Next time I feel like tomato sauce, I’ll go back to the Rustica Tomato Basil, which tragically seems to not be stocked by my usual grocery store. I haven’t had it in a while, but my memory tells me it has a fresh tomato taste and a somewhat chunky texture and is exceptionally delicious, especially for someone who doesn’t typically love tomato-based sauces.

The first new blog I’ve picked up is Tiger Beatdown, a collective lead by Sady Doyle. I’ve heard it mentioned before, but never checked it out until recently. I started reading during Ladypalooza, more specifically, the post about Dude Music. (The rest of the Ladypalooza posts can be found on this archive page and can I just take a moment to tell you that it drives me to despair when people refuse to make it easy on me by tagging their posts in a useful fashion ;_; ) I appreciate that there are multiple posters who all seem to have reasonable things to say (unlike some other blogs with multiple posters :p) and I like the wide range of topics covered and the hipster-ish sense of humor there. That said, I can see why the hipster-ness of it all could be a turnoff for some people. And I would also like to express my appreciation for their NPR-style support of themselves. People should be paid for doing work. And all that is why they are my new jam. I just wish they’d update more often, but then they’d maybe suck more, so I guess I’ll just have to learn patience or something.

The other blog I’ve added to my regular rotation is Fugitivus, which I will delay in linking for a moment. I feel somewhat terribly awkward for reading it and liking it so much, because Harriet very frankly discusses her abuse and rape and how she deals with the long term repercussions of them, which is often extremely distressing. The wonderful parts about her blog are how well she writes and how thoughtfully she discusses coping. I feel like after every post I read I have an entire month’s worth of ideas to chew over and digest, and I really appreciate her very personal approach to Dealing With Problems and Being Better In The Future. It isn’t just identifying a problem, but then also thinking about how to solve it. An other aspect I really appreciate about her writing is how honest she is about how hard she is on herself, and the ways she is working to be kinder to herself and others, which is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. Being able to read someone else’s thoughts on the ways they are unkind to themselves and the ways they change to become kinder to themselves has really helped me thinking about how I treat myself and what I want to change. At any rate, you can find her writings at Fugitivus.net and be prepared for explicit discussion of distressing topics.

I’ve also dabbled in Fatshionista, but my engagement is somewhat uneven as I am not really the audience she is writing for, and I am okay with that. I just love that she also loves Lady Gaga and linked to this great performance of Lady Gaga singing Gershwin.

I read Pandagon.net for a feminist analysis of the world around me. This analysis is often combined with general pop culture. Today we got a post about the soccer and the World Cup which is about to go down soonish which much of the non-USA parts of the world Really Really Care About.

That’s nice, I think. Then I read the comments.

Thing that Actually Happened:
A commentator, oldfeminist, posted a list of links to feminists talking about the problematic aspects of soccer culture in general and the World Cup in particular. Namely, that like most mainstream sports endeavors, most of the people involved in high-powered soccer in general and the World Cup in particular are misogynist dicks.

Wow, you say. Since I am a reader of a moderately advanced patriarchy-blaming blog, I am not shocked by these developments.

OH BUT WAIT FOR IT.

COMMENT THAT WAS ACTUALLY POSTED: (emphasis mine)

Wow, can’t have fun without someone being humorless all over it. For a good example of how to acknowledge that this is a tremendous thing for South Africa while not forgetting the problems of the country and the corporatism of the tournament, check out some of the coverage in The Guardian. They don’t go enough in-depth but it’s a good start. Or look at the work Grassroot Soccer is doing to fight HIV and teach life skills to youth in South Africa.

Personally, I’d rather celebrate the good while acknowledging that more work needs to be done. Football needs more women to participate as fans, administrators of the game, and players, not less. But if you’d rather piss all over other women’s enjoyment, more power to you. I’m going to watch a few games outdoors in Dupont Circle tomorrow and enjoy myself while cheering heartily for England. Thanks for bringing footy to Pandagon, Amanda and Marc!

Comment #27: elena on 06/11 at 12:03 PM

LOLWUT?!?!?! Did someone with a rather female-sounding name just tell another someone who I also presume is female that they were being humorless? As in “A Humorless Feminist”? As in, one of the accusations that is constantly being thrown at feminsists? Was a feminist who was pointing out that there are some pretty ugly problems with the international soccer community being told to sit down and shut the fuck up and stop spoiling our fun by pointing out that it has very ugly problems associated with it?!?

OH YEAH, THAT JUST HAPPENED.

Thankfully, later in the comments, oldfeminist and elena seem to kiss and make up and agree that they were talking past each other. Which doesn’t really excuse Amanda’s multitude of comments defending the misogynist-dick-loving-lets-ignore-it-when-people-bring-up-stuff-we-don’t-want-to-think-about-right-now crowd, but whatever. This is me, wearing my whatever face.

And for the most delicious icing on this shit cake, I leave you with this one final gem:

The World Cup is probably the only thing the brings the world together (hope I don’t sound too idealistic). So criticizing it is kinda tacky/uncalled for/doesn’t help your cause/etc., that’s how I view it, anyway.

Comment #56: whiskeytangofoxtrot on 06/11 at 06:45 PM

Wow, its like there isn’t this other GIANT Sporting Festival that happens every two years, but instead of focusing on just one sport it showcases lots of other sports from around the world, is attended by people from around the world, and countries from all around the wold send athletes to compete. Now, if I could only remember what it was… OH THAT’S RIGHT. THE OLYMPICS. WHICH JUST HAPPENED. But maybe that’s too American-centric, what the fuck do I know.

What I do know is this: It’s also tacky to point out that your neighbor is beating his wife, that the nice upstanding pillar of your community also likes raping little girls, and that you would really appreciate it if your boss would stop looking down your shirt, staring at your tits, and ‘bumping into’ your ass. It isn’t polite to criticize things, unless you have a penis.

Fuck that with a stick.

However, a little help from Google brought me to this recipe, from about.com of all places, and I have found my happy caramel place, where the caramels are perfect and wonderful (and don’t need corn syrup).

Time: ~30 mins to make, ~2hrs or so to cool
Cheapness: not bad.
Difficulty: pay attention and be bold
Meal: dessert
Servings: not enough for your entire Christmas gift list, but enough for that small party you are going to.

I’ve noted my modifications in itallics (and strikes).

Ingredients:
* 1/2 cup cream
* 1/4 tsp vanilla extract (a little extra never hurts)
* 6 tbsp butter, cut into small pieces
* 1-1/3 cups light brown sugar

Preparation:

1. Grease a small square pan. I am fond of Crisco or similar for this purpose.

2. Combine the sugar, cream, butter, vanilla, and 1 TB water in a medium heavy-bottomed saucepan. Stir with a spoon over medium heat until the sugar dissolves and the butter is melted.

3. Bring to boil and cover for 3 minutes.

4. Uncover, but do not stir! (Do whatever the hell you want) Continue boiling until a candy thermometer reads just under 250 degrees. The hotter you heat the syrup, the harder the caramels will be at the end. Somewhere between 245 and 250 should give you a nice soft caramel. Err on the side of lower, but don’t go lower than 245.

5. Pour the caramel into the prepared pan and let it cool down. I was having a problem with my caramels crystallizing if I used a spatula to scrape down the pan. I’m not entirely sure what the problem was there, but I will recommend against it. I have successfully used a spatula to scrape into a little custard cup, and it was fine, so no idea.

6. When it is still slightly wet, score the top into squares, and then leave to harden completely.

7. Once firm, cut into pieces and wrap individually in waxed paper or cling wrap. Candies can be store in an airtight container at room temperature (not refrigerated) for up to one week.

Other notes:

If you are so unfortunate as to have your caramels crystallize, they can be rescued! Allow everything to cool, and then get it out of the pan and back into your (washed) pot. I added a little cream to help dissolve the sugar again (water would probably also be good), and warmed everything back up and it was great! Be careful of the amount of liquid/cream you are adding, however, as they could cause the caramels to come out softer than desired. Mine had to be sort of scraped out of the pan, so not so awesome if you are planning on giving them to people. I think the solution would be to continue to warm over low heat for a bit, giving the additional liquid time to cook off.

Specifically, I’ve been looking for a Roomba of my very own to help keep my apartment clean given my extreme unwillingness to clean on a regular basis.

At google.com/alerts. I entered the search term roomba site:CITY.craigslist.org and it gives me alerts any time someone posts a listing for a roomba in my city! I also did it for DealNews.com.

And lo, Dealnews.com told me about a roomba was being sold by Woot.com, and it was much cheaper than anywhere else, and I bought it! And I didn’t have to spent time checking all over the internet every day to find it!

To make this a slightly less worthless entry, I will also tell you that I am plugging away at my Anne Elliot Spencer. I recently finished the second half of the front, and I just cast on for the first sleeve! I’m … still not done!

But actually, the whole point of me posting is because I want to enter another Grosgrain giveaway.

The first thing is this lovely dress! I am in love with the buttons down the sleeves. Just-above-elbow-length sleeves are my favorite length for sleeves! And buttons! The other giveaway is for these rose earrings, right here! I don’t know if I would be able to do them justice, but I want them anyway! Either way, it’s an awesome idea, which I will have to remember for Christmas time. I bet my sister would love a set of ‘Rose’ earrings.

Grosgrain is doing another giveaway, for a dress from Shabby Apple, and while I don’t really want the dress they are giving away, I am really liking a few of their other dresses. I’m really sad that the first one doesn’t seem to come in colors besides fuchsia and black. The second one comes in black and houndstooth. I’m really tempted, but their sizing kind of freaks me out for some reason. I think I don’t usually buy such expensive clothing online.

Instead of the stripes called for in the pattern, I decided to make these babies solid yellow, with a sporty red stripe across the back of the hand. I also made them extra-long in both directions for increased warmth. The first pair of these that I made came out nicely, but I would have liked them to cover a bit more of my fingers.

I haven’t actually gotten that much better at making the thumbs, but I have gotten better at knowing which stitches to pull together to get the holes to close up.

The whole reason I am posting all this is that to enter the giveaway, you have to post a link back to her blog.  And also, to show you what a pretty dress I’d like to win!

Isn’t it beautiful?!  For more pictures, see her blog here.

It would be just the thing for a jaunt downtown or down to Barton Creek.

In retrospect, it undoubtedly would have been more time-efficient to get one of the plastic ball winders, but I do hate to buy plastic things and it was cheaper, so I got the Nostepinde instead.  It is actually nicely medatative to sit and wrap the yarn around the stick.  But it does take forever.

I… was not really impressed.
To backtrack for a moment, there is a trope, most often found in half-hour sitcoms, but can be seen in many other places.  It is the Hot Wife Married to Fugly Loser Dude.  In SitcomLand, all the women are HOTT, and they always marry fugly-ass losers who can’t wipe their own ass without help.  For (hopefully) obvious reasons, I hate this trope with the passion of a thousand burning suns.

Knocked Up has exactly this trope, and I just can’t get past it.  Katherine Heigle is gorgeous.  Her character is in the entertainment business, and is in front of the camera.  She is HOTT. Not only is she hot, but she is apparently (at least) moderately intelligent and has a career on the upswing. The dude who is played by one of those frat-boy comedy actors whose name I can’t be bothered to remember is not hot.  He isn’t completely fug, but he’s definitely not even in the same league as her.  Add on to that the fact that he is a skeezy-ass loser with no income, and no ambition beyond building a completely revolting website devoted to nudity in film, I completely FAIL to buy the premise that a) she would sleep  with him once, no matter how drunk, and b) that she would continue to associate with him once the pregnancy was discovered and she found out what a loser he was.

Add that COMPLETELY IRRITATING AND ENRAGING trope to the movie’s already repugnant handling pregnancy and the issues surrounding an accidental pregnancy, and Knocked Up is definitely not going in my list of classics any time soon.

According to the remains of this extra-old entry, there were some things that I thought the movie did well (perhaps the montage where Fugly Loser Dude halfway gets his act together), but I can’t remember what they were for the life of me, so I’m going to leave it at that.

Have a wee little picture from my laptop’s webcam camera.  I’m too lazy to get up and get an actual camera.

The pattern gave no directions about what exactly was supposed to happen (binding off, what have you), so I just threaded a bit of junk yarn though the loops and called it a day.

Now for the rest of the garment.

Because of the way the pattern is written, it took me a while to figure out if I was supposed to repeat the row of knitting only  in between the rows with the YO’s that create the holes.  The answer is YES, but I’m a dufus and had to read the section on the clover pattern a few times before I realized that.

FULL STEAM AHEAD!

I am now nearly done with the back piece, and I’m hoping to cast on for the front pannels soonish.  Pictures to come!

Craftzine linked to The Ongoing Project’s crocheted collar, which looks beautiful!  It is going on my list of things to try out sometime soonish. I’m not exactly sure what 2-ply means, so I see some experimentation in my future.  I have some very light stuff I use to crochet snowflakes, but I’m not sure if that’s too light or too heavy!

I recently came across Whip Up, which I feel like I’ve seen before, but maybe not. At any rate, it is a great little collection of how-tos and tutorials for most things crafty.  I re-discovered a nifty little idea for reusing fabric scraps and old egg cartons.  *adds to list*