Welcome to this weekend’s Open Thread! Today’s host otter is coming at you via Darrel Birkett on flickr.
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 
Morning all!
I should get up, clean my teeth, organise some stuff then go and meet my friends. But I have a purring cat on my lap, so I can’t. Life is hard 😉
I had a moment of feminist pride in Mr angharad last night. He’s been watching the reruns of Red Dwarf they’ve been playing on the ABC lately, and last night he said to me ‘You know I really prefer Hatty Heyridge as Holly. Otherwise this show has no women in it at all!’
I found this and thought of you. Also hurray for leftovers and ice cream for breakfast.
http://www.dailylife.com.au/dl-people/dl-entertainment/otter-dislikes-watermelon-but-cant-stop-eating-it-20130116-2csmg.html
Just loving the way that OP otter is cooching up to the snowclump; the watermelon-eating otter looks scary!
I have had a Week. The details of it are not fully mine to share, so I will spare you them, but I don’t want another one like it.
Sorry about your Week, tigtog. I’m spending the next few days hiding from the heat. I did make mango sorbet this morning, which is about the most marvellously delicious thing ever. Pulp of four overripe mangoes, a little sugar syrup (1/4 cup sugar, 1/4 cup water, boiled up then chilled), two egg whites, and the juice of two lemons, all blended then thrown into the icecream maker. Omnomnom.
Hope you have gotten all such weeks out of the way for the rest of the year TT. I need to get ready for a flat out week next week, yet here I am at 5.48pm on Saturday and still not started…plus I’m on the internet. #gettingsortedforbusyweekfail
I’ve got an op-ed up at FF101 in my Cyberbullying 101 series. It’s about comment moderation, and the very first commentor thoughtfully provided me with a perfect example of heading off undesirable commentary at the pass.
Oh look ‘Pretty Girls Making Ugly Faces’ is pretty girls pretending to have double chins so they look ugly. Nice.
Hoydens, I need some recommendations. My person (J)’s wife has two young children (18 months and three) and is struggling with depression as well. She’s quite involved in the mainstream mommy-blogging sphere, which from hearsay can be really policing and vicious at times. At the moment she’s having a really hard time with her own absurdly high expectations for herself as a mum, and it’s starting to really hurt her and her family.
I thought it might help for me to send her some cool feminist parenting blogs, ones that deal with similar sorts of themes? Chally’s already recommended Blue Milk, Spilt Milk and Raising my Boychick to me – does anyone else know any other blogs or people on twitter/facebook/etc that she might be able to talk to and share experiences with? Seeing her and J having such a hard time is really sad. 😦
@Jo – Veronica Foale talks a lot about child rearing, but you might want to have a quick read through first before you recommended it. A blog about two Aspie kids and one with a mystery ailment might not be what your friend needs, although the writing is very good.
It’s not perhaps the most straightforward route, but this site http://mothersforwomenslib.com/ which is now a bit defunct was a collective of feminist parent bloggers and has a list of links. It was also home to the feminist parenting festival (defo defunct), but the archives are there and there is wider range of bloggers in that than in the links on the main page.
Thanks for the recommendations, Mindy and Feminist Avatar! I’ll have a look through those sites and see what I think. 🙂
Oh dear. I’ve unleashed a metric buttload of Whovians on Feministe’s latest Open Thread.
Kinda fun though.
Maybe they will do wonders for the commentariat? *snark*
Just having a regular Open Thread seems to be much appreciated by the regulars there, as it acts as a refuge from the more heated threads. We’re trying out a few moderation innovations over there too, so as to give the commentors more contact with the moderators. We’ll see how it goes.
Yeah, I noticed. Haven’t been there for a while though, I’ve been away in Italy on a study trip, and that post from just before I left (three weeks ago?) on how ‘your identity politics is ruining activism’ made me really mad. I don’t quite know why I keep going back there, it’s just so hostile a lot of the time. But anyway, I’ll stop snarking now. 🙂
Oh dear. I’ve unleashed a metric buttload of Whovians on Feministe’s latest Open Thread.
Well, it was a nice chance to see people rhapsodise about the Ninth Doctor. 🙂
Something cool that occurred to me. I don’t know if you saw the Madam Vastra minisodes they showed to prequel the last Christmas special, but in one of them Vastra tells a police inspector what she really is, and that she was woken by expansion to the London underground and was one of the “destroy all mammals” type of Silurians until she fell in love, with Jenny of course. Which makes her the first time I can think of that a same-sex love has been portrayed as the redemptive, “cure you of your evil ways” kind of love.
Hope your next week is better than the one you just had.
Got back from my first session of singing group about an hour ago. Still buzzing with the invigoration, but gotta do a more thorough warm up before next week – they threw us in the deep end!
Oh, I hope you are filled with much buzzing and invigoration in the future, tigtog, rather than Weeks.
I am so glad I don’t have to deal with the Feministe comments anymore.
Today I am reuniting with WildlyParenthetical after far far far too long. Yay!!
Coming here extremely late (hey – is the bar still open?) but I just came across this story which begins with one of the best ‘SOON…’ gifs ever.
I had wondered whether the owl lived or not, glad to hear it’s OK!
Lauredhel, I MUST buy an icecream maker now.
Helen: SO GOOD. I know you can theoretically make sorbet (and icecream) with an icecream maker, but in all these years I’ve never quite bothered expending those spoons. With the churn, it’s a doddle.
Try Freecycle and Gumtree – I think a fair few people get them and never use them.