personal political

modern girls

We often walk to school with a girl in Olle's class, Tilly. Yesterday as we walked, Olle with great passion was telling her a story, which involved lots of rocket sounds and big hand movements as things got blown up.

We stopped to wait for the lights and I smiled at Tilly and said, "Boys like explosions".

She replied, with complete sang froid, "I like the occasional explosion too... ".

milks

Milk in small bottles which had curdled in the sun is a strong memory from my early school years. It put me off drinking plain milk for good, from about age six. Two of my siblings would pour themselves glasses of milk after school, but I stuck to water. 

easily pleased

He has a new teacher this term, who sent home a reading log two weeks ago. They're to record each book they read and give it a rating out of 10. The log was on the kitchen table and I had a quick look - he had listed six books and rated every one 10 out of 10.

photos

I was thinking of writing about the Henson controversy but Elissa wrote such a good post, I'll simply link to that.

And I'll just add that our culture is saturated with so many ugly, exploitative, sexist photos and stories about women which are right there in the mainstream media, that it seems truly sick to me that Henson's few photos have become the focus of a moral panic.

Coincidentally, I recently came across Ella Dreyfus' photos of pre-p*bertal boys, also n*aked from the waist up (as are the girls in Henson's photos, which I saw on the gallery website before they were pulled.) Photos like these are provocative, but not at all in a sexual sense.

newspeak

The United States has opposed a worldwide ban on cluster bombs, calling instead for "technological fixes" that would make them safer.

[How different life would be if I'd never read 1984.]

[But at least I have a life with which to contemplate that irony, unlike, presumably, most of the people who happened to be under the 240,000 American cluster bombs dropped on Iraq during the invasion.]

echo

I'm supposed to be writing (and not this blog!) - a history essay which is partly about the holocaust. I've been immersed in the literature all week and looking up, find disturbing echoes of that era in contemporary Europe.

sleeping over

This was a big week for us and a big week for Olle - he spent a night away from us both, for the first time ever (not counting the first month of his life in hospital).

girlistic: fashion

This past issue of Girlistic magazine looks impressive - enough reading to fill a couple of hours, about feminism and fashion.

bangladesh: climate change speaking tour

Bangladesh is one of the countries that will be most dramatically affected by climate change. A one metre sea level rise is expected to affect between 25-50 percent of the population, or up to 70 million people. Much of southern Bangladesh is already experiencing water-logging and salinity problems.

Despite this, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) is considering funding what will be one of the largest coal mines on earth in northern Bangladesh.

skin

I'm sometimes told that I have good skin for my age. What people mean by that is that I'm relatively unlined and unwrinkled. But that's just an accident of facial geography - the placement of bones, features, etc, hasn't created any deep lines.

But beneath the surface - and increasingly on the surface - my skin isn't 'good'. It's damaged, from a typical sunburnt Australian childhood of the 1960s-70s (and typical unaware early adulthood in the sun). And this week I was diagnosed with my first skin cancer. I'm sure it won't be my last.