The AntiCraft has an awesome contest: submit your pattern for a
Vlad the Impaler hat with earflaps and bobbles in knit or crochet before March 31st. I'm so totally not going to have time to do this, but I wish I did! If you're interested at all, please enter this contest. :)
The whole hubbub was started by a writer for the Philadelphia Weekly who wrote a dumb article about knitters (and then wrote a dumber follow up). I'm not going to link to him, but you can find it in the responses from
Zabet of the Anticraft and
Shannon Okey of AlterNation.
I will admit I had fun writing the snarky comment I left on Shannon's post. But, in all seriousness, I find any comparisons to Hitler or Nazis *always* in poor taste. Especially in the Philadelphia Weekly writer's case, because his really makes no sense. He says knitters are overly touchy, but I don't recall anyone thinking the Nazis were, you know, sensitive. I'm the last person in the world that you could accuse of holding things sacred, but there are some things that carry their own weight, and the holocaust is one of those things.
That was even more clear to me yesterday when Andrew and I went to the Philadelphia Art Museum to see an exhibition of
Lee Miller's photography. She's a very interesting woman and her photographs are amazing. During WWII she was a photojournalist. She took pictures of the liberation of concentration camps and wrote an article that accompanied some of them for Vogue. It's a sad and disturbing event in world history.
I'm totally not politically correct: I think it's hilarious to make fun of people; I've got my own secret feelings about hipsters (some of which are accompanied by WTF?);
Schadenfreude is one of my favorite words. Plus, I'm always willing to have a laugh (or let others have a laugh) at my own expense. I mean, crafters can be a weird bunch. Sometimes we're downright kooky. But dude just went a little too far in his quest for ... I-don't-know-what. If you aren't creative enough to trash people without bringing up Nazis, you're scraping the bottom of the talent bucket, bub.