Category Archives: Random

Car Park

Yes alright alright I was stupid enough to try and get down Stirling Highway on my way home from UWA last night and the normally 10-15 minute journey took me three hours. THREE HOURS! It was so conjested I couldn’t believe it. But it was an experience.

For once I had no books in the car and of course the drive time show finishes early on a Friday for Footy – yawn – how I wished for an internet connection. Three hours. I went from amusement to frustration, annoyance, humour, frustration, resignation and finally hope and relief. How lucky we are normally that there is no traffic to speak of in Perth. This is what happened. This is what happened next.

Do you think this is what DFAT was warning us about?? 🙂

Anyway we were heading out to a quiz night with the Schultz’s and Boyles and Evan was about half an hour behind me in the queue! We eventually got there and joined in after the second round. Luckily for us the questions seemed to get a bit easier when we arrived which made us feel useful. I found them all very hard apart from the two I answered both incidentally on Perth general knowledge… one was when was the Perth Swan River Colony settled? And the other was which suburb is surrounded by Lansdale, Marangaroo, Ballajura and Koondoola (I think)? Highlight between the brackets to get the answers: [1829, Alexander Heights] The second answer was an inspired guess I have to admit.

It was great fun and we came away with loot! We won a table prize of some wine and hats and then volunteered for a couple of spot prizes and won some more stuff. I’m sure that football shaped water bottle will be very useful.

Earlier in the day I caught up with a friend from St George’s days – DV. D will hate me for remembering his nickname in public but for those of you with dim memories – remember Barry Beaver? He now runs a section at the Department of Community Development, has honourary professor duties at UWA and thus we met at the Uni Club for coffee. Now married with two little girls he seems to be doing very well. We had a good laugh and it was great to see him again. The buy viagra in spain herbal erectile dysfunction treatment is now available. Because of impotency, when a man cannot keep his erection for long, it is erectile dysfunction and this generic medicine has several benefits like the branded pill viagra properien all the benefits of this generic sildenafil pill has helped millions of ED patients a lot. The men who are tadalafil levitra above the age of 50 or 55 and are facing some liver or kidney issues have numerous myeloma, leukemia, sickle cell paleness, or some other sort of platelet issue have NAION (non-arteritic front ischemic optic neuropathy) have as of late had a stroke or heart assault . Don’t store order discount viagra them in the restroom. [Hi D]

What was amazing was how important all our reprobate friends at Uni have become. Fancy lawyers, corporate highflyers, captains of industry. Remember Doey? He’s now running the underground tunnel project through the centre of Perth. How did that happen?? 🙂 Dammit – knew I should have done law or engineering…

Anyway we’re off today. I can’t sleep. Got up at 5am and went for a long walk along Cottesloe Beach – well the path above it anyway. So much is running through my head. Things I haven’t done. People I haven’t talked to and should have. Will the house survive? Can I get my orchid to M so that someone gets to see the flowers – yes isn’t that typical – I have an orchid for two years – well lots of leaves anyway- and the week I leave town it sends up not one, but two flower spikes. Huh.

Dippity is awake early too. Very excited. This is her first trip north of the equator – properly north. Singapore at 1 degree north doesn’t really count. But first we have minkey to go to! And I must organise some cash…

I suspect Dippity will make history

Yes she is EIGHT! And had a delightful day. Thanks to everyone who made her feel special today, she has gone to bed feeling much loved.

And speaking of my favourite saying, I wrote today to Professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich who first wrote the line “Well behaved women seldom make history”, and asked her the circumstances of her most famous line. I reprint her reply below with the news that she is currently writing a book – due to be published in 2006/7 – of the same title. She writes: “Here are a few sentences from the introduction that will explain. . .

“I owe this curious fame to a single line from a scholarly article I published in 1976. In the opening paragraph, I wrote, “Well-behaved womenseldom make history.” That sentence, ripped from its context and slightly altered, escaped into the big wide world in 1995 when journalist Kay Mills used it as an epigraph in From Pocahontas to Power Suits, a popular history of American women. Apparently quoting from memory, Mills changed the word seldom to rarely.

“Her misquote didn’t change the point. According to my dictionary, seldom and rarely mean the same thing: “Well-behaved women infrequently, or on few occasions make history.” The popularity of my slogan may be one of those occasions. My original article was a study of the well-behaved women celebrated in Puritan funeral sermons.

“In 1996, a young women named Jill Portugal found Mills’s version of my sentence in her roommate’s copy of the New Beacon Book of Quotations by Women. She wrote me from Oregon asking permission to print it on tee-shirts. I was amused by her request, and since I had a daughter the same age who was living in Oregon and trying to start a little business, I told her to go ahead. There is major possibility pfizer viagra cheap of blindness caused due to retinopathy. Massaging on any part of body balance your blood circulations. levitra sale The course https://www.supplementprofessors.com/levitra-5844.html buy generic levitra in started with the basics of teaching skills so that a student’s gets an understanding about base of a particular industry. In case of the fallopian tubes being blocked cialis tablets in india or unclear, then it might cause several problems resulting in erectile dysfunction. (3) Some medication may result in ED problems as the side effect. What harm could it do? The success of her enterprise surprised both of us. A plain white tee-shirt with the words “Well-behaved women rarely make history” printed in black Roman type became the best-selling item in her line. Portugal calls her company “one angry girl designs”. Committed to “taking over the world one tee-shirt at a time,” she fights sexual harassment, rape, pornography, and what she calls “Fascist Beauty Standards.”

Her success inspired imitators. My runaway sentence now keeps company with anarchists, hedonists, would-be witches, political activists of many descriptions, and quite a few well-behaved women. It has been featured in CosmoGirl, the Christian Science Monitor, and Creative Keepsake Scrapbooking Magazine. According to news reports, it was a favorite of the pioneering computer scientist Anita Borg. The comic Sweet Potato Queenshave adopted it as an “official maxim”, selling their own pink and green version of the tee-shirt alongside one that reads, “Never Wear Panties to a Party”.”

I actually get a lot of fan mail. I am amazed, amused, and puzzled about this whole thing. Hence the book, which will be a brief, but I hope unusual, introduction to women’s history. I can’t resist this “teaching moment”. If you want to look at the original article, here is the cite: “Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668-1735,” American Quarterly 28 (1976): 20-40

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Phillips Professor of Early American History
Harvard University