Today’s Open thread is hosted by these squabbling otters, shared on flickr by Tambako The Jaguar, who photographed the otters at Zoo Basel in Switzerland.
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 
Filed under “Kinda Missing The Point” : Anti rape wear I wonder what men’s clothing designed to stop men from raping might look like?
Male rape prevention wear: Prince Albert, chain, padlock. Key in care of a trusted friend. Strap male member to one leg and lock in place.
And yeah, that mob are missing the point by so much it’s laughable – as well as playing into all the old stereotypes of rape being akin to lightning strikes (something which is completely out of human control, but which can be avoided if you take appropriate precautions). Because, of course, rape only happens in the classic “attacker in the bushes” model. And of course the ideal thing to do to prevent rape is to wear a modern chastity belt equivalent. And of course, it’s only available in “regular” sizes, because plus-size women don’t get raped. Ever. Neither do children. Or men. Or pregnant women. Or, according to their marketing material, women of colour. Oh, and of course you’re not likely to get hit by a bus or suffer another insult which will require you to head into an emergency room while you’re wearing this special chastity belt underwear, because everyone knows that taking adequate precautions against rape makes you immune to anything else.
(Sorry, this one has been floating around on tumblr for the past week or so, and I’ve run across it a lot. Plenty of time to get the snark polished, and to get adequately annoyed enough to want to unleash it with both barrels).
How do you pee? And what do emergency services do with you if your clothing fabric is “cut-resistant”? And… so many other questions. They are missing every point there is. This has gotta be a contender for the Fractally Wrong Award 2013.
In other, more fluffy news, I have BABY CHICKENS.
My latest news: I got lucky recently, and managed to find bathers (swimwear) which fit my chest properly (look, I’m a 20E, and most swimsuits with cups tend to be equipped with the standard “12B or not 12B” version, which means I spill out of the top of them in all directions). So I then paid about $200 plus for a 50-entry ticket to the local leisure centre (South Lakes) and I’ve been going swimming every second day since last Sunday. At present it’s mostly walking up and down the “walkers” lane in the lap pool, because I’ve only just got enough strength to do a single up-and-back in the slow lane when it comes to swimming (I did two of these on Thursday; the plan is to build up slowly) but I do that for about a half an hour each time. First time I’ve done regular exercise in years.
Of course, over the past couple of days I’ve been telling people about it, and today I feel all “meh” about the idea of heading down there again. This appears to be a Thing with my brain.
Oh, and for those as are interested, I got the bathers from Best & Less. They appear to have at least one buyer in their women’s plus sizes section who has actually seen (or heard rants from) a plus size person in the wild, and therefore gets clothes which tend to cover a diverse range of figure types in there.
I struggled with swimming until I discovered breast stroke. I just don’t get on with other swimming strokes, but I love swimming breast stroke.
The lurgy has been through our house. This is the first day in the best part of a week I feel human and not like some kind of exploding sinus beast. Yesterday we had one of those awful ‘both parents are sick, who’s going to drag themselves out of bed and do for kids’ days.
Re swimming and bathers, I’ve reached the stage of pregnancy where I need to decide whether to haul out a bikini or not. Yikes.
I’ve granted myself an exemption from political rallies for late pregnancy, but I am pleased to hear about the climate change turnout today. Someone on Twitter reminds us of how little impact the anti-war rallies had a decade ago, which is reasonable, but also, what the hell else are we supposed to do? If there was political action that was possible and guaranteed to effectively influence the government, presumably we’d be doing that, as it is, a number of strategies need to be tried to effect change.
Yay fluffy chickens!
I’m currently travelling with mio sposo to points south and just having a quiet getaway (which may or may not have a job interview in the middle of it depending on whether or not they realise just how marvellous I would be for this job).
Yesterday I saw a swan parent with 4 cygnets on the nearby park lake. Nice.
One sweary cocky:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/mALNyHFqw14?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent