Miss Frances Williams Wynn is getting right into the gossip today, about the Gunnings – poor Irish girls who married remarkably well, becoming respectively the Countess of Coventry and the Duchess of Argyll. (Each of those links will also take you to an image of the “celebrated beauties” of their day.)

There’s also a dastardly male rape plot foiled (not of course that Miss Frances is so explicit – but were she a Victorian I’m sure she wouldn’t even have said this much).

The ends of Constantinople and Venice – this review takes them together, recommends both, then suggests:

Cities are entering a new golden age. Like the great city states of 15th-century Italy, modern cities such as New York and Hong Kong have become dynamos of wealth and creativity, increasingly distinct in tempo and mentality from their surrounding state.

I’d put London in that grouping too. The geographers say that Bangkok is the most extreme “primate” city – drawing in all the wealth and skills from the national hinterland, but London must come close to its rival in that category.

It is an interesting thought that this might be necesssary for a great city – this article suggests Paris and Moscow haven’t managed it, so have been dragged down by their hinterland.

I’d really not care to live anywhere in the UK except in London (well except maybe Oxford and Cambridge, but university towns are a special case). The rest really is a different country.

From the excellent Financial Times weekend magazine (excellent book reviews – often of books not highlighted elsewhere), a balanced outline of the great project of the redevelopment of Stratford in East London as a whole city within a city – something much bigger than just the Olympics. Can the planners finally get it right?

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I know I point to Matthew Parris just about every week, but he so often has worthwhile things to say:

Every age produces its small, sick crop of brutes. Every culture reaps among its harvests the tares of human failure. Every body of human beings has its leg ulcers.
And they need excuses, these pathetic riff-raff. Every blood-lust needs to rationalise. Even the least human among us is human enough to seek reasons for our brutality. There will always be young men whose heads and lives are so comprehensively messed up that they are crazed by the urge to wound, destroy and kill.

He’s referring to the case of the killing of Jody Dobrowski, and homophobia – something being promoted by the Pope. Yet, as he says, the new “religious hatred” law would stop the tackling of the spreading of that very hatred and “justification” for violence.

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In today’s Guardian, Mary Beard produces a satisfying review of the new television series about Rome, a subject sure to fill acres of newsprint, but seldom as well as this:

“There is also, I suspect, a particularly 21st-century imperative behind the rash of recent “Romes”, from Gladiator on. In the world of publicly sanctioned multiculturalism (excellent, in many ways, as that is), popular representations of cultural difference have become increasingly dangerous and heavily policed. All the old ways of celebrating “our” identity against the peculiar habits – often the eating ones – of the outside world now seem a bit risky. …
…that past cannot answer back, has no government machinery on its side (or not usually), and you can do what you like with it. If they were portraying a modern religion, the lurid, blood-soaked representations of Roman paganism in the new Rome would probably end with the director up before the beak on a charge of “incitement to religious hatred”. As it is, it’s only Rome, so it doesn’t count.”

And she points out the uncomfortable fact for directors: “The Roman senate banned the eating of dormice in 115 BC.” (Read the whole review to find out why that matters.)

Get a Bluetooth phone to talk to a Bluetooth PDA.
Get the phone and the PDA to talk to the home computer.
Get the Wifi on the PDA working.
Get a folding keyboard to talk to the PDA.

If you get a post that is one long scream, don’t be surprised.

Any tips from experience much appreciated …

This reminds me of reading during the week that Google might be going to provide free WiFi all over San Francisco. Here – maybe – is the future: total connectivity.

Now if there was just genuine “plug and play” to go with it.

before anti-discrimination legislation:

Today we are appalled by the story told in “North Country,” a film that chronicles the first class-action lawsuit brought for sexual harassment. The suit was led by Lois Jenson, a single mother trying to provide for her family, who became one of the first women to work at Minnesota’s Eveleth Mines.

The sexual harassment she and other women at Eveleth Mines suffered in the 1970s and ’80s was, indeed, appalling. They endured lewd jokes, taunting and unwelcome physical contact. One female employee opened her locker to find sexual fluids on her personal belongings. Others experienced stalking and threatened assault outside of the workplace….

It brings back nasty memories – although nothing as concerted as this. I’ve dealt with Playboys scattered around the workplace; a really unpleasant calender (which disappeared when we put up one with an equivalent picture of a male); and endless innuendo. It reminds me that workplaces have, at least outwardly, really improved in the past 20 years.

In today’s Guardian, a study from the British Medical Journal that found that women who’ve had an abortion during a first pregnancy are less likely to be depressed than those who had a child.

The authors studied the history of more than 1,000 women, aged between 14 and 24 in 1979, who either aborted the foetus during their first pregnancy or chose to have the baby between 1970 and 1992.

The women were interviewed over several years to establish whether their decision was linked to later depression. The abortion group had a significantly higher education and income and lower total family size. The group with the highest risk of depression was that among women who went on to have their baby before 1980.

“Some women who undergo abortion will also experience clinical levels of depression. However, other research has found pre-existing mental health is the more important predictor of mental health after pregnancy, regardless of how the pregnancy is resolved.”

This reminds me to highlight the excellent blog Abortion Clinic Days – which speaks of the difficult realities of women trying to get an abortion in America today.