Categories: Uncategorized

15 Oct 2011, Comments Off

Down Under Feminist Carnival #41

Author: Helen

Downunder Feminist Carnival

The latest DUFC is brought to you by Stef at A Touch of the Crazy.

What’s Good: This enables me to put a post up despite not having written anything for a month.

What’s bad: Not having written anything for a month.

This is the busiest time of year at the Steve Jobs Memorial dogs home (and cattery): It’s when we send the personalised statement out to hundreds of thousands of dogs (and cats) with lots of variable data presenting itself in different ways according to the breed of the dog (or cat). The Dalmation Spot Count alone needs a week of testing. This year it’s fraught because it’s the first time we’ve done it since the release of our new system, DOGZ. As anyone who has worked on a systems upgrade will know, some issue over HERE will cause some bizarre problem over THERE some of which, despite the best efforts of your testers, will slip through due to their sheer bizarro-unpredictability. This year it appears a bunch of wire-haired terriers have missed out on the mailout due to a glitch in the code intended to exclude Mexican Hairless, and we have to do some more work to run the mailout just for them.

Also, I have something wrong with one of my finger joints, and I know there’s no weaker-sounding excuse than “I haz a sore finger.” But it’s making typing a pain.

Back soon.

11 Feb 2011, Comments (1)

Friday Earworm: The Cure, Fire in Cairo

Author: Helen

No, I can’t imagine why I would have had that as my earworm for the last couple of days, can you?

10 Oct 2010, Comments Off

Down Under Feminist Carnival #29

Author: Helen

Downunder Feminist Carnival

This month’s Carnival is up at Bluebec.com with a wealth of hoydenish goodness for your reading.

10 Oct 2009, Comments (6)

What’s going on with the Balcony?

Author: Helen

The Cast Iron Balcony is undergoing renovation. Although cast iron is likely to figure prominently in the future, the old lace in the header has been biffed off the Balcony and taken away in a skip to restore a nice old Victorian somewhere else. At the moment I’m using the generic template – think of it as one of those house renovations where all the studs and frames are exposed for a while with a tarp hastily tied around some bits of it.

The old look was just getting a bit beige for me. Any cast iron lacework images featuring colour and rust would be greatly appreciated if anyone has any. I’ll be doing the redesign when I get around to it – and as anyone who knows Australian amateur renovators would know, that could be a while!

4 Oct 2009, Comments (3)

Essentialism damages, even kills

Author: Helen

Is this becoming a pattern in Australian heterosexual behaviour and criminal sentencing?

1. A dysfunctional couple have a child. The dad just decides he’ll opt out of the child care role.
2. The mum is such an abominable carer that the child dies.
3. The dad continues to live in the same house without lifting a finger to help said child.
4. The dad’s legal team argue that he is less culpable than the mother, as he had less responsibility than the mother.

This has now happened twice. I wrote about the first incident here. In the first case the prosecutor threw the argument out and charged both parents equally severely. In this case, it’s succeeded; the dad has twelve years for manslaughter, the mother a life sentence for murder. Notice, also, the headline of the linked newspaper report, which refers only to the “cruel mother”.

Is there any possible reason for the unequal view of the parents’ culpability, and the dad’s assumption that it was OK for him to do nothing, apart from the extremely essentialist and determinist views of gender that are so popular at the moment? Have we gone so far down the track of dumbed-down evpsych / Women-are-from-Venus/ “hard-wired” interpretations of human behaviour, that adult court officials can actually believe this story? That an adult couple can share the same house and the same family, yet the woman must be more responsible for their folie a deux simply because she should be genetically hard-wired (or something) to be the nurturing parent? Or that men are so hard-wired not to be the nurturers that the father surely can’t have been expected to step in, or pick up a phone? (And people say feminists are disparaging towards men.)

I’m at a loss for any other explanation. It’s like magical thinking.

Gender essentialism (as well as all the other forms) is damaging. It’s not only damaging and insulting to women, but to men as well. And it keeps both of us from living as well as we could. And yes, sometimes, it kills.

 

 

Note – There are obvious disability and mental illness issues in this story, too. I’ve focused on one aspect of it here but there is really much more in it to unpack.

4 Sep 2009, Comments (2)

Friday Earworm: Pete Murray

Author: Helen

The boychild introduced me to this singer. I’d heard of Neil Murray, but not Pete Murray.



I can’t work out whether this one is my favourite, or this:



I love the way the rhythm section flies in the chorus.

That natural voice, sitting pretty in the natural range, with a bit of breath, no meslisma and pyrotechnics: Idols please note.

8 Aug 2009, Comments (9)

My Pink Half of the Drainpipe

Author: Helen

Just for the sheer hell of it.


This is about SETTING BOUNDARIES. People, take from this what you will.

29 Jun 2009, Comments (14)

Spirit of P P McGuinness, leave Razer’s body!

Author: Helen

One of the scary things about getting older is watching other people, who used to be younger and groovier than yourself, age and settle into the sclerotic patterns of unexamined privilege and rightwing attitudes.

In the 90s, as a thirtysomething, I used to listen admiringly to Helen vocalising volubly on 3-RRR Triple J with Mikey Robins. You might have noticed I have a weakness for people who write hilarious, OTT rants full of subordinate clauses, tangents, abstruse words and the occasional runon sentence – Twisty and Tiger Beatdown, Elizabeth Farrelly sometimes. That’s a clumsy attempt to describe what I liked about Helen on the radio. As a thirtysomething in the 90s, I heard her as the voice of younger and hipper people, as well.

So who took away that Helen and replaced her with Christina Hoff Sommers?

I respect Helen’s childfree status – but she doesn’t, it seems, respect others. And all that boilerplate anti-Greens shit? “Hippies”/naive/”ancient-grains”/”patchouli” – it’s a wonder there’s no reference to hemp or volvos there, but you get the incredibly original and edgy jokey references that have never been made before, don’t you?

And the idea that she once voted Green because she was perimenopausal, and therefore unable to make a rational decision, is really special. Of course, that could be taken to mean that childfree women are equally unfit for Parliament because they’re all stark raving bonkers once they reach the median age for the MPs there. That just explains why no-one should employ a woman over forty to do anything, anywhere. Good one Helen! Seems there’s really no life stage in which we can expect to share in the democratic process!

Seems the spirit of backlash antifeminism has claimed another writing soul. And it seems in the MSM as it is today, that kind of writing is well rewarded. The punters love it – so maybe Razer has just made a rational decision, despite the dreaded perimenopause. It’s sad for us fans, though.
 
 
 
Crossposted

18 Jun 2009, Comments (6)

This is what I get for trying to maintain civility in my discourse

Author: Helen

First time I’ve ever been scolded for not being sweary enough in an internet discussion thread, I think. And here I was thinking that the standards at ALR would be so lofty.

I do bristle at the idea that asshat is a mere euphemism, though. Although mild, I love it for its evocation of the location of the subject’s head relative to his arse.

(More etymology of asshat here.)

2 Apr 2009, Comments (9)

Walkin’ back to Happiness

Author: Helen

The AGE: “The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has begun distancing himself from his controversial internet censorship policy in what one internet industry engineer has dubbed “the great walkback of 2009″.
 

 

He laid aside his foolish pride, learned the truth from tears everyone he cried.

Of course, it’s another example of where a politician revises a bad decision and someone who wanted that outcome nevertheless mocks him, for doing a backflip, or a backpedal, or in this case a walkback, which is an artefact of an old software language. IT humour, hurghhh hurgh hurghhhh. Hilarious. POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT: UR DOING IT RONG. But I guess he just couldn’t resist coming out with something so side-splitting.

Helen looks very Amy Winehouse in this clip. Mess up that scary, scary beehive and apply the thick upswept kohl eye makeup and you’d have doppelgangers. The resemblance doesn’t end there, either. They’re both London girls from vaguely similar backgrounds and they both started performing very young, but while Amy’s crashing and burning, Helen only looks in danger of perishing from wholesomeness.

Never mind. The Clean Feed is dead: Let’s talk, hep cats! Work that tweed jacket.

  • Twitter- CastIronBalcony