R2D2 toque

On the 9th day of Christmas (i.e., 4 days before), I finished knitting another Star Wars project:


An R2D2 toque for Jeff, the same recipient of the Boba Fett balaclava. The pattern was inspired by another R2D2 hat I found online, but because I wanted more of a toque than a beanie, because my gauge was quite different, and because I'm anal-retentive and wanted a super-accurate pattern, I made my own chart, which I will post once I have a moment to figure out how to make an electronic copy.

For the knitters: I knit most of the hat on straight needles so that I could use the intarsia colour knitting method, though there was some stranded/Fair Isle knitting in an attempt to reduce the number of ends that would need weaving in. I even decreased on the straight needles until I got to the blue circle at the very top, whereupon I switched to dpns and sewed up the seam with a mattress stitch. As it turned out, my attempts to keep the ends to a minimum were unsuccessful.

Witness the hat's insides:


But once everything was woven in and cut off, the end result was, if I may say, brilliant:



Edited Jan. 22 to add: Post with pattern and chart can be found here.

Slow news day, much?

One of these stories is factual and one is not (though both are kind of truthy). Guess which?



And it's street protests over antagonistic board meetings... this time.

Tuque and OED

My knitting group is composed of mostly English PhDs, but even they thought it was funny that I recently looked up "tuque" in the Oxford English Dictionary (online). If I hadn't though, I would never have learned that, according to the OED, a tuque is a knit wool hat that is actually folded in on itself—that is, it is a long tube, tapered at both ends, and one end goes into the other, making it hat-shaped. This construction seems to be the defining characteristic of a tuque, setting it apart from watchcaps, fisherman's hats, and wool hats in general.

And now I want to knit one.

What, no knitting geeks?

An astounding poster featuring 56 types of geeks is for sale here, with a full image here.

It's not that I know people who could be one of these geeks, it's that I know several people who are more than one of these geeks that alternately thrills and depresses me.

Glass shopping carts

Seriously? Holiday gift guides still divide merchandise into his and hers?

According to Chapters, women are interested in cooking, shopping, bland, inoffensive music by inoffensively bland young men (hello, Josh Groban!), Celine Dion, and soapy TV shows. Men, on the other hand are interested in politics, history, bland music by the shell of a formerly credible artist (hello, Eric Clapton!), Springsteen, and tragic-epic TV shows.

Oh, and Borat. Borat next to Brian Mulroney. That's almost—almost—enough to make the old-school sexism excusable.

Facebook now just Little Brother

Facebook (must I hyperlink the word?) has moderated its latest intrusion of users' privacy, Facebook Beacon, a program that sent notices to all of a Facebook user's friends when they bought something on one of 44 participating websites. These notices show up on newsfeeds accompanied by a complementary banner ad on the left.

Facebook Beacon prompted an online petition against its practices that led to today's announcement. The Becaon feature will remain, but case-by-case opt-outs will now be available and more noticeable so that not everyone will know that you bought a Fight Club movie poster on allposters.com.

Facebook is trying to walk a fine line between respecting people's privacy and making a profit so that it can stay in business. While I believe that Facebook (the application) is not "private" in any sense of the word and that users lack a private subjectivity that they possess in real life, I also believe that my personal information shouldn't be used by any kind of tracking software for such blatant marketing purposes. Ideally, what I buy is no one's business but my own.

My post was inspired by a rather dense digital media marketer quoted in the New York Times story:

“Isn’t this community getting a little hypocritical?” said Chad Stoller, director of emerging platforms at Organic, a digital advertising agency. “Now, all of a sudden, they don’t want to share something?”

The quotation, along with the existence of Beacon itself, indicates how far marketers have to go before truly understanding the mindset of the Facebook user. Yes, Mr. Stoller, all of a sudden, we don't want to share something. Perhaps you have noticed that everything we share on Facebook we volunteer. Perhaps you've noticed that users can determine which kinds of actions are published to their public newsfeed. Perhaps you've noticed that people in general don't take lightly to having their own information used without their knowledge or information. The issue, sir, is not about not wanting to share, but not even knowing that you're sharing and not having the chance to say, "no, thanks, I'd rather not."

I believe that Facebook execs and advertisers have gone about tracking user purchases the wrong way. Facebook is unusual because its very existence depends on the public nature of its information gathering. We know that Facebook tracks us because we see it in our newsfeeds. But everytime the cashier swipes my Safeway, my Indigo card, my Shoppers card, I know that the information is flying through the ether into a database in who-knows-where as well. That doesn't seem to bother me as much because, oddly, I have no idea what the information is being used for. In other words, the information gathering seems—and only seems, mind you—more benign because I don't see the end results.

Facebook can't lull its users into the same sense of false security. But what it could do is capitalize on its users' odd penchant for sharing every bloody part of their lives online— emphasis on the "sharing". If Facebook could figure out how to make users want to talk about their latest purchases (sale notices? promotions? coupons?) there would be less backlash. I do tell my friends if my favourite store is having a good sale or if I bought something particularly nice for myself recently. I do it because I'm an excitable (self-aware but still excitable) consumer. Capture that excitement, Mr. Zuckerberg, and you might be in business.

Literary realism vs. internal logic

I've been teaching Eliza Haywood's Fantomina, Or, Love in a Maze recently and some students can't get past the fact that the story's eponymous heroine manages, four different times, to seduce a man while she is in four different disguises. Yes, she is an excellent actress and yes he's probably a little dense. I would also argue that Fantomina picks her "personas" carefully, selecting roles that most eighteenth-century men would already associate with female sexuality (prostitute, maid, widow).

But my students' inability to let this point go speaks to a larger issue about any kind of narrative art form—the question of whether or not it's "realistic" and the odd moments in a text/movie/story that disrupt the sometimes-necessary suspension of disbelief involved in consuming narrative. In other words, it's not the larger conceits that we have issues with, but the smaller inconsistencies. For example, when watching the time-travelling movie Run Lola Run, in which the same story is played out three different times with the heroine learning from the previous rendition, my friend Natalie was bothered by how the protagonist and her boyfriend seemed to be talking to each other while separated by a sliding glass door. Though she wondered how they could have heard each other, she didn't question the movie's overall concept that Lola somehow managed to travel back in time twice (do-over!) in an attempt to save said boyfriend.

I have realized, however, that the issue I'm describing is not a question of realism but rather of logic. We expect a work of art to have its own internal logic and at least be consistent in its own world: If all the animals talk, that's fine; if only one animal talks, it's weird. And as readers we somehow still expect an internal logic, things to "make sense" in the world of the movie. The need for unity is strong indeed.