Knitblog pet peeves and a doulicia's book group book

I spend far too much time perusing knit blogs. When I can't be knitting myself, I want to see knitting. I want inspiration. I have about 30 knitblogs bookmarked and I whip through them like women with People Magazine at the hairdressers. It really can become frenetic: more yarn, more patterns, more beautiful photos. Gimme, gimme, now!

Which is why, perhaps, I'm starting to get really crabby -- for no reason other than my own idiosynchratic preferences -- at certain knitblog habits*.

• Socks. Socks may be fun to knit and even better to wear, but I don't want to see them. This probably will change when I knit my first pair. For now, it's just variations on a theme. (Nothing against sock knitters or sock knitter bloggers...I just may not visit your site much).
  
• Lace in progress. It looks the same one day to the next. I know it takes forever to knit lace. And if one wants to update her blog frequently, she can be hard pressed to come up with fresh material. But if you've added four rows since yesterday -- even if it's up to 350 stitches on size 2 needles -- I'm probably going to pass your blog right up.
  
• New yarn. I can go to the yarn store if I want to see balls of yarn. Knit it into something and then show me.
  
• Links to patterns you'd like to knit. Coulda, woulda, shoulda.
  
• Sheep photos.

O.K. Please don't send me hate comments. The pet peeves are real, but the comments are unnecessarily snarky, possibly due to hormone level readjustment and a short night's sleep.

On to reading. If I were as famous as Oprah, and had my own bookclub, I'd add this to the to-read list:

A "social history" of sperm. What could be a more loaded topic? Surely I don't know. To have a sociologist deconstruct its various social and cultural meanings sounds fascinating.

To tease you into reading it, check out this great interview with the book's author, Lise Jean Moore, at Salon. From the interview:

Secular children's books want to anthropomorphize these little sperm cells and make them interesting, heroic and exciting, people we would identify with.... They have very masculine personalities, of purpose, competition and aggression. They give sperm qualities that we would want our fathers to have. Just like "Daddy did this for you, the sperm did this for the egg cell." But sperm carries the X or the Y, so technically it's not really he or she.

The narrative is so monolithic. It doesn't say, wow, most sperm cells are in a shape that isn't healthy and most don't swim right, and most don't have tails, and it's actually sort of miraculous that people get pregnant because semen is a highly unpredictable substance. Children's books also create this narrative of children always being wanted, always being planned, always being predicted, and of the sperm cell having some cognition of that. It never bangs into a diaphragm or the back of a condom. It never comes out in the air because the guy is jerking off.

I hope you'll read on!

*note: I am fully aware that I may have in the past or may in the future be guilty of any or all of these actions. I would appreciate not having these lapses brought gloatingly to my attention.