My Wonderful Weekend

Freedom?2

I had a discussion with a liberal feminist friend the other day about women's freedom to wear what they want. Her sister works in Kuwait and has to cover up and she sees muslim dress codes for women as oppressive. I do not disagree with her in essence but we do disagree about the relative freedom of being able to wear what you like. On a saturday night my local city is full of young girls wearing next to nothing - even on very cold nights. I question that this is an expression of freedom - as many of them are chained to behaving in certain ways to pick up a man. If a woman dresses as she wants for herself it is one thing, but if it is to attract a man and this often involves being freezing cold or uncomfortable, then to me she is potentially less mentally free than a muslim girl who chooses to take the veil. Obviously, living in a free state to pass comment may seem trite, but still I think there is often the illusion of external freedoms, when actually mentally we are far from free.

Freedom?

At the Publishing Triangle Awards event last week in New York Martin Duberman received a lifetime achievement award, and spoke about "how assimilation isn’t the point, and how the gay and lesbian community's focus as a movement on inclusion in institutions like marriage distracts them from more systemic problems like poverty, education, and health care."
If freedom to marry a distraction from the bigger issues and are those other battles being lost because of the diversion? Sometimes you can focus so much on one battle you can lose the war.

Amigurumi and The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

Today I learned that:
1)"Amigurumi is the Japanese art of knitting or crocheting small stuffed animals and anthropomorphic creatures. The word is derived from a combination of the Japanese words ami, meaning crocheted or knitted, and nuigurumi, meaning stuffed doll. Amigurumi are typically cute animals (such as bears, rabbits, cats, dogs, etc.), but can include inanimate objects endowed with anthropomorphic features. Amigurumi can be either knitted or crocheted. In recent years crocheted amigurumi are more popular and more commonly seen." Thank you Aunt Soozie and wikipedia.

2) There exists a website for the Church of The Flying Spaghetti Monster - with excellent posts of sightings of this omnipresent pasta diety: http://www.venganza.org/
3)A swift is a knitting tool so you can not look up knitted swifts - without seeing hundreds of many armed apparatus upon which to wind wool. So to mark the return of summer's swift I leave you with a knitted swallows instead:

Knitted Dung Beetles

Not to be out done by the wooly Belemites, I was determined that Dung beetles would have their day in crochet. So I did a google search and what came up was the sublime to the ridiculous. Genuinely all these images ( and many more) came up for the search "knitted dung beetles". Enjoy!

Beetle Safari

The woods are beautiful in the England at the moment. So many shades of green in the emerging leaves. The Horse chestnuts are in flower and the oaks must be too because there is an almost deafening buzzing coming from their canopies. My not so little boy Noah (5), Litle girl Lucy ( 3 last month) and I went for a minibeast hunt in the local woods to find dung beatles - just like medium sized scarabs - rolling dung into balls and all. I just thought they were of African origin so was amazed the first time I saw them stumbling slowly over the paths with their loads or even behaving amorously ( spring is in the air afterall!). But sadly they are so slow moving there were far more dead than alive - crushed by unobservant walkers and cyclists. They are irridescent - seeming black but glowing midnight blue in the light. Lumbering like gentle giants. May be we should follow South Africa's example to protect our rare and wonderful wildlife: