Happy New Year! This weekend’s open thread is hosted by this row of watchful otters:
And these less watchful otters.
Bonus critter links: these Zooborns photos are the most adorable baby-gorilla photos you ever did see. I am reminded of the days of having a young human baby myself. And while we’re at Zooborns, I can’t resist a baby giraffe photo. And lastly, The Week recaps “the cutest zoo animals born in 2013” – from baboons to zebras.
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’m guessing everyone is too busy coping with the heat to post? We’re heading somewhere poolish as soon as I get my act together.
Apropos nothing in particular, I have a theory that the whole “don’t read the comments” and eg Lewis’ Law offshoots, are a specific example of Dunning-Kruger. There are the people who have something worthwhile to add, and do it, the ones who have something worthwhile to add, but don’t realise (or recognise that their worthwhile contribution has already been made by someone else), the ones who don’t have anything worthwhile to add and realise that, and finally the ones who don’t have anything worthwhile to add but don’t realise it. Without editing, most comments will be by people who do not realise they are adding noise.
I spent some therapeutic time with a mattock in my front yard. As a result a medium sized gardenia is out of its pot prison and in the ground. Now the shade has gone though, so I can’t take out some more frustration on the grass I’m slowly ripping up out the front. I need a very contained plague of locusts – perhaps in a box I could move around the lawn? Or, alternatively, does anyone have a goat I could borrow?
I slept in this morning after an emotionally wearying day yesterday, going with friends to the funeral of an old mate we’d all lost touch with over the last few years, who died unexpectedly three weeks short of his 40th birthday. We all knew he wasn’t well but that he didn’t want to talk to people about it, and then we heard that he had died during a hospital visit that was meant to be blood transfusions as he’d had before that would keep him going as he was – no-one in his family expected it either. Despite the absolute shock of it all, it was a fine funeral where his Army mates did him proud and we were glad to represent the comedy community there to show his family and friends how well regarded he was.
I had a major achievement yesterday, in that I managed to organise a visit to a new GP for myself (which involved making a phone call, something I particularly dislike). So I purchased myself a new geranium or two (one flowering, one scented), some lemongrass, and a punnet of lebanese cucumber seedlings, as well as a couple of planters to put them into. Today’s minor achievement was finishing off the last of the backlogged dishwashing on the kitchen counter (so now I get the fun of messing the kitchen back up again!).
User Pays? Can I raise an old issue? Male offenders were responsible for most convictions recorded by magistrates courts in Victoria in the three years between 2010 and 2012, a Fairfax Media analysis of Sentencing Advisory Council data has revealed. Men made up more than 80 per cent of those convicted for more than 400,000 offences heard by magistrates over that period. Happy New Year anyway….. and thank you for your work over at LP, tigtog.
I’m interested in hosting a guest thread on the cult-classic sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf.
How do i go about it?
John re hosting a guest thread – there’s a link in the sidebar for our guidelines for submitting a guest post. Heads up though – we’d have to be a lot more familiar with your writing before that would ever be likely to happen.
So yeah, just blithely said to @IndigenousX that the story of Tiddalik the Frog has been around for a while because I first heard it in preschool in the 70’s. Yeah. Major fail there. I’ll just be here dying from embarrassment (I immediately tweeted an apology).
We’ve been madly rushing around doing house buying things this week. I am going back to work on Monday after two weeks off and I can’t say I’m looking forward to it.
I was planning on going to the movies to see Frozen (because it was 41 degrees here today – fun!), and it turned out that although I was an hour early I couldn’t get a ticket because everyone else had apparently had the same idea.
In other news, I wrote a post based on that discussion on Ja’mie Private School Girl that happened a few Otterdays back, and compared its treatment of teenage girls to Libba Bray’s novel Beauty Queens. *cough*shamelessselfpromotion*cough*
Here comes some nattering from Seattle, USA . . . Our family has spent the Christmas holidays in dissipation . . . candy, TV, video games, staying up late. (Yes, that’s our version of dissipation.) We started off the new year driving to some snow and sledding down very non-steep slopes with a broken toboggan we found in the parking lot. We made miniature snowmen and used photo angles to try & make them look giant. I stayed up late reading Hild. In two days the kids go back to school and my husband goes back to work. Today we clean. I’m trying to wake up my brain. Cheers!
I just slashed my hand open cleaning my bathroom, requiring my visiting mother in law to give me butterfly stiches (which I’m hoping mean I don’t have to go to a medical prof). So this is a warning- don’t clean your bathroom, it’s not worth it.
It’s not actually hot here in Adelaide. Its 21C and raining and has been much of the week. Back to work properly tomorrow (because presumably all the writing I’ve been doing at home doesn’t count).
My past week has been a week of Feral Children, including my own. Biting, throwing sharp things, tears, attempting to cut furniture, tantrums galore… Happens this is at a time when I personally feel run down and exhausted, too, urrgh!
I’ve managed to stay pregnant long enough for my spouse to see The Hobbit, the Dr Who special and the Ashes whitewash. For me personally merely the first would have sufficed. Apparently my body is all about the summer entertainment schedule for him! Grr.
Hope you are coping okay with this heat Mary. We are watching the smoke from a bushfire that has started to the north of us. Apparently there is also a small grassfire, now under control, to the south of us too. Not too hot today but quite windy. Hopefully the wind will blow the fire back onto itself and all will be good.
I’ve done some work for Channel 31 the community television in Melbourne and found out rather a lot about the state of Australian television archives.
The ABC TV archive is in an awful mess and their catalogues have a tendency to not reflect reality.
The Seven Network – certainly HSV-7 Melbourne – transferred all its 2 inch Quad videotapes to 1 inch in the late 1980s, before destroying the Quads. This I confirmed last week with a friend who is an HSV tape librarian and was involved in the transfers. The dubs were done with speed and not much care, meaning that, on more than one occasion, a dub has been called up from the HSV library and found to be blank or have severe recorded-in Quad faults
ATV-10 Melbourne (and probably other 0/10 affiliates) junked most of their monochrome film and VT, and now say that they regret that decision very much. Somewhere in Melbourne there is a landfill full of 2″ tapes, probably still in their plastic boxes.
The Nine Network has kept quite a bit of 2 inch videotape and have been transferring it over the last few years, which it why we keep getting new clips of Graham Kennedy and so forth that have only recently been dubbed and made available for viewing.
Don’t forget that a lot of Australian programs were independent productions, and the final responsibility for archiving the programs was with them, whether that be Crawfords, Grundys, Cash-Harmon, RS Productions etc.
I know that Cash-Harmon junked a lot of the B/W episodes of Number 96 after the introduction of colour – an incredibly stupid act since the B/W eps were far more daring (not to mention just plain better) than the later colour installments.
The former National Film And Sound Archive – now known as ScreenSound – tended towards film rather than VT. I know they have all 110 episodes of “My Name’s McGooley What’s Yours?” on 16mm film, but that was historically important as the first really successful Australian sitcom. Of course the videotapes of those episodes are long gone.
I… don’t think he got it. 😀
Is Cori Bernardi trolling for attention on feminist blogs? The list of families he doesn’t find acceptable sounds like more than half of Australia to me, and I’m surprised he doesn’t mention that the children should only be conceived in the missionary position.
Bernardi is trolling for speaking gigs from conservative and evangelical groups after his term as Senator expires in June. Abbott et al are ecstatic for him to be getting this much attention as someone who won’t be part of the government going forward, because it means people are distracted from what the government is actually doing.
The marketing team for this book knows what they’re doing. The timing is perfect – just after the silly season when people are waiting for a fresh politics story, but before the parliamentary media cycle gets properly back into gear. That means it’s getting way more attention than it deserves.
After more than two months of caring for stray cats, and having adopted out three, we finally got mamma cat and her last kitten into a wonderful, no-kill shelter today. This is great, but I’m also very sad indeed that they’re gone from my life.
Yay for that great news. Sorry I couldn’t help you find a home for them.
No one could have expected you or anyone in particular to – I certainly struggled! Thank you very much.
angharad wrote, in another thread:
The Slate comparison diagram in itself is rather interesting. Men have an anus, women have buttocks? Men have an eye, women a brain? Men have a heart, women breasts and nipples? Curious choices.