Oh my goodness. Do you know what I got when I got my new Betz White book? Warm Fuzzies; both metaphorically, because this book is the best, and literally. Warm Fuzzies is one of the coolest new books I have seen (other than Crafter Culture of course). First of all, Betz White is a really cool chick. You should surely check out her blog, of which I regularly stalk along with my early morning coffee and blog-reading ritual. She is witty, up-beat, and eternally carefree as she moves along in her busy life of kids, business, and artfulness. To prove how artful this book is, I have even thought about our other wonderful critics, and thought I might offer some of you some inspiration to find peace and get crafty through the world of feltyness:

• Granola girl - You will be happy to know that these projects are encouraged to come from recycled materials, such as old wool sweaters. What better way to help the cause of clean food than to reduce waste?
• Womanyst - The basic instructions on felt constructions could surely be applied to a nice felted set of ovaries or other female-specific genitalia
• Mr. Kriticle - I think you would be pleased by the organized implementation of each project.
• Tech nerd - You would just love the possibilities of many tech gadget cozies made of felt. LOL, LMAO, TTYL.
• Mad Critic - Hmmm…there is something very sinisterly pleasing about my mental pictures of you meticulously hand-sewing a bed for your beloved Westminster acclaimed canine, while subsequently cussing at your thread in Latin.
• Pornstar - Every great girl needs a great bag, you should try one of the adorable totes. Take a little time out for yourself and sew.

I plan on making one of the super-easy pins first to get used to the felt technique, and you just know I’ll have to make a cute bag for my little girl next. In fact, instead of using a sewing machine, most of the projects are diverse enough that you could hand sew instead of using the machine and let the kiddies get in there to make their very own hat, gloves, or purse. This F+W publisher isn’t too bad either. After doing some digging on publishing a craft book (wouldn’t this be the ultimate for an artist? A girl can dream…), I found some of their other books. Here are a few that caught my eye:

• The Art of Personal Imagery: Expressing Your Life Through Collage - After all, the whole point of art is to have time to look within and be uninhibited in expression
• Nuno Nouveau: Fashionable Felt for Accessories and Home Decor – Though I haven’t gotten my hands on it yet, I hear Nuno felt is the cool new fiber art. I first heard about it on one of the first blogs that I stalked, Heal My Life. The author of this blog used these techniques to make awesome bags, but I have seen beautiful scarves and such too!
• Kaleidoscope: Ideas And Projects to Spark Your Creativity – Another one I have seen on several crafty-art blogs! Great price, and another way to delve into the artful person who resides inside of you.

I don’t know how I feel about discovering that I’m as bad at bowling in Second Life as I am at bowling in real life. I do know how I feel about Splitsville, the bowling alley I found in Second Life: I love it! The design is classic, complete with checkerboard floors, dizzying carpet in the billiards area, and naugahyde banquettes behind each lane.

The site offers three areas for bowling: indoor lanes, rooftop lanes, and the outdoor bowling pavilion south of the building. All the lanes provide a free bowling glove and HUD (Heads Up Display, which is an attachment scripted to help you do things like animate your avatar), and you grab the ball of your choice from the rack near each lane. The HUD provides adjustments for speed and aim along with a “Throw Ball” button. After starting the game, you position your avatar, take aim using the HUD, and click the “Throw Ball” button.

If you’ve positioned yourself well, you might throw a strike. The script runs your avatar through the usual movements of bowling, including the occasional face plant as you slip on the polished floor. The animation seems to return you to your original position; but even if you just threw a strike, there’s no guarantee that you won’t throw a gutter ball if you presume to stay in that spot for the next throw.

The game allows for one or two players per lane, so you can go by yourself and practice or take a date. There’s no need for special shoes—I bowled in my stilettos (hm…maybe that explains all those gutter balls). The only thing I wish the HUD or the lane would provide is a bit more information about how bowling is scored, and an indicator to tell the players whose turn it is. It’s been a long time since I bowled in RL, and the sport has some quirks in those areas that should be explained to the new and the rusty.

In addition to bowling, there are scripted billiards tables, dancing, and a swimming pool shaped like a bowling pin. You can sign up for bowling buddies if you want to bowl with another aficionado, or join the Splitsville Bowling League. The Splitsville Arena offers concerts, and the Pro Shop is a good place to buy bowling shirts and teddy bears.

So if you find yourself wandering the grid in search of an activity, and you’ve had your fill of the usual dance clubs, head over to Splitsville and try your hand at virtual bowling. And be happy that you don’t have to rent special bowling shoes that have housed thousands of other smelly feet.

The common idiot will be found sitting at a stoplight under the delusion that his/her music is so cool, that they must roll down their window and turn it to the highest possible volume so all the other people at the stoplight will be forced to listen to the driver’s “hip beats.” Unfortunately, the common idiot’s choice in music often reflects his/her mentality.

What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, and Marriage: Lessons for People from Animals and Their Trainers is is a book by Amy Sutherland that has been getting much attention in reading circles full of witty, cute-as-a-button womyn (who are afraid of smart people like me) lately. It teaches you to train your husband to do things around the house by using techniques common in animal training. This paragraph was to show Mr. Kriticle that I can be somewhat kind. The rest is for the other readers:

OK. OK. OK. I’m trying to tell myself What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, and Marriage is at least better than books on good house-keeping. All psych students know the old trick where you can get a professor to move by having everyone look at the place you want them to go, which is all well and fun, but do you really need this kind of effort to get your spouse to move? If you have to stare at the kitchen for hours in your already droning life to get your husband wash a few ceramics, you need to call a lawyer. While I agree men are comparable to rats and canines, please tell me why womyn need to spend their lives finding out how to get them to do tricks. Despite the satisfaction some pop-tart soccer mommy might have when her husband actually talks to her like a human being instead of one of the children, you are still deciding to surround your life around his brainlessness.

What’s saddest about What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, and Marriage is that it only adds to the asinine concept that women have to spend money, bow down all day, and get off all night to get men to do what they are better off doing themselves (and that includes all three tasks dears). Here’s an example that is so generously offered by a review in Newsweek: “If your mate picks up just one dirty sock without being asked, give lots of praise.” Do I really need to comment on this? For those of you desperate procreators who think this is insightful, read it again. Read it slowly this time. Now read it one more time. Now you have two options:

1. Realize that you should never feel compelled to praise someone for something they should do out of respect, responsibility, or cleanliness
2. Stab your self in the eye because you think you should have to reward a male for doing something you do all day.

The article cites BF Skinner and other classic conditioning psychological researchers for this, guess what I call it? Growing up. Now, lets all agree that showing tits and kissing ass is not a broad’s only natural talents, and encourage womyn to instead get a backbone and kick ass until they get what they deserve because we’re not only entitled, but also superior. Want more? “Don’t take it personally: Laundry is just laundry, not a symbol for how much your spouse loves you or values your marriage.” Then it shouldn’t be a problem for your beer guzzling, idiotic husband to get off his ass and do it himself.

Conclusions: Sutherland is a conspirator with a penis and a wife who defied him by cutting her hair without permission. I’ll give it 2 and a half stars only because it compares men to animals.

So if you are now a one-eyed subordinate, empower yourself with The Daring Book for Girls and trick yourself, once again, into thinking you are free. Or, for those of you who are smart enough to know that confining yourself to pleasing a male for the rest of your life, get The Daring Book for Girls and The Dangerous Book for Boys and learn how to be self-sufficient. Either way, after you’ve read these, take your DIY to a new level and try Getting Off: A Woman’s Guide to Masturbation to fully realize a girl can be perfectly happy without an X chromosome in their life.

The Kingdom begins with a history lesson, a visual timeline which starts in 1933, and takes us through to the present. It takes up only a couple of minutes at the beginning of the movie and merely scratches the surface of the history of Saudi-US relations, but Peter Berg is still to be commended for providing some context for the premise of this film. It’s no Syriana, but in some ways that’s a good thing. Syriana was brilliant, and complex, an absolute must-see, but a wee bit confusing. The Kingdom manages to both entertain and educate, slipping information about radical Islam and Saudi princes in between car chases and gunfights.

I’ve had a mad crush on Berg since he appeared as Dr. Billy Cronk, the smart, sexy, passionate doctor on the series “Chicago Hope” in the mid-90s. He went on to direct the film Friday Night Lights, which has since become a television series (he also directed the pilot), and has just wrapped Hancock, starring Will Smith, Jason Bateman, and Charlize Theron, which will be out this summer. He’s always struck me as a smart actor and director, willing to delve below the surface of his subject matter, and The Kingdom, for the most part, doesn’t disappoint in this regard. It does suffer from some clunky exposition for the benefit of the audience. “How many princes are there in Saudi Arabia? And do they each have a palace?” don’t seem like questions these agents would have to ask, for example. It’s also hard to believe that forensics expert Janet Mayes (Jennifer Garner) would be unaware of the fact that it is against Islamic law for her to touch a dead Muslim.

In spite of all that, The Kingdom manages to deliver a fast-paced, suspenseful action movie with snippets of some pretty well-written dialog, and some sharp acting. Jason Bateman provides comic relief as Leavitt, the wisecracking, Pixies t-shirt wearing (he’s an FBI agent AND a hipster!) who arrives in Saudi Arabia with a passport marked with three Israeli stamps (“My grandma lives there, is that okay?” he tells the uneasy Saudi guard). Chris Cooper (who coincidentally also appears in Syriana as well as Jarhead) steals all of his scenes as FBI Bomb Tech Grant Sykes, a slow-talking, quick-witted Southerner, and Saudi Colonel Faris Al Ghazi, who ends up helping the FBI team in their investigation, is brilliantly played by Ashraf Barhom. Leading the team is Jamie Foxx as Ronald Fleury, a fiercely determined agent out to discover the perpetrator of a bomb attack on an American compound in Riyadh which has killed not only a hundred or so Americans, but one of their own, an agent on the scene. This is what fuels the whole team’s determination and provides the emotional hook for the story, but this is not a revenge movie in any sense, and this is also what saves it. In spite of the forced nature of some of the scenes, Berg’s message here is ultimately that the Saudis and we have much in common – love of family, pride in our culture, and a sometimes manic resolve to preserve and protect what is ours, no matter the sacrifice.