Author Archives: Natalie Bennett

The anti-4×4 campaign has a success

THANDIE NEWTON, the British star of Crash, the Hollywood hit film, has become a crusader against gas-guzzling cars after a Greenpeace activist slapped stickers on her 4×4 accusing her of adding to global warming.
This week, Newton, 33, will make her support for the anti-emissions campaign public by writing to fellow Hollywood stars and other celebrities who drive such vehicles, asking them to join her in switching to greener forms of transport.

One solution to this problem is to make these dinosaurs in cities profoundly unfashionable; to make their ownership symbolic of ignorance and irresponsibility. (Which of course it is.)
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OK, that’s the bit of good news I’ve found for the day. In Zimbabwe, the situation is going from bad to worse – as shown by the rate of discarded babies being found around the city. (Warning, quite graphic story, complete with an astonishing quote from a quasi-official figure about how they block the plumbing…)
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Then, with Tony Blair (soon may he go, although from the Green Party perspective perhaps not until after the local election – he is so good for our campaign) seemingly wedded to nuclear power, a timely story on the anniversary of Chernobyl: the BRITISH farmers who still have to get their stock checked with a Geiger counter before they can take them to market.

Quote of the day from the doorstep

Intercom: Buzz, Buzz

Mature woman’s voice: Yes?

Me: I’m one of your Green Party candidates for the local election. Have you thought about voting Green?

Voice: (Laughs.) No. I’m a member of the Labour Party, with all its horrors….

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The other event of the day was the young gentleman who dripped down the hall from the shower, wrapped in a towel, his face covered with shaving cream.

Sorry!

History Carnival No 28 …

… is now up on Patahistory, and it is a whopper. Not sure if there are record number of links, but it sure looks like it.

Some of the highlights include the collections of MUSTS for historical fiction set in the Victorian era – if you’ve read any Anne Perry you’ll realise just how true it is; some great Women’s History Month posts, and much more…

P.S. Do check out the booklist for Christian homeschoolers … showing just what a huge industry this is.

Australia’s shame

Many years ago I covered the Aboriginal issues beat for a regional daily paper in Australia, and it was the most depressing subject I’ve ever had to deal with. My inability to find a legal way to report the abuse of an Aboriginal youngster counts as one of my greatest failings as a journalist. And Australia’s shame just goes on and on.

Jenissa Ryan, 15, was the great-granddaughter of the revered Albert Namatjira, Australia’s first celebrated Aboriginal painter. Was.

Police believe Jenissa was bashed by a teenage boy and a girl – almost her own age – as she walked the Alice Springs streets on the last Friday night in January. It may have been the injuries she sustained in this attack that killed her.
Attempting to walk home to the Hidden Valley camp, she collapsed unconscious in the gutter near the college. It was there that three teenage boys found her in the early hours of Saturday morning.
Police have testified that the boys thought Jenissa was drunk or dead. Instead of calling for help, they dragged her 10 metres behind a knoll on the verge of the college grounds and raped her. Discarding their condoms, they left the scene.
…Nobody knows how long Jenissa Ryan lay unconscious in the fierce morning heat as her life slipped away. But by the time ambulance officers arrived, honey ants were beginning to gather on her dishevelled clothes.
That means a number of residents of middle-class Grevillea Drive probably noticed. …It was not until around 10.30am that a female college employee called for an ambulance.

Now it has made the national media – two months later.

A 15th-century rhyme that is still in use…

Thirty days hath November
April June and September
Of eight-and-twenty is but one
And all the remnant thirty one.

The oldest known version of this is in a 15th-century manuscript, and I still recite a slightly modernised version to myself when trying to sort the 30s from the 31s.

It is a powerful demonstration of why so much early modern “technical information” is put in verse – while oral transmission and memory remains important, even if the material is also being committed to print, and other media – Thomas Tusser, author of a phenomenally successful book of housewifery, recommends that the “comely decked guest-room” be decorated with painted verses, such as:

“The sloven and the careless man, the roinish [scabby] nothing nice,
To lodge in chamber comely decked, are seldome suffered twice.”

A cobbler too, was expected to be able to readily “reckon up his tools in rhyme” – surely a good way of checking nothing was missing.

(From Jones, M. “Such pretty things would soon be gone’: The Neglected Popular Verse 1480-1650”, in Hattaway (ed) A Companion to English Reniassance Literature and Culture, Blackwell, 2000 p. 457. This is a mammoth tome, but has some really excellent stuff in it. I’m using it to try to ensure I haven’t missed anything important in various projects relating to the period.)

Friday Femme Fatales No. 50

Break out the balloons and the streamers – we reach a total collection of 500 women bloggers. (Yes there are millions out there, this just seeks to highlight a nice range of them and give them a bit of publicity.

Why “femmes fatales?” Because these are killer posts, selected for great ideas and great writing, general interest and variety.

First off, unusually, I’m going to start with a whole blog, rather than a particular post, since it would be unfair to single any one out: Reading Middlemarch is a group blog of women (at least I think they are all women) reading George Eliot’s masterpiece, and reflecting on it as they go. A great idea – and it would be fascinating if someone wanted to do something similar with a feminist classic – say The Female Eunuch? (Just a thought… I’m already committed to a variety of projects for about 23 hours a day.)

Turning back to the politics – well I have too, even if with a heavy heart – but let’s start with a positive story: on Avast! Feminist Conspiracy! (which proves from its title that irony is alive and well in America – whew!) an account of the campaign of Tammy Duckworth, “a disabled combat veteran and a woman of color, running on the kind of democratic platform that many of us joined the party for”.

Also on a note of celebration, Mikaila on The Pan Collective (a women’s blog “on Caribbean life” makes her first blog post, celebrating Jamaica’s first female Prime Minister – the Honorable Portia Simpson Miller.

Now I think Hecate on her blog should stop pulling her punches, say what she really thinks, as on the case of the Wiccan high priests versus a Great Falls, South Carolina town council. “The basic premise is that if xians aren’t allowed to shove their religion down everyone else’s throat, then the xians are being persecuted,” she says.

Belledame222 on Fetch My Axe (know the feeling) reflects on sex, porn, oh, all those issues around sex-positive feminism.

Turning to the artistic side, Lisa Call is, I guess you’d say, an artistic quilter, or an artist who quilts…? Forgive me; not my area. But she’s tracked the movement of her Welcome to Parker and given us a peak.

Then to the heartbreaking work – in this case medical – side. On Lost in Sasazuka, Kim is a final-year medical student on placement in the “deepest darkest Northern Territory” (Australia). And this is her quite technical, but deeply moving, account of the attempts to treat a young child, a case of ‘third world’ lifestyle – dirty water & overcrowding, managed with with ‘first world’ knowledge and resources.

Staying in warmer parts, That Girl in Samoa attends a movie premiere, a rather special premiere, of the the first Pacific Island feature length film, Sione’s Wedding.

Finally, a fun link for readers who have lots of computer power to burn – mine is still groaning. (If you’re on dial-up DO NOT CLICK.) On i-Anya Angela Thomas has a Tibetan-themed music sim.

And next week, we’ll continue on, towards the 1,000 mark….

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If you missed last week’s edition, it is here.

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Please: In the next week if you read, or write, a post by a woman blogger and think “that deserves a wider audience” (particularly someone who doesn’t yet get many hits), drop a comment here.

It really does make my life easier!