Definitely a rest day today. Fi had a visitor, a friend of a friend she’d met recently who turned out to be involved in the Disabled Photographers' Society amongst other things. While I am now a disabled person who takes photos it’s not something I’m keen to pursue right now (to be honest I never identified much with the photographer community - I’m definitely one of those wankers who calls themselves a lens-based artist).
But they do raise funds by selling donated camera equipment at photo shows and I have LOADS of lens-based junk in the attic which I’ve been wondering what to do with. So we took it all down yesterday and today she took it away. It felt a bit weird going through the boxes holding the detritus of my camera hacking from around 2006 to 2016. I kept a few items as most of it was just bits-box hoarding, but even so. The end of an era that ended a decade ago.
Lady No-Kids
I was idly going through my downloads folder of memes and images I’ve saved from the streams and came across Lady No-Kids.
I’ve always liked this cartoon but also have felt a little unsure about sharing it, given I’ve known plenty of women with kids who would happily follow a goose and see where they ended up, and plenty without who wouldn’t. But I still like it, not just because the cartooning is top drawer. You can tell this is by a talented professional with many years under their belt. And so while trying to rest today I decided to look them up.
The cartoonist is Will McPhail who primarily works for the New Yorker, hence the classic typed caption, although he’s from the UK. It would appear Lady No-Kids was a solitary cartoon which he decided to expand in the collection of his work, Love and Vermin.
Lady No-Kids is also the name of a blog for child-free women and was inspired by finding McPhail’s cartoon collection in a bookstore. The author, Christine Burns, wrote a lovely piece about the comic and why it meant so much to her, and luckily for us reprints it in full, fleshing out the blunt original with some judgement-free nuance. I sent it to one of my no-kids friends who said it was really beautiful. I wonder if my some-kids friends would agree.
Always a pleasure when Joanne McNeil posts something new. “There’s the pursuit of information as way to find joy—even the search itself can be pleasurable—and then there is compulsory completion, a kneejerk response to feeling unmoored where there are blanks in the trivia with which we are familiar. Lately, I’ve been thinking I need to get more comfortable with the blanks."
Drill, Burnham, drill? The oil basin that is a totem for Trump - and a headache for Britain’s new PM
Now that a light has been shone on the UK’s oil fields I’m learning all manner of interesting things about something that seemed like it had always just been there. First, they were only discovered in 1969 and subsidised the 80s Thatcherite revolution. Next, Aberdeen was chosen as the main port to service the rigs as it had fewer links with unions than Dundee. Finally there’s the familar but still depressing statistic that Norway built up a $2tn sovereign wealth fund while the UK… didn’t. If we had it would have been worth £850bn.
The big revelation though is the grip it seems to have on the British imagination. The very notion that maybe there’s no oil left, or that what’s left is of such low quality as to be not worth extracting, is sacrilegious. Like suggesting the monarchy is a bit weird, or that Churchill might have been a morally complicated figure. And yet realising coal wasn’t economically viable was fine.
See also The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil
- The Strange World of… Adam Curtis — An beginners guide to his somewhat intimidating oeuvre.
- This video is not about spark plugs — A delightful video from my recent-new-fave YouTuber who has the energy of someone very keen to explain something to you while very aware that you might not be as interested in this as they are. If you’re like me you know that feeling.
- Sentiers is back — Lots of good stuff from Patrick which I’m saving for later in the week.
- You’re not censored, but get off my stage — “An utterly mediocre conservative white man with terrible opinions has faced some repercussions for something he knowingly did, so obviously we must now have a global discourse on deplatforming, academic censorship and cancel culture. Something this latest episode made me think about therefore, in addition to throwing my phone in a lake, is how we’re constantly mixing terms and concepts in this discussion - especially around the difference between ‘censorship’, ‘platforms’, ‘stages’ and ‘online yelling’."