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[Apr. 13th, 2012|12:41 pm] |
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I worked out last night what I want to read. I want to read the equivalent of The Kids Are All Right - basically tedious middle-brow fiction, but with LGBT themes. What fits the bill? |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 11th, 2012|09:16 am] |
LJ front page cycling between "I was forced to be pregnant" and "Rick Santorum no longer a contender". Hm.
Someone on Twitter described Santorum's withdrawal as "the end of the most elaborate SEO strategy yet". Heh. |
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| Piano! |
[Apr. 3rd, 2012|03:52 pm] |
Livejournal, I got a piano! Did I tell you I got a piano? I think I forgot to mention it outside A Certain Community. Anyway, I did. I played ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) gibtsdochnicht's at the beginning of March and discovered I wanted a piano enough to get a digital one, and then I went and tried some in the music shops and discovered that £300 was the kind of piano I wouldn't play and £1000 was the kind of piano I would play, and then I found out that I was going to inherit some money from my grandma, and, well, a piano is exactly the kind of thing that she and my mum would approve of. So I bought it Saturday a week ago, and it was delivered last Thursday, and PIANO.
Piano playing is going surprisingly well! I'm actually very surprised. ( Scales and arpeggios and Hanon and Bach and Mozart! )
The only thing I am slightly worried about (and noticing rather a lot) is that half an hour's practice is noticeable in my tendons. How to build up stamina without hurting myself? Any suggestions? |
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| How Companies Learn Your Secrets |
[Mar. 12th, 2012|10:20 am] |
“We have the capacity to send every customer an ad booklet, specifically designed for them, that says, ‘Here’s everything you bought last week and a coupon for it,’ ” one Target executive told me. “We do that for grocery products all the time.” But for pregnant women, Target’s goal was selling them baby items they didn’t even know they needed yet.
“With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly,” the executive said. “Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.
Quite apart from the general freakiness, it's good to know what sort of things pregnant women would NEVER buy. |
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| Jumper decisions |
[Feb. 7th, 2012|11:18 am] |
Livejournal, for my next project, I will be making a bottom-up raglan yellow jumper with a colourwork yoke (except it'll be a decrease-at fixed point one, rather than a natural decrease.) I have been playing with designing colourwork. Which works best?
( umbrellas or traditional-esque Fair Isle? ) |
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| the important thing is that I amuse myself |
[Jan. 9th, 2012|09:20 pm] |
Dad: I'm going to see a film tonight. A film about a metal.
Me: OK.
Dad: The metal's chemical symbol is Fe.
Me: It's a film about iron?
Dad: No!
Me: About ironing?
Dad: A film about ironing! How boring would that be!
Me: Well, a film about iron doesn't sound that interesting.
Dad: It's not about iron.
Me: Is is Ironman?
Dad: No, but close.
Me: Pyrites of the Caribbean?
Dad: ... oh dear.
Me: OH COME ON.
(I worked it out two hours later.) |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 6th, 2012|11:34 am] |
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Did anyone else here the Today presenter just before 9am, marvelling about Stephen Hawking's comments that "women are a mystery" because it "reminds us that he's got a full life, he's not just a brain, not just a scientist - I mean, he's been married, he's even got children!" Jesus. |
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| things to make! |
[Sep. 10th, 2011|11:10 pm] |
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teal dress
50s dress, bodice based on the same pattern as my 60s cocktail dress, but sleeveless, and with extra pleats added at neck. Slightly slimmed skirt. |
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pink jumper
Pink jumper: was supposed to be ribbed and very structured, but I just bought 500g of Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Astrakhan on Ebay for £15, so for better or worse, it's going to be a bit fuzzier than originally planned. Will be knitted on 3.5mms, probably, for tightness and structure. |
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| social mobility |
[Sep. 6th, 2011|02:49 pm] |
Folks, a discussion topic -
There's lots of stuff in the media about social mobility, and barriers to social mobility. What's basically meant by social mobility is whether people can move out of the social class they were born into, and generally politicians and the media are mainly interested in whether people can move "up", or whether middle-class kids overwhelmingly stay middle-class, and working-class kids stay overwhelmingly working-class.
I work in education, in a university where social mobility is a huge priority, and I'm currently working on a project getting stories from our students and graduates about how coming here and doing a degree has contributed to social mobility. There is a lot of good stuff going on, and it's great to read stories of people who were discouraged from going to college, but then get degrees as mature students, and just be massively passionate about studying and education.
At the same time, we're very aware that your parental income and status hugely determines where you end up. It's very obvious to me as a careers adviser that even when people have got to university and got their degrees, what they expect to happen next and how high and how realistic their aspirations are for post-university life are enormously influenced by their backgrounds. And one of the things that's often quoted is that despite the huge expansion of university places, social mobility has slowed down enormously in the last twenty to thirty years. It's also said that there is too much focus on university as the driver, to the exclusion of people being able to get into well-paid professions and positions through other routes.
So, f'list, what do you think of this debate? Do you think social mobility is important? What does social mobility mean to you? Do you think you are socially mobile? Do you think it's worse than it was for your parents' generation? What do you think makes a society socially mobile and makes it easy for people to have a different social class to their parents, and what are the things that prevent it?
CP'd to TLL |
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| NHS reforms |
[Sep. 6th, 2011|11:14 am] |
So, all the attention given to Nadine Dorries abortion counselling clause has neatly kept the focus away from what the rest of the Health and Social Care Bill. How convenient! And what's in the rest of the bill is pretty shocking.
There is more available about the specifics of the bill here: http://www.38degrees.org.uk/page/content/NHS-legal-advice/
The bill removes the Secretary of State's responsibility to provide or secure provision of NHS services. This potentially means that the NHS will cease to be a state-run service. Parliament will no longer have the responsibility (or possibly even the means) to direct the NHS to provide services that the public needs. The NHS will effectively not be democratically accountable, but run by various national and local agencies.
One of the other big changes is that the NHS could be opened up to external competition law, allowing foreign private healthcare companies to bid for and take over NHS hospitals and carry out state-paid services.
Personally, I am not wholly against some of these changes - I suspect that some areas would be better off if they were run locally than run centrally, although others would certainly be worse. But I don't think we've had enough information or debate for this decision to be made today and tomorrow. I don't think the election or the coalition agreement gives the government a mandate to make such radical changes.
Soooo ... if you felt like writing to your MP, you could do it here, where there is a pre-written email for you to edit, or you can make up your own here here. |
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| Style =/= mine! |
[Jun. 19th, 2011|09:35 pm] |
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Livejournal seems to have changed to default style=mine. Any idea how to get rid of it? I like seeing other people's styles! |
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| (no subject) |
[May. 20th, 2011|04:20 pm] |
Deborah Orr, in an otherwise unremarkable article on sex scandals and the media:
Again, a common generalisation is that powerful men are commonly a sexual menace, assuming that they can help themselves to women, when they can't. Can I suggest that although this sort of view is considered, rightly, to be militantly feminist, the truth is that it characterises women as blank and passive, every bit as much as the pre-feminism credo that insisted that women did not really like sex at all.
It must surely be acknowledged that even women, we paragons of virtue, are capable of finding power, esteem and wealth to be sexually attractive, and that these predatory men are not operating entirely in a strange vacuum, unrelated to reality? Their assumptions of female sexual availability are based on experience, not delusion.
What an odd way to perceive the relationship between sexual assault and attractiveness. I can't work out whether she's implying that the women who are attracted to a predator bear some responsibility for his warped perception that all women are attracted to him and his desire to force himself on them, or whether she thinks that it's not possible for a man to assault someone who is attracted to him. Surely it's fairly normal to be attracted to someone but still not want to sleep with them?
If the entire world is really going around sleeping with everyone they find attractive, they're keeping very quiet about it. |
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| (no subject) |
[May. 12th, 2011|06:56 pm] |
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Whaaat - no Communities Only, Journals Only and Syndicated Feeds view options? |
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| (no subject) |
[May. 6th, 2011|11:51 am] |
You may have already seen this on Facebook or Twitter, but I am just so in awe of the incoherency of our senior politicians that I want even more people to admire it:
A senior Tory:
"David Cameron would be in real trouble if the vote went the other way. This is not a traffic accident and so we will not be sending them flowers. Of course David threw the kitchen sink at them. He is a serious politician. He will do the same if they flounce out and force an election."
A minister said:
"It is naive to say that David should not have gone out and campaigned against a crappy electoral system that is a threat to our jugular. This shows what a superb political leader he is. The Lib Dems are duplicitous toerags, though I have to say they are very good ministerial colleagues."
Imagine working with someone like that. |
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| fuck off, Ian Hislop |
[Apr. 26th, 2011|11:18 am] |
So far I have heard Ian Hislop do TWO self-righteous rants about the superinjunctions story which include his oh-so-hilarious "it's all just slappers and footballers" line: one on Have I Got News For You, and one on the Today programme this morning. Have I missed any more?
I am generally in sympathy with his argument, but self-righteousness plus misogyny is a bit hard to take. The first big superinjunction story was about John Terry's alledged affair with Vanessa Perroncel, which she still maintains didn't happen. The superinjunction was the footballer's attempt to protect himself whilst Perroncel was bullied horribly in the press. But hey, she's just a slapper, right? Who cares?
Hislop's quite happy to call Andrew Marr is a hypocrite, but despite the fact that this story is actually about him having extra-marital sex and conceiving a child, it turns out that sex-based slurs are just for women. Thanks for that, Hislop. |
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| cycling |
[Apr. 18th, 2011|04:15 pm] |
Gosh, just imagine what it would be like if drivers actually followed Highway Code 163, that you should give motorcyclists, cyclists and horse riders at least as much room as you would when overtaking a car. Motorised vehicles wouldn't overtake bikes unless there was a car's width to do so, so on all those roads where there are regular traffic flows through lanes, vehicles would travel at the same speed as bikes. Revolutionary!
I'm thinking of doing a blog in May where I log every day how many Highway Code violations I see from drivers on my commute each day, and marking which are just against the Highway Code and which are actually illegal. Though I might wait until June, since there're so many bank holidays in May. |
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| (no subject) |
[Feb. 26th, 2011|11:48 am] |
Me, looking at the branding on a passing van: Skynet? Seriously? You can't be called Skynet!
Random man: I am SO GLAD someone else understands how wrong that is!
Posted via LjBeetle |
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| braised red cabbage |
[Feb. 5th, 2011|09:35 pm] |
I just made this up and it was v. nice and I am writing it down so I don't forget it.
( recipe ) |
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