Where is Hunter S. Thompson When You Need Him?

(There is knitting in here eventually)

I was reading yet another article about Tea Party happenings last night in The New Yorker. (So they've stopped calling themselves the Tea Baggers, I see. They finally got clued into that one, and now they get all offended when people call them that, never mind that this was what they started out calling themselves. But I digress.) This article was about Andrew Breitman and mentioned various TP conventions, goings-on, etc. Anyway, in the middle of reading this article, I had a sudden realization.

What the world is really missing right now is Hunter S. Thompson's take on the Tea Party and its denizens. Mainstream media tries so hard to be fair and to attempt to deal with the movement's more rational members and rationales. Faux, of course, treats them as being on an equal footing with the Founding Fathers. Only Thompson could get inside there and get us a true portrait of all the crazy. I'm so sorry he's gone.

In a similar vein, I'm really amused by all those southern Republican politicians -- you know, the ones who are so vocal about overreaching by the federal government, the ones who wanted to refuse stimulus money, ones who so loudly proclaim their favor for "state's rights" -- crying crocodile tears over how the federal government isn't doing enough to deal with the oil spill in the gulf. I heard one talk about how the federal government had the knowledge and the resources to fix this now, whether it was through Homeland Security, the Army Corps of Engineers (let's not mention the levees in New Orleans, shall we?), or even NASA, as if there were a fix out there that is being withheld. Oh, the irony.

Knitting. Yes. I still get to do that a little.

I've finished the knitting on Elegant Empire. The pattern calls for the sweater to be blocked before the side seams and hems are sewn up. That is where I am right now:


And more of a close-up:


And since I still haven't quite settled on what to knit next, I went back to finish up Virve's Stockings. Not done yet, but I've gotten almost to the heel:


In the comments to my last post, Tracey posted a link to a great blog series on fitting sweaters to flatter your particular figure. This was a great series of posts. Unfortunately, I can't decide whether I am top heavy, curvy, or proportionate. But it did lead me to a great pattern from Twist that went into my queue, called Poplar and Elm. So, still waffling on the next pattern, but I do have ideas.