It’s time… for a baby otter. With bonus kittehs! This photo is from the Baby Animal Zoo Website and features an orphan baby otter who was put with a litter of orphan kittens for company. They have bonded and now go everywhere together. Awwwwwwww.
Image description: Baby otter lying across a sleeping brown and ginger kitten.
And just for good measure here is another photo.
Image description: Baby otter and brown and ginger kittens together with their front paws on a rock.
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 
[TW: sexism, misogyny, related problematic stuff]
As a fan of low-quality TV, I am annoyed that the patriarchy has reared its head in The Celebrity Apprentice. Every episode, they publish viewers’ tweets about the show on the bottom of the screen.
Last episode, they showed a tweet about Mark Bouris* assistant, who fiddles with the computer at her desk for srs bznss-y realism purposes: “She’s still working on that spread sheet? Clearly she got her job between the sheets!”(I think that was the wording. Spreadsheet/between the sheets was definitely the core part of it).
A few episodes ago, when Tanya Zaetta was handling a live snake as part of a challenge: “I reckon Tanya has handled a few snakes in her time!”
I know I should not expect much from a network with a crap track record with sexism/rape culture and a show that gave Pauline Hanson a job. But I just like my cheese terrible-yet-compelling, silly and with a side of eye roll-inducing self-aggrandisement! Is that too much to ask?
/rant
*The businessman who “fires” people in the boardroom at the end of every episode.
I had no idea that the Robots of Death (one of my favourites) had spun off into an audio series called Kaldor City with a character that crossed over from Blakes 7. And now Paul Darrow is appearing in the stage version of Robots of Death as Kaston Iago, a part that supplants the role of the Doctor. Mind pretzelled, in a good way.
I’m wondering whether anyone can help me out with a small problem I’ve been having since my (previous) computer spontaneously up and died on Wednesday night?
Essentially, I lost about 6 – 8 years worth of accumulated bookmarks in the crash, so I’m now having to rebuild the collection. Now, in some ways this is a good thing – I’m planning on getting at least a little bit of organisation from the get-go, rather than letting things turn into a great steaming pile of links again. But I have some rather solid requirements (which I’ve detailed over at my own blog here) and I’ve no idea where to start looking.
So, if any of the readers would like to help me out, this would be greatly appreciated.
Target’s website has some subheadings under ‘girls toys’ and ‘boys toys’ and there’s no doubt on which side of the Lego friends stoush the retailer comes down, given where they’ve stuck the generic ‘Lego’ listing. FFS.
Stumbled over the listing for my book at the Palgrave website. Didn’t realise it was up yet. Wheeee! Makes it a bit bloody real.
How exciting, orlando! Congratulations!
Preparing for another busy day of packing up Mum and Dad’s house (that they only moved into 6 months ago) so that they can move into a bigger house with my brother. Various frailties and treatment regimes have brought the necessity for this on somewhat suddenly.
I was knackered yesterday. Slipped into bed at 8:15pm thinking I’d probably wake in a few hours and do some writing, but didn’t actually wake until 5:45am, which was too cold, so I went back to sleep for another hour. Longest sleep I’ve had in years, mind refreshed, muscles achey (how much from bending/lifting and how much from virus of some sort as yet undetermined).
Congrats Orlando!
So far, this weekend has been domesticity, with the socialising starting this afternoon (it’s a long weekend in Qld).
Hope the move lasts longer this time, it doesn’t seem like 6 months since you were last talking about helping them move. I hope the virus gets worked out of your system and the good sleep continues.
@Orlando – c0ngratualtions on your book being in print.
Squee, Orlando! How thrilling. 🙂
That sounds like an awesome book, Orlando, congrats!
I’ve had a good week with lots of extra choir rehearsals for a gig at a wedding I’ve just gotten back from. All these people are getting married and they can’t look a day over 25! Is that normal? To asexual 20-yr-old me all these people getting married just seems really crazy.
TW for rapey comments
The blog has had a bad week though, I’ve gotten four comments this week that make me really frustrated. One on a post about how difficult it must be for survivors to watch TV when it’s so inundated with violence and rape scenes, from a guy who said “well I watched rape scenes in GoT the other day with a survivor and she was totally turned on, so a) your point is invalid, b) normal people don’t care about violence on TV, and c) rape is totally ok in some situations. Another on how saying that people shouldn’t make sexist jokes is censorship on the same level as the dictatorship he once lived in, and anyway, nobody actually seriously believes the view that women belong in the kitchen, so it’s totally ok.
And a long email from a man in the US in response to a post on sexual harassment and why it’s hard for women to speak up or deal with it themselves, asking “are you seriously so scared in such a situation that you can’t just deal with it and punch him or something?” Short answer? Yes. I wish it wasn’t this way, but if someone doesn’t accept my no the first time, then I don’t know what else they will ignore my no for. And that makes them dangerous to me. That email also had a lovely side of “but I’ve been seduced by heaps of women who say no to start off with.”
DISEMVOWELMENT, the lot!
Jo, re your correspondent asking why you don’t just punch a man who’s sexually harassing you – that correspondent is probably best ignored anyway, but what about the fact that women are very well aware that a punch would make them liable to arrest for assault?
Yay orlando! Sadface for tigtog :(. They’re really coming at you, aren’t they, Jo?! Everyone I know is getting married at the moment, too. I’m helping plan my best mate’s wedding and, oh my, there is a lot to do.
There is not a lot happening in my life because I am generally keeping my head down and working my little socks off. Which is, I suppose, something. I am in a happy place. I hope all of you spend the coming week in a happy place.
Or liable to infuriate a man who could then cause them significant harm?
Absolutely!
Yeah, there’s totally that too. Because the person being harassed probably did something to lead the harasser on (sarcasm!) so it can’t even be classed as self-defense.
I read a post a while ago (can’t remember where exactly) where the author made a really good point about men and women’s fears in situations where sexual harassment may occur or has occurred or someone’s advances are rejected: that men fear being laughed at or ridiculed, and women fear being raped or killed. And it makes me really sad, but I think it’s completely true.
@Jo, Jennifer Kesler of the Hathor Legacy made a point about this sort of thing, that those who audit behaviour don’t stop auditing because you’ve followed their first suggestion – this guy who thinks you punch harrassers will almost certainly, if you do so, embark on an immediate auditing of whether it was really harassment, and you were were really justified in doing so – it won’t be and you won’t be. That whole style of advice doesn’t just create a fine line between over- and underreaction, it makes them overlap to the point where anything you do can be judged as wrong. And I rather suspect that’s the unspoken intent of it.
@Orlando, in better news, whahey!
Orlando – Congratulations!
Jo and Chally – I am facing a similar deluge of weddings. My partner and I are being witnesses at the wedding of our best-friends, and then two weeks later his brother is getting married. They’ll both be fun, but I am not looking forward to the ‘Your turn next!’ comments.
Was just reminded of a conversation with the taxi driver earlier this week, when the radio news covered “the Catholic Church’s”* dire warning for “picky” ladies which reckoned there were only 86,000 eligible men for well over 1 million single women, and he said “how about that?” with A Certain Tone of Voice and A Somewhat Smug Expression.
I responded that those figures didn’t seem to line up with how dating websites are regularly offering discounted memberships to women because they had way more men on their books, and he lost the Smug Expression, and after that we had a moderately interesting discussion about managing relationship expectations from both men and women where we avoided stereotypes. Quite refreshing.
*(actually just one unnamed “church official” apparently relying on the PR blurb for Bernard Salt’s book Man Drought)