'I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want-an adorable pancreas?': Jean Kerr, The Snake Has All The Lines (1960).
Okay, I daresay no-one has ever been told their pancreas is adorable, but people whose life's work involves pancreases may, perhaps, be occasionally moved to comment if they ( Read more... )

In case anyone hasn't seen it, a woman got a sexist message complimenting her on her appearance on LinkedIn (that's right, on a site that's for making professional contacts) from a senior male in the same profession. She called it out on Twitter and got the usual troll-back, including being called a Feminazi by the DM.*
So there is a lot of 'woez ( Read more... )

People who are either total strangers or whom I only know by repute coming up to me to inform me that they love my work.

This, and the good panels I've attended and the not-too-bad one I was part of, compensate for the fact that I am playing that tiresome conference game of dodging tedious person I do not want to get cornered by.

I have not only ( Read more... )

Riffing off on a tangent from a discussion somebody linked to:

One of the good things about being My Age is that if somebody (and in practice this has been a gender-neutral phenomenon anyway) makes an appreciative comment vis a vis the green streaks, I can assume it's just that ('Hey! today I saw this Cool Old Lady with green streaks in her hair ( Read more... )

Happy, happy-making thing: received the other day, The Essential Rebecca West: Uncollected Prose, which appears to be intended as a taster volume for the delights of Dame R for those daunted by, say, the sheer mass of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. It consists of selected fugitive articles and reviews from her copious journalism, some previously ( Read more... )

*Sits going wibble*

It's been that kind of a week.

Someone called me a polymath this morning during a telephone conversation in which they were seeking from me information just somewhat tangential to my general areas of interest, and during which a lot of what I was doing was vamping and tap-dancing while trying to come up with something more ( Read more... )