This may be a watershed: the Rudd government has been challenged to show its true colours on women’s rights. Way back in the twentieth century, the Liberal government faced a situation where a woman-hating theocon, Brian Harradine, held the balance… Read More ›
health
Duncan Fine talks sense on BMI
It’s not anything that our readers familiar with Shapely Prose don’t know, but using the BMI as the sole determinant of whether someone is overweight or obese is a really unreliable measurement. Given the hysteria this week about Australia’s “obesity… Read More ›
An Embuggerance
Author Terry Pratchett has revealed that he has been diagnosed with a rare form of early onset Alzheimer’s disease. I can only imagine how distressing it must be for someone who has spent his life as a wordsmith to start… Read More ›
Friday Hoyden: Colleen McCullough
McCullough in 2004 I’ve just spent the last week, in between spring cleaning and the odd gleeful skip over the departure of John Winston Howard from the national scene, reading the latest volume in Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series… Read More ›
“Plus we sell fair trade coffee!”: Say No to WHO Code Offset Attempts
[all images courtesy of promom.org. Click for larger versions.] There’s been a bit of discussion about the traps about whether carbon trading offset schemes are of any real use, or whether they have the end result of not-so-covertly encouraging resource… Read More ›
WTF du jour: “Milkbar” breastfeeding pillow ad
I’ve ranted before about advertisements normalising and idealising artificial infant feeding. You can read more about the World Health Organisation Code on the marketing of breastmilk substitutes here at IBFAN (the International Baby Food Action Network), INFACT (Infant Feeding Action… Read More ›
Double standard watch
Why is it that doctors employed at Royal North Shore Hospital are giving press interviews outside the building every day this week of the NSW parliamentary inquiry into the hospital, while not a single nurse employed by RNSH has given… Read More ›
Opportunities squandered
JOHN Howard squandered the benefits of the $80 billion-a-year resources boom and wanted to be re-elected so he could retire, Labor leader Kevin Rudd said yesterday. Defining the choice facing voters in one of his last major speeches of the… Read More ›
So what are you doing tonight at 9pm?
You could do a lot worse than listen to the repeat broadcast of today’s Life Matters Health Report program on Radio National. It was a cracker, taking a different tack in this election period on the traits we all have… Read More ›
Bobby’s Dairy: “Your baby cannot have your milk.”
Moving house is sucking all my blogergy, so here’s a tale for you. Trish and Bobby. [Image source] Background to this story: Bobby was born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome. This is a congenital defect in which the left side… Read More ›
Hoyden About Town 