Otters! Vicious little wea —
dawwwwww.
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?
[image, by psg3 on flickr, was snapped at the London Zoo.]
Categories: Life
Soggy here, innit? 
In memoriam: Diana Rigg 
Getting out the ‘yes’ 
100 books by women in 2016 
Hoyden About Town 
Just wondering if any hoydenizens/lurkers are planning to do the 10:23 Homeopathy – There’s Nothing In It mass overdose demonstration tomorrow?
Due to heatwave I probably won’t be venturing outside because puddles of tigtog can’t effectively demonstrate anything, but I’d love a report from anybody who does go.
P.S. PodBlack Cat has details of the Australian meetups
I am grumpy and sick and tired and sick and grumpy. So blah. Anyone got something awesome to cheer me up?
Oh, but happiness: I blogged about something cool that happened at work yesterday
I am also in a miserable mood. I am turning [ridiculous age] soon, and I don’t have a job, nor a quirky townhouse, nor a Nobel Prize, nor a dedicated servant race of genetically-engineered radioactive mongeese. Bah.
Though I did see a portly gentleman in yellow lycra riding a penny-farthing this morning.
I think we are near the end of moving. We’re in NZ, settled in a house, the children have started school, we have started our jobs, we have internet in our house (this has been a bit of a saga). Every single box has been unpacked, ‘though we still have piles of books in awkward places, and some stuff is stored in the garage, and the kitchen is not yet organised quite as we would like. But those are mere quibbles around the edges. We still have to do tax returns for leaving Australia, but that will be next weekend’s task. Not a small one: our tax situation is, shall we say, complicated. But sort-able.
Some gratuitous advice for Hoydenistas. Don’t move countries. Especially don’t move countries with three children and the accumulated detritus of 9 decades (between us) of living. Unless you are moving home, in which case it is definitely all worth it.
And in the midst of all our moving, I have been watching the news from Australia, and worrying about my family and friends and connections who have been caught up in floods and horrendous storms. Aue! Kia kaha!
Anyone got something awesome to cheer me up?
I am also in a miserable mood.
Nothing awesome. A piece of quirky trivia (Bridge was originally designed to be played with a tarot deck), and a nice story (from Pam’s House Blend, about a pit bull defending two complete strangers from a mugging). Virtual hugs if such things would help.
A story from last year’s severe winter snows in Britian (not as severe as America’s, if for no other reason than our towns and points of aid are closer together, but it still cut off the village where I was staying, stranding me there for a week). But during that week, a local farmer with a tractor that could make it through the snow took it on himself to keep the village shop supplied, and made a deal with the shop and the pharmacy in the local town to transport medicines prescribed to the standed. There’s so much bad shit in the world that we forget sometimes how good people can be.
Deborah, I’ve had a few days this week in which I’ve definitely felt like this whole moving countries thing is a bad idea, even if it’s only for two years. I certainly didn’t move across the world (my stuff has not yet actually arrived; another two weeks, they say) to face down some massive antifeminist carryon in response to my academic work. I think I could have finished a bingo sheet in the 90 minute ‘response’ to my paper. Possibly one of the more astonishing claims was that my italics made it seem like I was angry. No, wait, that goes up again ‘men get raped too,’ ‘men suffer too’ and ‘you blame everything on white middle-class men.’ I can’t call a winner, but perhaps it’s the fact that they invited someone to move across the world, leaving behind all their loved ones, to a country where they don’t speak the language, in order to get some diversity into the research community there and then… promptly make them feel as alienated as possible for exactly that ‘diversity’. Token feminist killjoy, that’s me!! I’m sure that’s what I moved across the world for. /snark
Also I typed in the name of my new town plus ‘feminism’ and ‘feminist’ into google, and one person, one wikipedia article, a bookshop that has probably closed down (one reference only) and my own name. Sigh. Thankfully my facebook friends have been unexpectedly supportive, and an Australian feminist aca has recommended a feminist library in Amsterdam. I’m arranging a visit.
Sorry everyone’s had a shitty-ish week, or a shitty-ish mood, etc. Things that have gotten me through this week include: Damn You Auto Correct, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv3j4JWNw1A (because if we’re anthropomorphising animals, let’s make it ridiculous [TW for allusions to domestic violence]), cheap Dutch beer and a kind of strange amount of HalfLife2….
*hugs* to all who would like them…
WP, as an academic of a sort I think academic culture plays down the massive massive painfulness, disruption and loneliness that’s involved in the relocations that many fields expect, not to mention the potential intellectual and political isolation.
Best wishes with settling in.
Oh, WP – I can’t believe somebody negged on italics! I think you should do the next paper in ALLCAPS 😦
Hope all Hoydens in Perth are safe tonight. And everyone else too.
I just had the best pride march ever! I wore my Victorian-era outfit, and my hair was done up in lovely orange spikes. During the pre-march wrangling I met Very Interesting, and as we were chatting the parade started. I was still chatting to Mr Interesting when he took his place behind the marching band. I figured it was too late to get a good place along the road, so I just walked along with the others. Everyone clapped and cheered and took photos of Very and I. It was surreal! Then at the after-party everyone who missed their photo opportunity in the march asked me to pose with them. I think my image must be burnt into every camera in Melbourne. And I met Simon Overland, the police commissioner.
tl;dr I would exercise more often if there were always a marching band preceding me.
Best wishes to everyone in Perth, too. Just saw it on the news.
Yes, best wishes to all in Perth. What’s next for Australia, a volcano eruption in Tasmania?
Apologies. On reflection the above is too flippant when real people are in real danger. I shouldn’t have hit the publish button.
Safe here. Hope other Perth & surrounds Hoydenizens are also.
tigtog: all through this I’ve seen people joking and laughing from the centre of crisis. I think it’s a very Australian thing to do.
I have friends in Kelmscott who had to evacuate. I also have friends in Midland and Kenwick. They’re fine right now, unless the wind changes. I am so very worried right now, and close to tears.
In the hopes of spreading some cheer…
Yes, adding my hopes for safety to the chorus for Perthites and Victorians (I hear there’s more storms on the way, but I might be out of date). So sorry that this summer has been so horribly damaging for so many people. Must be really hard.
And TAK, pride parades can be so much fun! I wore a corset, ball skirt, domino and top hat the first time I walked! So fun.
Also, Sunless Nick, that’s all kinds of awesome! 🙂
Snort
A commenter on a story about Miranda Kerr defending a photo of her son Flynn being breastfed which she posted on her blog.
Yup. How terrible for a breastfed new born to be confronted with his mother’s bared breast. He might get hungry or something. Except that he was actually feeding at the time.
How oddly apposite that moving countries and frustrating adventures in academia seems to be one of this weeks themes, as I am at this moment dying the death of a thousand cuts, where each cut is me logging onto my email to see if word has come back on last week’s job interview. Wasn’t going to bring it up here, because I don’t want to have to tell you if I don’t get it, but this is torturous. Though, Nick, that beautiful object does help.
After being suprised by the new face, I’ve just caught up with the whole stock-photo to-and-fro with the replaced Privilege Denying Dude.
I have to say, I don’t find the meme funny at all any more, since the new Dude looks much more like me than the old Dude.*
*Am I doing this right?
@ Liam
But he’s not wearing a beret. I can’t see how you could possibly be offended!1111!!! I don’t find it offensive at all.
Orlando, with no expectation of announcement when the situation is resolved either way, I’m crossing fingers, and I really sympathise with the particular tenterhooks you’re on at the moment. And grumping at the singular lack of awareness of same that seems to be displayed by universities at these moments!!
Seconded. Good wishes and fortune Orlando.
@Mindy: That is a… sterling example of cluelessness.
argh – the mods at LP have requested that nobody derail the thread there with debating the point, but FFS – simple contempt for one’s (pompous and entitled) views is not the same as hate speech, you disingenuous false-equivalencer.
Edited to add: My post there might well, and totally justifiably, be deleted for ignoring a moderator edict, so I’m reproducing it here:
It’s like he’s not even really trying any more. Make a bit more effort, please.
OMG alert: friend on Facebook posted this shot of me from 20 years ago, and I remember everything I was wearing but none of the people. Oh dear.
(I’m the one with the floral frock dominating the foreground)
Actually, I do remember that they were all am-dram people at the housewarming for where I was a lodger. It was ye good night.
Continuing with the nostalgia, here’s a photo posted last year by a schoolmate from over *30* years ago, quell horreur…
(Ahem… sorry Mary, missed your comment. Thanks for the good wishes – this settling-in thing is taking work, that’s for sure!!).
Great pics, tigtog! Facebook may come up with some answers about who people were. I just hope it doesn’t come with the comment that I’ve seen on a similar nostalgia pic:
Person 1: Who is the hottie on the left?
Person 2 (poster of photo): Dunno.
Person 3 (also in pic): John someone? I think?
John: IT’S ME. Person 1, we’ve been friends for 20 years!!
🙂 Person 1 was hilariously unrepentant in the aftermath, in a slightly impressive way.
http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/wellbeing/kids-of-working-mums-fatter-study-20110208-1al0g.html
Kids of working mothers are fatter says article -probably because working Mums don’t have time to shop and cook healthy food. It would seem that we are suddenly a nation of single mothers since fathers/partners are never mentioned at all. I wonder if they controlled for partnered/non partnered families. Do women need more support or do fathers need to be told to get off their arses and learn to cook?