The Milkman of Human Kindness

Are you still here, lovely people?

I've been howling at this blog post quoting extracts from "Are Women People?" (1915) (via Twitter; I think ailbhe linked to it).

For instance:

If They Meant All They Said

Charm is a woman's strongest arm;
My charwoman is full of charm;
I chose her, not for strength of arm
But for her strange elusive charm.

And how tears heighten woman's powers!
My typist weeps for hours and hours:
I took her for her weeping powers—
They so delight my business hours.

A woman lives by intuition.
Though my accountant shuns addition
She has the rarest intuition.
(And I myself can do addition.)

Timidity in girls is nice.
My cook is so afraid of mice.
Now you'll admit it's very nice
To feel your cook's afraid of mice.

Don't know if I'm behind or ahead or right on the tip-top of the curve with this one, but anyway. Friends, it is TIME TO PLAY Cheese or Font?

Really, it is.

CHEESE?

or

FONT?

See? What could be simpler? Go click.

I'm editing papers for a Festschrift that my mother is producing this summer. From a paper by John Barnes (UCD): Dante talks about how 'the human soul at first considers goods of little value to be of great value, but by experience or instruction sets its heart on more valuable things':

So we see small children desiring above all else an apple; then, when they are somewhat older, desiring a little bird; then, still later, desiring fine clothes; then a horse; then a woman; then riches in small measure; then riches in large measure; then even more riches.
(Dante, Convivio, IV. 12. 16)

Well. Nice to know where I stand in the hierarchy of possessions, all the same. Feck off, Mr Alighieri.

In the West, we're distanced in time from such odious assumptions, of course, but also in space. I'm thinking of something my sister told me recently, about meeting delegates from the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, who spoke about how hard it is to raise the question of women's rights in communities where wives must crawl on hands and knees to serve their husbands' food.

More to do.

1. The plumber got the boiler back up on its feet today. Can haz heating! Yay! Apparently it cut out because of an airlock, and it's not 100% better - he'll be back tomorrow to clean out the pump.

2. The Oyster does quality mondegreens: today he sang the chorus of "I'll tell Ma when I get home" as "Cheese handsome, cheese pretty, cheese the belle of Belfast city". I had to stifle my giggles. (He still plays hide-in-the-sink, although I suppose it's only a matter of time.)

3. Two frequent themes from our games at the moment:
    (1) the Oyster is an alien / monster / wild aminal who arrives in our house from his werreld. My role is to look beyond his aggressive facade and recognise that he wants to make friends. He then asks if he can stay with us, and I enthusiastically welcome him. He asks "So, do you like me so far?" quite a lot.
    (2) the Oyster is a superhero (more coping with non-omnipotence, I'm thinking). Yesterday he was Superhero John Murphy, who wore a big pink super-cape (OK, bath towel), and could run, jump, and fly. He asked, "So, are there any problems you'd like me to solve?" I said I wasn't too impressed with the current government, which prompted a long discussion about economic policy, voting, etc. John supports rich people sharing their money with poor people, and he's going to make a machine that will make money so that everyone can have as much as they want. Each rich person will give some money to a poor person that they know (we didn't ultimately resolve the issue of rich people who know no poor people and poor people who know no rich people). It's important to remember that if the government give all their money to the poor people, then they will be poor themselves. Taxes may help with this, although I'm not entirely sure that the concept was grasped. John will run for election. His posters will show a picture of him in his super-cape, with a slogan that makes it clear that he can fly. But he can't make people vote for him: they have to decide for themselves.

4. Huge roadside sign on the way to Castledermot, Co. Kildare:

Fed up renting? Own "YOUR HOME" from just €720 per month.

Gotta love those quotation marks!

5. The Feaster is talking a blue streak. Most of what he says isn't English, nor close to it, but he clearly knows exactly what he's saying. He addresses us solemnly, using syllables and intonation and everything, then waits for a response. It's KILLINGLY cute. (Actually, it's very like the language of Boo in Monsters, Inc.) English words we've positively identified include (in no particular order):

- there (deh)
- that (dah)
- there [he|she|it] is! (dehhh-iziz, often with a beautiful baby top-note on the first syllable)
- cow (a very rapid d-gw, possibly for "the cow" - haven't heard it in a good while)
- moo (bvvvvv)
- train (day or tay)
- Mama (mama)
- bread (debd)
- cracker (gah-goh)
- potato (duh-duh, just this evening)

He also uses annann to mean "food" or "food I want RIGHT NOW", and he has a word meaning "breastmilk" that I've yet to pin down. It's something like dez, I think.

He seems hugely amused at the whole language gig, which is delightful.

I've deliberately omitted context here, in case that's not clear! This is for all the pop-culture polls that leave me clueless and bemused :-)

[Poll #1268047]

I'm just back from a lovely holiday in Kerry, on which I finished reading Anne Enright's 2002 novel The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch.¹ There's a paragraph towards the end of the book, just after Eliza has had her first baby, that accosted me with its rightness²:

And then later he is in the crook of my arm. They say you must love a child - but not too much! They say you must do this, or that. But a word like 'love' means nothing to us. It is not even a feeling I have for him, or he for me. It is a silence, or very like a silence. It is the inside shape of me - and it is the outside shape of him. It is nothing that you could stick a word between. (Anne Enright, The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, London, Vintage, 2003, pp. 214-15)

What she said.

¹ Mental Health Advisory: I loved the novel, but it does contain some bits that may distress parents. There are certain things that I could've read fairly easily before I had kids, which I now find very painful. Death-of-children stuff, mainly. There's not a great deal of it in this book, but it's there, and I wanted to mention it because I know some of you have a similar reaction.

² Phrase borrowed from gibtsdochnicht.

niallm just turned round to tell me about a marketing decision that I really hope is a wind-up.

It's a new MP3 player.

And it's called.

i.Beat blaxx

I mean ... is it just me? Please say it's not just me.

When I started writing this post, I thought I might have a point to make. It turns out I don't, really. There's nothing new here. I'm too tired to try to excavate any sort of novel argument from my porridgey brane. But the link in the penultimate paragraph is worth following.

A month ago, when we were visiting Reading, ailbhe had an assignment to look for portrayals of infant feeding on television. We watched for a few evenings, but whatever programmes were on were apparently not targeting a demographic that would be interested in such portrayals. We didn't see a single one.

However, I've kept an eye out since - I've been watching a hell of a lot more television than usual recently, because I don't have much energy for anything more strenuous - and last week, I saw my very first infant-feeding ad. You might know it. It begins with a mother breastfeeding an infant. Voiceover says something like "you always knew you'd give your baby the best". Image switches to a mother bottlefeeding an older baby. Voiceover: "Then, you probably switched to formula." Image switches to soft-focus toddlers in brightly coloured clothes, playing vigorously. Voiceover: Some pap about how great their particular brand of follow-on milk is (I am deliberately not recalling the brand, incidentally), and how it's still "the best".

So, no explicit claim that formula is as good as breastmilk, but a blatant equation of breastfeeding an infant and giving follow-on milk to a toddler, plus the reinforcement of the notion that the "natural" (hello?) progression goes breastmilk>formula>follow-on milk.

Which, I suppose, for many people, it does.

I hate that. Why does it make me so angry? Aren't companies allowed to advertise their products? And shouldn't people have the right to choose how they nourish their babies? Well, ultimately, within reason, they should. Women are entitled to choose not to breastfeed, or to wean early - or, indeed, to breastfeed their children for four or five years - if that's what works best for them and their families.

But the problem is, breast versus bottle is a health issue, NOT a straightforward "consumer" choice. And the deliberate and calculated skewing of that choice by cynical marketing campaigns on behalf of huge, obscenely rich corporations - including the creation of a whole new product (follow-on milk) designed to get around the restrictions on advertising infant formula - is pernicious and wrong.

At least, in the West, formula feeding merely increases certain health risks (by levels that, depending on a mother's circumstances, may represent the best option), as opposed to being a matter of life and death. George Monbiot wrote this week about G8's empty promises, and specifically about the situation in the Philippines, where the government is being prevented by international pressure from implementing the WHO code on the marketing of infant formula. "Every year, according to the World Health Organisation, some 16,000 Filipino children die as a result of 'inappropriate feeding practices'" - while many more become iller than they would have been if breastfed.

But, you know, at the end of the day, they're only furrin babies. Western corporations' profits are clearly MUCH MORE IMPORTANT.

I have nothing of substance to say about devolution/power sharing in Northern Ireland, but I couldn't resist passing on this Freudian typo from ireland.com's breaking news section:

However DUP members have been loathed to commit themselves to nominating ministers by the March 26th deadline...

(Earlier, Radio 4 described Paisley's "decades of roaring opposition" to the Nationalists. I liked that. See? Nothing of substance. I'm all about the funny.)

I've just been reading the website of the Australian International Univeristy.

Laughed a lot.