Book: Tasty Crochet

I had a 40-percent-off coupon and a $5 credit from my Borders Rewards, so I bought Rose Langlitz's Tasty Crochet. Anyone can dimple a red ball and call it an apple, but Langlitz's patterns have more impressive shaping--properly pear-shaped pears, oblong fried eggs, and an awesome chicken drumstick. Hell, the samples in the book are photographed next to real food items and utensils to show off their realism. I bought this more to practice making different 3-D shapes than because I have any particular need for yarn food.

While I was at the bookstore, a bunch of teenaged boys had picked up one of those "How to swear/talk dirty in Japanese" books, and one of them was loudly reading the expressions for Who farted? and You idiot! while another tried to get him to shut up and the others giggled. Any Japanese tourists nearby must've gotten a kick out of that. ^_^

Stereotypes and historical whitewashing are so cuuuuuute!

Recently discovered the manga/anime Axis Powers Hetalia via TVTropes. I haven't seen the print comic or the anime yet, just looked at some of the original Japanese webcomics.

All the characters in APH are anthropomorphic personifications of different countries. Some of the webcomics are based on historical and current international relations and cultural trivia, while others are just the characters interacting in a (sometimes slashy) funny way. Thus far, my favorite character is Greece, just because he's so adorable with his tousled hair and white T-shirt and his cats all over the place.

Still, I alternate between liking it and being a little disturbed by it. Almost all the characters are both goofy and endearing, so I don't find the stereotyping that offensive, but then there's Turkey, who I've only seen drawn as an antagonist so far, and China--the Japanese stereotype of Chinese people speaking broken Japanese with "aru" at the end of all their sentences has always bugged me. And while it's natural for a gag comic to avoid srs bsns like genocide, slavery, and other atrocities, given Japan's tendency to pretend its war crimes never happened, I can see why some people would be upset about a whitewashed historical comic.