Monday Paintblogging

I’m feeling way too sick to write anything much (stupid lungs), so I bring you – more kid art.
Chroma Kidz washable paint on Reflex A4.

Filed under: Life, family, fun

Friday fun: A day at home

The lad’s not quite 100% today, and we’ve kicked back at home with some movies, popcorn, and a box of drawing tools. He decided to draw a pageful of “monsters”. And here it is.

Caption by the lad:

“A scary monster with long Grinchy claws,
An eleven-legged spider with a red back,
A mummy. The kind that is wrapped in bandages, not you,
A three-eyed horse bee,
A tiny mouse-creature. Whenever a mouse sees him, he gets scared and he runs away. And that little spot in him is his bones,
And a ghost.”

Detail (with a little photomanipulation):

I like them all, but it’s hard to escape the fact that the mummy is particularly awesome.

[ETA] Two more from this morning, this time in acrylic paints. (click for larger version)

A tiger

A walrus on a beach

Filed under: Life, family, fun

So, is it OK?

crossposted at Feministe

Jessica, Amanda, Twisty and Violet Socks (and Melissa too!)have all written about this article: Is it OK to Demand Anal Sex?.

The picture accompanying the article is odiously twee and threatening simultaneously, and as virtually every respondent noted for starters, when is it ever OK to demand any kind of sex? (The title mysteriously changed to Is Anal Sex a Deal-Breaker?)

The particularly repellent men interviewed openly admit that their pursuit of anal penetration from casual partners is about strutting an achievement in front of their mates: the achievement of persuading women to “give in” and agree to behaviour that they will find painful (at least initially) and which is regarded by the men themselves as degrading. (Language from here on NSFW – Not Safe For Work – comprehensive sexual education lies ahead).

Filed under: crass, education, relationships, sexuality

Where the wild political parodies are

My ISP hates me and I can’t hardly browse anything at the moment. Luckily I have siblings with computers who also have kids whose cuteness is second only to mine own sprogs’ cuteness who can be blogged about.

Image credit: originally uploaded by tigitogs

I uploaded this photo from my sister’s extensive collection of sprogshots, taken yesterday in the Enmore/Newtown area. Does anyone recognise the new head on the Wild Thing’s shoulders? If it is Teddy Roosevelt, why?

And speaking of favourite books for kids, what do your littlies like best at bedtime reading? Mine, alas, think they’re too old for bedtime stories now, at least for mum and dad reading them anyway. I used to love storytime.

Filed under: family

Whatever game that’s in aid of, you can play it on your own

Scene: Chez togmob, master bedroom, early hours. The senior togmobbers are engaged in lustful pursuits, when mr tog reaches playfully into the bedside drawer, and flourishingly extracts

A SHOEHORN.

tigtog: Eep!

mr tog: oh.. er.. um.. not what I meant to grab…

Both: gales of hysterical giggles

Luckily, both of us find laughter aphrodisiacal, so the lustful pursuits were eventually resumed. However, I may never look at a shoehorn the same way again. I see myself redfaced, struggling to repress my mirth, emitting various embarassing high-pitched not-quite-laughing sounds in shoestores for years to come.

Filed under: relationships

Work/Life/Family Balance in NSW

On a day dominated by the media attempting to beat up a story about NSW Premier Morris Iemma taking time off to spend the school holidays with his young children, another story got hardly any traction. Both stories tie into Guest Hoyden Helen’s post from last week on the “Real World” of time-management around school holidays not being perceived as a male i.e. “real” issue.

Call for curbs on unsocial work hours

ALL fathers should receive two weeks’ paid paternity leave, and unsocial work hours should be restricted to preserve family life, a group of academics says.

Increased retention rates and lower absenteeism would be just two of the benefits to employers, while for employees it would mean more control over their work arrangements and being able to accommodate family and caring responsibilities, they said. The Benchmarks for Work and Family Policies report, taken from the latest Australian and international research, pushes against the trend towards excessive work hours.

Of course, it’s exactly those excessive work hours that Mr Iemma is being slammed for not performing, the accusation that “he lacks the commitment to lead NSW” being made most forcefully by Liberal leaders former ex-Premier of NSW Nick Greiner and ex-Federal Opposition Leader John Hewson, with fellow Liberal ex-Premier of Victoria Jeff Kennett reported as joining this criticism even though the only quotes from Kennett that I can find sound wistful about his own failure to spend the time with his own family that Iemma is insisting upon, noting that Kennett’s wife actually left him for six months because he was failing to share family duties, before getting onto the obligatory denunciation of NSW as a “basket case”.

Another Liberal ex-leader in NSW, former Opposition Leader Kerry Chikarovski, sounded reluctantly yet staunchly supportive of Iemma’s prioritisation of his family,

Filed under: Media, culture wars, family

It’s not just the moustache

This guest post is by Helen on the Cast Iron Balcony.

Aaaaaaargh!

It’s (gag) happened!



Elizabeth and the dweeby, creepy, moustached Anthony have finally realised that each other is their Only Trew Love, and they’re going at it like… well, as far as anyone can go at it in this agressively wholesome, goody two-shoes comic strip. I’m not the only one. There is appalled-ness all over the internets.

If you don’t know what I’m going on about, it’s the comic strip For Better or For Worse, or the FOOBiverse, which has been infesting the funnies page of the AGE for the last few decades. I’m drawn back to it time and again by the seeming inevitability that somehow, sometime, something interesting has to happen… and it never does. The strips ususally end with a bad pun, or a trite piece of folksy wisdom, in the final frame.

For years, young twentysomething Elizabeth has been seeing various attractive helicopter pilots and other charismatic, if one-dimensional, characters who inhabit her teaching zone in far north Canada, or wherever it is. Meanwhile, her dweeby High School boyfriend languishes in her home suburb (just around the corner from her parents), married to the evil Therese (who works full time while Anthony looks after their child – you see, he wanted a baby, she didn’t, and she acquiesced when he told her he’d be a SAHD. Well, she.. she… well, she took him at his word! Sheesh! She is the evil to end all evils.) Naturally, everything in the FBOFW plot is grinding hopelessly towards what Shaenon Garrity describes as “the plodding inevitability of the Liz-Anthony pairing”.

Filed under: Culture, crass, peeves, relationships, vitriol

“I will…NOT”

Marriage, or the lack thereof, is in the air at blogdom. At least at Feministe and I Blame the Patriarchy.

The two threads have different moods. At Feministe there’s a lot of young unmarried women telling why they see little need to join the marriage tradition, and if they do they won’t go along with the patriarchal symbology of the wedding. Part of possibly my favourite comment at Feministe so far, from Nita:

it has always seemed weird to me to talk of wanting to get married or not wanting to get married as a theoretical construct separate from the “getting married TO X”–the desire to get married seems so contingent on the person or people you have relationships with, that it just doesn’t even make sense to talk of my general desire for (or lack of desire for) marriage. I may want to get married if I find a particular person who is so amazingly awesom that I simply can’t imagine NOT being with them for the rest of my life, but may emphatically NOT want to get married if I had to choose between George Bush, Rick Santorum, and James Dobson.

Then at IBTP there’s women who are/have been married telling other women “don’t do it” (even when these women are married to men they love and respect, they still feel that they would have been happier unmarried but still pair-bonded, especially those who would never have got married if there was another way in the US to get partner benefits on health insurance).

Filed under: relationships

Domestic abuse

A great post from a survivor of an abusive marriage, addressing the issue of “why do women stay?” and how responses to a survivor are often just victim-blaming instead of true support.

Filed under: relationships, sexual violence, solidarity

Talking about acting childish,

I finally downloaded some pics from my cameraphone, and here are the tiglets.

Tigling is 12, and togster is 14, but they still sometimes act like they’re 5. Good on ‘em.

Filed under: family, photoblog