If you have been to my house you know I always have too many magazines. Magazines everywhere! That’s why when Li-Shen sent me this way of making tables out of magazines I was very happy! Now I just have to read a few and bam, instant table.

In etsy’s continuing plan to choke me on material goods, I really now want wooden knuckles.

I think matryoshkas are the new “pirates.” They are everywhere. This is exciting to me because I love them. I have wanted some Yakov Smirnov ones for quite some time. These computer storage size ones though are my new favorites. Urban Outfitters is all over matryoshkas. They had some wall decals and this pillow. They also have a set of blank wood ones:

I have some of these someone was freecycling. I am completely excited about them, but what to do? I have 4 different styles of them, so I have a lot of choices.

I really like the plain wood look. But then I thought I could stain them in different wood colors. My original idea when I got them was to paint them with some of the vocabulary hierarchies from work. So like, Food and Drink>Beverages>Beer>Craft Beer.

The unification of crafting, taxonomies, and booze would be a beautiful thing indeed.

But I like these more modern matryoshkas, so any new ideas are appreciated.

Since I generally veer toward isolationism politically, it should come as no surprise that I am not whole hog on the war in Iraq. While I, like most Americans, probably, try to put it out of my mind as much as possible, this whole fourth anniversary thing has brought it to the forefront. I think it’s a bad idea to NOT think about it, but generally I feel pretty powerless and don’t know what to do.

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DISCLAIMER: I <3 soldiers. On my mom's side of the family every generation has had a few soldiertypes. My brother served in the first Gulf War. Yay for troops! In fact, I am thinking of sending over a care package. So there, just to clarify, in case there are some rabid "You hate the troops" readers out there, I like soldiers! They are awesome, and honestly, totally do something I can't say I would be willing to do. I am very thankful for their existence.

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So anyway, there was this whole “We have always been at war with Oceania” anniversary, and I started watching Alive in Baghdad, which is heartbreaking if even 10% of it is true (I think most of it is true, but even for skeptics, it’s tough to watch). And my alma mater just started a new chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (wow, THAT’s a wake up call), and put up this beautiful flag display representing the number of people (yes, people include both Americans AND Iraqis) killed to date. And then today I went to an AWESOME exhibit at the Museum of Art and Design on radical knitting. In it, there was a recreation of a war knitting circle, complete with wartime patterns. Generally I find a lot of the WWI knitting stuff pretty cute and nostalgic, but one of the patterns is for Body Count Mittens. The idea is, you knit the number of soldiers dead on the day you make the mittens. Whoa. That totally crystallized it for me. And a woman at the exhibit started talking to me about this whole shoes protest along the same lines as the flags. And this was a total stranger who just came up to me and basically just earnestly went on about how the war was bullshit. Which, in retrospect, is probably not “ballsy” in an art museum in New York City, but still, it’s pretty surprising that such an anti-governmental stance is pretty commonplace to talk about these days.*
And, being originally trained as a Soviet historian, my major question has always been, in their day to day lives, what did Soviet people REALLY think when they HAD to have known that Stalin was just killing thousands of people all the time? And although our much freer society cannot compare to the Great Purges, it does give you a little inkling of what those people must have felt like. And that makes me kind of sad, because maybe people in 80 years won’t realize how many people thought a lot of the military planning of this period was negative, because so many people, like me, just don’t want to think about it.And then, I had some dinner, and read The Onion. And the whole Onion, in honor of the anniversary, was on the war. And it is SO SO SO GOOD. My favorites being:

• US to Give Every Iraqi $3544.91, Let Free-Market Capitalism Do the Rest
• Humor in Uniform Submissions at an All-time Low
• I Support the Occupation of Iraq, But I Don’t Support Our Troops

Once again, humor got right to the farcical heart of the matter. Let’s hope the Onion survives another century.**

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*which is why I really like America! Fuck Yeah!**Is any library collecting The Onion? WorldCat says no. That’s so wrong.

If you have never looked at etsy.com I suggest it. For one thing, it is a lot of cool things for sale made by people who really love crafting. That’s great. There’s a lot of creative stuff there not available elsewhere. A lot of one-of-a-kind items. As much as I like crafty things, a lot of items I find on individual crafters websites are things that have no use or collect dust. I just can’t take on that much crap, even if it is made with love and cool looking. That’s one of the reasons I like etsy–that most of the stuff seems useful.

But I had never used their Alchemy feature. Basically you say what you want and how much you are willing to pay for it, and people bid on it to make it. How great! I wanted a laptop case for my macbook that was not bulky and also covered the screen from the keys. Sure enough, with a little chatting with the bidders, I got this extra cute laptop case. Especially in the electronics world where cases are sooooo boring, I was excited to see this.

Another reason to love etsy, from an LIS point of view is that they have AMAZING navigational systems. Color, geography, and TIME TRAVEL. How great is that? It’s a fun site to play with, which results in me finding more things that I want to buy. I am a sucker for glass art, and so I am currently drooling over liskidder’s shop. I am having problems deciding on a favorite. Sadly all the ones I seem to be most in love with are in colors I never wear. Perhaps I will have to commission one of these too. Commissioning art makes me feel like a monarch. Muahahahhahhaha.