Dec. 24th, 2007

dreamer_easy: (teh game)
This is what I get for having too many role-playing journals - annoying multiple emails of LJ announcements, sent to a tiger, a sphinx, and a malevolent tomato, amongst others. *busy changing settings and passwords*

ETA: ... others including the quantum love child of Ianto Jones, the Doctor's mum, the Doctor's daughter, and Mr Logan from the Red Nose Day sketch. I think.

ETA: Also Snape, the Reverend Wainwright, Russell T. Lady, a toy rabbit, and Captain Jack's twin daughters by the Doctor.
dreamer_easy: (ave pomona)
The mysterious and sudden adoption of feminism by Islamophobes is endlessly amusing. Katha Pollitt comments: "In the zillions of words for which [David] Horowitz is responsible--as writer, activist, speechifier and editor of Frontpagemag.com--there is virtually no evidence of concern for the rights, liberties, opportunities or well-being of any women on earth, except for Muslims." She also points out how useful this is in attacking Western feminists "as a bunch of princessy complainers. (Domestic violence? job discrimination? abortion restrictions? Honey, you're lucky someone's not stuffing you into a burqa!)"

Damsels in distress?: "The west should stop using the liberalisation of Muslim women to justify its strategy of dominance."

"Muslim!" Now Available In Insult Form: "Long before America cared about the rights of women in the Muslim world, Muslim women were launching anti-honor killing jihads. One of the most far reaching attacks against Islamically sanctioned forced marriages has been a film from Pakistan, not a vitriolic screed written in a high-end magazine in London. Whenever there is progress in the Muslim world, it is because of something Muslims themselves accomplish."

ExpandSaudi Arabia, Aqsa Parvez, hijab )
dreamer_easy: (smut)
Miss Withers: Are you sure it was a man's voice?
Secretary: Well it ain't likely a woman would be calling me "baby", is it?
Miss Withers: No, not as far downtown as this.

(Wouldn't have been able to sneak that in after the Hays Code took hold two years later!)
dreamer_easy: (we are as gods)
Anyone want my spare copy of:

Vanstiphout, H.L.J. "Inanna/Ishtar as a Figure of Controversy." in Kippenberg, Hans (ed). Religion and Reason 31 ("Struggles of Gods"). Mouton, Berlin, 1984.

?
dreamer_easy: (cardiff)
'Missing link' between whales and land-dwellers is found

Humans are still evolving - and it's happening faster than ever - this is fascinating, because I'd absorbed from somewhere the assumption that technology means and end to selective pressure. Well, of course it doesn't. In fact, our evolution is speeding up: there are way more of us, so a larger change of a useful mutation popping up, like the handy ability to digest milk properly in adulthood. (Here, "evolution" means "a change in the frequency of genes in a population in response to selection" - for example, if food is scarce and only some people can digest milk, those lucky folks are more likely to survive and have kids, so there'll be more people who can digest milk in the next generation.)

Alison Bechdel saw, and painted, an ermine.

A report on trends in baby names informs us that "NSW is awash with little Jacks." Wonder how that happened...

The Ongoing Battle Over Deli Cats - in New York delis, cats are engaging in their long-traditional role of eating the rats and mice.

Caitlin Moran reviews Voyage of the Damned: "I know with scientific certainty that my sister Weena will take to moaning 'Tennant's eyes' at around 7.04pm, and not really stop until December 28. 2009." One of us! One of us! (Weena?)
dreamer_easy: (Default)
Nick Hornby's report on his attempt to read some science fiction is one of the funniest goddamn things I've ever read in my life. YMMV, of course, but even thinking about it keeps making me crack up:

Even buying Iain M. Banks's Excession was excruciating. Queuing up behind me at the cash desk was a very attractive young woman clutching some kind of groovy art magazine, and I felt obscurely compelled to tell her that the reason I was buying this purple book with a spacecraft on the cover was because of the Believer [for which he wrote his 'Stuff I've Been Reading' column], and the Believer was every bit as groovy as her art magazine. In a rare moment of maturity, however, I resisted the compulsion. She could, I decided, think whatever the hell she wanted. It wasn't a relationship that was ever going to go anywhere anyway. I'm with someone, she's probably with someone, she was twenty-five years younger than me, and — let's face it — the Believer isn't as groovy as all that. If we had got together, that would have been only the first of many disappointing discoveries she’d make.

When I actually tried to read Excession, embarrassment was swiftly replaced by trauma. Iain M. Banks is a highly rated Scottish novelist who has written twenty-odd novels, half of them (the non-SF half) under the name Iain Banks, and though I'd never previously read him, everyone I know who is familiar with his work loves him. And nothing in the twenty-odd pages I managed of Excession was in any way bad; it's just that I didn't understand a word. I didn't even understand the blurb on the back of the book: "Two and a half millennia ago, the artifact appeared in a remote corner of space, beside a trillion-year-old dying sun from a different universe. It was a perfect black-body sphere, and it did nothing. Then it disappeared. Now it is back." This is clearly intended to entice us into the novel — that's what blurbs do, right? But this blurb just made me scared. An artifact —that's something you normally find in a museum, isn't it? Well, what's a museum exhibit doing floating around in space? So what if it did nothing? What are museum exhibits supposed to do? And this dying sun — how come it's switched universes? Can dying suns do that?

The urge to weep tears of frustration was already upon me even before I read the short prologue, which seemed to describe some kind of androgynous avatar visiting a woman who has been pregnant for forty years and who lives on her own in the tower of a giant spaceship. (Is this the artifact? Or the dying sun? Can a dying sun be a spaceship? Probably.) By the time I got to the first chapter, which is entitled "Outside Context Problem" and begins "(CGU Grey Area signal sequence file #n428857/119)", I was crying so hard that I could no longer see the page in front of my face, at which point I abandoned the entire ill-conceived experiment altogether.

Profile

dreamer_easy: (Default)
dreamer_easy

May 2025

S M T W T F S
    123
45678910
11 121314151617
18192021222324
25262728293031

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

Expand All Cut TagsCollapse All Cut Tags
Page generated Jul. 8th, 2025 05:39 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios