2024-03-28

This world is ruining my reading

I’m so tired lately. A lot of people have been saying they’re tired. It’s hard to get up every day and read about what horrible new thing has made “normal” move another step towards “intolerable”. We’re all frogs in the pot at the moment, aren’t we? (Cue Bruce Cockburn: The Trouble With Normal Is It […]

2012

And so — 2012. As usual Neil Gaiman has the best wish, which has managed to condense thoughts that took me three pages to write for my niece into a few short lines. Well, that’s why Neil gets the big bucks and I don’t, isn’t it? I hope that in this year to come, you […]

It Gets Better

I’ve long had a lot of time for Dan Savage, low-bullshit un-shockable sex columnist and general sensible guy, but his latest project is really something I’d like everyone under the sun to both know about and spend an hour of their time with. The It Gets Better Project is Dan’s attempt, through video, to convince […]

Choose Privacy Week

(h/t to BoingBoing) Lovely video from the American Library Association about privacy, what it means to people, why we should worry about it, various (mostly American) legal issues, and why librarians are your friends. If you don’t have 20+ minutes to watch, start watching at about 19:30 for a good summary of pros, cons, the […]

On the flu and the choice to panic (or not)

I’ve been doing my best to restrain my usual cynicism about the hysterical media coverage of health issues in the case of the swine flu, as until quite recently there have been too many unknowns to do much other than shrug and say “we’ll see”. But it seems now that we do know some things: […]

Advice for idle parenting

The Idle Parent Children actually have an inbuilt self-protective sense that we destroy by over-cosseting. They become independent not so much by careful training but in part simply as a result of parental laziness. Last Sunday morning, Victoria and I lay in bed till half past 10 with hangovers. What a result! And the more […]