Month: August 2002

“Tiger Woods, Nike spokesman and unmarried father of none…”
Ooh, this is such a good rant. The author takes on sportswriters who always include a woman’s marital or family status when writing about female competitors, as if they can hardly believe that a mother could also be a first-class athlete. In a roundabout way, it also reminds me of something that happened in London a year or two ago, where a woman was killed outside a train station. Every headline blared “MOTHER OF THREE GUNNED DOWN” or something similar. As if crimes are somehow more senseless when perpetuated against a breeder. Why should the fact that she had children have anything to do with it? Somebody died, that’s horrible. Somebody won a race, that’s great. This need to single out women (whether for additional pity or congratulations) on the basis of their “domestic achievements” is patronising and unnecessary.

Our new houseThe suburban jungle…
Yes, this is your first glimpse of our new house. Isn’t it cute? I just love the brick. The house is narrow but it goes back pretty far. Ma Snook took this picture when she came down to help us move a few weeks ago. (That’s me looking particularly unattractive on the right, and the Snook himself peering out of the front door.) I’m hoping to get indoor photos taken soon, as soon as we get the last of the new furniture and hang up all our pictures.

Okay, see, that’s where the post was supposed to end. Instead we now have to talk about something scary: spiders. I’m not a fan. In fact, I’ve been developing a rather severe case of arachnophobia since we moved. See, all the most poisonous beasties in the world are here in Australia. Most of them, the snakes and jellyfish and stuff, don’t live in the middle of the city and I don’t have to worry about them. The spiders, however, do. And some of them are downright nasty. (Last week at the Slashdot meetup, even the most hardened lifelong Sydneysiders admitted to being petrified of funnel web spiders.) In our nice little modern apartment, I didn’t even think about creepy crawlies. Now we live in an old house, a house with street-level entrances and a back garden. I think about them. I especially think about them when I go out to the shed to do the laundry. I just know they’re going to be in there. Anyway, this is all background information. The point of all this rambling is…

Huntsman spiderThis bastard crawled across my hand tonight. It’s a Huntsman spider, which is technically supposed to be one of the harmless ones. It was still frickin’ huge and hairy and scary though. I was out on the front porch moving the trash and recycling bins out onto the curb. I reached for the recycling bin and suddenly this thing was crawling over my hand. I seriously jumped, like, three feet straight backwards and started shaking my arms like mad. (There may have been some screaming, but to be honest, I’ve blacked most of it out.) I ended up on the sidewalk with the spider sitting on the welcome mat looking at me. I had no idea what kind it was, nor whether it would bite me if further provoked. So I did the only thing I could do… I stood there and yelled for Snookums to come rescue me. He showed up and explained that it was harmless, and then proceeded to bash it with a newspaper since I was still hyperventilating. Dude, I can still feel it. I have a feeling my phobia’s only going to get worse.

Do you share my pain? Or are you a friend to the eight-legged freaks?

In case you’re wondering, we haven’t forgotten to pay the electricity bill. CouchCam has simply been down for a couple days without us noticing. I tend to surf with images turned off (because of our slow connection), so neither of us caught the error til today. It’s been uploading nothing but blackness for 72 hours. You guys are supposed to tell me this stuff! Anyway, I’m going to take it down for awhile until we get it fixed.

I was pretty surprised to see that NBC has picked up the rights to the British show The Kumars at No. 42 in an attempt to retain its Thursday night ratings crown. The Snook and I are big fans of the Kumars, who are an Indian family living in Wembley that host a chat show in their back garden. Guests have to come through the house and meet the whole family (Mom, Dad, and crazy Grandma) before going onstage to be interviewed by the son, Sanjeev. No, it’s not real, but the guests are and it’s still hilarious. (We were damn happy to find it’s on here in Oz.) But I just couldn’t picture Americans getting all the Indian jokes. Then I read that they’re going to redo it with a Mexican-American family. Ahhh! Now that makes more sense. Although I don’t think there’s as much a tradition of self-deprecating Mexican-American humor as there is with the Indian-English. And other than Millionaire, US networks have a bad habit of royally screwing up their British imports (i.e. Cold Feet, Men Behaving Badly). This could be very sucky indeed. (Off topic: Indian-English? Is that what you’d say? That looks weird.)

I somehow found myself in an argument over SUVs at Metafilter today. I think a lot of my attitude towards them (and their drivers) comes from my years at ND. It seemed like over half of the undergraduates brought them to school and you never, ever saw one filled to capacity. They were status symbols, not off-road vehicles. (The prevalence of “Eddie Bauer” special editions will attest to that.) Sure, it’s nice not to have to shovel around your car in the winter, but is it really necessary to burn that much fuel just to go up to Meijer and pick up a case of Coke? See, I’m working myself into a rant again.

Three whales have been frolicking in Sydney Harbour for the last couple of days, having stopped off for a break on their trip to Antarctica. They’re heading out, but apparently some of the ferry pilots saw more coming in last night. I can’t believe I live in a place where I could go whale watching without leaving dry land. This Midwestern girl is impressed.