The man behind the mail-order bride slur, John Brogden, has been forced to resign. (And I was pleased to see that Anne Summers, one of the grandes dames of Australian feminism, agrees with me.)

On another subject altogether, has anyone else been having problems logging into Blogger? I keep having to have two or three goes at it, both at work and home, getting error messages indicating “cookies are not enabled”. Anyone know of a solution? And yes, my cookies are perfectly available and I believe tasty, thank you.

Light blogging today, due in part to inertia induced by horribly sore muscles. The message for next season is that I must do more preparation for wicketkeeping. But I have added a nice range of new bloggers to my blogroll: please check them out.

Two stories on opposite sides of the world are a reminder that an awful lot of stereotypes about women, and men, haven’t changed at all.

An Australian state Opposition leader has got into trouble for calling the premier’s wife a mail-order bride. (She happens to be from Malaysia – actually highly unlikely to be a source of women using paid online marriage arrangement services, since it is far too wealthy.) It left me wondering why “mail-order bride” should be considered, as it undoubtedly is, a nasty term of abuse?

Perhaps the suggestion is that anyone who is a “mail-order bride” is little better than a prostitute (an uncomfortably obvious exposure of the traditional economics of marriage) and anyone who marries them can’t get a “proper” woman – a slur on his manhood indeed. I wonder, if you called such women “economic refugees”, would they get better treated?

Then in France, that home of supposedly sophisticated relations between the sexes, the Interior Minister, and possible future President, Nicolas Sarkozy is, according to The Telegraph considering divorcing his wife Cécilia, since while the French public apparently has no problem with male politicians having several simultaneous relationships, one of their wives doing the same thing is considered a reflection on her husband’s virility.

Why even, if this were true, should virility have anything to do with political ability? Is there some hint here into the reasons why women candidates can find selection committees, if often not voters, so resistant to their campaigns?

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On another side of stereotypes, the Sydney Morning Herald’s Spike column reports that the second and fourth most common Australian web searches for men are Ned Kelly and Slim Dusty (an old-style country music singer, now dead). Funny how one of the most urbanised societies on earth clings to its foundation myths.

Shane Warne (cricketer) and John Howard (current, dreadful Prime Minister) were first and third, for the record.

Well the “sweat it out” theory seems to have made my cold neither better nor worse: thoroughly unscientific conclusion – it doesn’t work.

Well today I tested out, possibly to destruction, the theory of “sweating out” a cold. Having been down with a rotten one for a couple of days, I really wasn’t fancying a scheduled cricket game, but since I knew we were already two short I didn’t think I really could pull out – nine is almost a team; eight really isn’t.

So I trotted along, and wasn’t altogether surprised to be asked to keep wicket. Well, I told myself, at least I won’t have to run – just leap up and down and around hundreds of times ….

But in cricketing terms it worked quite well. I was pretty chuffed with how I kept, to one serious quickie and a couple of sometimes wayward medium pacers.

And then happily I didn’t (quite) have to bat as we astonishingly – with the help of a magnificent century – managed to successfully chase a total of 251 in 32 overs.

And I didn’t even get a lot of bruises …

It was only the third time I’ve kept since taking it up again after an 18-year hiatus, and I think I have to thank cycling for the fact that I survived the experience – without the underlying level of fitness it has given me I would never have made it.

And feeling rotten might have even helped in an odd way – it took some of the pressure off feeling like I have to succeed amid an otherwise all-male team.

But as for the sweating-out theory, we’ll see. I’m off to bed for a long sleep … I may be some time.

A fascinating collection of posts on the 18th-century email list has been exploring historic inks. It’s a reminder of how much more complicated everyday living was in the past; how much you had to know about all sorts of things that now happen invisibly, off stage.

I once intended to learn Chinese painting – might even get back to it one of these days, since I love the results – so I have got a lovely stone palettes and ink sticks, which just have to be ground with water.

But in the West these don’t seem to have developed; instead you started from scratch. There are some recipes here. (And if you are wondering about the seemingly essential “gallnuts” they are: “A nutlike swelling produced on an oak or other tree by certain parasitic wasps.”)

But the results, it seems, from the The ink corrosion website – which deals in detail with “major threat to our cultural heritage” – were not always ideal.

This left me musing about modern inks: pen and computer. How durable are they? But then again as librarians often warn, electronic records are certainly worse.

* Women’s eNews today has a commentary on the lack of visibility of prominent women in the media. I found it hopelessly naive and US-centric, but it did remind me I’d been meaning to point to Pratie Place’s post on the Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai. If you were going to write a book on “great women of the modern world” she’d be near the top of the list.

* Research into the death of Christopher Marlowe that looks somewhat better founded than such reports usually are.

* Two Australian journalists face jail for refusing to reveal a source. This was not some issue of “national security”, but a wrangle over veterans’ pensions that embarrassed the government. So sad to think that little more than a decade ago Australia was one of the world’s leaders in human rights. It is getting more like the “Land of the Not-Free” every day – which of course suits John Howard just fine. Still, I suppose it is at least not yet AS bad ….

* Alabama’s use of the death penalty sounds like something out of the 19th century:

All 19 of Alabama’s appellate court judges are white, as are 41 of its 42 elected District Attorneys. Odds are 1 in 3 that your jury will be all white as well. …Though black people account for only 26% of Alabama’s population overall, nearly 63% of its prisoners are black. Of the 23 people executed in Alabama between 1975 and 2001, 70% were black.

So much for the right to life.
(Via Pen-Elayne.)