Today’s otter was snapped by Don Benova on flickr at Zoo Negara, Malaysia.
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?
Categories: Life
Soggy here, innit? 
In memoriam: Diana Rigg 
Getting out the ‘yes’ 
100 books by women in 2016 
Hoyden About Town 
Otter doing meerkat impersonation!
Hi. I don’t have anything worth saying, I just wanted to interact with the blog.
A man just came to the door to collect money for charity and told me he lived here in the 70’s. Apparently the rather rustic on brickwork on the inside is not a decorative element but the result of his aunt shooting snakes with a shotgun.
In today’s exciting episode of Adventures with my dictionary:
I discover that “zingiberi” is the Latin word for ginger.
Quo Vadis the cat fails to live up to his name by spending the whole day sleeping.
I postulate that the Romans lined their streets with sponges because they had no word for puddle.
In excellent news, I have hunted and wrangled a wild programmer to work on our Super Scary Big Important Project this year. They’re endangered in our course, so having one is quite a advantage, and will help our chances hugely.
Also, there exists such a creature as the Screaming Hairy Armadillo. Which will be promptly added to my big list of things to change my name to. Through probably not very high up.
@ su
What on earth was the snake doing with the shotgun? Was he in cahoots with the elephant in my pyjamas?
So glad to have found this blog… I was getting pretty sick of all the others I read being so US and Eurocentric, and there not being much about Australian feminism out there. This is a breath of fresh air.
*waves at Alien Tea*
Pull up a pew and share a few yarns, if you like. Or else just lurk and enjoy. We like to know we have lurkers.
Heh. Not just one, but a whole posse to carry one gun. Your elephant is obviously the scout. One day I will get the grammar sorted, at the moment there is more than the usual amount of static on the line.
Nice to meet you, Alien Tea.
Has anyone stopped to think recently about how great Australia smells? It always smells of some combination of moist air and sea and vegetation, with the odd coffee shop or Thai takeaway thrown in. Not quite like anywhere else I’ve been, and very good for the soul.
I hadn’t stopped to think about that, but it’s a damn good thought!
Have thoroughly enjoyed the broadcast of Tropfest tonight. Some great little films.
Orlando, you forgot gum trees!!! I love the smell of gum trees.
No wait, you didn’t, a brain, I can has one. Vegetation would pretty much cover gum trees, wouldn’t it, d’oh.
I was going to write gum trees, but then I thought no, it’s broader than that. It’s also frangipanis and polleny things and fallen leaves going mulchy.
Re. Tropfest: the boy who took me to our year ten formal had a film in, about his dying father. I do hope it was well received.
orlando, that film was stupendously moving. I think he won third prize for it.
Anonymous has declared war on the Westboro Baptist Church.
It couldn’t happen to a nice bunch of gobshites, but I wonder at the effectiveness of this particular tactic. The WBC’s goal is to turn up and be assaulted just hard enough to file a lawsuit (while relying on the police to protect them from anything worse) – their website is just a PR thing, it doesn’t stop them actually fulfilling their goal of picketing the funerals to piss people off.
Oops. Anonymous says WBC was trying to play them (in order, of course, to harvest IP numbers so that they could – what do you think – FILE A LAWSUIT).
Aww, thanks for the welcome 🙂
Wow, it’s like they actually have a halfway decent point buried under all the misogyny and homophobia.
Dreading the news coming out of Libya – looks like Gaddafi wants to outdo Tianenmen Square.
A friend pointed me towards this effort from social justice comedian Rob Newman: The History Of Oil.
It’s a stark representation of just how hard “Western interests” have worked over the last century in the Middle East to ensure that ruthless dictators have been raised up and kept in power to stand on the necks of their people, because Western strategy and economic imperatives require q quid pro quo with those guys to keep the oil flowing no matter what else, and bugger the rights of the people who get crushed underfoot in the process.
Bloody hell. Cynical gobshite backtracking ahoy.
As a gesture it’s a start, and a fairly startling admission. How will it go down with the new regimes that are about to arise, I wonder?
Question: does anyone know of any good feminist podcasts? Especially Australian ones?
Via Feministe, I found an NYT article – the link only leads to their login page – regarding the situation in Libya. Ibrahim Dabbashi, the deputy leader of Libya’s mission to the UN has come out and said that Gaddafi is a war criminal, called on the UN to interdict the country and other African leaders not to support his regime if he asks. Asked if he feared reprisals, he said that any risk he faced was less than that of the Libyan people.
Between this and the stories from Egypt of troops refusing to fire on peaceful protestors, it’s quite heartening.
@TAK, I don’t know of any good podcasts, sorry. It’s something that I’m actually moderately interested in, but I don’t have the time to set one up myself.
@SN – the news out of Libya is mixed, sadly. Gaddafi will not go down easily.
More amusingly, this post on Deltoid details some UK science populariser who shouldn’t be let on to the internet on his own, by the looks.
@tigtog: Agreed, he won’t. He’s trying to buy in mercenaries from elsewhere, according to Dashabbi, and he’s trying to create a martyr vibe for himself. I’m just glad that some in authority, at least, are siding against him.
Regarding the Deltoid post, I particularly liked this from the comments.
I would never google anything like “Johnny Ball” and expect anything good to come up.
Though I’m one to jeer: I was looking for a suckage equivalent of “mea culpa,” and should really have had more foresight than to use “Latin for suck” as my search term.
Heh. I rather like the little point in Latin that “fellator” is the one getting blown, and therefore was never used as an insult (they obviously figured everyone would be a fellator if they could). “Irrumator” was the one doing the blowing, and that one was definitely an insult.
Some things never change, eh?
Breaking news: Assange has lost his case against extradition to Sweden. He has 7 days to appeal the ruling.