Today’s Open thread is hosted by a sunny pile of otters. Are you looking forward to summer?
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 
I think my last dose of lurgy burnt out the lingering remnants of the previous lurgy, and I now feel that my lungs are finally clear after months of phlegmy blurgh. It’s a very welcome change.
Good news TT, I hope the good health lasts long past next winter.
Also 20 (or maybe 19) reasons why you want an otter for your best friend. No. 15 might be of particular interest to Orlando 😉
Those otter pics are way too cute.
I’m just watching Spartacus and noticing the scene where they all ride horses to go a-raiding. Cowboy gladiators FFS. I find it most unlikely that even the Spartacans with their rejection of Roman traditions could have (a)found enough horses to use them in raids (b)been willing to risk the valuable animals in raids, and (c) have suddenly invented stirrups all on their own.
Why is it that blooper-spotting, especially with anachronisms, is is energising a hobby?
It’s the adrenalin rush of outrage without the depressive effects of the cause of the outrage actually mattering.
My Mr11, who has been very down lately to the point of having suicidal thoughts (we are now seeing a psychologist as well as the school counsellor), who stormed out of his singing lesson 2 weeks ago announcing he was a terrible singer and there was no point to anything and who very nearly did the same thing again this week, has just decided that he will be performing this evening at a workshop with fellow students despite having sulkily told me for the last few days that he wasn’t even coming along to see mum and sister sing.
This feels like hope.
It also proves I am a master manipulator – I asked why he’d changed his mind and he said I was too good at guilt-tripping. All I had done was say I thought it was a shame but it was up to him to decide and I wasn’t going to say anything more about it.
Does anyone know of a good book that examines ley lines from a sceptical view point? It’s for my son who has developed an unhealthy obsession. Fact and fiction and wishful thinking re time travel are getting all entangled.
Gosh Mimbles I didn’t realise that 11 yr olds could get to that point. All the hugs for you both. Glad that you are a master manipulator. Whatever works.
Su I haven’t looked into that stuff but a quick google brought this up: http://www.skepdic.com/leylines.html. Maybe you could channel your son’s energy into writing timetravel fiction. Sounds like a fascinating idea!
Mim, so glad to hear that he’s feeling up to singing. Sad to hear he’s feeling so terrible otherwise.
Su, seconding skepdic.com as a starting point.
Thankyou both, that was good, I’ll see if I can find some references among their links.
Sorry Mim. I hope his performance is fun and positive for him.
Re looking forward to summer: yes, insofar as my second child (like my first) will be born in summer. My son is looking forward to the ocean being warm too. However, I really hope we don’t have another year of “heat domes” over the centre sending out their 46°C tendrils to the coasts, but I think that pattern has already managed to happen once this season, so I don’t have a lot of hope for either a mild or normal summer, weather-wise. The summer my son was born was unusually hot, and it was brutal for early breastfeeding.
Su, I don’t know that I’d point him directly at Rational Wiki, but they have some links to ley line processes as applied to, eg, locating ancient supermarkets. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ley_line
Does anyone else hate e-tax with a passion? Every time I try to use the thing it fails. I get to the bit where it’s supposed to collect info from banks etc, and it just stops. The navigation bar isn’t there, the menus are greyed out. I fucking HATE this thing and hate that you have to jump through hoops just to get a goddamn paper form now. It’s too fucking stressful.
@Kitteh – I’m afraid I’ve never had any problems with etax. In fact I generally find it pretty easy to use. Which reminds me…
I wish I could get it to work, but it never does.
Mim, I’m so sorry to hear about Mr 11. I hope his singing is a way out of the Sadz.
Anyone read about Amanda Marcotte having to pull an article from Slate? About sexual harassment in tech? What was that all about?
It looks like it was atheism/scepticism, not tech. The story was at http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/08/07/karen_stollznow_writes_about_her_experiences_with_sexual_harassment_why.html
Limited Google caches suggest it was related to the allegations and events detailed at http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Skeptic_harassment_revelations_2013 but I don’t know what specific claims Marcotte made that Slate considered unverifiable.
Karen Stollznow’s original article detailing her years of sexual harassment by a workplace colleague was pulled by the editors at blogs.scientificamerican.com, so I presume Slate decided to follow suit due to prudential legal concerns.
Are the Marcotte items related to the recent admission of naughty goings on with his students by a certain history professor that until recently was viewed as a male feminist icon?
No, as Mary already said, it was related to the skeptic/atheist community.
BTW, that certain history instructor was most
empathicemphatic about how he was such a male feminist icon, but that doesn’t mean that most feminists actually agreed with him.::snort:: He’d probably be pissed that there are feminsts who’d never even heard of him.
Well, I tried downloading that ^&*(^$# e-tax thing at work, in case my computer at home is lacking some vital component for it.
It imploded even sooner on this attempt.
I’ve ordered paper forms.
[eta] carefully written to avoid spoiling major plot points for Dexter S8 Ep12 [/eta]
Arrrgh. Like just about every other Dexter episode this season, I am yet again muttering at Hannah on the screen “well if you’d just dyed your bloody hair then you wouldn’t be having this problem”. Damn you blinkered writers and your suspension-of-disbelief-shattering plotting gaps.
One of my tweeps last night said that the last season of Dexter was a real phone-it-in disappointment. I have only watched Seasons 1 and 2.
The storytelling side of it was lacking some oomph compared to previous seasons, yeah. The actors’ performances I still enjoyed.
I used to work with a guy who looked a lot like Dexter. Made for interesting meetings.
This Vodaphone ad has some weird images of “kidults”. The idea seems to work with better with the men, but at 46 secs and 54 secs the baby heads on young women just looks wrong. Am I overreacting? Or is this ringing some real alarm bells?
I didn’t much like that ad either. My (adult male) partner described the scenes with the baby heads on the young women as creepy. I concur.
Hi
I only just discovered the no maccas flash mob today and I’m posting it in case anyone else missed it – so good! I’m in love with it
tiny town in the hills takes on global corporation –
no maccas flash mob http://www.burgeroff.org/no-maccas-flash-mob-strikes/
That’s a great flash mob, Val.
Hugs, Mimbles.
BTW, that certain history instructor was most
empathicemphatic about how he was such a male feminist icon, but that doesn’t mean that most feminists actually agreed with him.Yeah. Oh, and despite his Leaving The Internet Forever a few months ago, he’s apparently already starting on his disgrace-redemption programme. *Pukes*
Eww, that Vodaphone ad. Reminds me of a dollmaking show I went to years ago, where there were adult-bodied and infant-headed dolls (all female, of course). It was seriously creepy; my gf and I thought it was really skirting pedophiliac stuff.
Thanks tigtog, it is isn’t? I lived in the hills (ie Dendenong Ranges near Melbourne) for many years so I really feel for these people and wish them well in their fight with MacDonalds.
They say if MacDonalds does succeed in getting an outlet in Tecoma, they will try to discourage people from going there. Bet that would come under the new secondary boycott provisions the LNP is talking about.
They could find themselves not just being sued by MacDonalds ( as they currently are) but also prosecuted under the new regulations, conceivably. Bad times we live in
I know some people on HAT are interested in the issue of accessible voting in Australia. PWD Australia is running a survey whose results they will apparently pass on or summarise to the Electoral Commission.
Full disclosure: I am not involved in or endorsing PWD Australia, and I’m not awfully impressed with how the first page of that survey does on the disclosure issues I outlined at Mary’s helpful guide to soliciting research participation on the ‘net. Proceed with appropriate caution.