Serendipity Update

BlueJ tells me that the 14th of May is also the date that the wiki entry for de Pizan was most recently updated. Someone tell me what's going on with de Pizan!!!

Serendipity

According to our sitemetre, on the 14th of May, around twenty people, all from the American Midwest, and particularly from Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska, all searched for the same quotation and were directed to our site. The Midwest has a population of over 66 Million, so twenty people aren't a lot in the grand scheme of things. It's just that the quote they were searching for is an unusual and unusually long one:

...we have not come to do you any harm, but rather, out of pity on your distress, we are here to comfort you. Our aim is to help you get rid of those misconceptions which have clouded your mind...

No one has ever been directed to our site before through that quote, which comes, of course, from de Pizan. If any of you find your way back here, what were you looking for? And what happened to prompt you to look in the first place?

Spam

My email has randomly started putting important emails in my spam folder. This means I have been forced to undertake the totally icky job to going through my spam mail to check nothing has been misdirected. This is a generally depressing and thoroughly unrewarding experience, so I was grateful for this comic relief this morning; I found an email entitled 'Bomb her womb with your enormous cannon'.

If anyone is actually getting off on this stuff and is wondering whether they are normal or likely to be happy at all, ever in their lives; I'm so, so sorry. No Dice.

Bees

I was at the exhibition of Light at Trinity last year with BlueJ and it was completely great, except that one of the exhibits was a collection of 3D rendered bee-maps, showing the exact path that the bee had flown. The paths were being mapped because some snotty post grads had made a grid of different coloured dots with sugar water behind one of the colours and wanted to see if the bee would come to associate the colour with sugar water and fly more directly to it. I don't know whether it was an experiment meant to demonstrate that bees, like every other living thing, learn from experience or to demonstrate that they can see colours. I thought everyone knew both those things... unless it was designed to demonstrate the bees learn a lot quicker than Science post grads?

Haints and Saints

So I am completely not going to write about the article in the paper today on how women deserve to be paid less because they don't work as hard as people.
Partly, I'm not going to write about it because it will only annoy me, partly because biological determinism is so last century but one and even then it was only really the National Socialists who really got off on it, partly because it's silly (we all know that what we're talking about is women being financially punished for having children - academics and social scientists, out of the pool!) but mainly I'm not going to write about it because the guy who conducted the study is called 'Prof. Wooden'.

'"It's a well known fact that women are indolent," quipped Prof. Wooden, woodenly, "This is no laughing matter."'

You see? I'm not going to be able to be grown up about this, not even close. So instead I'm going to write about how I find Bluegrass music confusing.

I really like every sound in Bluegrass music, every instrument, I just don't like it when they all play together at the same time. (Yes, I know, for all of you humming "Mama Don't" in their heads at the moment.) When Torvill and Dean were awarded their honorary doctorates, the speaker joked that the definition of an intellectual ought to be anyone who can hear Ravel's Bolero without thinking of them and I have the version of a same problem with Bluegrass; it's very difficult not to think how twee redneckism really is.* Finally, it does have the unfortunate characteristic of making every song sound the same. I think that's mainly to do with not being able to vary the rhythm so much if you're getting strings to do the job of drums and because at the heart of it, it's playing not listening music. So, virtuosity is more important than not homogenizing everything.

Partly, of course, this is all Bill Monroe's fault. Anything earlier than the Bluegrass Boys has more variety or sound and rhythm and fewer instruments which lets the music come out from amongst all that talent a bit more. Clarence Astley is a great example of that haunting high and lonesome sound in the banjo music before Bluegrass. The Newgrass movement made some progress on that front and I think people like Gillian Welch who are on the edge of it have been even more successful because they're going back to pre-Monroe music. Rick Danko is my favourite male singer (all his early influences were Bluegrass but he did something with them) but Tim O'Brien is my next favourite and I never listen to him because there really is only so many times you can listen to the tiddle-ti-tees.


*Anyone who is going to write in to tell me that a) the term 'Redneck' originated in the South, not Appalachia and b) 'Redneckism' isn't actually a word, and please God, never will be, don't because know and I'm very sorry, really. (Actually, I always thought "Redneck" came from Mississippi, but according to the OED doesn't.)

Post-Feminist Australia

First Troy Buswell's bizarre chair-sniffing incident and now Sam Newman fondling a lingerie clad mannequin with a picture of Football journalist, Caroline Wilson's face attached to its head. In some quarters there has been a suggestion that, despite how tough it is being a female journalist in the football world that she should 'just get over it'. Troy Buswell doesn't seem able to 'just get over it' although he won't stand down as Liberal Party leader and although it wasn't actually him who was victimized. He seems to have been traumatized by victimizing someone else. According the The Age:

Tears in his eyes, Mr Buswell said he needed a short break, turned his

back and then asked his press secretary to bring him a glass of water.
Mr Buswell said his wife was aware of the allegations before they were published

on Sunday. He said it had been a difficult time for him "on a personal level".
"These are difficult issues for me to deal with and they are very difficult issues

for my family to deal with," he said. "It's hard dealing with these matters and

having to face up to your responsibilities behaviourally, publicly, and it's

harder to do it privately."

Is it hard? Really? All we're asking of him is that he not snap female MPs bra straps as he did a couple of years ago and that he not publicly sniff chairs in which female members of his own party have been sitting.

I am genuinely perplexed by his comments - perhaps he also does these things when he has people round to dinner? Perhaps he does such things to his mother? Or this mates? If he doesn't, then why would he do it in this circumstance?

In the cases of both Buswell and Newman, there has been an attempt to down play it as a joke. But the point is that in both cases these men tried to embarrass women in their profession, tried to make them feel awkward and excluded. In both cases, aside from the sexual harassment aspect, it was a very nasty insult.

One letter to the Editor attempted to cast this as a civil liberties issue, but given that we have defamation laws and no one thinks that that's the kind of censorship which, as the letter-writer put it 'has no place in a liberal democracy', I think we can put his letter down to his weak grasp of what constitutes censorship in the first place.

What is really lovely about the public response to both these incidents is that the vast majority of people have been outraged. Men, in particular, have been vocal about how embarrassed they feel that there are still men out there that behave like this and how offended they are about this kind of behaviour generally.

That's what this comes down to; it's not a women's issue, it's a human issue. It happened to women because in both cases the women work in professions in which they are in the minority, but it is nothing more than the bullying, excluding and victimizing of people who were already at a disadvantage. Gender clouds the issue, if not for that, there would be unanimous support for the women; all Australians step in if they see that someone isn't getting a fair go.