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writer, singer, webwrangler, blogger, comedy tragic | about.me/vivsmythe

  • BDS: Disgust, not Derangement

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    Lance Mannion has a kickarse post – Why We Don’t Like Him – on the US media’s uncritical adoption of the argument that the Left has an irrational distrust of President Bush, the wingnutteria’s invented mental illness “Bush Derangement Syndrome”…. Read More ›

  • The battle over language and abortion

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    Interesting editorial by one Erik Gable from a small-town newspaper in the States. Some time ago, I received a letter from a reader asking why The Daily Telegram used the phrase “pro-choice” to describe people who want to keep abortion… Read More ›

  • Upgrading

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    Bear with me while I upgrade the blog software. Hopefully downtime will be minimal. UPDATE: Done. Easy-peasy. And gravatars are working again! (In Firefox, anyway. Gravatars are spotty in Internet Exploder with it’s silly idiosyncratic approach to HTML compliance. Honestly,… Read More ›

  • Up-skirting not just for schoolboys, sadly

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    Last year one of the boys at my daughter’s school was upsetting her and her friends by looking up their skirts. I spoke to his teacher and it apparently stopped soon after, but those girls were greatly distressed and a… Read More ›

  • Why am I pro-choice?

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    The promised Blog for Choice Day post, belated. I’ve been pregnant twice, both times intended, and both my pregnancies resulted in healthy full-term babies. Both were (and continue to be) happy experiences. In the ten years of my life before… Read More ›

  • Harsh of the week

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    He’s so insubstantial that he’d be rejected by Bertie Wooster’s Drones Club on the grounds that he wouldn’t have the strength let alone the nerve to steal a policeman’s helmet on Boat Night. ~ Lance Mannion (on Hugh Jackman’s interpretation… Read More ›

  • Blogging for choice

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    I’ll probably be doing a belated entry on this topic, as I’m still marshalling my thoughts (attempting to pummel them into some cogency actually) on the deceptively simple topic – why exactly am I pro-choice? Anna put up a top… Read More ›

  • Totally missing the comet so far

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    There was no news coverage about this comet in Norway, France or England/Wales, so we didn’t know that the night of our return was the night of the brightest showing of the brightest comet for decades (who else remembers the… Read More ›

  • My contribution to the world while travelling

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    Every time I used a shared access computer in a hotel, I opened a certain program and deactivated a certain “helpful” feature (if the user configuration allowed me to). This webcomic covers the issue nicely. Thanks to Paul and Clive… Read More ›

  • Back, jetlagged

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    Arrived 6:25 yesterday (Monday) am from Heathrow after spending a few days in the old haunts around Wales (one afternoon with our neighbours and I had the lilt back again). Slept midmorning 1:30pm, out for lunch at the beach with… Read More ›