Aplogies for belated Otterday, I went away for the weekend and it just didn’t happen.
Today’s otter is coming at you from The Independent, which describes how the competing interests of otters and anglers are being sorted out in the UK over recent years.
The return of the otter in England is causing problems for commercial fisheries, which are resorting to unusual remedies. Otters threatening an angling club's prize fish, worth thousands of pounds, are being kept away with a novel deterrent – lion dung.
Please feel free to use this thread to natter about anything your heart desires. Is there anything great happening in your life? Anything you want to get off your chest? Reading a good book (or a bad one)? Anything in the news that you’d like to discuss? What have you created lately? Commiserations, felicitations, temptations, contemplations, speculations?
Having now had a good sleep, I do apologise to all for the very late appearance of the Otterday. I went up to Newcastle (where I spent 9 of my school years) to visit my brother, who has just moved back up there. The showers interrupting the finer weather were brief and didn’t spoil the fun. We cooked and chatted and ate and chatted and went for walks and chatted.
Newcastle is in the middle of deciding how to reinvigorate its CBD – the mood appears split between the new! shiny! new! crowd supporting the developers with bulldozers who want a shiny new multistorey air-conditioned shopping centre as the heart of the precinct, and the conservationist crew who want to renovate the older buildings and enhance the existing pedestrian mall shopping parade area to keep it as an open-air complement to the new foreshore developments. Hunter Street at the moment is a mix of utterly derelict rows of shops, some surviving groups of quirky operations and bargain shopfronts and a few small concentrations of new upmarket boutiques. Quite obviously it lacks coherence as it stands: people don’t go to Hunter Street to browse much, they go there for something they know is there.
I for one don’t understand why there aren’t a few more footbridges over the railway to encourage more organic pedestrian flow between the older Hunter Street area and the new foreshore Honeysuckle area. It’s a very long walk between the one crossing at Wickham Station and the next crossing at Civic Station: it doesn’t make sense.
The otter renaissance has proved to be a control on the wild mink population, so that’s something to cheer for them about. (Context: animal rights protesters in the UK tend to release animals held in testing and other facilities; this has included mink, which turned out to be a huge problem for local wild- and farmlife).
JUst got back from a massive family gathering, celebrating the diamond anniversary for my grandparents (card from the Queen and all). Some good, some bad.
The two friends I said a few otterdays back that I might have lost, it seems I haven’t.
Trying to figure out budget (fully! itemised! for three years!) to enter into automated submission system for grant application. Not my strong suit. Head, it huuuurts.
Whoa. Bin Laden dead?
Has everybody noticed this morning how the presence of a woman in the room where Bin Laden died is being spun as him cowardly “hiding behind a woman”?
I guess there’s no possibility that a woman might actually be an active defender of the place, or a bodyguard. Nope. Women are always just passive puppets.
When cobbling together leftovers for dinner, is it too, too wrong to be considering curry tacos?
Mmmm, intriguing. You never know until you give it a go!
I’ve had my last haircut in a while.* My usual hairdressers have doubled their prices, and there’s not many places that do student discounts any more. Is everything getting way more expensive lately, or has everyone except me been given a pay-rise?
*Mostly turquoise, with a pink-tipped S-shaped mohawk, if you’re interested.
Oh, and does anyone know where I could buy a soft toy kidney?
Oh, The Amazing Kim, I hear you. This is one of the reasons, I confess, that I’m now growing my hair out – haircuts can stretch to every four or five months, apart from the odd fringe trim. (Making my own product/buying cheap bulk conditioner base helps. No, I’m not going no-shampoo.) And the Lad gets his hair cut in a revolving-door chopshop down at the markets for very little; I can’t quite bring myself to try cutting it myself, since last time I attempted to cut hair it was a disaster of quite impressive proportions.
Here’s your kidney.
Oh, brilliant! Thanks extremely much for that.
I was going to a hairdressing school, where the lack of expertise was offset by the tiny amounts of money they charged. Now they’re the price of a regular salon, there’s no point in going there any more. To save money I might have to paint my hair white with liquid paper and give everyone coloured sunglasses.
I probably shouldn’t get started on the difference in price between men’s and ladies’ cuts. I have a man’s cut, it’s just attached to my lady body, and my androgynous money just wants to stay where it is in its nice warm wallet.
Does anyone has any suggestions for ways to help fight back against all the anti-choice legislation going on in the US? I feel so frustrated because I don’t have a good idea of what to do.
@Carmen, I don’t have any good suggestions at all, sadly. I share your frustration, absolutely. I just hope women can get out of Gilead before it’s too late :(