Dreamer Easy

Doctor Who meets Top Gear. With the BBC's blessing. :-)

(This is on YouTube where all the world can see. Beware one clip from the finale.)

Hilarious Top Gear ads for Season 11!

Go to housesforthehomeless.com.au, prove you're a human, and they'll donate a dollar on your behalf. (Would my overseas readers test this pls?) It works from outside Australia, too! (Thanks guys!) ETA: Blimey, they raised the whole $100,000 in just three days! You can still make a donation, though, at the Mission Australia Web site.

That thing about germs being good for children's immune systems is apparently true: Day care helps ward off cancer, study finds

Spit-take: Jeremy Clarkson has accepted the fact of global warming. Plus he has a plan!

Matching rights for gay couples in Australia: money, not marriage, but it's a huge step in the right direction.

Hicks case flawed all along: prosecutor

Rob Paravonian's Pachelbel rant gets more and more hilarious as it goes on.

Chess champion Bobby Fischer passed away this week.

Attacked by "conservative culture warriors" such as the former PM, Australian schools are quietly dropping contemporary approaches to literature, such as examining the role of race and gender.

"Conservative voices in the media misrepresent what goes on in the nation's literacy and English classrooms," [Assoc Prof Ilana] Snyder says. "Literacy teachers are not mindless promoters of educational fads and left-wing ideologies. They do not ignore basic literacy skills, traditional grammar and the books of the canon. Such claims are false and enormously damaging to the enterprise of education."

(Mind you, Internet fandom demonstrates that close reading isn't exactly a widespread skill.)

benchilada found a great pulp book cover.

Top Gear with British Sign Language. (Surely that clip cuts off too early! I want to see the BSL for "badger of death"!) Plus! A cheeky Deaf man obviously imitating Jeremy Clarkson!

Have renamed my "full-blown mother-earthism" tag to "eco-mentalism" in honour of Jeremy Clarkson's NTA win. ;-)

It's now approxiately ten hours since I dropped the boys off at the cattery, something I always find enormously stressful. I hadn't realised how much of that was the cats' obvious distress, first at the taxi, then at the sudden plunge into unknown surroundings. Normally I have no choice but to leave them cowering and miserable. But this time, they seemed to know where they were (about time, after five visits) and very quickly settled down. In fact, Frank started attempting to chew his way into the bag of Tim's special sensitive tummy food, and when I gave him a little snack of it even timid Tim emerged from hiding to steal some. This was a terrific relief to me, although let's face it, the 0.5 mg of Xanax didn't hurt either.

I then spent ninety minutes waiting for a taxi back from Annangrove. It arrived five minutes before the bus, so I pretended it had nothing to do with me and caught the 641 instead at a fraction of the cost. Ha ha.

I'm quite confused not to have the pudews constantly underfoot; I can leave doors open without naughty intruders, etc. I don't pine for them too much on our overseas jaunts, but they're part of our home and I miss them already.

In wholly unrelated news, Hamster's new hair > Rossy's horrid beard.

omg, Top Gear interviewed a synaesthete! (Check out the sceptical comments. Does this mean I belong to another oppressed minority? w00t!)