The Rugby Star

Baby A is modelling the rugby suit his great grandmother in England made for him.

The last time he was photographed in rugby attire he and the ball were roughly the same size.

I'd say this is a marked improvement.

Why Do They Probe?

Initially I was resistant to using a Kindle for reading but I decided to give it another chance.

The soft back lighting, portability and access to thousands of titles are the obvious pros of this device.

Having to mind the battery charge, not being able to easily flip pages to go back to an interesting passage and not having an apartment filled with several "leather bound books" are the cons.

After charging the thing up I started browsing for an interesting read.

I really wanted to get Travis Walton's "Fire in the Sky" in which he writes about his alien abduction in the 70s, but all that was offered was a short, detail starved account written by someone else.

I bought it anyway and was just as disappointed as I suspected I might be.

Kindle offered suggestions for other books of similar topics that I might like.

I saw several other texts with covers of menacing, ebony-eyed extraterrestrials and was intrigued.

But how to tell if they were any good?

That's where the reviews come in handy.

Many of the reviewers seemed to possess both compassion and a healthy sense of skepticism although, several of them complained about the poor writing skills of the authors.

They seem to think a person whose entire life has been dedicated to coxing forth edibles from the earth in rural Indiana should also be able to take up the mantle of community college adjunct English professor in a pinch.

I think this is an unreasonable demand.

Aside from this, I found that there was only one brave reviewer who dared to address the real elephant in the spaceship.

Katherine A. Shelton of San Francisco's review of the book "Aliens in the Backyard" was titled "This would be a fabulous book, if it were satire."

Katherine comes with an open mind and is even up for a bit of what she terms "paranormal smut."

She earnestly tries to find something useful or informative in the text but eventually takes the authors to task for lazy writing and focusing on the absurd sexual abuse abductees "discover" under the dubious practice of hypnotic regression.

I don't know if it was the lateness of the hour (around 2a.m.) or the sudden departure from educated language into the realm of the vulgar, but Katherine's take on the recurrent "anal probe" theme sent me into hysterics.

She writes:

"Truly sit and ponder why aliens would need to probe our asses. If, for whatever reason, an alien race decided they wanted to know something about human physiology and they really need to probe a human anus wouldn't one suffice? Or two? Why would "The Grays" need to abduct people en masse and then probe all of their asses? I mean really?"

Katherine, you are a treasure. Never change.

If I am thinking of a serious reason for "ass probing" I guess it might be to gather fecal matter and analyze an organism's dietary intake.

In this was "The Grays" might learn that most Americans have a surfeit of high fructose corn syrup and saturated fats in their meals with certain pockets of the West Coast population containing high concentrations of kale and granola.

In closing, I will leave you with this video from my favorite Canadian comedy troupe:

Origami Difficulties

I went on a recent cleaning and redecorating spree around the house and one of the end results was a teenage-friendly hangout in the conservatory.

I bought a new couch (which everyone hates because they are not allowed to eat or drink around it), and put the old one in the sun room.

Previously there had been some potted tropical plants out there and a draft board that both the NPR and I use for painting and drawing.

Now the drafting table overlooks the garden and has a potted orange tree beside it and the other side has the couch, a rug and a coffee table. Above it hangs a ball mason jar with a tea light in it. Behind the couch is a large tropical plant and my potted Nopal sitting on a small table.

I got one of Nick's old work benches, made an adjustment to one of its legs and turned it into a bookshelf. Underneath it are a few jigsaw puzzles and a model of a Stearman airplane that I mean to put together one of these days.

I wanted the space to be one where the NPR and her BFF/sometime boyfriend/fangirl soulmate Nygell could hang out.

The curtains can be pulled so that the area's residents can watch a series of online angsty anime series in relative privacy.

This was one of the selling points I gave to the NPR when I encouraged her to invite friends over to hang out in her newly designated Bohemian paradise.

Unfortunately, I used the coffee table to put together a new jigsaw puzzle I ordered and the NPR arrived home with her mate to find her teen sanctum occupied.

There were some terse words spoken at the sliding door and some good old fashioned guilt tripping from the sofa.

I decided the last thing to add to the space would be a linked chain of origami peace cranes. I bought a little kit that had a how-to booklet and some thin paper.

All was going well until I came to something called a "petal fold."

It made no sense so I started to freestyle in my folds.

The paper ripped a little bit and got a wilted look.

I got angrier and angrier until I finally threw the paper down and declared the how-to booklet to be worthless.

I hated how something so tiny could make me so mad but I had a plan B.

When the NPR was younger she used to make peace cranes all the time.

Once she sat on her bed in a grump with me and folded and entire flock of them. When I entered her room to talk to her she huffed and shifted on the bed causing some of the cranes to make tentative efforts towards flight.

So I got the NPR to sit at the edge of my bed and talk to me about yokai whilst folding a series of cranes.

I watched her make one and experienced a twinge of jealousy at how effortlessly she made the paper take the shape of the bird.

I will try making a jumping frog next and if that doesn't work I'll probably give up on the art entirely.

Revisiting the Iliad

In my junior year of high school I attended boarding school and was tasked with slogging through the Iliad.

I found it tiresome with it's never ending cycle of anger, jealousy, war and death.

It was just page after page of killing and being angry and then killing and making someone angry so they would go off and kill and make someone angry.

Also, women were stolen as trophies.

Gross.

The only levity during that time was when our German exchange student Bjorn asked "What means booty?"

While the professor explained that it was another term for the spoils of war the rest of us tittered and exchanged knowing glances.

Tonight the NPR asked that I read over a paper she is writing for Classics on a comparison between the Iliad and the movie Troy.

I was first struck by the fact that her class only had to read a synopsis of the Iliad with selected passages. What gives?

Then the old irritation with the text returned and I proclaimed it to be "an overlong poem about epic butthurt."

I told the NPR she was welcome to put that in her paper and quote me but upon further reflection, I decided I don't want to be featured in another contentious pull quote right now. 

The Pull Quote

Back in February I wrote a scathing letter to the editor of North & South magazine in response to an article called "A Roadblock to Happiness."

The writer of the piece took what I saw as a flippant attitude towards groping and uses his own experience as an example of how everyone else (women) should just get over their experiences.

Last night Nick and I were coming back from the pub when we nipped into a local shop to pick up some snacks. I saw that the newest edition of N&S was out so I started to peruse the "Letters" section.

And there it was. My tirade. And what's more, my mean spirited conclusion had been put in a bold pull quote.

I was happy and dismayed and joyous and embarrassed in stages.

I had written the response a month ago and I had forgotten some of the particulars.

When we got home I shut myself up in our room so I could re-read what I wrote and decide if it was well written or not.

I like what I wrote but seeing my anger staring back at me in a large print quotation still gives me a strange mix of emotions.

Here's my letter in case you are curious:

In his essay “A Roadblock to Happiness,” Graham Adams diminishes the role of a sexual harasser in causing trauma by using such labels as “irritating” and “pest.”

He quotes Laura Kipnis who writes that, in her day, “Hooking up with professors was just what you did” and “Sex-even when not so great or someone got their feelings hurt- fell under the category of experience, not trauma.”

Kipnis seems to embrace the rhetoric of rape apologists who claim that women report sexual assault because sex was bad or regrettable.

It appears that both she and Adams need someone to explain the difference between consensual and non consensual sexual contact to them.

Adams’ suggestion that Naomi Wolf is “making mileage out of a grope” is patronizing.

Wolf makes it clear that she followed up with Yale University to protect others from being harassed the way she was. She writes, “After nine months and many calls and e-mails, I was shocked to conclude that the atmosphere of collusion that had helped to keep me quiet twenty years ago was still intact.”

Both Adams and Kipnis seem incredulous that unwanted contact from an individual in a position of power might leave someone feeling traumatized. They overlook the further effects of an “atmosphere of collusion” which serves to protect harassers and silence victims.

Kipnis never questions the ethical implications of “advances by a socially clumsy professor” toward a student.

She writes, “Isn’t it possible that the recipients of unwelcome advances wield some power in these situations-the power to humiliate the advancer at the very least?”

Twenty-seven-year-old Mary Spears of Detroit, Michigan was shot in the head and killed by a stranger after politely resisting his sexual advances.

Tugce Albayrak was beaten to death in Germany for telling a group of men to stop harassing two teenage girls.

A man in San Francisco was stabbed in the neck and back when he asked a catcaller to leave his girlfriend alone.

These are but a few examples of retaliatory violence against those who speak up for themselves.

Adams relates a story of being groped once on a crowded bus and says he found it “irksome.” He seems to think everyone else has had an identical experience and should just get over it. It takes a lot of hubris to write something that insufferable.

Books and Fossils

As if libraries weren't already great for their books, magazines, DVDs, free internet, weekly Justice of the Peace services, baby singalongs, toddler story times and English as a second language classes-my local library has upped the awesome bar by hosting this exhibit of Moa bones on loan from the Canterbury Museum.

Moa were giant emu-like birds that went extinct around 1440. 

They were flightless, vegetarian and preyed upon by Haast's eagles and the early Polynesian settlers who probably still hold the record for eating "The World's Largest Drumstick."

Several of their skeletons were traded with other museums to help build up the Canterbury Museum's collection of cool old stuff.

It is my dream to one day uncover the most fantastically preserved specimen ever seen in New Zealand but for now I'm happy to look at these bones and marvel over the creatures they belonged to.

Every now and again, someone will claim to have spotted a Moa somewhere off in the South Island and it will drum up plenty of attention but no one has ever provided proof of these sightings.

One publican claimed to have seen one near Arthur's Pass in 1993. Today this statue stands as a testament to the sighting:

From the library exhibit: