Once these names were all once considered manly names exuding virility. Yet every one of these traditionally masculine names might as well suddenly have become Sue, since all it took for most parents to stop giving these names to their sons was for them to become popular names for girls.
history
those who do not know are doomed to repeat etc, besides it’s fascinating
Ukraine’s Got Talent winner
Sometimes the weird things people forward around in email truly are extraordinary. This video shows the winner of “Ukraine’s Got Talent”, Kseniya Simonova, 24, drawing a series of pictures on an illuminated sand table showing how ordinary people were affected… Read More ›
Girls Gone Wild or Wild Women? or: We Never Had Nasty Sluts When I Were A Lad
Reading an article about women’s violence at Schoolies’s Week recently prompted me to pull this languishing post out of my Drafts folder. This snippet exemplifies the phenomenon of low levels of criminal or “disorderly” behaviour by young women being given… Read More ›
Whoydensday Nerdopalooza
I know you all want to see the Children in Need trailer for the Xmas episode, but watch this no-spoiler video first (as Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait titled this 2001 A Space Odyssey/Doctor Who mashup/crossover: HALlons-y! [sfx: appreciative groan])
Happy Birthday to OTOOS
150 years for Mr Darwin’s Big Idea! I’m rather attracted to the idea of this special edition: Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species: A Graphic Adaptation.
Keiko Fukuda: Be Strong, Be Gentle, Be Beautiful
Olde-tyme Hoydenizens may remember that I wrote about Keiko Fukuda back in 2007, in the Friday Hoyden feature. Fukuda is probably the most knowledgeable and accomplished judoka alive, the last living student of Jigoro Kano, the founder of judo. Geekfeminism… Read More ›
Quickhit: “defining moments of the noughties”?
This Top 100 is a British list, and it’s from the UK Daily Telegraph (“that fascist rag” is always appended to any mention of it by my Welsh DB), but it’s still an interesting idea. What do you agree with,… Read More ›
Fought and died “for the flag”?
One thing that leaped out at me during the media blitz on the Battle of Trafalgar flag that fetched a record price at auction is that it brought out one of my least favourite pieces of rhetoric from the anonymous flag collector who won the auction, in a radio interview, about the connection he felt to those who had “fought and died for this flag”.
Sweet FSM, that phrase raises all my hackles.
Belated Friday Hoyden: Goodbye, voice of my childhood
I grew up as a folkie. Lots of people in our bushwalking club were also folkies, so we had serious singing around the campfire as well as going along to many ceilidhs and festivals. The voice of Mary Travers was one of our icons.
Quick Hit: Just because you can, should you?
A 7 year old African girl is at the centre of a custody dispute between her single mother and a wealthy white Australian couple who have helped with her care since she was a baby. The full story is here… Read More ›