This may not have crossed all my dr rdrz' radar: Wellcome Trust and Wellcome Collection: planned building closure. And, as my dr rdrz may or may not know, the Trust is one of the world's major medical research NGOs, and the Collection is one of the world's major centres for the history of medicine. We feel that they know whereof they are dealing ( Read more... )

Title of a feature on public health and safety information posters from an earlier day:
That’s us told… posters from when the nanny state knew best.

Well, some of us still feel that washing one's hands, not spreading germs, eschewing driving after drinking, etc, are actually good rules to live by in society.

These seem to me to be about individual ( Read more... )

And muttering furiously about 'Young people today' -

NB while the child's behaviour was atrocious, I think we can blame the parents, who are all about their offsprings' speshul snoflakiness, and relative to me, they are young people.

When I first saw that report, yesterday, about child climbing on a sculpture in the Tate Modern, while parents stood ( Read more... )

I was somewhat aghast at Hadley Freeman's column today (I hope she is doing that journalistic thing of '6 people I met last week = new trend') except, you know, this is not a new thing. Even if we ignore Germaine Greer trumpeting the benefits of withdrawal c. 1980, I would not be surprised if there were not already a PhD thesis on resistant ( Read more... )

It's a long time since anyone actually said to me explicitly 'But surely a grown woman should have the poise to be able to deal with unwelcome attentions' in a discussion about sexual harassment, and in that case it was a bloke of at least a generation senior to myself, at a time when the issue was just beginning to be articulated.

Which I somehow ( Read more... )

Thanks to everybody who responded to the 'should hedjog transmogrify into Mr Toad vroom-vroom parp-parp' post yesterday: these replies are still giving me food for thought.

Have also been thinking further about whether actual skills, of whatever kind, are essential to adulthood, or whether it is really more of a state of mind and an approach to ( Read more... )

Rape victims seeking compensation are having their payouts reduced if they had been drinking before they were attacked. That's right. Women who are among that devastatingly small minority whom the law in its wisdom has deemed to really have been raped, are being denied Criminal Injuries Compensation because [sic] 'they had been drinking'.

However ( Read more... )

Britons give more to donkey sanctuary than abuse charities. Okay, maybe this is just All About The English and Animals (no, this is not another bestiality post, honest) - read in, er, Journal of Saw It Somewhere Studies that the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds had more members than any political party (it might even have been than all ( Read more... )

Something which a fair number of my flist have been considering, when not being eaten by zombies etc.

Well, yes, maybe, perhaps, a good thing. But (IAMC) to what or whom is the responsibility due? the audience or some other thing (though I do take the point that people who have muses demanding that they write threeway incestuous necrophiliac ( Read more... )