the kerfuffle over sarah palin's wardrobe is so ridiculous. they're totally using her as a scapegoat for any and all blame after they got burned so badly in the election. nevermind that this was such a strong statement on the country's dissatisfaction with george bush, and that they were dumb enough to choose her anyway. the fact of the matter is, if you're running ads and interacting with people, especially only briefly and from a distance, then what you look like MATTERS. and if you're a woman, lots of people (THE AVERAGE PERSON) won't respect you unless you look good. physical attractiveness is bound up in gender identity, and validity as a society member, for the entire female sex. not only among men, mind you, which would make sense because men are more visual and women are more verbal, but among women, who are without a doubt the harshest critics. and if they want to show off her family, which would have to be completely redone to have that all-american look, but not too rich, but well-off, then that takes some cash, too. the people who are outraged by this are the same ones that can't recognize someone if they drastically change their makeup routine. i mean, i strongly dislike palin;s stance on several issues, but anyone who has a problem with using campaign money to work on a candidate's wardrobe has no idea of how the world works. i'm not saying it's good, but it is a fact of life one cannot ignore- PEOPLE JUDGE YOU BY HOW YOU LOOK. even if you try not to, you do, and even if you're not conscious of it, you totally do. its not like someone wakes up and says "i think i'm going to estimate someone's worth as a person by how attractive they look today" but it just happens as a part of being human.

my mom bought my car for me at a ridiculously cheap price from my grandma. let me just put that out there- technically it's not 'my car' in a who-pays-for-the insurance sense.
that being said, my car is a hell of a lot more mine than anyone else within 100 miles of said vehicle.
so imagine my surprise when i leave the laundromat to find that my car's carefully applied obama sticker has been covered up by a mccain sticker.
i peeled it off, and a small part of me feels the urge to buy more obama stickers and plaster every mcain everything i see, but i won't. this is not because i'm a democrat(although i usually am), or because i'm cowardly(i am not), or because of some christian self-denial-turn-the-other-cheek-thing(this may or may not be a part of my religion, as i am a unitarian and can believe pretty much whatever the hell i want).
i feel a sense of outrage not because i was outdone, but because i was oppressed. frankly, i don't go around slapping women's rights slogans over those damn 'it's a child not a choice' bumper stickers, although they irritate me to no end, not because i agree with them, but because it is VANDALISM OF PRIVATE PROPERTY.
to me, and to the first amendment of the u.s. constitution, freedom of expression is the fundamental right of every human being. i don't care what stickers someone else puts on their car, but if you cared half as much about america as you did about some crusty old fogey with a spazzed-out morally bankrupt person as a runningmate, you would respect my civil liberties and put the sticker where it belongs...hell.(or your car. what evs.)

i have several friends who support mccain, we know we beleive different things, but we also know that what makes the U.S. great is that there is a longstanding tradition of nonviolent transition of power from one leader to the next and the possibility of peaceful coexistence with people who think differently.

i don't care about what people have to say as much as i care about the right they have to say it.
that being said this confirms my worst suspicions about republicans.

it just struck me that the whole hubbub over rachael ray;s scarf meant that somebody, somewhere, cares what she has to say about international affairs. and that newspapers and a huge doughnut corporation care what that somebody (who care;s about what rachael ray might have said thru a very basic clothing accessory) thinks.

i care deeply.

but seriously, the only reason i feel so cheesed off about it is that it's just one more way that conservative republicans make americans look like dumbasses by association. i don't care if they act like idiots, but must they bring their less rabid countrymen down with them? obvioulsy we've been well briefed on the war on terror, haven't we? it's all in the scarves. it has nothing to do with the severe trauma of living in a region pf perpetual political instability brought about by constant interference from outside sources who were only there in the first place for their own interests. it's not like they were upset about it or anything. or even that they were evil. it was those damn scarves, with their eyecatching contrasting colors and usefulness in a hot desert environment.

just shut up. just tape over the mouths of all the people who violate the rules of intelligence and actually knowing what you're talking about and have done with it.

so i actually think john mccain's choice for a female vice presidential candidate is a step backwards for women's rights. he picked someone no one outside of alaska ever heard of, with a full-on mega conservative viewpoint, whose husband works in oil fields. that last bit should rule her out automatically,as it would definitely cloud one's judgement when dealing with the energy crisis that is rapidly approaching. given all the hunting she does and all the taxidermied wildlife in her office, i'm guessing she's not much of a conservationist. so much for global warming.
political viewpoints aside, she's not a really well-known politician. her only fame is getting picked for a job by a man. given her lack of political standing compared to someone like joe biden, she hasn't had enough time in the national political arena to be able to hold her own and earn notoriety on her own terms. so she'll be easy to manipulate, and essentially a patsy for lobbyists or mcain himself, all the while thinking she;s acheiving so much for women;s rights, when all along she's just a yes woman. it;s simply an exploitation of the fact that she is a woman, a bid to win votes, presumably from women,(even though she differs from the majority of women you;d probably want to persuade, the ones in the middle, given her sharply right wing views.)
so then her nomination seems like a token gesture, much like arranged marriages(which mesh so well with gender equality) OR mcain and his advisors underestimate the critical thinking skills of women to the extent that they assume we'll vote for anyone in a skirt. if that were true, we'd elect a lot more scottish people in traditional dress, not because the kilt is a skirt but women are obviously too dumb to know the difference between a skirt and a kilt. there was a large portion of the population who couldn't grasp the difference between a scarf and a keffiyeh, though(let alone the political implications of wearing one of them...which are pretty limited, or they were until the hubbub, and then i decided i needed one, desperately, just to piss people off...i need to wear it around lancaster, with an obama pin. and a yellow ribbon and an american flag lapel pin, maybe a bishop's hat, just to confuse the shit out of them) so i don;t know.

have had the idea to make an acorn hat and pinecone mittens. i like these matching thematic sets.

so i feel a compulsive need to knit as much as humanly possible. and my favorite things to knit are baby things-hats, booties, etc. the best part of baby clothes is that babies don't know if they're wearing something silly or tacky, and they're so cute that they can pull it off anyway. so far i've made 2 sets of cupcake hats and matching booties, 3 viking hats, and one squid hat. i have plans to make-
squid booties,
duck hat and booties,
cookie beret,
pineapple hat,
nordic mittens,
ice cream booties,
cowboy booties,
sneaker booties,
baseball cap,
rasberry tart hat,
raspberry tart booties,
raspberry hat,
cherry hat,
acorn hat,
elf hat/booties,
pumpkin hat
ugg booties
strawberry tam
yoda hat
panda hat
bear hat
gnome hat
dragon hoodie
sock monkey hat
totoro hat
owl hat
cloche
swedish flag sweater
and dalek socks. but those are for an adult.
i intend to finish everything on this list before christmas, hopefully. knock on...something.

can someone please explain why miley cyrus is such a big freaking deal? i'm not saying that the stupid, artistically irrelevant pop star thing is anything new, but in my day they were pretty. i'm not saying i was a britney spears fan, but she wasn't so damn gerbil-esque. i guess she can sing. i dunno. when it comes to her, there's such a fine line between belting and screaming. and a finer line between accessorizing excessively and decking your self out like a christmas tree. the finest line of all is the one drawn between mocking laughter and disgust. she is SOOO TACKY. and not in what at all can be construed as a cute way.
but tackier still is her dad. first of all, he's totally riding his daughter's coattails to revive his one-hit-wonder-in-the-mid-90's career. second, it's actually working. people refer to him like he's legit famous. the man is actually totally devoid of charisma. he is neither funny nor thought-provoking, and he has some of the worst hair ever in the world, like, ten people below that guy at farm fair with the perfectly coiffed greaser pompadour, because that guy gets major maintenance points and a retro-cool bonus. seriously. billy ray cyrus must be the cheesiest person ever.
i think it's a problem with country singers in general. the music itself is a break from the ever progressing direction of pop culture. fashion trends don't have much of a place in a music genre whose origin was in rugged, rural areas. the music itself is a celebration of that quintessentially american rugged individualism and simple country values. getting all wrapped up in trends that usually originate overseas is so impractical as to seem silly.
fashion is like a game of telephone, and country music is like the kid on the end of the line who's kind of bored with the game anyway.

rarely has a band befuddled my sense of cheesy and brilliant as much as coldplay. i loved their first album, parachutes, and rush of blood to the head was good, but i really hated x&y. i hate band snobs, you know, the kind of people who get all indignant if the music they like become commercially successful, because i don't think it should matter if anyone else likes it. i mean, are the beatles not good because they sold tons of albums? no. I dont think mozart was a sellout, either.
the thing about coldplay is that for all their social activism and progressive outlook, there's always this tiny hint of soullessness or something, like you just know mtv is going to sample bits of it for use on something like 'the real world'(such a misnomer, can't help but think it was deliberate) to indicate a sweeping moment of melodrama. i think it comes from their use of other bands as a sourcebook. i can remember freshman orientation in college, and a group of us were discussing coldplay, and someone said said "i don't like them, they rip off u2 too much." and i replied 'yeah, they do have a similar sound now that you mention it, but i don't think they do it deliberately', to which someone replied, 'no, they really deliberately copy them'. seriously, there are like a million soundbytes from them talking about borrowing things from bands they liked- there must be a whole paragraph about it in wikipedia. which is a major turn off to my artistic sensibilities and convictions.
so i decided i didnt like coldplay anymore, although i allowed myself to like everything on parachutes and also clocks and fix you. but then this damn album came out, and the title track gives me goosebumps. it doesn't hurt that apple does a lovely job with their tv ads and i am a sucker for stylishly sophisticated marketing as well as pretty colors.(if i'm being totally honest, it's mostly pretty colors that get me.) anyway, all that aside, i realized that the music is still really good. and so began the war of inner monologues(which i suppose makes it a dialogue...?)
-yeah, it is good, cause someone else already thought of it and it became successful and these people stole it.
-but did they really steal anything but an idea? is there such a thing as intellectual property, really? how can one really do something new, in a world where so much has already been done? what great musician hasn't borrowed from somewhere? where would all those great bands of the sixties be without all those old- timey blues musicians? and where would current music be without them?
-the point of borrowing from someone is to innovate, and take what exists into another level, so it becomes a more fitting form of expression for the individual musician. they didnt do that so much.
-you're overthinking it, as you do all the time. you like what you like, if it;s good it's good, and you like it, so its good.
-i dont like it, you do, because you're the cheesy, sentimental component of our shared personality.
-and you're the music snob.
-take it back.
-no. make me.
-im a voice in someone's head, i can't force you to do much of anything...no wait, i can listen to bright eyes until you cave in...
- i don't care, im not the picky one
-ugh, forget you.
-forget you, then.
and it just spirals on like this for hours. it's quite annoying, as you can see. it's not even the cute, clever banter that usually exists in my head. im the kind of person who becomes madly obsessed with a band for several weeks if i like their album. it'll be all i listen to for a while, so i better be damn sure i like it. i am still waiting for an answer. (i have time to decide, though, since itunes is declining my debit card for no good reason. they better hurry up and realized i deposited mucho dinero several days ago, though, because i can only split my obsession between flight of the conchords and vampire weekend for so long before they start to wear out their welcome...)
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