Recommended reading: Ken Parish has a thorough, detailed post over at Club Troppo: Lock them up and throw away the key? There must be a better way!.
Related link: Get Up! campaigns on the issue of refugees – add your voice.
This page uses a traditional full-content blog layout, for those who prefer to view the posts this way
Recommended reading: Ken Parish has a thorough, detailed post over at Club Troppo: Lock them up and throw away the key? There must be a better way!.
Related link: Get Up! campaigns on the issue of refugees – add your voice.

Oh, Donna Summer.
So sad to hear she died this week, reportedly of cancer at the age of 63. Her biggest hits were the disco anthems of “Love to Love You Baby”, “Hot Stuff”, “Bad Girls”, “No More Tears”, “MacArthur Park”, and my very favourite, “I Feel Love”. She had an incredible mezzo-soprano voice. Like so many of her peers she was raised on gospel and gave her first performance in her church. It is easy to under-estimate disco music, but “I Feel Love” was like no other song of its time and represents the beginnings of techno. Summer has been a huge influence on artists ranging from Grace Jones to Beyonce.
Shw managed to survive the death of disco and went on to make a feminist anthem with, “She Works Hard For The Money” in the 1980s. There was a horrible moment of controversy in her career around this time when she was alleged to have said some homophobic remarks about AIDS while becoming a born-again Christian. In huge numbers, fans handed their records back to the label. It was forgiven over time. Elton John, among others, has called for Summer to be recognised in the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame and has also noted her as a big supporter of the Elton John AIDS Foundation.
And, If you haven’t been dancing in a gay nightclub at 3 a.m. and watched a row of half-naked boys dancing in perfect unison to this then you haven’t lived.
Ooh it’s so good, it’s so good
It’s so good, it’s so good
It’s so goodOoh I’m in love, I’m in love,
I’m in love, I’m in love
I’m in loveOoh I feel love, I feel love
I feel love, I feel love
I feel loveI feel love
I feel love
I feel loveOoh fall and free, fall and free
Fall and free, fall and free
Fall and freeOoh you and me, you and me
You and me, you and me
You and meOoh I feel love, I feel love
I feel love, I feel love
I feel loveI feel love
I feel love
I feel love
I feel love
More of the invisible work of motherhood. From here at the Huffington Post.
For the uninitiated, Mommy Homework is the bane of many mothers’ lives. While perhaps intended to be an opportunity for bonding between parent and student, it instead frequently devolves into a parent Googling “How do you paper maché?” at midnight. It is dioramas in first grade, ancestor dolls dressed in authentic cultural costumes in second grade and re-construction of Colonial Williamsburg in fifth grade.
I have to say as a mother who works outside the home that I find homework extremely difficult to organise. If I was also a single parent it would just about break me. On the days I go off to work we don’t all set foot again inside our front door until just before the kids’ bedtime. Asking friends and family who pick up our kids from school and kindy, and who look after them for the afternoon and evening (including bathing them and giving them dinner), to also supervise their homework feels like a step too far. Fortnightly homework schedules are a little easier for me to manage because that gives us a weekend to catch up on all the homework. But my friend has this theory about homework; he says it is a capitalist plot to train children to unquestioningly do unpaid overtime in their jobs when they grow up, and I have to say I do wonder.
The other morning when I was rushing through the kindy/school/drop-Bill-at-the-train/get-to-work routine and I suddenly remembered Cormac’s kindy homework is to bring a picture for ‘sound of the week’ and that the letter was ‘o’ this week, and I then managed to find a picture of friggin’ okra in the house for him to cut out and take.. well, I felt like giving myself an effing standing ovation.
My weekend mornings look a bit like this…
[photo shared on flickr by Mr T in DC]
How’s your Saturday going? 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?
In the new Sherlock Holmes adaptation by CBS titled Elementary. Johnny Lee Miller will be starring as Holmes. It’s set in Manhattan. Wheeeee!
Oh my, this news has received a wide range of reactions, some of which seem very, very odd (I mean, I love Bandersnatch and Bilbo’s BBC version as much as anybody, but this is hardly going to hurt it – just watch both! And watch the Iron Man/Sky Captain movie version too! WATCH ALL THE VERSIONS!).
Sarah Rees Brennan and Kate Linnea Welsh tackle some of these reactions, but my favourite one has to be the fans arguing that Johnny Lee Miller’s English accent sounds so fake (which has to rank up with the US-based Whovian twitterer who asked if the Whoniverse was ready for an American actor to play the Doctor and proposed Hugh Laurie (tweet long ago deleted)).
Anyway, back to Lucy! The personality shown in the clip above seems fairly classic Watson (if we draw a line through those few decades where he was depicted as buffoonish) – a strong sense of decency, fair play and honour, intelligent and empathic with some lasting damage of her own to work through, and a lot of conflict with Holmes on the proper way to do things while nonetheless admiring his intellect and insights. What I think will work particularly well here is that the constraints of canonical Watson (which will have to be adhered to strongly in other ways in order that the gender-switch doesn’t kill belief in the character altogether) should work against most possible temptations to exoticise her just because of her Asian ancestry. No wonder she took the part.
As someone who fondly remembers Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s outings as the legendary duo and most of the dozen or more English-language adaptations since (Richard Roxburgh was a fave) I’m really looking forward to seeing this to add to my WATCH ALL THE VERSIONS! scorecard. Maybe it won’t work for me when I get to see it, but I’m very much hoping that it does.
Who is your favourite Holmes/Watson combo, either actual or ideal? Den of Geek has a list of their top 10 Sherlocks – how many of these have you seen?
A gift. How do I make the best use of it?
A quick google indicates seafood, or melons, or lamb, and possibly more. Anybody got any experience to share?
While we’re at it, it’s a while since we’ve had a recipe thread. Any new discoveries or perennial favourites to share? I need more awesome noms!
This particular list is from She-conomy | A guy’s guide to marketing to women: MARKETING TO WOMEN QUICK FACTS. Like all these lists (incidentally so currently beloved by MRAs), it presents women as having an amazing amount of purchasing power compared to men. Yet, yet again, it makes no distinction between
*discretionary personal spending which a woman can choose not to do and nobody except herself will care
versus
*necessary household spending, which if the woman doesn’t do then somebody else has to get it done.
If products purchased for a household are deemed necessary by the members of a household, yet only one of the household members is the person who goes out to collect and pay for those things, is this really an exercise of power? Or just the fulfilling of a delegated logistical responsibility? After all, the person who collects and pays over money for military materiel is the unit’s Quartermaster, but I’ve never heard anybody suggest that a Quartermaster really has more purchasing power than that unit’s CO, because it is the CO who determines the parameters of the required materiel, the QM just makes sure it’s there when it’s needed. Even in a hippy commune applying a rigorously egalitarian rota system and consensus decision-making, it’s still probably going to only be one or two of the members each week doing the market run in order to acquire what the whole group needs – it’s still a matter of delegation of a task/chore.
Some of the insights in that Quick Facts article about which products a QM woman might prefer over a rival product and for what reasons are I’m sure very useful insights for marketers and I don’t have any quibble with those points, particularly about the growing consumer independence of ageing female Boomers. But this sort of bald statistic (that “85% of all brand purchases are made by women”) without even an asterisk added to indicate that there might be a few qualifiers to be taken into consideration?
This is the sort of stuff that just feeds the fevered imaginations of MRAs who overlook the “brand” in that website’s pull-quote (after all, if it’s not a brand then it won’t have a marketing budget, so unbranded purchases are naturally enough overlooked on a marketing website): let’s estimate how many brands are purchased in a shopping trolley full of a week’s worth of groceries for a family of four? 50+ is easily done – after all, even apples and bananas are branded these days. Now how many brands are purchased by a man “networking” down the pub drinking a round of shouts? 3 or 4, tops? Is picking up the tab for a business lunch considered purchasing any brands at all?
mr tog and I make the weekly shopping list together – we both have favourite brands for some things and look for bargains for others – the parameters are agreed by both of us. Most of the time, I’m the one who gets the grocery shopping during the day while it’s not so crowded, so I’m the one who gets in 30-40 brand purchases per week at the supermarket. By comparison, my husband buys one weekly train ticket (is State Rail a “brand”?) and buys his lunch freshly made from a sandwich/salad shop every day – that probably doesn’t count as a “brand”. Once or twice a month he goes to drinks after work and buys a few rounds – 2 or 3 brands there. We tend to take turns to pay for branded fuel depending on who is driving when the gauge drops down to 1/4 full.
We engaged in a lot of market research before we bought our last car, did the test drives together of the 3 competing brands that we narrowed it down to, and signed the papers together. However, I was the one who went to take delivery of the car and make the final payment, again because it was easier to do it during the day, and as a free-lancer I have the more flexible hours. How did that purchase look to whoever tallied up these things for the marketing division – was it noted down as a joint purchase, or was it noted down as a woman’s purchase?
We needed a new laptop. We’d discussed it, what sort of processor and other features it should have. I was the one who went and bought it. I’m not the only one who uses it.
So colour me skeptical, deeply skeptical.
A weirder than usual fashion photo from Queen magazine in 1960 (via).
RouteRegion N51 runs between the city of Reims and the town Epernay (Dizy is 3kms from Epernay) in the Champagne district of France (where else?).
The News With Nipples has screenshots of what a few different media organisations thought was so much more important than the fact that there won’t be a by-election in Dobell in the near future and thus the Gillard minority government doesn’t have to worry about a hypothetical new Liberal MHR shifting the balance on the floor of the House of Representatives, and thus the Labor minority government remains with a working majority in the House.
Craig Thomson cannot be forced to step down as an MHR unless the Electoral Commission rules against him, and today they chose not to do so. He still has to answer various other accusations of improprieties and criminal behaviour, but those will take time to work their way through the courts, and until/if/when he might be notified to appear as a defendant against criminal proceedings in a court of law, his right to retain his seat in Parliament cannot be denied.
That is simply a matter of fact. I’m not a fan of Thomson, but he has his right to due process just as anybody else should have, and he’s exercising his right to retain his seat until the accusations are resolved in full. This is how the system operates, and it’s working as it’s supposed to, no matter how many column inches fulminate against him. Since he’s no longer a member of the Labor Party, there is no point in continuing to ask Gillard, Swan etc what they plan to do about him – they no longer have any way of applying party disciplinary measures against him.
I get that the situation has a certain salacious appeal. I wish that wasn’t such irresistible bait for more column inches than it deserves, and I wish I could believe that the Liberal MHRs who are sanctimoniously opining about the proper deployment of union funds actually gave a rats arse for the interests of union members.
As usual with our Media Circus threads, please heave your brickbats and bouquets at the various journalists who deserve them, on any current topic – but let’s keep a closer eye on the impact of policy and legislation rather than buying into the moving wallpaper ethos of personality conflicts trumping the actual political process, OK?
As a 6 foot tall, 200 pound, greying white straight male I can assure you that the main feature of the “easy” setting is that the rest of the world gives you a certain amount of respect when you walk into the room that they tend to not give other players on “harder” settings. There is an assumption, that I know what I am doing and/or if I fail I made a “honest” mistake. The “ref’s” are less likely to call fouls and assign penalties. So, the issue is what can we do about it??? First, what I try to do is make sure that I give others the same respect they give me and I second I actively confront others who treat those on the harder settings with less respect. I view it as an obligation for having been smart enough to figure out the game is rigged.
That is a comment from Chuck Repke about 100 comments in on this post by John Scalzi, which I really recommend reading. There’s a lot of heavy lifting on the Privilege-101 front going on in the comments.
Scalzi post via @JessamynSmith

Cover Text: ARE YOU MOM ENOUGH? Why attachment parenting drives some mothers to extremes – and how Dr. Bill Sears became their guru.
As I wrote in the aftermath to my participation in the New York Times “Motherhood versus Feminism” debate, parenting isn’t something that is solely in the mother’s domain, but the way TIME and others construct these “mommy wars,” you would think that it was.
If we do not talk more openly and frequently about the role that fathers can, should, and often want to play in parenting, then we will not see the societal shifts that are needed to migrate away from the conflict that women feel between their careers and their families.
Choosing a parenting style, whether it is attachment parenting or something else, shouldn’t be something a mother has to do alone. If she does have a partner, they should decide together how to parent the child and both participate in the parenting.
Take-away bullet points:
In the PhDinParenting post that pointed me to the above article, Annie mentioned a few other aspects of the cover that fired up her obstreperal lobe:
My head hit the desk. Not because of the picture, but because of the headline.Mom enough?
Driving mothers to extremes?
Dr. Sears as my guru?
[...]
This morning, I woke up to a request to be on live television on one of Canada’s major networks at 11:00am. As the day went on, I got more requests for radio shows, for guest blog posts, for quotes for magazines and newspapers, and even an invitation to be on a reality television show about “alternative parenting practices”.
I said no.
I said no over and over again, both because I had other commitments and because I’m sick of making what I think is a valuable contribution and then having an “extreme parenting” label slapped onto it[...]. I doubt [blogger and mother] Jamie Lynne Grumet knew she was going to be positioned as the poster child for a parenting movement that is “driving mothers to extremes” or that she’d be held up as “mom enough”, while the rest of the world is obviously not.
Annie doesn’t point it out here, but has anyone else noticed how keen the media is to cast any male author who writes a book about something affecting women as a “guru”? Instead of maybe just being someone who happened to write a book/books that some people find useful? FFS, a quick look at the wikipedia page for Attachment Parenting shows that while Sears coined the term for a developing body of parenting guidelines, he hardly came up with the ideas all on his own, which are based on the principles of the attachment theory in developmental psychology
, an area of psychology to which there has been a plethora of contributions from many, many researchers and scholars.
I’ve never read a book by Dr Bill Sears myself (never even heard of him until this week), but seeing as how he’s apparently written dozens of best-selling books about parenting over the last 4 decades, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that he is an effective communicator of large chunks of complex information, and that his how-to books are nicely laid out in a chapter form that flows well through the progression of ideas, and that they are also thoroughly well indexed. This makes his how-to books useful. Useful how-to books get recommended to others, and passed on amongst circles of friends. This is basically the point of how-to books.
Writing a really useful how-to guide doesn’t make the author a guru or a prophet or any of those other judgemental words. If it did then authors of the First Aid Manual or the Model Airplane Construction Manual would be gurus, but I don’t see TIME suggesting that, do you?
A new tumblr to answer this question about a range of activities.
Is This Feminist? |
Because being a marginally acceptable feminist is a full time job. |

So you add *I Don't Mean That In A Creepy Way* to the end of all the creepy things you say? You're not fooling nearly so many people as you think you are.
Have heard/read a few too many examples of this phrase as some sort of deflector shield recently:
If, after saying something, one feels the urge/need to say:
“I don’t mean that in a creepy* way“,
THEN ONE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER THAN TO SAY IT IN THE FIRST PLACE.
*sexist/racist/homophobic/classist etc
(made a version over at memecreator too)
ABBOTT: ‘blah blah Gillard govt schoolkid bonus bad blah blah’
REPORTER: ‘How is this different from the Howard govt baby bonus?’
ABBOTT: ‘Well look, they just are.’
Let the hashtag begin:

Why do you think Clive's dimples are cuter than Gina's? They Just Are | Picture: Twitter / @rupertmichael
Any captions you’d like to add?
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