Best Quote I Heard All Day
My favorite thing about the Internet is that you get to go into the private world of real creeps without having to smell them.
--Penn Jillette

And I've met a few of them...

Do I Really Need This?
And If So, Why?
This is my question du jour or possibly du month. It's moving time: September 22 I'm out of here. So I'm taking a break from packing boxes to write the blog. I have no life.

Why did I buy so many books?

At last count, I have 10 boxes of knitting literature alone. And that's just one bookcase. The other knitting bookcase will fill about the same amount.

Do I need The Sacred Art of Knitting? Granted, it's a curiosity and has been out of print for years and years...but do I need it? Guess so, because it went into the box.

We won't even discuss the magazines--Threads, Knitter's, Interweave Knits, Vague, pre-80s Vagues, Spin-off, Piecework, various McCall's Needlework & Crafts, American Home Crafts, Family Circle Knitting, assorted pattern books from the '20s through the '60s.

Oh God. And that doesn't count the other fiber and needlework books on quilting, embroidery, and textiles.

I did discover a very interesting book that I'd forgotten I owned on Russian Revolution textiles.

Thirty years of indiscriminate collecting. I swear I'm going to catalog everything as it comes out of the box and put it all on a database. Really.

And then there are all the other books downstairs.

It's Alive!
Well, sort of. I went to the abominably organized XRX web site because the pictures of the Fall Knitter's are up. No, I will not give you the link to the Knitting Alexisverse. Go do a Google.

It's not totally hideous, amazingly enough.

There is one completely awful vest by Cyr that is so misshapen, I could cry. Besides the yarn, which looks like it was lint spun by a cretin, one side of this thing seems to be smaller than the other, especially above the armhole. Gack.

And of course, the Tiny Diva has some bizarro offering, an asymmetrical vest that looks just like other things she's done. Perhaps David Letterman will enjoy it, though.

But on the whole, the issue is blandly inoffensive.

The Elsebeth Lavold vest is exquisite. I will buy the magazine for that alone and make it.

And Speaking of the XRX Web Site...
While I was there, I thought I'd also take a peek at Melville's Purl book. Figured there'd be some preview pictures. Not.

But the really funny thing that I discovered was that on some of the XRX book pages, you are invited to write a review and rate the book.

There's only one problem. Well, two actually.

First of all, if you click on the "Submit a Review" button, the window text immediately informs you that whatever you write becomes property of XRX. Of course. Stupid me.

Second, nowhere on the pages could I find any link to reviews that had been written.

Does this mean that no one has written reviews? I doubt that, given the sycophantic nature of the Knitter'sDweebs.

I could hazard a guess and suggest that the advertising department is collecting these "reviews" for their multitudinous in-house ads.

But then I'd be a cynic, right?

Back to packing I go. Strapping tape is so rare and handy, I could almost want to wrap it around my naked body and make a fashion statement.