Recent Posts - page 382

  • Whoydensday: Torchwood S3 Trailer

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    We still don’t know when it will air (although there are lots of whispers pointing to June), but the BBC last week released a 60 second trailer for Series 3 of Torchwood, which will consist of five hour-long episodes aired… Read More ›

  • Ebooks, pleasure reading, and the planet

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    Naomi Alderman writes: “A novel idea: curl up in bed with a virtual book” Recently I’ve been intrigued by the idea that ebook readers could be a greener way to spread the printed word. And since I started using one… Read More ›

  • Life is too bloody short to faff around with this stupid Nokia 6120

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    This new phone had lots of bells and whistles, and some of the features are indeed very clever, but somewhere along the line they lost the plot with structuring the menu. The new interface offers a highly counter-intuitive menu, one that makes me want to hurl my phone with great force several times a day as I search through each fecking submenu to find what I want, and which unbelievably offers no way that I or anyone else can find of turning off the “predictive” text unfeature.

  • Forced-birther blames bushfires on abortion law reform

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    There’s always one, isn’t there? The fatuous godbag woman-hater who blames disasters on the Wrath of God. We saw them after Hurricane Katrina, and now they’re starting to waggle their loathsome little fins in the wake of the horrific Victorian… Read More ›

  • Blub

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    If you’re in the bushfire zone looking for something to do to help and you’ve already donated to the Red Cross and the CFA, your local wildlife rescue service could probably do with a hand – ring them and ask them if they need some eucalyptus leaves from your garden trees, or some help filling water containers in the shelters, or just a cash donation.

  • “If only”? New child abuse campaign.

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    ASCA, Adults Surviving Child Abuse, has just launched a new advertising campaign, which they call “confronting” and “provocative”. It is confronting and provocative, and knowing the origins, I expect that they definitely mean well. But I’m not at all convinced… Read More ›

  • Quickhit: How Hollywood made its heroines weight-obsessed and man mad

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    From the Guardian/Observer:

    Hollywood heroines are being increasingly portrayed as neurotic, idiotic and obsessed by men, weight and weddings, a professor at Oxford University has claimed.

    Dr Diane Purkiss, who is a fellow at Keble College, argued that over the past five decades the film industry has made its female characters “dumber and dumber”. The latest slew of chick-flicks, including He’s Just Not That Into You and Confessions of a Shopaholic, fall prey to the “worst kind of regressive, pre-feminist stereotype of misogynistic cliche,” she added.

  • Women as wheelbarrows: Italian PM wants woman in coma alive as fetus container

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    Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, in consultation with the Vatican, is trying to overturn a court order to remove the feeding tubes from a woman who has been in a coma for 17 years and been assessed as having no… Read More ›

  • Victoria is burning.

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    Update 9 Feb: There are now 126 people confirmed dead, and the toll is projected to rise about 200. Flickr photoset of the firest here. ~~ Any fire reports? Are the Hoydenizens ok? There’s probably no mobile coverage if you… Read More ›

  • Review: In Bed With

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    A couple of weeks ago, I was intrigued by an article in The Guardian, by columnist Libby Brooks, which discusses recent publications of erotic fiction written for and by women, focusing particularly on In Bed With, an anthology edited by Kathy Lette, boasting contributions from a number of well-known women (who nonetheless hide behind a “nom de porn”—name of first pet followed by name of first street).

    Book cover illustration for In Bed WithBrooks’ article has a definite feminist slant to it, and she speculates that Lette’s project (and others like it) could be used to counter the “raunch culture”