feminism

Breakfast reading 5.10

Posted by hil

Murdoch turning his empire green: ‘Although some of his newspapers were once sceptical about global warming, he said that although he was no scientist, he knew how to assess a risk. “This one is clear. Climate change poses clear,
catastrophic threats. We may not agree on the extent, but we certainly can’t afford the risk of inaction,” he said.’

Diggers speak about Iraq ambush: Did anyone else see this last night? Its been covered in the papers too. It seemed like something new to me, interviewing soldiers giving accounts of their activities as if they were policeman, sportsmen or celebrity. I can’t quite work out why I found it so disquieting – anyone else feel it was inappropriate or different?

The fine print in the university endowment scheme: The Howard government proposes centralised control of universities with a view to privatisation. It has wedge politics written all over it, too. Chilling.

Blogging Was Just the Beginning: Women’s Voices are Louder Online: Chris Nolan on political commentary and feminism online. (via Doc). I hope to get to other articles in S&F Online’s Blogging Feminism issue, too.

The SMH ran true to bumbling form (when it comes to its coverage of new media) the other day with this ‘lesson’ about blogging, which conflated the opening question “Isn’t blogging just for people who are stupid and lonely?” with women bloggers, gender inequity and ambivalence in Australia! “Of the 8000 women’s blogs listed at BlogHer.org, just 96 are of Australian or New Zealand origin. By comparison Canada, a country with 36 per cent more people, lists 82 per cent more women’s blogs.” I think its silly to take membership of BlogHer as a real statistic on the ratio in Australia. I’m not listed at Blogher, for instance.

Doc, who always gets a real buzz out of flying and seeing whats below, has some wonderful photos of Greenland from the air. Check out his other sets for Scotland, the Hebrides, England and others, too.

Little Golden Books: Tibor Gergely

Posted by hil

The following illustration is by Tibor Gergely from the Little Golden Book ‘Houses’ by Elsa Jane Werner. I’m posting it as a comparison to the one by Richard Scarry in another Little Golden Book, ‘Cars and Trucks’, over at Wee Wonderfuls. There is an interesting discussion there about how in updates of the book that particular illustration has been changed to accommodate a more feminist attitude to gender roles. This one obviously belongs firmly in the earlier era, and I wonder if it was changed in a similar way later on?

I don’t have an exact date for this book – its one of a set of four books that together make up a ‘Little Golden Book Library’ that I bought in about 1983, and the dates given collectively are 1948 through 1969.

I was interested to see in an online bio of Tibor Gergely that as a young man he worked for two years in a Vienna marionette theatre as a puppet designer and stage decorator :-).