Les Liens du Lundi
Oct. 7th, 2019 06:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
highlyeccentricCurrent and stale affairs, hot and cold takes:
Useful: Got no good news today, have a useful pattern instead
Longer political and/or climate science
Longer historical, cultural, scientific, misc
- Graham Readfearn (Guardian AU), It's heartbreaking: a coastal community watches its beach wash away. This is a really interesting situation, because it's one where pointing the finger solely at climate change is too simple. I recall a geography field trip to the south end of Stockton Beach maybe fifteen years ago, to learn about beach erosion and reclamation methods back then, and it's just got exponentially worse. The harbour breakwalls have a lot to do with it, although I can't figure out from this article if it's just the recent renovation that's the problem, or if the 1950s resculpting of the entire estuary is where the finger is pointing. There's talk of a class action. (There's an oral history piece in the latest Meanjin, from a Stockton resident who grew up on the lost estuary islands, I'll post the link when it breaks paywall.)
- Carolyn Webb (SMH, August), At the third stroke there will be no more dial up talking clock - and there wasn't. The service ended on 25th September.
- ABC News, Scott Morrison pledges Australia's help as Donald Trump investigates Mueller probe. Rumour has it our ambassador already offered in writing, so... typical, Australia, typical.
Useful: Got no good news today, have a useful pattern instead
- Attic24 (blog post), Cosy blanket edge. After a. discovering that I crochet in a uniquely terrible way, that bears no resemblance to the yarn and hook holding methods of any normal human, and b. my mother's recommended blanket edging method is not good for me, I found this. I am cheerfully and cack-handedly edging a blanket.
Longer political and/or climate science
- Sarah Krasnostein (The Monthly), A man who hates women: the killing of Euridyce Dixon and the sentencing of Jaymes Todd. Content to be inferred from the title, but it also deals with Todd's plea for lenient sentence on the grounds of autism. I think the article is careful and cognisant of the problematics of that claim both from a feminist and a disability rights perspective, while also taking into account the offender's right to claim leniency on the grounds of any mitigating factors (including, eg, that a sentence that's reasonable for a neurotypical person might be unduly harsh for him). Anyway. It's very attuned to the specifics of legal argumentation, only read if you like that kind of stuff.
Longer historical, cultural, scientific, misc
- Michael Wayne (Past/Lives blog, 2012), Mortuary Station / Regent Street Station. Regrettably, a Man Explaining Things to a bored woman on the train was *right* when he asserted that the mural on the apartment building wall behind Regent Street station is a furphy: this place was not designed by Australia's first female architect (Florence Mary Taylor), because it was built long before she was born. Here is a post on its history that I found while angrily fact-checking the regrettably correct man.
- Chris Thomas (Out magazine June 2018), Premiere: Lizzo's 'Boys' is a summer anthem for 'The Playboys and the Gay Boys'. I noticed the line about gay boys in a song otherwise about men Lizzo sleeps with (it is, of course, possible she sleeps with gay boys) and wondered which way the discourse-o-meter swung. Positive, it seems.
- Erin Barnett, interview with Etgar Keret (Electric Lit), Emotions are like little gremlins. Has some really interesting commentary about translation.
- Sarah Boon, interview with Ann Patchett (Electric Lit), Ann Patchett gets inside a man's head. On her single POV narrator in The Dutch House.
- BBC News (2011), Speaking Clock: why are people still dialling for the time? Found this when I was reading up on the end of Australia's Talking Clock (just... one of those things I assumed was always and forever!), and it was interesting.
- Atkins and Frankel (WaPo), President Pelosi? It's not impossible. Filed thus under historical cultural, because the interesting part isn't the long bow drawn re Pelosi, but the background on the Nixon crisis and the then-speaker Carl Albert.
- William Brennan (The Atlantic, March 2018), Guilty dog pictures: your dog feels no shame.
- Siobhan Norton (The Independent, 2014), Rambling revolution: how people power won the right to roam. I did not know about the Kinder Scout Tresspass, but now I do!