search on the 5KCBWDAY3 tag.

WIP Wednesday: March really is quite mad

I cannot believe that February has come and gone.  I don't know if it was looking forward to a few highly anticipated events (marathon, birthday, Phoenix trip, etc.) that made the month fly by, or if perhaps that extra 48-72 hours every other month has makes all of the difference, but it's time to accept the preposterous fact that it is now March.  Madness!

I think the parodies of March Madness are actually more popular, and certainly more fun, than the actual madness of collegiate basketball.  Basketball remains one of the sports that I keep on the outskirts of following, even in the pros, where I'm still a little traumatized after rooting hard for the San Antonio Spurs in last year's ill-fated championships.

So I prefer things like Jezebel's Cake vs. Pie tournament from a few years ago.  Democracy and desserts, what could be better?  Though I remember some heated debate around who could claim cheesecake and who got Boston Creme Pie.  And now there's the PBS vs NPR Public Media Madness, which is has already forced me to make some really difficult choices.  Sorry, David Attenborough, but Bob Ross' happy little trees gave him the edge.  And I love Robert Siegel, but I have a nerdy fan thing going on with Kai Ryssdal.  I have compared Kai being 'my' Marketplace host with David Tennant being 'my' Doctor.  I know, I'm such a nerd.  I'm sure that as the rounds go on the decisions will only get more difficult.  Is there anyone I would choose over Mister Rogers, though?  I don't know.

I'll use Mister Rogers and his cardigans as a segue into the knitting portion of this post: I finished my socks!  Yay!  So I'll have to do a little photo shoot with those for Friday.  Unlike the marathon, which I'm thinking is a once-in-a-lifetime achievement (half marathons should be enough for me from now on), I don't think this will be my one and only pair of socks.  I don't know which ones I might make next, but more socks will also be on my to-knit list.

What I have actually been knitting this week, after finishing up the socks, has been one of my long-term WIPs, the Up for Anything Cami:

This picture is actually from the last time I worked on it a few months ago, but it doesn't look much different, just a few inches longer.  I still love how easy the stitch is for mindless knitting and how it creates a texture that perfectly handles the crazy colors of the yarn.  I'm really hoping to carry some momentum and just finish this up before setting it aside for another project that I have yarn being delivered for.

Because I just didn't have enough yarn already.

For more WIP Wednesday posts, go to Tami's Amis.

Monday Movie Madness: Freakonomics

I thought this week I would go with something educational.  A little entertainment fiber to help you digest any recent reality show binging you might be doing.  But hopefully the kind you still enjoy watching.  Like the way I love Brussels sprouts, and they just happen to be really good for you.

This is another instantly Netflix-able film, Freakonomics.

I haven't read the book that made this economist-journalist duo famous, and it isn't really necessary in order to enjoy the movie.  It's composed of several mini-movies each made by a different documentarian taking on a topic from the freakonomics perspective, which generally means taking conventional wisdom and pummeling it with statistics until a hidden answer emerges.  Undoubtedly the most controversial segment involves analyzing dropping crime rates in conjunction with the legalization of abortion, but I found the segments on the importance of names and whether students could be bribed into good grades to be really intriguing.

With this movie, you're getting bite-sized chunks of interesting information that invite you to take a second look at things you think you know.  And it shouldn't leave you feeling utterly depressed about the state of the world.  Which, trust me, can be a downside to many documentary viewings.

And if you like the movie or the book, I also recommend tuning into Marketplace on NPR when they have their their Freakonomics segments, usually with journalist Stephen Dubner schooling Kai Ryssdal.  It's a regular Wednesday segment, and it's one of the perhaps unlikely reasons that I look forward to working out on Wednesdays, because it puts me in the car driving home at just the right time to listen to the show at 6:30 on KUT.

And hey, if you're 'being good' and watching a documentary, that means you can indulge on the concession stand candy or popcorn, right?

Thanks again to our lovely host, Heather, and you can read her review this week at Amaryllis Mussings.

A Morning Edition of frustration

I try not to get overly political, because that's not the point here.  But this morning I experienced one of those annoyances that isn't about politics, it's just the reaction any time that you hear something that you know to be untrue.  It just happens to involve politics, so forgive me the faux pas.

I've taken to listening to NPR in the morning, taking in the day's news and generally easing into another work day.  This morning, there was, as there has been every morning since Todd Akin made his, umm, interesting comments, a report on the fallout.  The Family Research Council is one of the few standing behind him, and the head of their political action committee, Connie Mackey, came on to talk to Steve Inskeep about how partisan the media was, because while this blew up, no one had covered how Obama had said that men shouldn't be involved in any women's legislation.

Here's the thing: the comment she's referring to...I heard it.  On NPR.  It was covered, in fact it was covered in its full context rather than the extrapolation Mackey offered.  And thus, an angry tweet was born.

And just to emphasize the non-politics of my pet peeve, I had the same reaction when Michael Kors told a designer he didn't understand why he had put a turban on his model.  Michael, it was because he was in the bottom the week before, he was wearing a turban, and you told him you loved what he was wearing and that you wanted to see that style in his designs for the runway.  Did you mean 'slap a turban on your next look'?  Probably not, but don't pretend you have no idea where that came from.

See?  My irrational desire to yell at people who live in my electronic devices knows no limits.  We won't discuss last night's episode of Project Runway.  I'll just say: Ven has just as much trouble talking to/about real people as he does designing for them.  He should halt his attempts at either.