London 2012 prediction, part deux

If you are only now tuning in to see the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics, you have just missed a a most raucous performance by The Knights Who Say Ni Again - I don't think any of us can look at a saucepan the same way again!

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow... but expect delays.

Has everyone enjoyed their delayed and/or cancelled flights and unseasonal wads of snow? Yes? No? You find this question cruel as you are desperately trying to build up some Christmas feeling in Australia, of all places, and the season just isn't the same when it's stinking hot? Thought so.

London 2012 prediction, part 1

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics. We are only moments away from the official start of the games of the thirtieth Olympiad. We do of course all remember the staggering scale and awe-inspiring skill of the Beijing 2008 ceremonies: those thousands of drummers performing in absolute unison, the exquisite closing ceremony fire works, timed to coincide exactly with the shooting of dissidents. Now, a hush descends over the stadium and we are about to discover what Britain has brought to the world.

...oh look, it's the Wombles.

So, Wikileaks, huh?

I've been wanting to write about the whole Wikileaks/Assange business for a while, but until now I have let my relative ignorance on the issue stop me. I'm not going to pretend to have a particularly well thought-through opinion on any of this, but I just thought it might be useful (for me, if no one else) to write down some of my thoughts about it.

Gendered trauma?

According to some recent research, what is often thought to be postnatal depression is actually post-traumatic stress disorder.

Without going into the merits of the argument (I don't have the necessary medical understanding), beyond an emphatic agreement that birth is traumatic, I can't help but wonder about the implications of the theory. Put this down to my recent reading of Superfreakonomics, but I do suspect that there is more funding out there for research on PTSD, given its associations with war, violence and other more 'manly' pursuits, than on PND, which is clearly a more feminine affliction and still relatively widely thought to be just part of a natural process. Could the traumatic experiences of parturient mothers be taken more seriously or have more support services directed towards them if they were framed in the same terms as those of soldiers?

Form and Content

Now, before you panic, I'm not going all Brecht-Lukacs on you.

Instead, I thought I'd spend a little bit of time talking through my thesis. Not the argument, heavens no, not even the general gist of it. You probably couldn't care less. But what I can reasonably hope is that you, too, will care about what it looks like. Because you've been through teh internets and hated on Papyrus and Comic Sans, because you squirm uncomfortably at the thought of double-spacing: it just seems so patronising and vacant at the same time, suggesting that either the writer or the reader has a bit too much space where actual thoughts should be, right?

Got faith? Autoexcommunication in action

I've been fascinated reading about the recent kerfuffle in Finland over the unfortunately-titled current affairs program Homoilta, or Gay Evening, on Finland's public broadcaster on Tuesday. The program included discussion about homosexual couples' rights to marriage and adoption. I haven't seen the program, but from all accounts the very right-of-centre views of Päivi Räsänen, the leader of the Christian Democratic party, in particular have caused an unexpected reaction against the Finnish Lutheran church. From what I've read Räsänen is of the 'hate the sin, love the sinner'-view: that it's ok to 'feel' gay as long as you don't do anything about it. Good luck with that, gays.