Dysig ond unsnottor

As gryphonvere, my Canadian alter ego, can easily tell you, I traditionally have no tolerance for soppiness. Very matter-of-fact person, I am. With high standards regarding praise literature.
However, my brain has been eaten by PinkNFluffies. I am right ashamed of myself. Ic, dysig ond unsnottor, am gleeing over this, despite the fact that it is incomprehensible to me, and probably terribly written as well.

goblinpaladin , meanwhile, should be commended for this novel way of memorising gramatical structures. I, when preparing my french exam, wrote a series of short exercises about students failing exams. He writes me letters in Latin! *glees*

( enter here only if prepared to be knee deep in dead-language soppiness )

 No one who actually reads Latin is allowed to give me a translation before B does. Bablefish offerings and general mockery are both welcome.

Oh my

Neil Gaiman, our favourite and least-trusted author, when it comes to playing around in the medieval field, has just posted the first few paragraphs of his new children's book, Odd and the Frost Giants.

There was a boy called Odd, and there was nothing strange or unusual about that, not in that time or place. Odd meant the tip of a blade, and it was a lucky name.

He was odd though. At least, the other villagers thought so. But if there was one thing that he wasn't, it was lucky.

His father had been killed during a sea-raid, two years before, when Odd was ten. It was not unknown for people to get killed in sea-raids, but his father wasn't killed by a Scotsman, dying in glory in the heat of battle as a Viking should. He had jumped overboard to rescue one of the stocky little ponies that they took with them on their raids as pack animals.

Exerpts from chapter three can be found here.

Odd and the Frost Giants is being released in the UK only :( for World Book Day:

It was written for something called World Book Day in the UK, where a bunch of authors write books for nothing, and publishers publish them for nothing, and they get sold for £1 each to kids who have been given £1 Book Tokens, and the whole thing exists purely in order to get kids reading. They describe it on their website as the biggest annual event promoting the enjoyment of books and reading.

As to how you'd get a copy if you aren't in the UK, I'd suggest either get someone in the UK to buy one for you, or simply order one from an online retailer. You'll be paying postage but it's still a 14,500 word book for $2 (that's about half the length of CORALINE) so it's not going to set you back much.

I wants it, precious.

Belated...

I just noticed that my Stuff To Blog list has had this sitting in it for a while, and it's now a bit late for a Breast Cancer Awareness Month heads-up. But what the hell, I'm a student. We don't understand things like punctuality.

Last month was Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Stephanie Trigg, who has over the last year or so blogged her own experiences with breast cancer and academia, wrote an opinion piece for the Melbourne Age on October 21st.

I should come clean and admit that I am a direct beneficiary of breast cancer research... 
I expect some of the funding comes from pink sales and donations...
But this doesn't mean I can't be critical of the construction of femininity that characterises pink consumerism. It is not just in the colour — the pink of the Barbie aisle in a toy shop — that breast cancer promotions often infantilise women. It is the distinctive coding of the feminine as principally concerned with jewellery, clothes and cosmetics. What is on sale is the generalised clutter of the bedroom, often in the form of teddy bears and fluffy toys. It is a far cry from the womanly strength of the feminist purple of the 1970s. As Barbara Ehrenreich commented in a famous essay: "Certainly men diagnosed with prostate cancer do not receive gifts of Matchbox cars."
Most insidious, though, is the concept of "shopping for the cure", and the way it naturalises the idea of women as gleeful consumers of fashion and luxury items. There are lots of breast cancer promotions that don't depend on this idea, and many avenues for donating that assume that giving is its own reward. This is the case with many other health and wellbeing fund-raisers; we know Australians are generous. So why should breast cancer be so strongly associated with shopping?

Good questions. Go, read her article.