Best Quote I Heard All Day
To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.

Bill Gates is living testimony to that...

Speaking of Research
Do visit my friend Jennifer Tocker's blog, Yarnaholic Confessions, and read Jen's concerns about the article on copyright in the latest issue of Cast On versus her Copyright FAQ. If you have this issue, compare it to Jen's FAQ. While I'm not sure that this qualifies as a case of out-and-out plagiarism, the article clearly lifted a hefty amount of material and formatting from the FAQ. A bit ironic, given the topic.

Having been an editor and a writer still, I find this situation quite dismaying. Any writer worth a damn knows that one source does not research make. I hope Helene Rush, the editor of Cast On, thinks twice about buying another article from this author. I know that I wouldn't. And I sure as shit would tell the author why.

Cast On has a lot of potential under Helene's editorship. Until recently, many knitters, I among them, felt that the magazine was one of the worst knitting mags around. I'd hate to see its credibility take another nose-dive.

Oh Behave, Baby!
OK, I need a divertisement, knitting-wise. Work is a mere interlude between those moments of knitting that I manage to steal. Would that I had a life! But I'm thinking that as long as I can manage only small needles, I should restart the Pacific Northwest shawl.

Now call me a dim bulb, but when I first started this last year, I decided to do it in black laceweight mohair. Dumb, dumber, dumbest. Never mind that black is the chosen non-color of the terminally hip...and never mind that I wear a lot of black because it's always appropriate whatever the social engagement. Never mind that my eyesight is so lousy, I can't remember when I didn't wear glasses. Never mind that I'm a Taurus...although what that has to do with the price of shit in Shanghai, I don't know.

Suffice it to say that black was a mistake...and led to many onerous, lacy, yarn-overed problems. Shagadelic.

But I do have some lovely cranberry laceweight merino.

If I have some peace and quiet around here, like maybe Saturday, this could be the next angst-project. I do love a good complex lace project to cleanse the knitting palate.

So it is written, so it shall be done. Maybe.

Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles
Time to get my German up and running. I have 3 knitting books in German, the Uberlieferte Strickmuster aus dem steirischen Ennstal series that I bought at Stitches a million years ago. These three books are a compendia of traditional Bavarian/Austrian type traveling stitch patterns and are nicely, though unconventionally, charted out. (According to Richard Rutt, Aran knitting evolved from these traveling stitch patterns--if you don't have his book, he managed to debunk the Aran legend. This is a book well worth reading, although I believe it is now out of print.) I may want to do a traditional short jacket one of these days.

And there's always the cute German engineer, too. Ich bin ein gutes Deutsches madchen! Ja!

How handy!