[Image credit: The Age, "Charlotte Makes a Meal of Question Time"]

Cheers to the ACT parliament for becoming the first parliament in Australia to get Australian Breastfeeding Association accreditation as a breastfeeding-friendly workplace, as reported in IBN News.

The ABA accreditation standards can be found here. What this means is that now ACT parliamentary members and staff will have access to flexible breaks to breastfeed or express milk, clean and appropriate facilities to express and store milk, and information on these facilities provided to female employees. They may also have access to the “optional criteria” of flexi-time/job-sharing options, on-site childcare, parking for carers to bring children to the workplace, and further information and referrals.

I find it rather strange that the criteria don’t include processes to educate other employees about breastfeeding, and procedures to deal with those who create a hostile environment breastfeeding mothers, be the mothers employees or guests in the workplace. These issues are (somewhat inadequately) covered elsewhere, but I hoped that specific inclusion in a breastfeeding-friendly workplace standard might bring them to the fore.

Several parliaments, including the ACT Legislative Assembly, decided in 2003 to begin allowing breastfeeding in the Parliamentary chamber. This change occurred after the incident in which ALP MP Kirstie Marshall was ejected from the Victorian State parliament floor for breastfeeding her daughter. Twelve-day-old Charlotte was considered a “stranger in the house” under standing orders at the time. At the time, Liberal minister Amanda Vanstone had a dig at Marshall, saying that she pitied her baby for being fed in “a noisy and testosterone-filled televised parliamentary debate”. As always, women are expected to confine themselves, to avoid public life dominated by aggressive men, rather than men being expected to act like decent human beings – regardless of whether there is or isn’t an infant present!

The “Your Say” section in the Age at the time of the Marshall incident was revealing. Some of the negative comments from the public included:

“It’s a house of Parliament, it’s not a place for girls to be pulling out their breasts!”

“There are some things that should be kept private, one of them is breastfeeding.”

“What a joke! Either this woman wants to be a mother or she wants to be a person representing other Vics in Parliament.”

“Kirstie has chosen a life in politics – she is there to ensure that the people that elected her are represented. If she wanted a family life, then she should not have entered politics.”

“It’s a lovely natural activity, as one of nine kids I saw plenty of it early on and have seen plenty of happy suckers since, but there’s a time and place for everything and breastfeeding is also a distraction in an active, thinking environment such as parliament.”

And Premier Steve Bracks? The West Australian reported:

“Premier Steve Bracks said a room had been set aside close to the chamber for Ms Marshall to feed Charlotte. He said he supported family-friendly reforms to parliament, but a line had to be drawn somewhere.”

Anyhow, cheers to the ACT Parliament. May more workplaces make the effort to become formally breastfeeding-friendly, and may they go beyond the “essential” criteria and become genuinely misogyny-free in all aspects.

From Brazil. For low fat yoghurt. Iconic film images of Mena Suvari, Sharon Stone, Marilyn Monroe photomanipulated.

Tagline: Forget about it. Men’s preference will never change. Fit Light Yogurt.

Via Jess McCabe, at The F-Word blog.

Feminists and Breakfast Cereal, from Zenobia. A summary can’t do it justice, just read it.

Oh yes, I has new computer in my old case (with a video card combo that’s fast enough to play YouTubes properly at last), and we has ‘nother new computer hooked up to telly, and the old guts of my computer are getting put into a recycled box and going off to learn how to be a server for our LAN. The togmob’s collective computing power is now TEH AWESOME: we each have a box, all networked, and soon will have FSM knows what going on with the server (I’m not entirely sure what mr tog’s nefarious plan is there).

So, I’m off to the butcher and sorting out which red wine we’re having tonight. mr tog is always telling me how handy it must be to be married to a genius, and I usually throw lettuce at him, but secretly (shhh) he’s kinda right.

Let’s just remind ourselves of some recent history:

In 2001, Australia banned the importation of beef and beef products from Japan after a single confirmed case of BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy). The USA and many other countries also banned beef imports from Japan.

In 2003, BSE cases caused Australia to ban importing beef from Canada, and then beef from the USA as well. Japan, which had been America’s biggest export beef market, also banned imports from the USA, along with a host of other countries.

In December 2005, after huge pressure from the US Dept of Agriculture, Japan lifted that ban on the importation of US beef. In January 2006, that ban was reimposed due to renewed saftey concerns about American meat processing. South Korea partially lifted their ban on US beef imports in early 2006, but an import violation last week has now thrown that market into doubt.

Despite BSE scares leading to a drop in beef consumption worldwide, the import bans on US beef have been good news for beef producers in Australia, New Zealand and Brazil especially who have stepped into the supply gap for beef imports worldwide, but obviously it has made life difficult for the American beef farmer.

So what is the USDA (Dept of Agriculture) doing to ensure the Confidence of American consumers in domestic beef rather than foreign beef? They’re taking all the basic precautions with SRMs (specified risk materials), certainly. But what happens when a small meatpacking company wants to certify its beef as having had a higher level of safety testing/inspections than those mandated by the USDA, in order to give its product an edge in a competitive market and give consumers more choice? Does the USDA encourage such innovation and customer service?

WASHINGTON: The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease.

The Agriculture Department tests fewer than 1 percent of slaughtered cows for the disease, which can be fatal to humans who eat tainted beef. A beef producer in the western state of Kansas, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, wants to test all of its cows.

Larger meat companies feared that move because, if Creekstone should test its meat and advertised it as safe, they might have to perform the expensive tests on their larger herds as well.

The Agriculture Department regulates the test and argued that widespread testing could lead to a false positive that would harm the meat industry. . . .

If anyone needed more signs that the US Government is in thrall to corporations above citizens, add this to your list. A company’s free choice to add value to its product, in a way that will benefit consumers rather than harm them, is being constrained. And what about the highly touted, indeed almost sacred, principles of free market competition? How is this not an act of restraint of trade, exactly the sort of act which is against US Anti-Trust legislation, which is meant to protect smaller businesses from unfair competitive practices from larger businesses?

Ralph Nader had a point when he said that both the Republicans and the Democrats were branches of the Corporate Party. The trend for the same in Australia with the converging platforms of the Liberals/Nationals coalition and the Labor party is certainly arguable.

So who/what in either country, or anywhere around the world, is going to be the new Citizen party to counteract the Corporate parties? How will they get off the ground?

This is the container of leftover sausages I put away in the frig last night.

This morning when I woke up and went to the frig for milk, not a single one of those sausages had been eaten.

What can have happened to the Phantom Sausage Snaffler?

Sydney, 25/5/2007

Police hold grave fears for the safety of the Phantom Sausage Eater after a plate of sausages remained intact overnight in the Sydney Suburb of Togsville. A source who claimed to be close to the Phantom told us that the Phantom may have been distracted by an especially satisfying evening meal and the unexpected appearance of raisin toast at breakfast. A Police spokesman revealed that the sausages are to be left unattended again tonight in the hope that the Phantom will strike again and allay public concern for his safety.

APP Reooters

The Phantom has been a friendly ectoplasmic cohabitant in the tigtog household since mr tog and I first met. I find his disapparation inexplicable and most alarming. And who else is going to eat all those sausages?

image from NYT

This image is for Penguin Unearthed, who kindly included me in her list of bloggers who make her think a few weeks ago.

I’m choosing blogs that I often read but rarely comment on, because I don’t find time to compose comments everywhere I read, but that doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about what was written. These are also blogs that I don’t link to that often, because their work is not easily distillable for use as part of one’s own polemic, yet it still informs and persuades.

• Personal Political – one of the first ozbloggers to encourage my blogging. Thanks, susoz.
• Jon Swift – some people take a while to grok this.
• Orcinus – Dave Niewert and Sara Robinson deconstruct social conservatives.
• boynton – desultory delights
• Making Light – especially Teresa’s posts

Bonus: xkcd (geekery injokes alert)

Thank you all for stretching the grey matter.

While we’re talking about thoughtful stuff, here’s the NYT from 2006 on what science tells us about the power of kyewt.

The human cuteness detector is set at such a low bar, researchers said, that it sweeps in and deems cute practically anything remotely resembling a human baby or a part thereof, and so ends up including the young of virtually every mammalian species, fuzzy-headed birds like Japanese cranes, woolly bear caterpillars, a bobbing balloon, a big round rock stacked on a smaller rock, a colon, a hyphen and a close parenthesis typed in succession.

This isn’t cute but was very yummy: mr tog and I celebrated the arrival of the autumn cool recently as we do every year with Boeuf en Croute (aka Beef Wellington). I do individual cuts of fillet steak in puff pasty with strips of streaky bacon and a smear of foie gras. Here is the croute awaiting the piles of steamed veges to accompany it.

This weekend I’m breaking out the Fragrant Sour and Spicy Thai Soup.

So, what exactly is the difference between Pinot Gris and Pinot Grigio anyway?

There doesn’t seem to be a distinguishable difference in taste.

Some of you already know that while I am a militant agnostic (I don’t know whether any god exists and neither does anybloodyone else) my beloved mr tog is a regular churchgoer. He wasn’t when we met, it crept up on him. As the Sydney Anglican diocese has not yet been entirely taken over by strictly doctrinaire Paulinists, and he enjoys the musical side of worship (he plays piano and organ) as much if not more than the theological, we manage to rub along fairly well. At the very least I guess the kids will make up their own mind, having both belief and unbelief models to follow.

Since the Anglican church does not expect congregants to observe Lent other than by attending services, and I couldn’t give a monkeys if it did, really, it may seem odd that we decided to follow the tradition of giving something up for the period of Lent this year. As an autodidact scholar of history, mythology and comparative theology, I’m well aware of the power of tying a course of action to an established ritual. The idea of “giving it up for Lent” has an emotional power accreted over centuries of tradition. The extra emotional weight could be a significant advantage in sticking to a plan.

We decided to give up alcohol.

Over the last few years we’d gone from enjoying wine with meals maybe 3 nights a week, to having wine with our meal nearly every night. If we just shared a bottle of wine that would be right on the recommended limit of 14 drinks a week, but that’s an upper limit, remember? And we often had nightcaps, and rarely only one either. On the weekend we would sometimes kick it off with an aperitif as well.

All in all, although we weren’t getting totally squiffed all that often, by the time we added up we were getting on for well over double the recommended two units per night averaged over the week. We decided we needed to break the habit.

In order to make it more likely that we would stick with the regimen for the full forty days, we decided to allow ourselves two wine nights per week, but spirits are verboten. Just wine with meals.

So what’s been the result? Now that we’re in the third week?

Both of us have more energy, more alertness and feel generally more happy. I felt the benefit within a few days, mr tog took longer. For the first two weeks we both felt the occasional craving, but that’s mostly passed.

We’re sleeping better, and we’ve both stopped snoring. The loss of the need for one of us to shift to the spare room to get away from the other’s rumble has been most pleasant. (We had a great pattern going – he’d snore from bedtime till about 1am, then I’d start snoring about 3 or 4am. Restful, eh?)

Both of us are finding our clothes are looser. We don’t have scales in the house because they are the tool of the insecurity-imps, but his belt has gone in a few notches, as has mine. This last weekend I noticed that a blouse I wore a few weeks ago which was very tight in the sleeves around the upper arm then was now quite loose.

We’re both more alert.

We’re both more cheerful.

And only having two wine nights a week means we make an extra-effort: we go the gourmet. This is good. mr tog makes a mean chili con carne, and now that the cooler autumn weather has come in, I shall this weekend be making Beef Wellington. Yummo.

I just got a brand new Rancilio Silva espresso machine, and you (probably) don’t have one.

It is built like the proverbial brick shithouse. I need no longer dread any difficulties finding our cricket bat to combat an intruder: the coffee filter holder alone could easily fell an ox. Yes, I will be updating this post with pictures once I’ve picked the kids up from school.

Update 17 Feb: or I’ll get around to putting the picutre up on the weekend, actually.

originally uploaded by tigitogs. Note industrial-grade new coffee filter on right and old plasticky Saeco one on left for comparison.

We were meant to get it yesterday as our mutual V-day present, but it was a day late getting delivered.

You know what this means, don’t you my fellow coffee snobs? Yes, now I have to start roasting my own beans.

Addit: I’ve had the first cup of coffee, and now I know exactly how Harry felt a few years ago.