A Bug's Life

From Rick Stein's Fruits of the Sea:
Cooking dishes ... is a bit like ballet dancing. The dancers look as light as feathers, their movements effortless, the pirouetting as if it were just an extension of walking, but then, if you saw them behind the stage afterwards, sweating, their joints aching, you would realize the labour of love that has gone into their performance.

I am still bleeding after cutting myself on a herb chopper on Saturday. It's quite a gouge, and keeps pulling open as it's across a knuckle.

Early this morning I read a paper on gender and the Open Source movement, following a pointer from rmc28. 75 pages about how women are/feel excluded from Open Source communities due to their overarching meritocratic nature and lack of tolerance for other factors. Everyone should be equal, it is a pure meritocracy! Yeah, but one that boys started to build from a young age when they tended to shun girls with their girl cooties. Did their sisters get a fair share on the family computer? Women are competing in the communities (gracious, that's an odd phrase to use!) with men who have some years head start. How do you catch up with that? You don't get a place of respect until you can manage that.

Then maviscruet posted a link to this article by Douglas Hofstadter which uses "outrageous" parallels with racial discrimination to draw attention to how our "natural" language is rife with sexism.

And now my brain is spinning with far too many ideas to write down, certainly as a cogent standalone post.