Smittens

As Valentine’s Day approaches the web turns mushy and gooey with the love-related posts.  So when I saw this on Boing Boing, it seemed a natural to grab and re-post here. It’s a link to a knitting pattern so you can knit your own lover’s mitten, which was cleverly called the Smitten(tm).  Brilliant, thought I, let’s use this and actually post some frigging blog content already.

smittens

Steal the picture, add some clever words: bingo, a blog post. That would have been the end of it, except that the more I dug into the world of smittens, the more there was to know.  For instance a quick search turns up over 10 000 000 hits for smittens, inexplicably.  A scan of the top hits shows smittens.biz where it seems you can buy smittens.  Wonderful.  Then we have Smitten.com, where it seems you can buy, er, smittens.  Super.  It should be noted that Smittens.biz sells smittens for twice the price of Smitten.com, which makes me a whole lot less smitten about the idea myself.  Then we wander off to the Boing Boing link which tells you how to knit your own damn smittens for less.  So, the lesson to the creator of smittens (whoever you are) is: did you forget to patent your invention for needy couples?  Crap.  Bet you won’t forget that next time….

As a bonus from the Boing Boing comments, a related yet cuter product for parent-child dancing:

shoesforbabyandadults

From a site called Babygadget, it’s a concept, and not a real product, predictably.

Note:  No “silly kittens” jokes were made during the making of this post.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? this isn’t

Two criminals made a valiant break for freedom today in New Zealand, dashing away from the courthouse and demonstrating why they are both in jail in the first place….

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgjPICWYC9o

Note that they had lots of time to decide what to do, but decided no decision at all was best.  Good job, lads.  Future Ottawa Transit Union leadership?

It brings this gem to mind from Despair.com:

Happy New Years

The last post of the year would normally be some sort of top ten list, or perhaps some new year’s resolutions.  Not here though.  Here’s the past year of the blog, highlights and lowlights.  Mostly it’s just the stuff that jumped out at me today scanning back through the year’s posts.

First off we have perfect hindsight.  This one really smarts.  Looking back at January I was excited about the new Apple TV and thought it was ready for prime time.  Flash forward to just this past week and it seems that I am as stupid as can be.

I debated my increasing maturity because I realize I am now capable of listening to cover songs without instantly rejecting them out of hand based on some sort of naive sense of purity.  I noted that the music industry continues to die without many other signs of life, in spite of some really excellent advice available for free.

Technology was still of great interest of course, as it always will be.  The ever increasing use of social networks to keep in touch with people led to greater and more intricate knowledge of your network of friends, ambient awareness was the term coined.  It’s continuing, and the Friendfeed sidebar is a good example of how that will grow even more.  This year led to even more robots designed to assist humans live every day lives, which I noted would inevitably lead to the death of us all.

I spent quite a bit of effort trash talking Mexico and Winnipeg for their attempts to make their mark on the skating world, even thought I didn’t have to defend Ottawa all that much.  We still win.  Similarly, the LimerickDB is still the best place on the web for rhyming jokes, and we sampled a few of my favourites.  Also, we were privy to the most private thoughts of a monster, disturbing stuff though it was.  I had lots of fun with rubber truck nuts, not directly however.  It doesn’t hurt that they are silly beyond belief in the first place, but then the legislation starts and things get really weird.

It seems that a series of gun-related events cause me to post about them far more often than I normally would.  One gun post even actually resulted in a series of (gasp!) comments from actual other people.  Most often it was just me complaining about them and the people who are clearly not wise enough to be holding them, especially in public.

Speaking of people not wise enough to protect anybody, how about those TSA airport screeners?  It spawned a whole new category of posts that will no doubt continue to grow.  Similarly I particularly enjoyed myself writing about a certain monkey-smuggler who succeeded and then failed in remarkable fashion.  Also we saw a family who was too stupid to protect their dog from a hungry snake, although they had several days to do something about it.

The financial crisis and subsequent auto bailout wasn’t funny, but that didn’t stop me.  It lasted a few days, but we aren’t done with it yet since there’s more to come.  Finally the strangest news story to hit here must have been the multiple feet washing ashore in B.C. I stopped mentioning it, but the story continues to this day.  Crazy.

Finally, some of the more personal posts that kept me amused over the year, I mentioned Nikki’s growing fresh laundry addiction, just one of the hazards of staying home to watch the kids.  Similarly, I revealed how she is a heat vampire bent on freezing me solid.  She also laughed heartily at me for this little escapade with the Stratus, where I learned to use the Force to drive the car.

So there you go, it’s the past year of the blog condensed for your convenience.  Hope you had a good year, I think we did.  All the best to you and yours, see you next year.