fourth floor feminism | sociable speculation

When I was a secretary at ADI, spending my days: a) writing up tutorials for my Uni course, b) having countless running email conversations with workmates and Kristen in Canberra, and c) not really doing anything I had a vast word file of all the jokes I had ever received. I am sure I have it SOMEWHERE in my box of important papers, but this one, recently sent to me again, was one of my all time favourites. I use the phrase ‘full contact origami’ all the time, usually during my ‘torment a barfly’ routine during which I tell sozzled Lotharios that I am a retired World Bootscooting champion who is looking to move into acting in karaoke video clips and was born on Ayers rock because my mum wanted me to channel Azaria Chamberlain’s spirit. Blessed are the jokers, because they will get mates rates at the bar in heaven. The following was published in The New York Times. This is a NYU college admissions application essay question, and an actual answer written by an applicant: Qu...

The smell of Australian summer is toasted grass and sand pounded by the sun so it is only moments from turning to glass. A proper white sand and Indian Ocean beach at midday is a coruscant mirror of blue and white, shards of it splintering off to impale your eyes and flay the soles off your feet. The heat slams you down whilst it compels you to levitate in your haste to make the shade. In the bush the heat crawls into your ears with the low hum of the land choking and the insects and animals panting and it pushes out your energy until you can feel your strength running in silver, salty floods down your skin. I walked to the lunch bar today and while yesterday I was able to cope without sunglasses, today I needed their blessed shade. As I passed over freshly mown cooch grass my nostrils flared and I could smell that unique smell of singed grass being baked into a slice of grey-brown summer lawn, leaven with the fried sandy soil of the Perth coastal plain. It is hot over here, it i...

Last night I went to see one of Australia’s favourite popular scientific writers give a talk at UWA. Tim Flannery is an interesting character and if you want to get a bit of a background, here are some good links – Tim’s statement on Perth’s possibility of surviving the global warming and what his critics think of him. Flannery did indeed change Australia’s way of thinking about its impact on the environment with The Future Eaters, and he is a constant voice in the media reminding us that we can have both positive and negative impacts on the environment. His talk was fascinating, very Bill Bryson in that he gave you the figures, then broke them down into manageable sound bytes of data that were compared to quantities we understand from daily life. Regarding global warming for example he told us that the last significant rise in global temperature was a rise of 7 degrees over 7,000 years about 15,000 years ago. It is predicted that the global temperature will rise 3.4 degrees ove...