Merry Christmas, if you’re into that sort of thing!

Z&T:

I as well as 3 or 4 women I can think of off the top of my head – have given up on men completely.

If I remember Alice’s Restaurant, that puts you somewhere between an organisation and a movement. There ought to be an acronym.

Incidentally, I just googled for “seagull”, and top of google’s autocomplete list was “seagull recipe”, surprisingly. Clearly more and more people are going their own way!

sfhc

what Martin Freeman done? I didn’t know he is white supremacist. I remember one interview I watched when he is rude, but i don’t really know very much.

@JS

Yay, I have introduced somebody to Hambly’s Asher and Ysidro series!

Have you read her standalone Bride of the Rat God?

@Mish

Moving the cat?!?!? Blasphemy and lies.

Oh, there’s a lot to choose from when it comes to Hambly. Bride of the Rat God is set in 1920s Hollywood, and does (among other things) a superb job of showing period-appropriate cultural appropriation while making it clear how shallow it was. Plus it made me like Pekes. I’m not a dog person, and I’d always thought of Pekes as animate dustmops, but Hambly made me like the Pekes in this book.

If you want Edwardian espionage/horror, start with Those Who Hunt the Night. Our hero, James Asher, is an Oxford don who thought he’d left his past in the Great Game behind. (Not really a spoiler; you learn this in the first few pages.) His wife Lydia is a great example of a strong female character who doesn’t come off as a paint-by-numbers SFC. There are 7 books in the series so far.

Her Darwath series was written in the 80s, but the writing holds up a lot better than others from that period. It’s one of the more intelligent treatments of the “person from our Earth goes into another universe” stories I’ve seen. I don’t know if I can say more than that without spoilers.

I haven’t yet read her Benjamin January series, but that’s because of the So Many Books/So Little Time problem. If you like historical mysteries, I’m told these are a great read.

Does that help?

Next we’ll have a smartphone app that adults who want to sleep together will have to use to check precisely which sex acts the other does or does not accept.”

… hmmm….

(goes to I.T. department to query geeks about creating billion-dollar app….)

@Valentin

Dig around on youtube for the Basil Rathbone Sherlocks. Those are superb (in a very old fashioned way). 🙂
James Woods – guy from Videodrome. Really right wing.

And thank you all for the panic! I read Martin Freeman as Morgan Freeman and got quite upset for a minute.

@Mish

“The notion of sex as something women gatekeep has always infuriated me. It’s wrong on so many levels, including the total erasure of women’s sexual desire. It’s one reason I detest “friendzone” so much (“she could just have sex with me if she chose to, why is she so mean?”).”

I guess there is that truism that the person who wants something less is the one that holds all the power. But then we’re back to why the fuck ARE these men trying to have sex with women who don’t really want it?

And today in “troubling news”, it seems that fascism is busily reclaiming its ancestral homeland:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/13/italys-new-fascism/

Based on what the article says, most of the politicians there seem to range from spineless to outright sympathetic, particularly since (like Germany) Italy has had anti-fascism laws since the end of World War II, but they seem to be going unenforced.

On the other hand, one person — surprise surprise, a woman — from one of the genuinely left parties there, Laura Boldrini, had the courage to say the truth about what had happened. In a just world she’d be the next Prime Minister there, but somehow I doubt that will happen. 🙁

Well, now I hate Martin Freeman. And apparently I dress like a slob.

@Alan Robertshaw

I think I’ve said it on other older posts, but Brett remains the definitive Holmes for me. He really nailed the character’s cheeky flair for the dramatic (like with serving the titular Naval Treaty on a dish), but didn’t wallow in the anti-social aspect of it that certain popular adaptations of the character did *coughHouseandSherlockcough*

Because although Holmes is so often thought of as the man of pure logic and deduction, the man did actually care about his clients. (*mild spoilers to follow*)

He risked prison time to break into Milverton’s house because he hated what Milverton was doing to people. And the fate of his client in the Dancing Men clearly left him distraught, so he’s not the unfeeling a-hole that certain modern interpretations seem to glom on to.

@calmdown

Jordan Peterson (bleghh!)

Peter Coffin’s latest video is probably the best take on Peterson I’ve seen to date:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kbk_4x70OG4

As I mention in the comments of the video, the cult-like devotion to Peterson is really disturbing and reminiscent of the way Scientology uses bog-standard pop psychology to lure people in, but with a Tyler Durden twist. His schtick really doesn’t boil down to much more than “double down on conforming to gender stereotypes and you’ll succeed.” Boys, stand up straight, be tough and don’t complain. Girls, realize you’re biologically programmed to want kids at 30, so don’t bother with those manly STEM jobs. Go into nursing and raise kids like God nature intends. Men are programmed to be aggressive risk-takers so that’s why they’re all CEOs and don’t have time for your woman problems like changing diapers or midnight feedings (and if they do, it’s just because how gung-ho and manly they are).

It’s the same gender-essentialist claptrap any MRA will tell a feminist to explain away representation issues, but Peterson skillfully combines it with the detached contempt for activism and altruism and just panders to the “nobody matters but you” nihilism rife on the alt-right, peppering it with smart-sounding jargon about “postmodernism” to confound the normies, while leaving the rest of his followers to pick up the dog-whistles and internalize the buried puritan messaging.

I just wish that journalists (looking your way Channel 4) would be two steps ahead of this guy rather than two steps behind. Because the last thing impressionable young men need is more toxic notions about gender roles.

Jenora Feuer:

I’ve often described one of the big problems at my job as spending so much time putting out fires that I haven’t had time to install any fireproofing.

I can relate to that. Also, I have resisted making a dad joke about your name.

Me, yesterday:

Oh and yay, Canada now has its very own Trayvon Martin case!

And of course, the standard "Y U NO LYK SELF-DURFENCE!" caterwauling is making the rounds on comment boards all over the Canadian media landscape… enough that even Maclean’s had to remind people that it is in fact illegal to use or even threaten to use deadly force to protect mere property.

And when the PM weighed in to express what many legal observers are pointing out about the peremptory challenges system in place in the Canadian judiciary and how it was abused in the Colten Boushie case. In fact, I saw that system up close when I was called for jury duty: if your name gets pulled out of the big tombola drum as a potential juror, either attorney can simply look at you and challenge you as a juror. In the case my panel was selected for, those called were given the opportunity to explain if they have obligations that would cause problems if they sat on the jury and the attorneys used their peremptory challenges to dismiss those people as well. But if it’s used to ensure a biased jury in a criminal trial… yeah, that system needs to change.