First things first

Let’s take as our starting point some classically styled booties.

Then let’s move on to knee-high booties, for those babies who always manage to disengage themselves from their footwear.

These socks help babies express their inner Wicked Witches of the East.

Or maybe their inner monsters?

If you’re a sock knitter, you may especially enjoy these baby booties made with leftover sock yarn. Best of all, there’s no seaming whatsoever!

The person who wrote that pattern then upped the cuteness ante with these munchkin slippers, also made with leftover sock yarn and sized for newborn feet. Again, no seaming!

These are made from worsted-weight yarn,

Prefer your baby booties to come in mindless-knitting versions? Check out these slippers, formed from simple squares.

Jordan Matter’s Dancers Among Us photography project takes professional dancers from several companies and puts in NYC locations, in everyday settings. The results are amazing.

Years ago, Jan taught me the adage “There’s no movie that can’t be improved by adding ninjas to it–even movies that already have ninjas.” After reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I can’t help but wonder if the same can’t be said of literature and zombies. Not that Austen’s original work had any zombies in it to begin with. (Well, maybe Mr. Collins…) In addition to dramatically upping the zombie quotient of the original P&J, this book also inserts some eyebrow-raising humor that may very well have shocked Austen’s first readers. For example:

She remembered the lead ammunition in her pocket and offered it to him. “Your balls, Mr. Darcy?” He reached out and closed her hand around them, and offered, “They belong to you, Miss Bennet.”

If you can get past the idea that the Bennet sisters studied “the deadly arts” of zombie slaying with Shaolin masters in China (maybe reading this just-published prequel can put your mind at ease on that topic), the juxtaposition of seeing them bound by social mores and scenes in which they eviscerate the undead makes for a fun read.

Around the end of June, my tech life changed dramatically in two ways.

First, I became the owner of an iPhone 3G. Jan bought this two years ago and has used it pretty much nonstop every since. (We joke that it is his “auxiliary brain.”) When the iPhone 4 came out last month, he preordered one; it arrived (and was immediately activated) the day before it would have been available in stores.

Then the 3G became mine. I’m not using it as a phone, though. My cell phone use doesn’t justify this expensive; it currently amounts to about 400 minutes per year–so I use T-Mobile’s prepaid 1000 minutes good for one year for $100 deal. So the old iPhone is functioning as an iPod Touch*, which means I have Internet access whenever I have a WiFi connection.

So what am I doing with the 3G? Mostly gaming. It’s very handy for playing an asynchronous Scrabble-like game with friends, as well as Carcassonne. (If Settlers of Catan ever comes out for the iPhone, I will probably disappear for a while…) I’m also having loads of fun with Plants versus Zombies, which is exactly what it sounds like (and available for many platforms, for non-iPhone users out there).

The other big change is that I have pretty much stopped using Facebook in the past few weeks. I ranted here about Facebook several months ago, but ultimately still found it a useful place to keep in touch with people. But lately, I find that reading Facebook just annoys me: too much passive-aggression, too many “let me say something vague and negative so lots of people will ask me ‘what’s wrong?’” status updates, too much inanity. I started hiding people from my feed, and when I realized that I was hiding most people, I knew it was time to go. Oh, and there’s also that whole thing about how Facebook completely ignores any privacy concerns and aggressive markets users’ information to other vendors. Yeah, that.

(I haven’t nuked my Facebook account–still on the fence about that–but I’ve removed most of my personal information from there.)

So, aside from the blogosphere, where am I hanging out these days online? Believe it or not, Twitter, where I’m First Things; you can find me here. I’ve been active there only for a couple of weeks now, and so far it’s been…interesting. More on that later, though.

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*What a lame name. Seriously, Steve Jobs: Apple has excelled in the design and marketing department for some time now. This was the best you guys could come up with?

In recent years, I haven’t attended many concerts or other live shows, mostly because the ticket costs are prohibitive and partly because I live an hour from Philly (where most performances are in this area) and schlepping into the city, dealing with traffic and parking, and forking over a lot of bucks for a ticket usually seem like a bigger hassle than it’s worth to me.

But when Jan and I heard about the Walking with Dinosaurs show (oh, I’m sorry–it’s officially an “arena spectacular”) we knew we had to take our dinosaur-crazy daughter to see it. At first we thought, “Let’s get the cheap seats.” Well, it turns out that the cheap section comprises only the last four rows of a small portion of the arena. Okay then, how about the mid-priced seats? The only ones still available are next to the stage wings, which means that our vertically challenged five-year-old probably isn’t going to see squat from there. So we decided to throw down for the most expensive seats, which make up about 70% of the seats in the arena. Seriously.

Once that decision was made (after lots of agonizing and checking alternate dates, in case we could find decent less-expensive seat on another day–no such luck, alas), I then had to deal with Ticketmaster’s fees.

First, there’s a $10 “convenience charge”* per ticket. (My friend Rob, who attends many large-venue events each year, calls this the “bend over charge.”)

Then, I had to choose a delivery method. Interestingly, having hard-copy tickets mailed to me in 10-14 days will cost me nothing. But being able to print them immediately (which I did, because if there’s a screwup with my order I want to know about it as soon as possible) costs $2.50 per order.

And then, on the final screen, I saw that Ticketmaster assessed a $3.50 order processing fee. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

“Fuckers,” I muttered. And then I sighed and hit the “buy” button. Because if I want to take my kid to see this show, I have no choice but to do things Ticketmaster’s way.

Was it worth it?

Yeah. Totally.

Eddie Vedder, if you’re reading this, when you’re ready to take on Ticketmaster again, let me know. I’ll be in the front lines with you.

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*Whose convenience, eh? I had to deal with captcha challenges every time I checked a different date, then had to accept Ticketmaster’s terms (which included letting them give my e-mail address to all sorts of advertisers) before I was even allowed to buy anything. Oh, you mean this whole setup is a lot more convenient for Ticketmaster? I see!

First, watch this:

Now, watch this:

Double rainbow ATW. Awesomesauce.

(Nathan Fillion is insane, by the way.)

The deluge is just around the corner!

Look at all that pollen!

Seriously–how can anyone not like something called “100% Good Vibes Music“? This awesome Afrobeat-reggae album is CC licensed and available for streaming or free download.

Jan has a remarkable talent for finding four-leaf clovers. Now if he could just find a seven-leaf clover, we’d be all set…