Cherchez la Femme comes to Sydney for the first time! Since 2010 Melbourne audiences have flocked to see smart, funny feminists engaging on topics like sex, sport, sluts, comedy, film, fashion, public space and fat.

It’s like feminist Q&A…with drinks. CLF features thoughtful, uncensored, and irreverent takes on pop culture and current affairs from an unapologetically feminist angle.

Join us for a night of real talk, guaranteed lols and big-mouthed-feminist love!

It’s 5pm to 8pm at the Vanguard, 42 King Street, Newtown. Tickets are $21.80 through the Vanguard’s website. There should be a non-zero Hoyden and Hoydenizen attendance: I will try and remember to bring my plush Cthulhu for easy identification. We should be able to meet up through that, as long as no other geek meetups are occurring.

Also, if you’re in Canberra, your Cherchez La Femme will be held tomorrow night, Tuesday April 16, from 7pm at The Front Gallery & Cafe 2012 , Shop 3, 1 Wattle Place, Lyneham, $15 at the door.

Who is coming to Sydney or to Canberra?

Related posts:

1. Signal boost: Cherchez la Femme comes to Sydney!
2. Reminder: Sydney Hoyden and Geek Feminism picnic, Sunday 30th May
3. Reminder for Sydney Hoydenizens: Solstice Drinkies this Sunday!

Almost all of the children we first met at age 1, and then at ages 3 and 5, are returning from tonight in Life at 7, with only Loulou not appearing. This time, the two documentaries are Tackling Temperament (now on iView) and Finding Your Tribe (now on iView), screening a week apart.

People with Australian IP addresses can also catch up on the earlier documentaries for a limited time:

• Life at 1: Part 1 and Part 2
• Life at 3: Part 1: Fighting Fat and Part 2: Bad Behaviour
• Life at 5: Part 1: Resilience and Part 2: Great Expectations

Are you watching Life at 7? Please play along in comments, I enjoyed (and was frustrated by) the previous documentaries, and I’m looking forward to seeing the new series.

Related posts:

1. Life at 1, 3, 5: general discussion
2. Life at 1, 3, 5: disability
3. Life at 3: obesity

Since I posted it, I thought it was fair to offer you an update, which is that the editors of the zine have prepared a near-camera ready PDF version which they hope to launch online and in print during the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence (25 Nov to Dec 10). They are currently fundraising in order to print additional copies of the zine, as they can only afford 250 copies without additional funding.

At this point, I’d like to emphasise that I’m not affiliated with the project! I have seen the PDF version of the zine and can tell you that it exists, with 20 contributions included, but I cannot speak to the likelihood of the editors delivering a timely launch of printed copies if they meet their fundraising goal: I simply don’t know! Instead, I’m posting this for the benefit of people who might be wondering what happened to the project.

The editors, Mel Hughes and Kate Ravenscroft, have put up a fundraising page on Pozible aiming to raise AUD $3000. A contribution of $30 or more will mean you get a printed copy of the zine. Their blurb is:

WE WILL NOT GO QUIETLY is a not-for-profit creative resource on surviving sexual assault. Written by survivors of sexual assault, for survivors of sexual assault. We Will Not Go Quietly aims to provide survivors with a place to be heard, a place to tell thier story and a place to be acknowledged. Equally, We Will Not Go Quietly aims to provide the community with a resource for understanding what it means to survive sexual assault.

Accompanying the zine will be a website where stories will continue to be added and contributed.

We are incredibly proud of this publication. Each and every person whose story is included has achieved something amazing. Something that our community rarely recognises. To have been able to read and share these stories has been a great privilege and one that I hope you will recognise, too.

We aim to launch the zine and the website during the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence (25 Nov – Dec 10).

Our next aim is to print as many copies of We Will Not Go Quietly as possible and distribute it as widely as we can. Our plan is to make it available for free so that it is widely accessible.

So far We Will Not Go Quietly has been entirely voluntary and self-funded. However, to realise our vision of sending this publication out into the world as widely as possible we have decided to reach out to the community to see if we can fundraise and therefore maximise the reach of We Will Not Go Quietly.

If we can raise $6,000 we can print 1,000 copies in beautiful riso print.

We can’t help ourselves from dreaming big and imagining 1,000 copies of We Will Not Go Quietly out in the world – in CASA waiting rooms, in schools and doctor’s waiting rooms, in hospitals and support services…. Will you help us get there?

They’re also accepting contributions through their website, unlike Pozible, this money will be sent immediately, not only if they reach their goal.

Front page image credit: Slutwalk Manchester by Phil King.

Related posts:

1. We Will Not Go Quietly: call for submissions
2. Signal boost: Call for Submissions — AP Our Way zine
3. More sexist scum: Johnny Vegas *UPDATE* – in dispute

Amara (Universal Subtitles) is great stuff! Apologies to everyone for whom it is old news: I had heard of it before but not bothered to check it out, assuming it would be super-hard and fiddly. I really didn’t find it so.

How it works: you find a video on a popular video website (Youtube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, or several codecs downloaded directly for that matter) that doesn’t have subtitles. You submit the URL into the Amara website and a tool opens up that lets you enter subtitles for the video, in three steps:

1. type in all the subtitles a line at a time as you pause and restart the video (assuming you need to, professional closed captioners may not need to)
2. sync the subtitles with the speech (by pressing a single key every time it’s time to start a new subtitle)
3. review and publish

I am especially amazed at how easy it is to get a good-enough (I think?) sync of subtitle and speech when playing the video at full speed and just hitting the down arrow to advance to the next subtitle. Amara also provides embed codes that allow you to embed their subtitles with the original video in another webpage, which is crucial because I want to embed videos more often than I want to link to them. Finally, you can pull your subtitles out afterwards in text format, which means you can create a more complete transcript for separate publication.

Last of all, it is not a for-profit enterprise, it is a product of the Participatory Culture Foundation and the Amara code is itself open source. So it is not hostage to a commercial motive but is genuinely created with the central motive of providing more subtitled video on the web.

It does have some limitations: most noticeably for me, the controls over rewinding are a bit coarse-grained (go back 4 seconds and… that’s about it) and they don’t seem to have a facility for slowing the video down, which can help me transcribe fast speech.

They have a short introduction video about themselves (subtitled!):

As a demonstration of what user subtitled content looks like, here’s a subtitled version (not by me) of Karen Sandler’s keynote at linux.conf.au 2012, about medical devices and source code (in her case, trying to get the source code of her pacemaker):

The text version of the subtitles is also available.

Alternative

dotSUB (which I’ve never used either) is an alternative, reviewed positively in comments at FWD, from a for-profit company.

Related posts:

1. Big Shiny Public Tech vs Little Nifty Domestic Tech
2. Interested in women in open tech and culture? AdaCamp Melbourne wants you!
3. Twitter is TEOTWAWKI: Tech Culture Wars

I haven’t forgotten that I promised to do Ruth Park’s My Sister Sif and I still intend to, but while I’m tracking it down for a re-read, I’ve another Sydney novel in the interim: Melina Marchetta’s Looking For Alibrandi.

Spoilers for Looking For Alibrandi abound!

Warning: self-harm is a plot element in this novel, and it’s discussed in this entry.

Background/plot summary: Looking For Alibrandi is a 1992 young adult book by Australian author Melina Marchetta. Seventeen year old Josephine Alibrandi is in her final year of a expensive private Catholic high school, preparing for the HSC (the Higher School Certificate, which is the statewide final school exams in NSW). She is a scholarship student, the daughter of Christina Alibrandi, a single mother who had a child at sixteen and was exiled from her Italian-Australian family until her father died, in the recent past from the novel’s point of view.

Christina insists that Josie has a relationship with Christina’s mother, Josie’s Nonna Katia, but Christina’s own relationship with Katia is strained due to their long estrangement and Katia’s coolness to her throughout her childhood. At the beginning of the novel Josie is more concerned with school problems in any case: her quartet of outsider friends fight for recognition in their upper class Anglo-dominated school. Josie is school vice-captain to her mortal enemy, perfect blond Ivy, daughter of a wealthy surgeon, as captain.

But Josie’s home life suddenly undergoes another change. Josie’s father, Michael Andretti — son of Christina’s childhood next door neighbours, now a barrister — moves back to Sydney for a year to be welcomed briefly into unknowing Katia’s home as one of the family. Josie confronts him and they agree to have no contact, only to ring him from school frantically to extricate herself from a legal threat by a classmate’s father. After this they have an initially uneasy but gradually warmer relationship. In the meantime, Katia begins telling Josie stories of her immigration to Australia and her married life in rural Queensland in total social isolation, until the arrival of her sister from Sicily. Josie begins to see Katia as more of a person and less of an oppressively tradition-bound stereotypical grandmother.

Events at school also demonstrate to Josie that she’s not as much of a complete outsider as she thought, including a revelation by the principal after some irresponsibility towards younger students on Josie’s part that she was in fact voted school captain at the beginning of the year but that it was awarded to Ivy, who the principal felt was more responsible. While at the beginning of the novel Josie wants nothing more than a relationship with John Barton, her solidly upper-class debating friend, she ends up with Jacob Coote, captain of a nearby public school, as a boyfriend, and has to navigate being middle class to his working class.

It eventually becomes clear to Josie as Katia’s stories of her past continue that Katia’s Anglo-Australian friend Marcus Sandford was in love with her, and eventually Katia slips up and Josie works out her grandmother’s secret: Marcus and Katia were lovers and Marcus was in fact Christina’s biological father, which accounted both for Christina’s father’s loathing of her and of his swift condemnation of her when she became pregnant as a teenager.

Josie very briefly reaches a feeling of peace with herself and her story before her tranquillity is suddenly destroyed again: her friend John Barton commits suicide the night before the HSC exams begin, and she is told this by Ivy, who was even closer to John, crying out the front of the school. In the aftermath of this Jacob Coote breaks up with Josie, not sure what he wants from his future himself in the wake of knowing Josie’s relative class privilege and John’s death in spite of his class privilege. The novel ends with Josie about to find out her university entrance ranking, still relatively at peace with herself, but less sure of her place in the world and her ambitions.

Martin Place by Alpha, CC BY-SA

I think I read Looking For Alibrandi a couple of years after it was published: definitely when I was in high school. I recall it being a book that you had to wait some time for at the school library. (It gets assigned as an English text now, but I never read it in that context.) It has crushes and alcohol and uneasy relationships with friends and a pretty intent focus on high school academic achievement, all of which were pretty familiar to me, even if the rich competitive Sydney folk weren’t so much. (At some point John Barton despairs over his poor ranking in a mathematics competition compared to Sydney Grammar, a reference I understood better when I knew former Maths Olympians from Grammar while at uni!)

Again, it’s very evocative of Sydney: I in fact live now pretty close to where Christina and Josie lived in Sydney. There’s a speech day in Martin Place, truanting at the Sebel and a few other landmarks although it’s not quite as firmly inner west as Saving Francesca and The Piper’s Son (the latter of which is about twentysomethings, and with which I identify even more closely as someone who went to Sydney Uni).

To be honest, as a result of this book I even have a sneaking fascination with Stanmore Maccas, where Josie gets a part-time job briefly, and I felt rather betrayed when the movie version changed it to Oporto!

John Barton’s death was “that bit” in the book, as in “have you got to that bit yet? Oh, you’ll know what I mean when you get to it.” It was my main frame of reference in the aftermath of the actual suicide of someone I knew at school, while of course not fitting exactly.

Again with the fanon style questions: this is the twentieth anniversary of Looking For Alibrandi‘s publication. If we took 1992 as the year Josie was seventeen, she is now thirty-seven. Did she end up doing a law degree like her father, but which she had begun to doubt she was as interested in as she’d thought? Did Christina and Michael reunite, as the novel implies they are considering? Did Josie and Ivy end up with an unexpected friendship, as they are stumbling towards? Did Josie, who would have won Least Likely To Leave Well Enough Alone if Australian schools did yearbooks, attempt to track down Marcus Sandford?

I don’t have as strong a fanon in my head for this as for Playing Beatie Bow but if I had to guess, Josie did Arts/Law and dropped out after the Arts component (quite a lot of people in combined law degrees do this). I have no idea what she’d do instead though. I think there’s too much hurt between Christina and Michael to reunite, although probably Josie and Katia both pushed strongly for it. I don’t know what to make of Josie and Ivy! And I would put money on Josie telling herself that she doesn’t mean anything by nosing around in the S section of the phonebook and so on, and of course meaning something by it, finding out that, as always, people’s lives aren’t as simple as she thought.

Related posts:

1. This week on Feminism 101 Blog: Cyberbullying 101/Book Recs for Teens/Privacy 101
2. Children’s Book Council of Australia Book Week: Books which shaped me
3. Book Week: Playing Beatie Bow

I’m going to write about two Ruth Park books this week, Playing Beatie Bow and My Sister Sif.

Spoilers for Playing Beatie Bow ahoy!

Background/plot summary: Playing Beatie Bow is a 1980 older children’s book by New Zealand/Australian author Ruth Park. In it, fourteen year old Abigail sees a strange young girl (thin, wearing odd clothes, “furry” shorn head) watching her babysitting charges play, especially when they play “Beatie Bow”, a ghost game. One day she gives chase to the girl and finds herself in Sydney in the same area, only in 1873. She quickly incurs a head injury after being knocked down in the street by Samuel Bow, a war veteran who himself has a brain injury and “takes spells” (flashbacks) as a result. It emerges that the strange girl is his daughter, Beatie, who had found herself several times in the twentieth century watching a game featuring her own ghost.

The Rocks, circa 1900, State Records NSW, CC BY

While both parties hide their knowledge from each other for a while, the Bow and Tallisker (Beatie’s mother’s name) families who share a house in the Rocks know that Abigail is from a different time and will not help her return to the twentieth century. It emerges that some of the women in their family have a psychic Gift as a result of their Orkney heritage, and that every fifth generation it is imperiled, with a prophecy that of the adults in that generation, one is to be barren and one to die, risking there not being another generation. When this happens, the family is visited across time by The Stranger, in this case Abigail, who is destined to save enough of them to continue the Gift. The family has recently had scarlet fever and only a few members of the fifth generation survive: Beatie; her older brother Jonah; and her younger brother, Gilbert, yet to recover his health after the fever; and their cousin Dorcas (“Dovey”). Abigail is initially desperate to return home, but falls in love with Jonah, a sailor, when he has shore leave, and is more conflicted, especially since Jonah is betrothed to Dovey.

Eventually Samuel Bow causes a house fire, from which Abigail saves Dovey and Gilbert. She returns to the twentieth century that same day, under the care of Beatie, still cross with Abigail for pursuing Jonah. Shortly after returning she researches the family history in the newspapers, which suggests that Jonah probably died at sea shortly after she left. She then has a vision which shows that Beatie became a scholar, and that Jonah married Dovey but indeed died young at sea. She tries and fails to warn the family across time. Abigail is overwhelmed with grief that she cannot speak of.

Before long her own parents reunite after years of separation and move with her to Norway. In the final pages of the novel, she returns to Sydney five years later to discover by chance that the Crowns, her former babysitting charges, are descendants of Gilbert Bow through their mother, and (it is heavily implied) Abigail begins a relationship with their uncle Robert Bow after the novel ends. She realises that instead of her role as The Stranger being to save Dovey from the fire for Jonah as the family had believed, it was to save Gilbert.

I think I received Playing Beatie Bow as a gift from a book-loving relative. I wasn’t born when it was written, and probably read it in about 1992 or a bit later, when I was slightly younger than Abigail is for most of the novel. I remember finding the twentieth century portions rather strange for a while: this relative was in the habit of giving me high quality very recent books, and I didn’t realise for a while that the book was more than a decade old and the portrayals of Abigail’s high school experience (secondhand, as she thinks of them with contempt over summer) were using slang and events from the late 1970s! At the time I knew almost nothing about the 1970s, so it sounded rather as if Park had made up a bunch of plausible sounding teenage slang.

The Rocks in 2009, by Richard Taylor, CC BY

Abigail’s teenage alienation was a bit of a foreign country to me at the time. The novel begins with her spending the summer being angry about all sorts of things: her father leaving her mother for another woman, which has alienated Abigail so much she has changed her given name to one that isn’t connected with her father’s affection; her peers at school and their teenage crushes; her mother’s decision to re-partner with her father after his long-lived relationship with another woman. Interestingly, a big part of the novel is Abigail, via falling in love with someone else’s fiancé, coming to a realisation that there’s more going on with love than people falling in love to spite her. The coda at the end in which Abigail has demonstrably grown up emotionally in her nine-odd months in 1873 and then her five years in Norway was also important to me: the Norway part of the arc, being realism, maybe more important than the time-travelling.

It was probably also one of the first encounters I had with a critique of the idea that history is a uniform progression from worse conditions to better conditions (yeah I know, a pretty obvious misconception in hindsight): this critique is put into the mouth of Jonah who is utterly uninterested in the magic that awaits his world in the twentieth century.

Sydney always makes novels memorable for me, too. I didn’t grow up in Sydney, but rather in regional NSW, and as a teenager it tended to signify freedom to me. I was always very excited to have a book with a strong Sydney-centric sense of place: besides Playing Beatie Bow I think only Melina Marchetta’s novels were as evocative for me. (Only Looking For Alibrandi was actually published when I was a child, I was 22 and already lived in Sydney when she published Saving Francesca, and a new mother in my late twenties when The Piper’s Son came out.) Playing Beatie Bow is very thoroughly set in The Rocks around Argyle Street, and grounded in the local geography to the point where I believe it’s possible to identify the set of stairs that led Beatie into the twentieth century and Abigail into 1873.

Fan service insight for other dedicated Beatie Bow readers: there’s very brief speculation by Robert Bow at the end of the novel that his niece Natalie Crown, Abigail’s former babysitting charge and the only other person who could see Beatie watching them play, has the Gift, but otherwise the form the Gift takes in Gilbert’s descendants and what it means to have it with very little cultural connection to the Orkneys and its supernatural origins there, is totally unexplored.

I worked this over several times when I was younger: if I was counting the generations correctly, the fifth generation of Talliskers/Bows/Crowns after Gilbert ought to be Natalie and her brother Vincent, which should make them subject to the “one to be barren, one to die” curse (by the way, the inevitable “cursedness” of being childless is called out in the novel, by Beatie who deeply wants to be, and ends up being, the childfree one). If Abigail and Robert had children, the fifth generation would contain their children also. This last is of course a stretch given that about the first week of Abigail and Robert’s relationship is shown in the novel, but hey, fanon calling.

In addition, in the novel, Granny Tallisker, who had the strongest Gift, spends some time trying and failing to work out why on earth Abigail is their Stranger, since they expected someone with a family relationship. Neither of them at that point knows about the relationship with the Crown children, or for that matter that Gilbert is to live. But if a family relationship is required, Abigail doesn’t have this it unless she goes on to partner with Robert Bow.

In any event, whatever happens to Robert and Abigail, it seems that the Crowns are due a Stranger at some point in their lives. I was always surprised that Park didn’t write a sequel, given this (although as an adult, I can see why it would be difficult to preserve the tone with one novel set in 1873 and the other in the late twentieth century). In my fanon, a somewhat older Beatie ends up being their Stranger, in a reciprocal relationship to that Abigail had with her family.

Related posts:

1. This week on Feminism 101 Blog: Cyberbullying 101/Book Recs for Teens/Privacy 101
2. Children’s Book Council of Australia Book Week: Books which shaped me
3. Book Week: Looking For Alibrandi

Cream of mushroom soup

Ingredients:
A few handfuls of button mushrooms.
Half an onion.
About 800mL of stock, possibly somewhat more if using a stove top.
About 100mL of cream or sour cream, or some mixture thereof.

NB: I prefer and recommend sour cream but my co-cook despises it, so we tend to make it with cream.

Preparation: Chop up the mushrooms and onions. Fry the mushrooms and onions together. Add the stock and simmer for 5 to 10 minutes. Add the cream and simmer briefly. Pour into a blender and blend until smooth.

Alternative preparation: Chop up the mushrooms and onions. Place in slow cooker with cream and stock on low for 4 hours. Pour into a blender and blend until smooth.

Optional additions: we don’t cook anything much in our house in winter without thyme and bay leaves. Be sure to remove the bay leaf before blending.

Serving suggestion: grind pepper over the result.

Slow cooked chicken drumsticks

Ingredients:
An appropriate number of chicken drumsticks.
A 400g tin of diced tomatoes for about every 8 drumsticks.
About 100mL of stock for every drumstick.
A splash of white wine.
As many olives as you think sounds good.
Optional: onion garlic, thyme, bay leaf, etc.

Preparation: roll/dip/immerse the drumsticks in plain flour and briefly brown them in a fry pan (perhaps with onions and garlic). Place them in a slow cooker with all other ingredients and slow cook on high for 4 hours.

Serving suggestion: we serve with couscous.

Red lentil daal

For this we follow a recipe pretty closely, namely Stephanie Alexander’s recipe in The Cook’s Companion. It’s very similar to her published recipe in Fairfax’s Cuisine, except we haven’t been using chilli or mustand seeds.

I’ve also tried this in a slow cooker (don’t pre-soak the lentils, have all the pot ingredients in for 8 hours on low) but it ended up being too smooth for my tastes (I have a very strong aversion to some types of very smooth food, namely well-mashed potatoes, ripe avocados, and a few other things, and this daal went into that range).

Apple crumble

Another dish where we follow a (simple!) recipe closely, specifically Donna Hay’s recipe for individual portions. We had great luck also, when we had some passionfruit to spare, juicing several of them and mixing the juice with the apple slices for passionfruit crumble.

A few other warmers you might fancy:

• Skud’s apple and oat crumble for breakfasts.
• Tom yum goong can go either way, seasonally, but at this time of year if you make it spicy enough it will warm most of the lower half of your face.
• Lemon delicious pudding, another great dessert to make in one container or individual portions.

What’s warming you, this winter?

Related posts:

1. Noms Thread: Winter Warmers
2. Can’t blog: cooking Fragrant Sour & Spicy Thai Soup
3. A good bread day

It’s been a couple of years since an entirely gratuitous Terry Pratchett thread, and a Twitter discussion asked about favourite Pratchett novels, with a focus on readers new to Pratchett. What think you?

My overall favourite is Night Watch, but I think it would be a terrible place to start reading: you need the context of the earlier Night Watch sub-series for background. Night Watch follows Guards! Guards!, Men At Arms, Feet of Clay, Jingo and The Fifth Elephant. You could possibly skip Feet of Clay and Jingo and have most of the background, but that’s still a fair commitment. You want The Fifth Elephant because it introduces the major characters in an ongoing multinational inter-species political struggle (Monstrous Regiment, Thud!, Unseen Academicals, Snuff), but it’s also probably not strictly necessary as background to Night Watch.

The Night Watch sub-series is also interesting technically, as Pratchett has created two absurdly powerful political characters in this series (Vimes, the head of police, and Vetinari, the ruler of Ankh-Morpork), and has to come up with increasingly aggressive scenarios to actually challenge them. He has written elsewhere about finding this annoying when he wants to write interesting stories in Ankh-Morpork without Vimes sticking his nose into them.

It’s worth warning that Night Watch is one of the darker novels, with offscreen torture and onscreen immediate-aftermath-of-torture. Small Gods has similar warnings (religiously inspired torture), if you’re OK with that it is good and very self-contained, and has also served as an entry point for a number of people.

The first Discworld I ever read was Hogfather and I think it’s actually not a bad starting point, since it’s a fairly self-contained story and contains a bunch of core Discworld themes concerning how magic and divinity work. It also has a great heroine who unfortunately, in my opinion, otherwise appears in pretty mediocre Discworld novels.

Probably for most Hoyden readers I’d recommend starting with Equal Rites or Wyrd Sisters and reading through the Witches novels, which is where I went after Hogfather. The Tiffany Aching books didn’t exist at the time, but they’re very much in the spirit of the Witches novels, except that the Witches seem much more organised in them: Pratchett can’t leave well enough alone when it comes to creating power structures. See tigtog’s post about the Witches for more.

I find the Rincewind/wizards sub-series pretty unworthwhile, and still haven’t actually read all of it, so I can’t speak to that fairly.

Edited to add: there is a well-known reading order guide, which lays out the various sub-series in a flowchart style, but I cannot find an accessible version. Hence this post refers directly to the sub-series wiki pages.

Related posts:

1. Friday Hoydens: new Hoyden authors!
2. On the averting of civil unrest and slime on the carpet
3. Gratuitous Pratchett Appreciation thread: Crivens!

In any event, I propose a meetup for March. It will likely be south of the harbour this time: does anyone have suggestions for chill pubs or cafes with a decent amount of seating, wheel accessibility, and children permitted to enter? I’d prefer somewhere sheltered or else we just end up needing two entirely separate plans for good weather and bad. Chocolate cafe maybe?

If you’d like to come along, please indicate your preferred date at this Doodle poll. The 3:00PM thing is indicative only: basically, it will be an after lunch type deal.

Related posts:

1. Sydney Summery Femmosphere Meetup: Sunday December 18 in Manly, come one, come all
2. Sydney Summery Femmosphere Meetup: expressions of interest
3. Sydney Summery meetup is go: 9th January!

This week, meet Not Quite Feminist Phil. Phil loves women! And feminism means loving women, right? Or it should. So he’s kind of like a feminist. Here’s some of Phil’s right on not quite feminist thoughts:

Women should make just as much money as regular people

The Pill was a liberating invention, I never need a condom

Got your own Not Quite Feminist lines for Phil?

Related posts:

1. Thursday Internet Tradition: Soon! Soon? Soon…
2. Thursday Internet Tradition: Downfall mashups
3. Thursday Internet Tradition: Internet Performance Artists