web-goddess

Mmmm… Chocolate-dipped pork fat. I wonder if they could make the chocolate sauce with Splenda, thus resulting in the Best. Low-Carb. Treat. Ever! (I kid, people.)

It’s certainly shaping up to be a knit-tastic weekend! Tea in the Library (on York Street) is having a “Yarn-A-Rama” event tomorrow night after work. Five knitting gurus are going to talk about the craft and answer questions. Sounds fun!

Mortification and Hilarity
My friend Mardi noticed this morning that photos are available from the Nike Women’s Classic. Curious, I did a search on my bib number (#1422). The image shown here was the only one returned. I was confused. “Where the hell am I? I’m not either of those girls!” Did I have my bib number wrong? Then I clicked on the image to see the full-size version. Ohhhh, good grief, there I am. Yeah, I’m that half-person in the red shirt on the left edge of the photo. Click on the thumbnail to see the large version, complete with telltale wristband. I feel like Charlie Brown. I didn’t even manage to get in a photo.

Kitty Update: Well, whatever it was, it fell off. I picked her up this morning to check and it’s not there anymore. She’s got a tiny little bald patch and the skin underneath is slightly pink. I’m taking this as confirmation that it was just a scab. We’ll be monitoring it but I’m glad we didn’t bother going to the vet.

The Australian Parliament is considering whether to require special driver’s licenses for people with SUV’s. They’d be required to pass an off-road driving skills test. Brilliant! Maybe it’d cut down on all the clueless soccer moms in Land Cruisers yammering away on mobiles while cutting people off in rush hour traffic. Too bad such a thing would never pass in the U.S. (People here don’t believe me when I tell them how many Notre Dame students had brand new Cherokees that were only used to drive between campus and Meijer.)

Great name for a knitblog: When Knitting was a Manly Art. More guys should knit. I spent lunchtime showing a couple girls in the office how to finish a cushion cover (adding button holes and casting off), and a male co-worker joked that we looked like a bunch of grannies!

The Craft and Quilt Fair is on this weekend! Any of you Sydneysiders want to meet up Saturday?

I’ve got a developing case of kitty anxiety. I noticed while I was brushing Dr. Amy Jones the other day that she had a hard little bump under the fur near her right shoulder My first thought was that it was her microchip so I took care not to touch it. Today I noticed that I could actually see the place where it was without touching her, because it displaced her fur a bit. I held her under the desk lamp and checked it out. It’s sorta hard and dry and yellowish, about the size of maybe half my pinky nail. It didn’t seem to hurt her but she didn’t like me touching it too much. (I also think she’s been more vocal with the meowing lately, but maybe I’m just being paranoid.) Anyway, I was pretty sure it’s just a scab, but I thought maybe I’d call the vet just to make sure. Well, that woman freaked me out. She was like, “It’s not the microchip. Those are, like, granular. You should definitely bring her in. Can you bring her in tonight? Ooh, maybe the weekend would be better in case we have to operate.” I’m like, “WHAT? OPERATE?! I think it’s just a scab!” And she was like, “Cats are very prone to abscesses. They can fill up with pus. You should bring her in so we can check her and put her on antibiotics.” So we’re booked in for tomorrow night. The rational part of my brain (and the Snook) insists that she just poked herself climbing around under the dining room table or something, and it’s just a harmless little scab, but the manic little paranoid bit keeps screaming that it’s probably some kitty tumor and she’ll have to have surgery and get shaved and eat weird food and be in all sorts of pain. Which is totally irrational, right?

Roger Ebert has posted a thoughtful essay on Fahrenheit 9/11 that addresses a main complaint about the film: that it’s not “objective” like a documentary should be. Newsflash! No film is objective, and no book is either. If a human being is deciding which images and words to use, then the result is inherently biased.

I think this is a useful point to make. I spent a semester studying with director Jill Godmilow and she quickly disabused us of the notion that documentaries were supposed to be “the truth”. Everybody’s got an agenda. Everybody’s making an argument. I remember she showed us Nanook of the North, which is the prototypical “follow the foreigner through his daily life” documentary. We all assumed it was True. Then we learned how the director cheated, how the big walrus fight was actually staged with a dead carcass, how the igloo was a cut-away to let the light in better, how he glossed over Nanook’s second wife so as not to offend audience sensibilities. The whole thing was a construct, and everything contributed to the theme of the exotic yet noble Savage. It was about as “true” as reality television.

Cinema is by definition untruthful and biased. That’s just how it is. Moore’s under no obligation to present the opposing viewpoint. At least he never claimed to be “fair and balanced”, huh?

Changes I observed in Newtown today…

• A new Gloria Jeans coffee shop has opened and it looks to be doing brisk business. Very interesting. It’s the only big franchise on all of King Street. (I’m told that the Newts basically ran McDonald’s out on a rail when they tried to open a branch a few years ago.) I did notice a large sign out front though: “This is a locally owned and operated business.” Translation: “Please don’t throw a chair through our window, hippie. We’re not The Man.”
• There are now three gelaterias in Newtown. Three! There’s no way the market can sustain that. There’s one in the old Greek place near the Marly, one where Vinnie’s Gourmet Greengrocer used to be, and a brand new one next to Sushi Boat. The last is really gorgeous and gleaming, and its gelato is very yummy. Uh… not that I would know or anything. (Hmmm. It was only a year ago that I was raving about all the gelato I ate in Italy. Maybe I started the new Australian gelato craze!)
• The “pink store” is gone! I can’t believe it. It was this completely random shop on Wilson Street that didn’t seem to fit into any existing shop genre. It sold clothes, furnishings, flowers, all kinds of crap. As near as I could tell, the only criteria was that the product be pink. Now it’s a trendy kids’ clothing shop or something.
• The 7-11 next to the Post Office has closed! I bet it was because of the exorbitant electricity bills they incurred as a result of their extra-sensitive automatic door, which opened whenever anyone walked past it on the footpath.

It’s so weird going back to Newtown. Now I feel like a tourist…