Why so many knitting UFOs?

Fifth in the series on Knitting UFOs:

5) Why are there so many UFOs in the knitting universe?
a) Conspiracy theory: the yarn manufacturers, publishers, and the LYS are in league to get us to over consume their products.
i) They will stop at nothing until they have the entire world knitting 24/7.
ii) They will change fashion so quickly, no one will be able to keep up and finish a project while it's still fashionable. Therefore, UFOs multiply like tribbles in the bin.
iii) They are secretly blending in a tactile addictive substance to the yarns, the coatings of the needles, the surface of the paper of the patterns.
iv) Secret, Hidden, Subliminal messages are encoded into the patterns, the pixelations of the web pages, the photos in the publications.
v) The Paparazzi have discovered that if a magazine publishes a photo of a celeb knitting, the circulation skyrockets.
vi) The Movie Moguls have discovered that if there's good knitwear design in a movie, knitters will flock to see it and buy the DVD asap to replicate the designs, thereby boosting the boxoffice.

b) Short Attention Span, ADHD, what is the catch phrase of the week?

c) What 'r we talkin' bout? Moving on....

d) It's a nutritional deficiency. Lack of fiber in our diets. But that explains OCD Hoarding issues, not UFOism. That's gotta be a potty training issue.
e) The knitted UFO is indicative of our fear of commitment as a society.
f) Baby Boomers and those who have come after have never been required to finish anything. We've become a nation of quitters or at least changers; Is that a bad thing? or a good thing?
i) It's OK to not clean your plate.
ii) when we couldn't take the pressure, we quit the team, or the class, ....
was that because the pressure was too much? too soon? too intense?
iii) we changed our college majors 5 times, sometimes to get jobs that didn't exist when we were born.
iv) we job hop, often because the job left us.
v) we can't drive one car long enough to not be upside-down in the loan, (see notes on job above)
vi) we can't stay in one place long enough to pay off the mortgage, or say that we have a "Home Town", or give our kids a place to say they're "From" (see notes on job above).
vii) If we don't like the rules, or the laws, we change them
viii) We don't stay married when it isn't working
g) We demand instantaneous gratification. But with perfection and style. We want to finish a sweater in a day, but make it look like it took a lifetime.
h) We've become too busy with all the things that fill up our calendars. We fill every moment with something important, or maybe just urgent.
i) We've forgotten what is really important.
ii) We are flooded and bombarded with information and images.
iii) Even from infancy, we are driven to "live up to our potential".
Even our youngest children are learning more facts than our ancestors ever dreamed of.
There is so much more information in the world, and so much fantasy and imagination.

A distracting thought here: As an example, when she was a child, my grandmother had
8 grades to finish (no kindergarten or pre-school), now there's at least 15 to 20
26 presidents to memorize, soon to be 44
45 states and capitols
When she got a phone, there were only 4 digits in her number
Her house needed no key
Her one car had one key
The only passwords were for fun, or on a show on one of the 3 TV channels in Black and White, not 3 million colors HDTV via satellite.

Gotta go, There's a new Lost Heroes Star Expose' Mystery Reality Show on in a minute. My TV automatically tuned in to it (from among America's Top 200) so I wouldn't miss it again.

Tuesday Tips: Photocopies of Patterns

Keep in mind that there are copyright laws, and they apply to all of us.
But, one of my best tips ever is to photocopy the pattern from the book or magazine, and then carry the photocopy around instead of the whole book. You can write on the pattern, highlighting parts, coloring in patternwork, marking off where you've finished, all kinds of stuff.
As far as I can find out, it is perfectly legal to make a copy of a work that you own as long as it is for your own personal use. It seems that you cannot make a copy, then sell the book and continue to use the copy. Then there are the hazy areas of scanning to a disk, and "archiving". Well, those areas are not hazy at all to the writers, publishers, and copyright holders. So, watch yerself! Don't even try to post a scanned copy of a pattern on the internet. It will come back to bite 'cha in the butt.

Now, my Aunt Mary liked to make tiny little pencil notes in her books to remind her of what patterns she had made for whom, changes she made, sizes for people, etc. But, surely it is better to have not lost the book entirely than to have all your notes scattered around in all those books. I would give anything to have some of her books with all those little notes in them. But, after her funeral, a nutty brother of hers trashed them all. They were "worthless" to him.

But, I digress. If having a record of the projects made, etc. is important, maybe you could put those copied pages into a notebook to track the notes? I know that at some point in time my DH is going to "have enough" and go on a cleaning bender, probably throwing away magazines in the process. If a copy of the pattern has been stored with the UFO, is is possible, in theory, to finish it at some later date. So, in the interest of someday conquering my OCD-hoarding disorder, the notebook and copies make it possible for me to let go of some of the mounds of periodicals that surround me.

Library Books: Who in their right mind even imagines that a person, even a super knitter, would be able to finish an entire knitting project before the library book is due?

Magazines: Why do some magazines spread the pattern out over pages scattered somewhat randomly around the magazine? Photo on one page, yarn choice advise on a second, directions on a third, charts on a forth. Oh, and don't forget that the finish up directions might be somewhere else.