Canned wine... what next?

This could only have been thought of by an Australian. Canned wine. And they're openly targetting it at young people, who have no clue that wine is supposed to be sipped from a glass, let alone a can. Surely this can't be a positive development?

Full story here

Head in the 18th Century

So I’m sitting here at work with my email, internet and word processor, sitting in a multi-level building with my car close by. My fingers tap and my mouse clicks, putting together next month’s internal newsletter. But my head is somewhere far away… in England, in the early 18th Century.

This is the setting for my novel, you see. The more I write, the more I find the need to research, reading bits of trivia and biography every chance I get. My manuscript is also open, but I know I won’t get time to really concentrate on it. Wishful thinking. My thoughts skip from our summer promotions to what it was like growing up on a country estate two hundred years ago.

It’s a challenge, this period writing and research. There are little details about life back then that you suddenly realise you know nothing about, and your sentence can never be complete until you track the wretched facts down. I also get bogged down in the research, getting more information than I need and procrastinating wildly while I read it all. Because right now I’m having to make hard decisions in my manuscript, and I don’t like it. Carefree inspiration has been replaced by hesitant editing. I’ve come so far; what if I screw it up now? The word count crawls painfully towards 91,000 as I tweak. Must concentrate when after dinner tonight. Must push through and get it done. Before the end of the year, I want to have a finished manuscript in my hands! … I will need to be a lot more disciplined if it’s going to happen.

What's Your Bloginality

My Bloginality is INFJ!

Only 1% of the population, apparently.

Test Rat Outsmarts Scientists

A cunning rat released on a deserted island off New Zealand outsmarted scientists and evaded traps, baits and sniffer dogs before being captured four months later on a neighbouring island, researchers said.

Scientists from the University of Auckland in New Zealand released the Norway rat on the 9.5-hectare (23.5-acre) island of Motuhoropapa to find out why rats are so difficult to eradicate.

They got more than they bargained for.

"Our findings confirm that eliminating a single invading rat is disproportionately difficult," James Russell and his colleagues said in a report in the science journal Nature.

Despite all their efforts, including fitting the rat with a radio collar, they couldn't catch the crafty creature.

After 10 weeks on the island the rodent decided it had had enough. It swam 400 metres, the longest distance recorded for a rat across open sea, to another rat-free island where it was eventually captured in a trap baited with penguin meat several weeks later.

The Norway rat, which is also called the brown or sewer rat, is a husky rodent that weighs about 11 ounces (312 gram) and has a long tail.

Invading rats on remote islands off the coast of New Zealand have been a recurring problem. Norway rats have invaded the uninhabited Noises Islands at least six times between 1981 and 2002.

"Our results may help in the design of conservation strategies to keep islands free of invasive rodents," Russell and team added.

From XtraMSN

Rant: Desperate to be a Housewife

I’ve come to realise that, when it comes to your future employment, we’re deceived as children. As an intelligent young girl, I was put into advanced classes and taught “enriched” curriculums of maths and science. Throughout my school career I was encouraged to think about my future and which course I would take at University. The whole of my life was centred on my school education – the rest was just “extra-curricular”. Through my university studies, I felt I was still aiming for something – my “career”. I went overseas briefly, and then it began. To cut a long story short, 4 jobs and 5 years later I am entirely disenchanted with the whole process. Job satisfaction has slipped from average to non-existent, and I know I’m not alone.

So why did all of our teachers, role models and other leaders always tell us that we should spend our formative years solely preparing for this disappointment? Why didn’t they tell us that even if we slogged through our uni years and graduate with flying colours, we’d still be stuck with thousands of other graduates in the same un-fulfilling jobs? At least the let-down wouldn’t be so bad. At least we’d be prepared for the daily grind. But they would get us so excited about “our callings”, neglecting to tell us that if we chose anything half exciting it would probably lead to unstable employment at best, and that the more regular career paths would lead to daily dread.

If I knew then what I know now, I would have taken Home Ec at college. Surely learning how to run a successful household is more important than calculus? It completely baffles me how people can be so ambitious and strive to work longer hours and incorporate more stress into their lives (aka promotion). I have absolutely none of this ambition. My main goal in life right now is to finish off my novel, fight to get it published, and make enough money from it so that I can take a break to write the next one. In other words, I strive to leave the corporate world behind and focus on domestic matters. The long-term goals involve is for my husband, whose chosen passion will actually earn some money, to be the “breadwinner” and “bring home the bacon”. Will I actually get to enjoy life before the kids come along though? This is my dilemma. And this is the end of my rant. More upbeat, quirky posts in my usual tone to follow soon.