This morning Macka discusses the madness of Australia’s obsession with buying inferior overseas products and selling freehold land and strategic ports to Chinese Liberation Army. While Australians cannot buy even the smallest studio as freehold in
Beijing
... Australia All Over is a long-running weekly Sunday morning radio program produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The show airs each Sunday morning from 5:30am until 10am on the ABC Local Radio network and has been continuously presented by Ian McNamara since 1985. Wikipedia
Loud, constant parakeet chatter, the squawking of crows – there is no such thing as bad birdsong, a welcome respite from self-absorption
To This We’ve Come: A Reality Show Where Men Compete To Impregnate A Woman
Jessa Crispin: “Despite being pretty in a Getty-stock-image kind of way, and despite being a successful holistic health and beauty expert, Kristy has not yet found her fantasy husband. So she has turned to reality television programming to help her out. That’s the premise of the new show Labor of Love, in which 15 men compete to be the ‘one’ honored with impregnating the show’s heroine. As I watched her journey toward motherhood unfold, I thought, finally. Finally, someone has found a way to make a buck off the fracturing of the American family.” – The Guardian
First rescued snow leopard cub in India returns to mother Third Pole
F or Deirdre Bair, being Beckett’s biographer entailed exhausting hours spent on bar stools, keeping out of the reach of drunken Irish poets and professors
For Slate’s 2015 podcast series The History of American Slavery, Andrew Kahn created an interactive visualization of the 20,000+ voyages that made up the Atlantic slave traded that lasted 315 years. A video of the interactive map is embedded above.
As we discussed in Episode 2 of Slate’s History of American Slavery Academy, relative to the entire slave trade, North America was a bit player
What Other Governments Are Spending To Save Their Nations’ Arts Sectors From COVID Collapse
From prosperous Germany (a €1 billion rescue package) to destitute Madagascar (distributing bags of rice to out-of-work artists), here’s what ten countries are doing to mitigate the damage that the pandemic and shutdown have done to cultural institutions and arts workers. – The Guardian
Has Somebody Really Figured Out How To Decipher The Voynich Manuscript This Time?
“Any attempts to decipher the manuscript’s unique text, made up of a mixture of handwritten Latin letters, Arabic numbers, and unknown characters, have so far failed. … Now, after three years of analysis, the German Egyptologist Rainer Hannig … believes he has cracked the code to translating the work, and found the manuscript’s language to be based on Hebrew.” – The Art Newspaper
Dracula’ Wasn’t Inspired By Transylvania — It Was Inspired By Ireland
The town of Sligo, specifically, and the dire cholera outbreak there in 1832. Dracula author Bram Stoker’s mother lived through that epidemic, and there’s evidence, circumstantial but convincing, that it was her memories of the pestilence on which Stoker built the original vampire novel; Transylvania, which the author never visited, was simply a stand-in location. – Atlas Obscura
My father died nearly thirteen years ago, and I find myself thinking of him more and more with each passing year. My eulogy at his funeral did not fully capture the towering presence he was in my life, and he remains so in death. I so wish he had lived to see the man I have become over these past 13 years and hope he would be proud. My friend Al Sturgeon captured my thoughts this Father's Day, including this wonderful song from Chet Atkins
A Bittersweet Father's Day
It is hardly news to anyone that, for the past few decades, researchers, journalists and partners and parents everywhere have been discussing, debating and dissecting the division of labor in homes, especially in homes where partners have children. In the 1980s, Arlie Hochschild’s concept of “the second shift” articulated the phenomenon that, despite entering the workforce, women still took care of the majority of the household duties after they came home at night. Nowadays, this sort of work is sometimes called “invisible labor” because, as the argument goes, those who do it (usually women, according to the research) are doing it behind the scenes.
But are they? In my experience, making favorite meals, calling out spelling lists and helping pack the trunks for camp has placed me center stage. Sometime after my daughter was born, when I suddenly had two children under two, I complained to an older female friend about being the one who worked more hours at home while my husband put in more hours in the office. “But you get to be #1!” she said with a surprising level of enthusiasm. “I don’t want to be #1,” I replied, somewhat appalled. . . .
What I am suggesting is that, in many families, it is not only the amount of work that partners do or don’t do that is worth thinking about but also how visible that work is—and that men’s labor may be the most invisible of all.
It is not unusual for men I know, or who I work with as clients, to complain of being called the “emergency backup parent” by teachers or to feel like a “fifth wheel” in their own homes. That’s what you get when you lie on the couch and watch football, you might be thinking, but I don’t know many dads who do that anymore. In modern families, most moms and dads are working—in the office or in the home or on the soccer field or in the car—almost all of their waking hours.
Day to day, men do the mental work of thinking about their children and spouse as much as women. And on average, men spend more time than women taking care of finances, lawn care, technology support, trash collection and home and car maintenance—tasks that are often done out of sight.