Wow, my coverage of the death of Hunter S. Thompson seems to have struck a nerve...I've never gotten email before on anything I've posted here until now.

I just heard that apparently HST's penultimate act was to call his wife so that he could shoot himself with her on the phone hearing it. Now that sort of muddies the waters a bit. That's a damn cruel thing to do to your wife. Dirty cricket, as they say in Ol' Blighty. I still admire the dude, but I don't like this. Looking back on Thompson's writings, he had a definite misogynist streak. Bleah.

Speaking of misogyny, I received some of the last stuff I'm going to get off of eBay for a while, which included a sewing how-to manual that dates back to 1970. Aside from the smaller dress sizes (American dress sizes have been supersized over the past 25 years) and the Austin Powers-era fashions on display, it's pretty much up to date. Yeah, now modern sewing machines computer controlled and all that crap, but when you look at their mechanisms they are pretty much as Old Man Singer conceived them back 150+ years ago. My machine is pretty much identical to the ones they show in the book in function. Only the chibi size and the cute plastic hull are different.

As is befitting an antique, there are old attitudes on display in the book as well. "Women may not be wearing the pants in the family these days, but they certainly do wear pants." Eew. Ugly, ugly sexism. I suppose it's necessary to look back to see how far we've come, especially when one despairs about how far along we should be by now.

Long story short, however, the book is a good introduction to sewing skills. Which is just what I need. A geek behind a sewing machine? Hell, I've built and hot-rodded computers. This is easy.