Where were the hats?

Dear ABC

I very much enjoyed viewing the telemovie Miss Austen Regrets last night. It was a beautiflly written and acted dramatisation of Jane's life.

But I'm afraid that I do have to take issue with some of the costuming decisions.

I have been watching historical dramas for almost thirty years and feel that I've developed some expertise in this field. For instance I can spot at a glance the difference between Regency, Victorian and Edwardian attire.

This expertise has given me the unshakeable belief that until about 1960, English folk unless in the direst of penury would at all times when outdoors be wearing hats.

In most of the outdoor scenes (beautifully filmed against stately English home backgrounds) Jane and the other characters were hatless despite the clarity of the sunshine.

Was there perchance a milliners' strike during the production of this film? Did the high quality of the actors mean that this item of costuming was unaffordable?

I realise that you didn't actually MAKE this film but you are responsible for scheduling particular programs. Please note that traditionally the 8:30 Sunday timeslot has been for "bonnet dramas" and they are called that for a reason.


Yours sincerely

Mary

White Powder

According to The Sydney Morning Herald, the US Republicans read C.S.Lewis.

Or at least saw the movie

WASHINGTON: Conservative Republicans have begun sending bags of salt to Olympia Snowe's Maine office as part of a protest at her decision to break ranks and vote for a compromise version of Barack Obama's health-care scheme.

Salt is used on US roads to melt snow.

''Olympia Snowe has sold out the country. Having been banished to our world after Aslan chased her out of Narnia, Snowe is intent on corrupting this place too. So we should melt her,'' said one of the organisers of the rock salt protest.

Part of me thinks it's an imaginative and witty way to make a point but, you know, it does sound like misogynistic bullying.

And aren't there still security measures in place to stop politicians being sent bags of white powder?

Too late for the bandwagon but I'll play the same tune

My two-year-old was holding the copy of Debra Adelaide's Household Guide to Dying I'd borrowed from the library a few months ago but couldn't bring myself to read thinking it might be unnecessarily upsetting or depressing when there were likely to be other more cheering things to read like um the newspaper.

"What's this?" she asked.

"It's a book about death," I said.

She laughed and threw it back on the bed. "No it's not. It's a book about teapots!"

As practically everyone else already knows, we were both right.

I started to read it that day and didn't stop until finishing it after midnight by which stage I was a teary emotional mess.

I've often thought there should be warnings on the front of books like they show at the beginning of telly shows.

This Household Guide's would say "Some readers should be advised they may have strong emotional reactions to the contents of this book. These include parents of young children, sick people, anyone who has ever had a serious illness, anyone who has known anyone with a serious illness, anyone who is scared of sudden death, slow death, leaving things undone, in fact anyone really."

Apart from that, it was utterly charming, especially the chooks called after the Bennet girls.

Love and Marriage

Last week-end The Sydney Morning Herald was stirring the pot with >a long feature by sex therapist and psychologist Bettina Arndt about s*x in marriage saying:

different libidos were creating a generation of men who were “miserable, angry and really disappointed” that their need for s*x was “being totally disregarded in their relationship”.

Now I didn't read the actual feature because I suspected it would make me angry and I note the Hoydens are a bit worked up about it this morning...

But I did get a bit teary when this letter turned up in the letters page today:

Reading between lines
My wife was a very avid reader in bed ("Sex, wives and libido", Good Weekend, February 28). I didn't know whether she found the novels so interesting or whether she wanted to be sure that by the time she put the book down I was fast asleep. Once, I told her that the girlfriends I had before I met her never read in bed. Yes, she answered, because they were illiterate.

When she complained that I was snoring, I told her that this was my mating call, but she said that this didn't work with her. When I told her that I really must be getting old as the girls don't even whistle any more in the street when I pass, she reassured me: They still do, but your hearing is gone.

I was very happily married for over 40 years and I think a mutual sense of humour is the most important ingredient in a successful relationship.

This is in memoriam.

Andrew Partos Seaforth

Awww

Ambivalence about bonnets

I can't say I was actively looking forward to Cranford, the ABC's latest BBC bonnet drama.

But I was planning on watching it.

I love a good bit of historical drama especially when it has a decent budget and nice clothes and the sort of high production values the BBC sees fit to lavish on such things. (Thank you BBC!! If national telly licensing will save the Australian television drama industry I say "bring it on!") One of my favourite games is playing "spot the star of British stage and screen in fancy dress". And if it's based on a book I haven't read, well then there'll be a surprise at the end for once, won't there?

But it must be said, Cranford did not start well.

Dame Judi Dench, Imelda Staunton and other famous older actresses were running round in big skirts and bonnets arguing over whose gossip was more extraordinary? Not nearly as funny as I think I was expected to find it. And my Beloved agreed.

In fact, when the phone rang 15 minutes in, we both lunged for the handset. He was extremely disappointed to find it was for me.

But then I persisted, thinking "it's got to improve. Dame Judi, Michael Gambon and Julia Sawahla and the brother from Party Animals who isn't going to be the next Doctor aren't THAT hard up are they?"

It seemed a slim hope as Victorian novel cliche of dutiful daughter giving up love followed cliche of matchmaking stepmother followed new big city doctor trying to win over wary locals. Yawn.

But then something changed. I came to trust in the magic of the personable young people falling in love and by the time of the cough in the morning becoming the dangerous fever that night I was hooked. (this isn't really a spoiler because THIS IS A VICTORIAN NOVEL but all the same stop now if you don't want to know) By the time of the harrowing deathbed scene I was a teary blubbery mess.

Well done Mrs Gaskell! That did the trick.

Angry Penguins Update

I finishedthis book, really I did.

But I can't swear, 100 per cent, that I kept on liking it.

Because it made me feel

just a little

actually quite a bit

um

thick.

I mean there were lots of lovely absurd bits about the clash of popular and "serious" culture and well observed moments of domestic life and I realise it's NOT MEANT to be taken too LITERALLY especially when people zip babies into motorcylcle jackets and ride off with two pillion passengers. I mean as IF a proper bike jacket would have room for a child inside!

And I did understand a lot of the absurdity of the situation of trying to find the meaning to everything through structural analysis.

But I finished the actual plot part last Friday on my way home from work and didn't get a chance to open it again until waiting for the bus on Monday where I found a 30 page appendix explaining the search for meaning by classifying the 175 most common words in five texts of Helen Garner in different dimensions complete with diagrams and refernces to Halliday, Saussure and Jung.

And I'm afraid even though it was an EXTREMELY long journey with quite bad traffic, I didn't quite get the finer points of some of the arguments.

But it was quite nicely done.

I think I might like this book

Last night I started to read Alex Jones's Helen Garner and the Meaning of Everything . It's about a retired academic of literary studies pondering life while reading the books of Helen Garner.

This is an odd choice, firstly, because the only book of Garner's I've ever read was Monkey Grip a really long time ago. I was 18 and, of course, I knew everything about life and love and most of the time I was reading the book I wished I could just SHAKE the central charater for being so utterly HOPELESS about men. And, secondly, I spent yesterday whimpering in bed with the sort of cold where you need to sleep for 18 hours and can barely remember your own name much less follow complex things like the news or books about other books you haven't read.

And this is a complex book. I mean it has appendices! And endnotes! Endnotes in a novel! Moreover, endnotes well worth reading because they're not just references but comments!

So I am a bit surprised to find how much I'm enjoying it.

Well, so far, of course.

On the bus this morning I giggled out loud and disturbed my neighbour mid-application of lipliner when I found this on page 35 where the protagonist (the Dreamer) is advising Poppy, a high school student with a much older friend who may or may not be a boyfriend, about studying:

At last we came to English. Polly's class were reading a number of novels. Rita had bought copies of them, and Poppy produced them now - a low, uneven stack of mulitcoloured covers reflected in the glass of the coffee table. Uppermost in the pile was The Great Fire.* I put my finger on it.
'I'd start with this one,' I said, 'it should appeal to you. It's like Lolita retold as a Mills and Boon.

Now I LOVED Shirley' Hazzard's The Great Fire . I bought copies for at least two other people as gifts. But, it has to be admitted, it is about a love affair between a very young teenaged girl and a much older man and even worse, the ending was really really really contrived in a chocolate-boxy way and not really entirely credible. So, you know, I felt a bit bad about laughing because I was emotionally involved so I thought maybe this Alex Jones isn't such a nice man after all.

But THEN, I realised there's an endnote!

I flipped over to it.

It says:

Perhaps the Dreamer's unduly harsh judgement is coloured by his circumstances at this point.

So funny and not that mean after all! Hooray!!

Un-Australian?

It wasn't until after placing our order at the very welcome pub at the end of a three hour long walk through several suburbs that we realised that the Belgian-style pot of mussels with chips and mayonnaise and a glass of Hoegaarden weren't the most obvious things to have on Australia Day.

I blame the menu.

Cardigan wearers

The other day a mate at work was admiring my new black gossamer-thin tie-up garment that really can only be described as a cardigan.

Yes, I know it's summer but even if it's 36 degrees outside, it's still cool enough in our building for the finance sector types on other floors to wear their heavy suits with ties and cufflinks. This means that naked arms would spend most of the day covered in gooseflesh. (And no, I don't think whoever is in charge of the thermostat is thinking of the environment or their role in increasing the risk of global climatic disruption.) Hence, cardigan.

She pressed me for details of its cost and where I bought it.

I thought she was being polite.

But no.

Today she admitted that she'd rushed to the shop and bought three of them.

It's great to be a style icon but I'm not sure I want to be queen of the cardigan wearers.

There is a time for jargon

Apparently there was a big party in Washington today (link to every news site in the world not included for fear of breaking the interwebs again) where the new President made a "darkly sombre speech."

I thought it was good. Simple words, technical rhetorical things I don't know the terms for recalling the great American orators of the past and the Bible. About as far away from Our Kev's mangled buro-speak as you can get.

In fact it was almost worthy of Sam Seaborne.

Incidentally, I had a life imitating The West Wing moment the other day when reading about the real life 27-year-old speechwriter with "the uncanny ear for his master's voice" who's spent the last three months honing the inauguration address.

But I can't help thinking he maybe should have run this bit past the focus group - or even the real life Toby - one more time:

For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act -- not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise healthcare's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.

Um

Soil? Fuel?

Huh?

I really don't get it.

Unless he means "Biofuel" but couldn't say that because it wasn't a word in Abe Lincoln's vocabulary.

Sounded good but.

That's how you do it!

I found this extremely jaunty and evocative image on the cover of a really dull report about the ineterwebs.

No, really don't bother reading it. I'm not sure why I linked to it.

But just look at that cable with the plastic connector-y thing. You can just tell it's dying to have a conversation with the shiny optical fibre-y things all lit up over there. Doesn't this make you think that communications are important?

Who needs butterflies to illustrate the internet?

Well done imaginative bureaucrats!

Or at least, well done imaginative graphic designer who resisted the urge to use wildlife and persuaded bureaucrats this was a good cover.

And then there were two

Remember this?


The W Leage Grand Final will be played in Brisbane on Saturday afternoon between Queensland Roar and Canberra United. (You can get your tickets here.)

This is how it's being advertised.


Spooky.

Oddly familiar.

And yet not quite the same.

Something is subtly different...

Oh and what's that strange bit of green in the hand of player in the orange shirt (Queensland)? Is it really from pulling the Canberra player out of a jump in the previous picture?

I guess they're doing their best to get their heads at the same height so they don't look like they're pre-empting the result.

Of course, I can't talk. My efforts would probably look something like this:

I like this book!

I read Margo Lanagan's Tender Morsels a couple of months ago but can't really stop thinking about.

I picked it up in a shop because of the pretty cover (isn't it pretty?)

I almost put it down again because I didn't like the blurb:

Tender Morsels is a dark and vivid story, set in two worlds and worrying at the border between them. It is a gloriously told tale of journeys and transformations, penetrating the boundaries between male and female, reality and myth, conscious and unconscious, temporal and spiritual, human and beast.

Because, you know, ick. Sounds like 10,000 bad fantasy novels and hippy stuff.

I hestitated because there was a quote from Neil Gaiman saying it was the best book he's read for ages. Cool.

But then, I mean, I like him but he comes across as a terribly nice man who seems to be superenthusiastic about everyone he's ever met (the acknowledgements page of his most recent book made him sound particularly grateful to anyone who had bought him coffee).

So, on balance, I wasn't convinced I should buy it that day and I put it down.

But then I saw it in the library the following week and borrowed it without thinking.

And found I couldn't put it down. It has a fantastically imagined world where magic kind of works but it's really about women's lives and choices and adolescence and ageing and motherhood and love and and and...

It's the sort of book I wish I was in a lovely G&T drinking and chocolate quaffing book club where we could go "did you like this bit?" and "what did you think of this bit? Wasn't that clever?" rather than the snackless serious Alexander McCall Smith scoffing book club I'd join in the real world, if I was in fact a joiner.

Loved it. Gave a copy (not from the library) to my sister for Christmas and she loved it too. Hope it wins some of the prizes it's up for. Go Margo.

More nitpicking

I've spent most of the past day or so reading international policies on the realising the internet economy. Yawn.

I could have watched a podcast of a three day international meeting from six months ago if only I um why would anyone want to do that?

Only two things are keeping me awake:

Why do these people* think the web is about these







Rather than these:







And if cuteness is what they want, will they put some of these on their next report?



*Apparently I'm too much of a "digital migrant" to get bogger to upload include the actual picture that bothers me.

Ugh

Maybe it's just me.

Maybe because I've spent the past few weeks either "reading" the Little Einstein range on cats, dogs, babies and birds to a toddler or devouring grown up books with plots and characters and things, in short, not reading stuff that didn't go through three layers of public service editing before a minister's office sucked all the sense out of it, this seems worse than it is:

Australians are digitally aware and want to engage online. Many Australian businesses and individuals have realised the digital economy value proposition and embrace the benefits that the use of the internet and other technologies enable.

From here*

I think it means we like to use computers to do stuff.

I've only read it five times now.

Sorry if I ever write a paragraph as dodgy as that one.

*The same report taught me about "swivelling" which means making graphs and stuff from data. I'm not sure we needed a shiny new bit of jargon for that.

Not really outraged, just saying

Of course I got too busy with work and watching telly and reading other people's fabulous blogs for the last ten months to feel like posting here.

It's so much easier to be a consumer than a participant especially when other people say it so much better and sooner. Much much sooner....

But this image keeps turning up in my inbox attached to my Sydney Football Club (that's ahem the code formerly known as "soccer") update and it bothers me. So better late than never:



It's the promotional image for the new national women's football league - the "W League". This is being billed as a major step forward to have a semi-professional* national women's competition but I'm not sure which bright spark in PR thought this might help people to take women's sport seriously.

I mean, well, they look FABUOLOUS, all glossy bouncing hair and airbrushed make-up. Look how they're jumping for the ball!

But, well, how shall I put this? Has anyone ever tried to play sport with long hair hanging loose? I mean sports where you have to run and chase things like other players and balls - not yoga or chess.

It'd be really hard for them to avoid pulling each other's hair in a tackle.

Or maybe that's the point. It's probably designed to get adolescent boys to go along to matches.

I wonder what they think they get there and see


elite athletes running round playing footy.

Guess I should be grateful they're not wearing bikinis.

* All right, I just think they're paid. It's probably a nominal amount. Considering one of our best national players has recently retired because she can't make a livining from her sport, and the gate prices for the semi finals are a laughable $5 I don't think they can be getting much.