Link salad

[oursin]

Well, this is a real head-banger: Was it ever going to work - forming a 21st-century 'tribe' online with odd trips to a Pacific island? Decca Aitkenhead investigates. Boy, this one has 'unexamined assumptions' written all over it in neon, pulsating, capital letters.
Two years ago, a pair of young British internet entrepreneurs decided to start

Comments

[serrana]

*shrug* I find my menstrual cup much more hygenic for outdoor activities than tampons are. First, I can boil it and get it clean, and second, you have to carry used tampons around with you if you're in a wilderness setting. They can't be buried, and in most areas groundfires aren't legal, so you can't burn them either. And there's nothing quite as grue as a plastic baggie full of...well. Yuck.

That said, the tropical island folks sound weird, but basically harmless.

[oursin]

I was really worried about the facilities for keeping a mooncup adequately clean in the island setting.
(And also wonder, what do Fijian women do?)

[serrana]

Well, since all you have to do to keep it clean is rinse it periodically in clean water and boil it once a month, it'd be a much more hygenic option than anything else I can think of. If you haven't got the facilities to deal with cleaning your menstrual cup, you have MUCH, much bigger problems than your period. ;>

It's medical-grade silicone; it's basically nonreactive in the body. There's a much lower incidence of things like TSS with a menstrual cup than there is with disposable materials.

If you have to boil or filter your drinking water, you'd want to use that sort of water to rinse your cup with. *shrug* Like I say, I much prefer mine when outdoors, and when we get back to backpacking, that's what I'll take with me.

[shiv5468]

The tribe people sound creepy, and vaguely obnoxious.

[gillo]

Near the dining area is a blackboard on which Chief Alisi chalks her suggested activities for the day. These tend to be pretty undemanding - "collect firewood", say, or "grate coconuts" - and are largely ignored. The staff assure me this is only because it's Christmas time. "If members just want to lie in a hammock and read all day, well, that's cool..." Chief Alisi says, not sounding as though she entirely means it. And, in fact, most of us do spend the days playing chess, reading books or lazing about.

And not a single one of them has read
Lord of the Flies, clearly. I reckon they've got to about the end of Chapter 2, myself.

It looks like a redefinition of the concept of crassness, frankly.

[headgardener]

Richard Fortey is rather more than just a 'long-term curator' at the Natural History Museum. He's also a riveting writing on geology and palaeontology -- author of 'The Earth, an intimate history' which won several of the science book of the year awards when it appeared, and of 'Trilobite', ditto and LJ-reviewed by me sometime last year.