This photograph, which I’m sure many of you recognize, was released in July by Sepah News, the website of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. The photograph did what it was supposed to do——terrify the world about the possibility of Iran launching a nuclear weapon. It turned out, however, that the Iranian propaganda machine is much better at Holocaust denial than at using Photoshop:

This picture, courtesy of a July 10th blog post on the website of The New York Times, shows the sections of the photograph that were copied and pasted in order to increase the number of launched missiles by one. Why?  Because, as everyone knows, four missiles are much scarier than three.

The reason I’m (re)showing these pictures is to demonstrate that, much to my surprise, my Photoshop skills are better than the Iranian media’s.  Here is one of the pictures that I submitted to knitty along with the pattern for Retrofit:

Here’s the same picture, from before I rearranged a whole bunch of pixels:

There are two conclusions you could draw from this:

1. I’m a full participant in a massive cover-up of an alien conspiracy to take over all of earth’s hand-knitted items.
2. The good folks at knitty had already published a sock pattern with a similar motif, and so only wanted the sweater.

Not that these conclusions are mutually-exclusive, of course. The more important thing is, do you want to join the conspiracy I mean, do you like that space invader?  If so, hop on over to Ravelry, where I’m selling the chart for what is probably the same amount that the the Iranians paid their Photoshop experts. And don’t worry if you’ve already cast on; I used duplicate stitch for the space invader, and you can too.

Those secrets I mentioned in my last post are coming. I’m in the process of setting up my Ravelry store, and once that’s done, all will be revealed. In the meantime, a pressing issue has arisen; one that requires immediate attention.

Along with all the wonderful feedback about my Retrofit pattern (thanks everyone!), I’ve received a surprising number of emails and comments about the accompanying bio, in which I declare my status as a Rush fan as “former.” Some of you are quite rankled by this, which is really quite an education for me. Until now, I assumed that people stopped liking Rush when they turned twenty-one.

Why this assumption? Of all the concert crowds of which I’ve been a part, the ones that assembled for Rush had the most specific demographic: entirely white, mostly male, between the age of thirteen and twenty-one. The women who attended Rush concerts looked, for all intents and purposes, to have been dragged along by their boyfriends. (For the record, I never dragged a female of the human species to any of the Rush concerts I attended, mostly because, at that time, I couldn’t get a girl to come within ten feet of me). The only female Rush fan I’ve ever met was a music student with a concentration in the Baroque period. Which pretty much explains her interest in Rush all by itself¹.

Now, I had a great time at the Rush concerts I went to. I was enthralled by the lasers, the video screen, the complex arrangements, and the subject matter of Neal Peart’s lyrics: dystopian societies, nuclear annihilation, medieval stuff, and . . . um, Lord of the Rings. You know, stuff that turns any fifteen-year-old geek’s crank.

But then I saw them on the Hold Your Fire tour (I am not doing the math on that one), and I realized something: very little of the sound I was hearing was being generated by the three guys on the stage². The other people in my section must have realized the same thing, because everyone was staring at the stage with a vacant, glazed look that no amount of pot-smoking could account for. And it wasn’t just my section, either.  Someone had pulled the plug out of the arena, and the drain was the stage itself.

There wasn’t much to be done after that. With a decent set of speakers, I could produce the same experience in my living room, without having to put up with drunken fans, long lines, and cigarette smoke. It was probably around that same time that Lord of the Rings lost its charm.

These days I have no interest in big arena concerts. They’re too impersonal, and the tickets are a massive ripoff ($20 “service charge” anyone?) I’d much rather see local independent bands at the nearest hole in the wall. And then, of course, there’s Yo La Tengo.

¹ At least one of the people who wrote to inquire about my “former” status is female. You are very, very rare.

² Not long after the show, I learned from a magazine article that most of the music was being generated by computers behind the stage. I also learned that the computers were programmed to resequence if the band made a mistake.

You may have just surfed over here from knitty, by way of Retrofit, my most recent sweater pattern.  What you see, though, is not all there is.  This sweater contains many untold secrets, which I will be divulging in this space sometime in the next few days.  I’d divulge them tonight, but I’m going to see The Bad Plus play at Yoshi’s after work, and by the time I get home I’ll have too many crazy jazz covers in my head to write a reasonable post.

Stay tuned!