Happy 13th, blog

Yeah, the first post on here was on 26 January 2002, so this blog is 13 years old today.

I guess I was in the first wave of knitbloggers - I wasn't the FIRST, there were people writing before me, but I was in the first year or two of people knitblogging. A lot of the early blogs I've read are gone, either the people who wrote them had changes in their lives, or lost interest, or whatever. Lots of other people started blogging later on, some of them ultimately parlaying the blog into a writing career or a yarn-dying career, or something else.

I'm still here. Not as many people read blogs as did formerly; I suppose blogs are viewed as passé by some, and I know there are a lot of people who never saw the point of them at all. 

And that's okay, but I don't like the people who just totally denigrate the idea of blogging - there are still a number of blogs I read daily, and still others I read weekly. Frankly, I like actual blogs with *writing* better than I like Tumblr - which is more visually oriented - or more ephemeral platforms like Twitter, where something you say is gone and buried hours after you said it. At least with most blogs there's some kind of archival function. And yes, I do use my blog as a bit of an archive at times - for example, "When did my car's battery fail?" I know that because I wrote about it here and I can search it. Or "when did I get a tetanus booster last?" - it's back there in the archives. I'm not good at keeping a paper journal, but I'm pretty good at keeping up the blog. 

I don't write about knitting nearly as much as I once did here. For one thing, my life has gotten busier, so I don't have as frequent finished projects. And really, for "instructional" or "opinion type" things, Ravelry is a huge wide world of information. And I don't link as many things as I once did (Weblogs, I guess, originally did kind of develop as catalogs of links). But I don't have as much time to surf around, and most of the stuff I find, other people already know about.

Blogs grow and change. I guess like people.

And yeah, my blog is 13. Thirteen was not a good year for me....it was the height of the time the "mean girls" picked on me and the rest of my peers ignored/shunned me. I remember a class I had loved, science, was taught in a "student centered" way that I found massively annoying, and I actually think I brought home a C one grading period because there were all these stupid "challenges" that seem to be set up so that the careful, detail-oriented people failed at them, and the slapdash people did well. And maybe, okay, sometimes it's good for people who don't normally succeed to do so, but to have that happen at the expense of the people who are normally the hardworking ones feels deeply unfair....

(I will also observe, just in passing, that the science teacher that year wound up serving time in prison - I found about this years and years later - for "inappropriate" relationships with some students. While I was there? I don't know.  I will say I always felt something slightly "off" about the person and strove not to ever be alone in the classroom or lab with them.)

And thirteen was the height of my "awkward" phase - I had braces and a bad haircut and had just started wearing glasses and felt UG-LY. When I look back at my pictures now from that time, I recognize they are not so bad (at the very least, I was blessed with clear skin). But reality and perception are seldom the same and I remember feeling a lot of the time like I wanted to walk around with a bag over my head.

I don't know if blog-years at all equate to human years (I kind of thing that blog-years are like dog-years; that blogs mature faster than people). At any rate, I hope my blog's thirteenth year is far, far better than my thirteenth year was....

And here's something just kind of random and weird. Someone on ITFF introduced us to Max Raabe and his Palast-Orchester. Most often they do 1920s and 30s style dance-band music (they have an extremely sweet version of Singin' in the Rain, which seems to be more typical of their style and which I like very much) but occasionally they parody recent pop songs, and the effect is weird and funny.

Like this: 



(He's German, so there is an accent issue there. It's more noticeable on some songs, I think it's more noticeable on the "modern" pop songs than the "vintage" ones)

My thirteen year old self would have hated that song. She probably would have liked Singin' in the Rain, but she was a much harder-core music snob than I am now.

Edited to add: here's another wonderful, goofy piece by Palast Orchester. Apparently they "revive" old arrangements of things; I read somewhere that they started with sheet music found at thrift shops. This is a version of "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf" (from the old Disney cartoon) in German.

There must have been a tiny fad for this; on one of my old Chanson albums there is a version of it in French, done by....Oh, I forget who. Not Tino Rossi, not Charles Trenet, the other guy....

Jean Sablon. That's it. Jean Sablon did a version of this in the late 30s or early 40s. But here, they even have people playing the parts of the pigs: