CleverBlogName

JU-JUTSUFFRAGETTES!

Clearly I need to learn more about Edith Garrud.

India has a coin shortage. Why? They’re worth more as razor blades.

As I type, Ada is shaking her new maracas more-or-less in time to Dean Gray’s American Edit.

Is this one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen because I’m now a parent?

Ada had a rough weekend. On Friday she went into A&E after feeding problems and was diagnosed with ulcers on her throat; by Saturday morning she was refusing to eat because of the pain.

When she was admitted the doctor attending was making alarming noises about tube-feeding her via her nose. This was not a welcome prospect, to say the least; Maire and I managed to stave this off by using syringes to alternate squirting cold water (to numb her throat) and milk into her mouth, keeping her fluid intake up and some food going into her.

After she was given xylocaine, a numbing agent, though, she started to feed again, albeit very hesitantly (“Will it hurt again?” said the little eyes); after a night of persisting with the xylocaine Maire had her close to her normal feeding behaviour again, and we were able to leave on Sunday.

…only not.

From this article on very cool research tracking plant and animal spreads between Polynesia and America, we get the gem:

Along the way the new research finally sinks the already fragile Kon-Tiki raft which Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl used in 1947 to show that Polynesians may have hailed from South America.

Um, no, retard, it doesn’t. In fact, the person this bumpkin interviewed says it doesn’t when asked. What sunk Heyerdahl’s theory is the genetic evidence that links Polynesians to migrations from East Asia, not South America.

If anything, it underlines one of the more important bits of Heyerdahl’s work: that the technology available to the peoples of the era really did allow them to reliably sail huge distances.

Is having a reporter who actually knows what they’re writing about—or at least capable of enough research to fake it well—too much to ask?