1. From The Age: A frozen "Noah's Ark" to safeguard the world's crop seeds from cataclysms will be built on a remote Arctic island off Norway, the Norwegian government said today.

2. A quote that's almost a meme by now, via Matthew Cheney (mumpsimus_feed):

Here I am inclined to fight windmills, because I cannot yet say the thing I really want to say.
--Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

3. blackholly musing on young women and feminism.

And, you know, if I may wade in, here, when I was 19, a 19-year-old friend of mine said, "Gee, Deb, you were born too late. You would've made a great feminist!"
"I *am* a feminist!" 19-year-old me said, & I looked at her, stumped.
"You are?" she said, & she looked at me -- stumped.
And neither one of us could understand how the other one had ever reached that state.

Once, challenged by an embarrassed boyfriend, who wanted me to call myself an equal-rights supporter, or an equalist, or anything but a feminist, I said, "I have a bunch of reasons why I *call* myself a feminist, but at the bottom of the pile is this, that I do it out of a sense of gratitude to the women & men for whom the label was dangerous, who had to burn their messages into golf courses and who had to picket police stations to stop the so-called body searches of women -- any woman -- found on the streets after dark. And who campaigned to have rape considered a war crime. Did you know society had to stop & *think* about whether rape was a war crime? Can you believe that? And the people who marched in the name of women's rights while being hunted and slandered by placard-waving hecklers, which sounds like such a simple thing, but you have no idea," I told him, "you have no idea what it feels like to be hated by strangers in the street."

I have an idea. I call myself a feminist because feminism isn't finished.

4. body_impolitic on the ol' divide & conquer methodology: I’m disturbed to see the particular straw feminist argument coming up more and more: how can you complain when things are so bad for women in the Middle East? Since no one in her right mind would deny the urgent problems women in that part of the world face (and children, and men, and everyone else), this nasty rhetorical trope works on two levels.

5. Too much damn ridiculous spam! If I want to meet gorgeous Russian virgins or ... any of the other men & wimmin outlined in the subject lines of the spam hitting the Conflux email addresses, I will bally go out & find 'em myself.

Which I won't be doing, thank you very much.