by Mary
There are a few interesting galleries surrounding height/weight around:
Chillax: To chill … and relax.
No, I don’t really understand the subtle differences between chilling [out] and relaxing that require fusion into a new word either. But there you go. I first picked up the term from Paul Cook‘s talk at PACLING 2007 based on his paper Automagically Inferring the Source Words of Lexical Blends (where a ‘lexical blend’ is what I would have called a ‘fusion’, that is ‘chillax’ from ‘chill’ and ‘relax’ or indeed ‘automagically’ from ‘automatically’ and ‘magically’). My companions and I were all excited to be in on this latest linguistic gift from North America (this is more than a little patronising, but I consider North American neologisms such fun), but then I got back onto the Internet and everyone on Twitter and Facebook is already using it.
What loop are all you people in, that you beat me to ‘chillax’?
If you run an online forum where you choose to come down on juvenile or hostile behaviour towards women fairly heavily, you may in the past have been tempted to go into long and tedious explanations about why you don’t want to host these discussions in your forum.
However, as of this week there’s an easier answer:
[operator] has kicked [annoying person] from #somewhere ("Joanna, fire")
I have a certain quasi-professional interest in online reviews, but since I have no results of interest to talk about, I’ll leave that for now. My current interest is in booking some accommodation in Ko Lanta (a Thai island) in mid November, and my current problem is that online hotel reviews are useless for mid-range accommodation.
All mid-range accommodation is rated between medium and poor on online review sites with lots of complaints about the quality of the rooms and the food. Most luxury accommodation is rated excellently, with praise of the rooms and the food. Gosh, that’s really useful: it turns out that mid-range accommodation is less luxurious than luxury accommodation. Using online reviews to make internal comparisons between accommodation in the same price range is basically impossible; unless you’re paying for the top 10% of accommodation by price in any given area, most of the reviews will say that where they stayed sucks and that the reviewer will never return. Compare guidebooks, where there will usually be some kind of overall summary of accommodation standards in the area and then their picks in each price range, so that if you follow their recommendations you at least in theory are getting better-than-the-odds accommodation for your chosen price range (before we take into account the effect that a popular guidebook recommendation has on availability, price and standards anyway).
I don’t know that there’s a professional/amateur distinction here, except as a side-effect. What’s really going on is whether the person is writing for themselves (to vent or boast about their choice in accommodation) or explicitly positioning their review so as to be helpful to other people. Most online travel sites have not managed to encourage people to write in such a way as to be helpful to other travellers. I’m not sure what would help; with accommodation it’s especially hard, because very few people will switch accommodation in a given location, so only professional or very dedicated amateur travel reviewers are able to say ‘given a budget of X, I’d stay in place Y over other options in this area.’ Wikitravel, for example, which was founded on the premise that ‘ordinary’ travellers (that is, people who aren’t dedicating their trip explicitly to write ups of the experience) can write as good or a better guidebook than people whose trip is entirely for the purpose of reviewing, has generally found that accommodation is a hard problem. In practice it’s mostly written by travel geeks, who are more likely to be couch surfers, and even if not, aren’t likely to stay in upper-mid and high end accommodation. I’m not surprised the ‘just tell us what you think!’ sites have trouble, but I’d like it if they were useful.
I’ve been married for nearly five months. I still use the surname on my birth certificate rather than my husband’s surname. I haven’t talked to anyone about why, and no one has asked either, so this isn’t That Entry.
This is, however, Another Entry, which is about why people who call my house think that my name is Mrs B. This isn’t even so much about being actually married. It’s been going on for years. If I answer the phone, and it’s a telemarketer, or back when Andrew was looking for work, a recruiter, they will automatically assume that any woman who answers the phone where he lives must be both married to him and using his surname.
And this is positively weird to me. It’s true that married couples using different surnames are getting less common as time goes on after peaking about 10 to 15 years ago. However, living arrangements other than husband and wife are getting more common. De factos are common, and they almost inevitably have different surnames. We could also be platonic housemates. In any of those cases I could have any name in the world. When they want something from me, a donation or a sale, addressing me by the wrong name is a mistake. I know that English doesn’t really have a polite telephone script when you don’t have someone’s name, but that’s really too bad: it isn’t somehow better to have just guessed that I might have picked up a name from the man who lives in the house. Surnames are only communicable in a limited number of circumstances.
It’s doubly weird from telemarketers. We happen to be listed in the phone book under his first initial and surname alone thanks to old share house division of labour when it came to accounts (likewise, the electricity has been in my name since 2002, three houses ago). So the person calling has no prior knowledge that there’s even a Mr B at all. I could be the person listed in the phonebook. And yet inevitably it’s Mrs B for me. I have a surname don’t I? Stands to reason it’s because I’m married to someone.
I’ve only had the pleasure of the reverse a few times yet: where people assume from the different last names that we’re not married. Of course most people don’t give a rats nowadays, so whatever assumptions they make don’t really make it out of their heads. The only exception is the travel agent who recently booked our flights to Thailand put me down as Miss G (my understanding is that married women really don’t use the title ‘Miss’ even if we keep our surnames), that’s about it. It wouldn’t rate a mention as a bit peculiar except that we both sat in front of her wearing gold rings on our left ring fingers for half an hour.
Andrew just got invited to his 10 year high school reunion. The great thing about this is that it makes us either really old or really young, depending on your point of view.
A few years ago I was quite shocked to realise that I’d been out of high school longer than I’d been in it (six years in New South Wales), but actually, it does feel like a hell of a long time ago now. Even allowing for the magic of Facebook reunions.
Human papillomavirus (HPV) is a sexually transmitted disease. Some strains of it cause genital warts. Others cause cervical cancer: not in everyone who gets them, most people fight it off and regular Pap smears catch the cell changes early, but even so.
Gardasil is a vaccine against strains 16 and 18 of HPV, which are responsible for 70% of cases of cervical cancer. It also vaccinates against types 6 and 11, which are responsible for 90% of genital warts cases.
Gardasil is going to be given to high school girls from now on, apparently at more or less the same age as the rubella vaccine. However, there is also a catch up program on for women 26 and under whereby we can also get the vaccine for free. The catch up program ends in June 2009, and you must have had all three doses by then. (However, why not have them now, and enjoy that extra 18 months of protection?) It takes six months for the full course: one shot, then another two months later and another after a further four months.
You can get the vaccine for free if you are a woman and are 26 or under at the time of the first dose. Just go to any GP, hand over a Medicare card and say you want the cervical cancer vaccine. All the medical centres around here have signs up in their windows encouraging women to come in and get it anyway. I had the first dose today. My doctor didn’t feel the need to ask me about my sex life or anything else before administering it.
It’s not approved at all for any adult men or adult women over the age of 26; you won’t even be allowed to pay for it (the scheduled price is $460) unless they approve it later.
The Department of Health has a good FAQ on the vaccine and the free vaccination programme.
Hat tip to Catie, who first alerted me to the fact that the vaccine was even approved, let alone free.
Andrew and I have been studying our Certificate I course in Spanish language this year through OTEN (TAFE’s distance education arm). Certificate I is a 108 hour course: we’re trying to finish the second half of it before the semester ends in mid-November.
I’m really disappointed to hear that OTEN doesn’t intend to accept new enrolments in Spanish courses for 2008, meaning we can’t enrol in Certificate II.
I’m not quite sure what to do. My feeling is that, considering how busy we are with work, studies, diving, yoga, swimming etc Andrew and I won’t have the discipline to continue well with private and informal studies; in addition there will be no one to check our pronunciation and grammar and so on, which has been very helpful. We don’t have money to duck off to Spain or Latin America for immersion lessons more than once in about the next decade.
I can do some undergraduate units with my PhD (obviously Andrew cannot) and Macquarie University also offers a Diploma in Languages which is the equivalent of a full major over three years, but that’s an enormous commitment and neither of us really feel equipped to commit to undergraduate standard studies for any length of time (even leaving aside the commitment to continue being Australian residents). The university loading suggests that even though the Diploma is only one-third of a full-time load that we should prepare to spend 16 hours a week on it. That’s not possible: 5–10 hours for OTEN has been hard enough.
Thomson Education Direct offers Spanish, but at quite a high price and also it sounds like the course is essentially the one we’re finishing now, not the next level.
Meadowbank TAFE will likely run Certificate II in a classroom. In theory that’s only 25 minutes on the train, but those trains are half an hour apart, so there’s the up to 30 minute wait for the train at both ends plus 2.5 hours in a classroom: there goes an entire evening, and we already do this for yoga and SCUBA.
I actually went through this before choosing the OTEN course, and all this stuff was reasons why I did their course. I’m really sad that it’s being cancelled, because at this stage I really can’t find a approx 5 hour per week distance course (or one in my actual suburb, not just my region) to replace it and we can’t rearrange our life around a more intensive or more remote course.
The Sydney Morning Herald’s Lesbian sues over IVF twins article is one of those annoying ones where I realise halfway through the article that I’m being hurried down the garden path by the writer. But, babies! I’m supposed to say. Each one is a gift! That selfish woman (Andrew notes that the ABC version of the story uses the noun ‘mother’ to describe her by the way), the more the merrier!
Reading on, it turns out that the case hinges on the patient’s claim that she asked for a single embryo to be transferred via IVF, and that there were (at least) two transferred instead, as can be deduced from the subsequent birth of fraternal twins. While I’m not sure that the pain and suffering resulting from that is worth a wrongful life claim (but hey, that’s up to the courts) she does rather have a point. Multiple pregnancies are high risk for mother and child. Parenting twins is hard. IVF practitioners are criticised relatively regularly for tending to transfer too many embryos rather than too few and exposing women who are more likely to have a difficult pregnancy anyway to the extra risks of twins, triplets or higher multiples. (There’s a correlation between having difficulty conceiving and having a high risk pregnancy: that’s why you can’t get travel insurance if you get pregnant with any kind of medical assistance.) If you leave out the ‘lesbian!’ ‘wealthy!’ ‘ungrateful!’ ‘bad mother!’ overtones, the underlying facts sound like they are rather worthy of a complaint or a day in court. I hate those sort of articles.
I’ve had my current mobile phone number since early 2002, and only today did I discover that the Australian version of it (although not the one with the country code in front) is prime.