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Blue Is The Colour

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This is highly amusing. It is an edited transcript of Newcastle football club interim manager Joe Kinnear's first official press conference yesterday:

JK: Which one is Simon Bird [Daily Mirror's north-east football writer]?

SB: Me.

JK: You're a c*nt.

SB: Thank you.

JK: Which one is Hickman [Niall, football writer for the Express]? You are out of order. Absolutely f*cking out of order. If you do it again, I am telling you you can f*ck off and go to another ground. I will not come and stand for that f*cking crap. No f*cking way, lies. F*ck, you're saying I turned up and they [Newcastle's players] f*cked off.

And the press conference just gets better and better from there. Thank you, Live-In Boyfriend, for pointing this one out. It's hysterical.

The Decision

This is how my head works: I am about to make a decision which I actually made ages ago, finally decided upon some time ago, and took the first steps towards admitting to myself a few weeks back. So this decision which has been made and re-made half a dozen times is now finally about to be made-made and will be aired to unsuspecting parties tomorrow. And that action will seal this decision of mine and hopefully lead to some very good other decisions down the line. Here's The Young Knives with The Decision. Lovely spiky new-new wave.

St. James

My days are currently packed full of work and sleep. Seriously. Luckily I can also fit in my obsessive knitting as I have a three-hour commute. What you see on the left is the result of the past ten days. The pattern is St. James from the current issue of MetaPostmodernKnitting. The pattern has a tied bow at the neck but I have a strange aversion to bows, so the top is adorned by a cluster of crocheted flowers instead. The end result is really quite stunning and very vintage-ish. I have enough alpaca-silk yarn left for a dainty shrug/cardigan, so I'm going to look out for a 50s inspired little pattern that would complement St. James. Oh dear, I'm going end up with a twin-set.

PS. can you spot our Fourth Edition sign in the background? It's juust peeking out. Yes, we are sad, typography-obsessed nerds in this household.

PPS. Comments are very much appreciated but I cannot get back to anyone before the end of this crazy week, sorry. You know I luvs y'all, don't you?

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Is It Only Tuesday?

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You know what I abhor? The phrase "one of them". I was told Saturday that all foreigners should leave Scotland and when the speaker learned I was foreign, he qualified his words with a "but you're not one of them" excuse. If I had a penny for every time I have heard people use that phrase, I'd be knitting cashmere sweaters. It's a lousy, cheap way of trying to seem less xenophobic and more inclusive, but the phrase only makes the speaker appear more racist and exclusive. Anyway. Sorry for that mini-rant. It has been a long week even if it is only Tuesday. My head is pounding and I still haven't had dinner (because cake does not count). Let's go for some delightful links.

+ Viktor & Rolf's Barbican Exhibition. Side-by-side comparisons of runway models and quite creepy dolls. Interestingly, it took longer to recreate V&R's clothes in doll-size than it took to create the original runway look. + Interesting Bookcases and Bookcase Designs. I used to know someone who lived in a 17thC Copenhagen townhouse and who'd use the rafters as her bookshelves. It was awesome. I really like the children's bookcase-bedroom, actually. Wonder if it would be possible to recreate that in an adult size? + The Word Clock. What it says on the tin. + Czech uranium glass buttons. Uranium?! I came across these listings on eBay and I still don't know what to make of them. + I'm not a huge fan of cupcakes but this shark attack cupcake mountain is fantastic.

Finally, Charles Bernstein on the current global crisis:

Let there be no mistake: the fundamentals of our poetry are sound. The problem is not poetry but poems. The crisis has been precipitated by the escalation of poetry debt—poems that circulate in the market at an economic loss due to their difficulty, incompetence, or irrelevance. Illiquid poetry assets are choking off the flow of imagination that is so vital to our literature.