1) Simultaneously entertaining and alarming your kitten, dogs making their own song, and a dog proving that confusion is clear across species. Pigs decide floods are fun, fish decide a duck is their leader, and humans and animals can heal one another. Also, a lot of us probably feel like this by day's end (Mike said it was just missing a dropped ( Read more... )

1) When we arrived home yesterday afternoon from a weekend visit, we saw Bertha blithely sitting on her pot as she has been doing all week. Shortly after my last post, Mike spotted two eggs in the pot, and Bert has been coming and going in morning and afternoon to spell her.

But then this morning we woke up to this: ( Read more... )

In Pt. 1, I mentioned some problematic tropes that occur over and over in U.S. entertainment, and mentioned how The Wire largely avoided this by presenting a strangely universal story springing from actual events in a specific U.S. city. ( Read more... )

I really enjoyed this post because, regardless of whether you agree with all her points or not, it does what I wish I'd see more often, which is to examine what messages get reinforced repeatedly across media texts. Not surprisingly, this is easier to spot when the texts are not from your culture. One thing I've always liked about fanworks is ( Read more... )

1) Another great game played by Team USA against a good French team. I was also really happy for Japan's win. The commentators were right about how they have so much riding on their victories. I was also reminded of an article on the Cup that discussed the sparse number of viewers for women's sports in the U.S. ( Read more... )

1) This read like a piece of fanfic to me -- The Suicide Attempt That Ended With a Kiss

2) I have problems with the idea that "social" is the answer to information seeking, and their examples certainly don't support that idea. ( Read more... )