I’ve never quite understood why everyone gets so excited about Mary Queen of Scots. (Well I do – sex, murder, death all involving an attractive woman, but it is one of those stories explored and told so many times I find it hard to raise an interest.)
But in case she is your cup of tea – it is worth saying that the only known painting of her as Queen has gone on display today at the National Portrait Gallery.
(I might even pop in to visit her…)
Drumroll please … the Carnival of Feminists No 21 is now up on Being Amber Rhea. And this time you don’t even have to imagine the sound-effects, because Amber has created a carnival first – a podcast. I’m at work so I can’t listen to it now, but I’m sure it is just as excellent as the rest of the carnival.
I was particularly taken by the section on defining your feminism – always a tough task. (My answer usually depends on which day you ask me…)
But don’t dally here, do go over and check out the carnival.
It is enough to make an Australian choke on a cork from their hat with laughter – a British village is complaining that life is being made impossible by flies.
Residents claim that they have to sweep up piles of dead flies every morning. Local shops have sold out of fly spray and fly paper. The villages also suffered invasions of house flies in 2001 and 2003, but this summer is said to be the worst….Mr Draper said that he had found a newspaper cutting from 1862 in which a horse-rider complained of the large number of flies in Collingbourne Valley. He added: “If it’s a natural phenomenon, then there is little anybody can do about it.â€
Except of course the obvious – put in fly-screens on windows and doors.
I think, now the shooting has stopped in the Middle East, the media silly season might be declared to have officially begun.
You can feel a sense of the inevitable sneaking along: first they were talking about cloning a mammoth, now it is reckoned that mammoth sperm might have survived in the permafrost. (Which is of course all melting, thus exposing all of these ancient carcasses. But where will the mammoths live if there are no glaciers left?)
… now I’ve got good cause:
“in 1776 James Boswell was still trying to persuade his father to disinherit all his female relatives, on the grounds that “our species is transmitted through males only, the females being all along no more than a Nidus, or nurse, as Mother Earth is to plants of every sort”. (p; 101)
(Williams, C.D. “Another self in the case”: gender, marriage and the individual in Augustan literature,” in Porter, R. (ed) Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, Routledge, London, 1997.)
Over on CommentisFree I’ve a piece on the importance of the jury system for democracy. It would seem, however, that those of a more authoritarian bent don’t agree.
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