… is now up on Mind the Gap, and the team in Cardiff have done a spectacularly good job. There’s a feast of good writing there, and some startling ideas: I had never heard of “Prozac feminism” before.

The number of new (to me) bloggers there is delightful – one of the main reasons why I started the Carnival of Feminists was to try to get different groups and networks in touch with each other, and I hope it is achieving that.

Mind you, contemplating this carnival left me wondering “how many feminist blogs are there in the world?”

If you take a baseline figure for total blogs of somewhere north of four million, (yes I’ve seen much larger, but I’m trying to get at an “active” figure), combine that with the fact about 60 per cent of those are run by women, that produces 2.4 million blogs.

Now I don’t think I’d be going too far – in fact I’m probably being conservative, in saying that 10 per cent of those women, at least, must be feminist, whether they’d use that label or not. (If they occasionally post “it’s not fair” in relation to gender – or proclaim their right to be who they want to be, and to do what they want to do, I’d class that as feminist.)

So there must be at least 240,000 feminist blogs out there. Well we’ve highlighted a few hundred in the editions thus far, but there are still plenty yet to be “discovered” by the carnival.

Perhaps you could tell the next host, Uma on Indian Writing, about one you know. (Email indianwriting AT gmail DOT com, or use the submission form.)

It is astonishing that anyone should even think that destroying a 5,000-year-old large and complex religious site to make gravel was an acceptable option – but the Thornborough Henges are still not definitively safe:

A full public inquiry is now likely over the fate of land surrounding Thornborough Henges, three giant discs encircled by earthen ramparts which have survived from a complex of eight erected around 5000BC in the Vale of York.
The quashing of the plan by North Yorkshire county council was welcomed by English Heritage and the British Council for Archaeology which have ranked the complex as a “northern Stonehenge”. Although short of dramatic stone relics, the area is rich in burial mounds, traces of settlements and an formal avenue which may have been used for ceremonial funerals.

Archaeology now can out of very faint evidence make a great deal, and imagine how much more could be done in 50 years’ time … there don’t need to be great lumps of stone lying around for a great deal to be learnt.
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Not in the news again: a 76-country study, the Global Media Monitoring Project, has found “women continue to be underrepresented, and sometimes outright ignored, as subjects of and sources for news“.

“From Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe, we see the same patterns of under-representation and stereotyped portrayal of women in the news,” said Anna Turley, coordinator of the most recent monitoring effort. “The reason for these patterns is complicated. From the story angle and the choice of interview questions to the use of language and the choice of images; all these have a bearing on the messages that emerge in the news. These patterns are deeply rooted not only in professional practice, but in wider social assumptions about female and male attributes, roles and competencies.”

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Don’t know how I’ve missed it, but the Guardian has a cycling correspondent. This week was, apparently the start of the racing season – brrr, I shiver to think of it – and there’s also a complicated debate about how inflated your tyres should be when travelling in the cargo hold of an aircraft. For those who like trivia.

The latest Carnival of the Vanities , No 179,is now up on A DC Birding Blog. Why am I mentioning this particularly? Because John very kindly made my Old Bailey Women Burglars post, the first “editor’s pick”. Thanks!

There are also excellent science posts – particularly the Darwin one – and a generally interesting collection. Do check it out.

“The future George IV loved such social occasions, and in the Battle Royal (1788)…he is to be seen watching the match he has arranged between a working woman, ‘Big Bess,’ and his hanger-on Major William Hanger. The match fought at Plymouth lasted only five minutes, concluding with a knock-out blow and Big Bess being carried in triumph through the town exclaiming, ‘I have done the Major!'”
This is from, I believe, the essay “Equivocations of Gender and Rank,” Eighteenth-Century Life 16:1 (Winter 2002), 70-93. It was posted to the 18th-century email list by the author, Betty Rizzo.

“Secret filming” (there is some point in CCTV!) has shown the complexity of chimpanzee tool use in the wild, and the way different troupe’s “cultures” is passed along.

“The film shows the moment when a chimpanzee goes searching for a meal at a nearby termite mound. A male scrapes away some soil and takes a thick stick left nearby and thrusts it into the ground, grasping it with his hands and a foot, throwing his full body weight behind it. .. After making a hole a foot or so deep, the chimpanzee pulls the stick out and puts it to one side. He then takes a long, thin strand of grass from his mouth, chews the end to fray it, then feeds it down the hole to fish for termites. Meanwhile other chimps sit, strands of grass in their mouths, waiting for their turn.”

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In the “must be an amazing woman” category is Bibi Ayisha, 55, billed by the Telegraph as “Afghanistan’s only female warlord”.

Kaftar joined the resistance during the Soviet invasion, she claims. Her father was a powerful tribal leader and she had a naturally warlike temperament.
“It makes no difference if you are a man or a woman when you have the heart of a fighter,” she said. Kaftar claims to lead 150 men and her only concession to gender roles on the battlefield is that she requires a male relative to be present when she is fighting, in line with Afghan tradition for women outside the home.

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Pure barbarism: a US execution has been delayed, because doctors have pulled out of involvement. (What the hell were they doing there is the first place?!) So now officials are racing to complete the execution of Michael Angelo Morales before the warrant expires. But if it does, there’s a good chance he’ll survive.

Vernell Crittendon, a prison spokesman, confirmed that the prison has until 11.59 pm tonight (0759 GMT Wednesday) to execute Morales. After that, the death warrant expires and officials would have to go back to the trial judge who imposed the death sentence in 1983 for another warrant.
Seeking another warrant could prove difficult for the state, however, since the original sentencing judge, Charles McGrath, joined Morales this month in asking Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger for clemency in the case. Judge McGrath said that he no longer believed the credibility of a jailhouse informant whose testimony helped to send Morales to death row.

So pure accidents of logistics will decide if a man lives or dies, a man whose guilt is now doubted by the judge who sentenced him … US “justice”!

In 1597 churches in England were ordered to keep their official registers (baptisms, marriages and burials) on parchment. The originals earlier in Elizabeth’s reign had been written in paper.

In Rolleston, Nottinghamshire, the vicar, Robert Leband (in post between 1583 and 1625) often recorded details of the lives of the people he buried. One of this small obituaries was about the centenarian Joane Caley. It ran to 81 words in the original. In the official parchment copy the entry read “Joane Caley an ould woman”.

Only the lucky survival of the original paper means that Joane has not been lost forever. The vicar who knew her thought she was important, some clerk who may not have didn’t think an “old woman” worth any special notice.

From Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England by Peter Marshall, OUP, 2002, p. 292. (Which is, by the way, excellent.)