Tag: blogs

Clever Man: Man Up.

Clever Man: Man Up.

“Poor Rob” as people sometimes refer to my husband has a terribly sore back. He recently had to forgo several days of surfing while on a surfing holiday. This is him after a recent visit to the physio:

sore back

Coincidentally, at this time his buddy (today’s Clever Man) Henry Willis has been expounding the virtues of the Standing Desk, something he has had great success with himself.

standing desk 19th century

Rob has leapt to his feet fast on this one, and ordered a standing desk from Bad Backs, According to Henry if you have a sore back, walking into the store is as exciting as it was walking into a lolly shop as a kid.

msf standing desk RN

Ernest Hemingway was a big fan:

art manliness ernest hemingway

The article itself was on a fabulous website that is going to take up a good chunk of today’s online surfing time if you’re a fella:

The Art of Manliness

art of manliness logo man

The site is filled with wonderful, manly advice. Who has experienced the floppy fish or too strong handshake? Who worries that we’re not shaking hands enough anymore? Here’s how to do it right:

art manliness handshake

There is a whole section on relationship advice such as Being Neighbourly, How to Communicate Your Needs in a Relationship, How to Create a Lifelong Brotherhood and my favourite: Fathering with Intentionality: The Importance of Creating a Family Culture:

“Understand this: A family culture happens whether you’re consciously creating it or not. It’s up to you and your wife to determine whether that culture is of your choosing. If you want a positive family culture, you must commit yourself to years of constant planning and teaching. A culture isn’t something that’s created overnight; it requires daily investment. But the payoff is definitely worth it.”

art manliness breakup

Do you actually know the right way to break down a door? It could come in handy.art manliness break door

Yes, it is manly to carry a handkerchief like our fathers and grandfathers did. You’re not likely to be robbing a stage coach but there’s something rather attractive in a Don Draper sort of way about a man whipping out a handkerchief to mop his brow.

Art Manliness handkerchief

Not sure how to dress for a particular occasion? It’s all sorted here. There’s even a how to on shoe shining, which buttons of a jacket to do up and what to wear when an invitation says formal, semi formal or smart casual.

Art Manliness Casual Office

Thank you to our manly Clever Man Henry for this little gem of a website and for easing Poor Rob’s pain.

 

Heal Thyself

Heal Thyself

This post is about cancer, so first let’s make some jokes about superfoods. That works, doesn’t it?

zucchini pasta

I read a very funny article by Maggie Kelly yesterday. Her view of the clean eating mega-trend that is sweeping the first world. Among the gems, this:

Zucchini pasta is nothing like the real thing. It is like how those people in Argentina were selling rats on steroids as toy poodles. Just not the same.

The photo above is some zucchini ‘pasta’ I once made and thought about blogging. True.

And this.

To some of the more hard-core Clean Eaters telling them that I eat bread is like admitting I masturbate to old Adam Sandler movies whilst listening to One Direction and eating Skittle sandwiches. For them it’s weird, confusing and disturbing.

Before you think I am poking fun at you, disclaimer: I am riding that bandwagon myself. I have a kitchen full of chia seeds and gogi berries. My kids drink the occasional green smoothie – hell, there’s a huge bunch of kale sitting on the bench right this minute – and coconut products are spilling out of the fridge and pantry. It’s a superfood mecca here. I draw the line at pressing my own turmeric capsules but I have friends who do.

What the fantastic and yet slightly annoying trend indicates is a desire for we, the fat, unfit, unhealthy Western World to take our health into our own hands and work on healing. Work on creating and maintaining wellness rather than just fixing sickness. It’s good.

Scientists have been working through this stuff for years. They humbly lean over petri dishes and microscopes occasionally popping their heads up to say “ahh you might want to have a look at this” and bang, there’s a cure for polio or measles or cholera. Now the big strides are being made in the field of cancer research. They are just the coolest people.

I will try to explain cancer and some new research; the idea itself isn’t new but the progress being made is and it’s pretty amazing. Bear with me as I was born without science genes; I am just a science junkie with no insider knowledge.

New Scientist magazine reports that we are finally getting a leg up on finding a way to beat cancer, in this case melanoma, common here in Australia. This new approach has not only made the cells retreat, in some people they have disappeared altogether, within days and weeks in some cases. All thanks to the scientists teaching the good healing cells how to do their stuff.

In order to explain how the new treatment (still in the testing stages) works I have to first semi-plagiarise NS in order to explain how this cancer operates.

Cancer cells are good at hiding. What makes them so scary is they hide in plain sight. You can sometimes see a tumour growing right there on a body and that body’s own immune system simply can’t detect it.

The T cell is the antibody whose job it is to locate and destroy bad cells. The cancer cell grows a surface molecule called a ligand, like a little tentacle that can stick on to stuff. The ligand then binds on to the T cell (the good guy).

Once it has attached to the T cell, it instantly activates a receptor in the T cell called PD-1. You can guess the rest: Once PD-1 is activated, the ligand, along with its sneaky cancer cell becomes invisible to the good guys, the T cells. Tumours are now seen by the body as normal tissue.

cancer cell

Traditionally, cancer treatments have involved trying to kill off cancer cells, however this means killing a lot of good cells too, which is why some cancer patients become even sicker during treatment.

Scientists have worked out how to wake up these T cells. There are three antibodies that are being trialled. Two, Lambrolizumab and Nivolumab work on the PD-1 receptor and the third works on the cancer cell ligand. In each of the therapies, cancer disappeared altogether in nine of those on the trials (135 in one trial and 53 in another) and halved or more in another 75.

“Many effects happened very quickly, sometimes within three weeks,” says Jedd Wolchok of the Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, who led the trial.

Jedd Wolchok

Wolchok says that what makes the antibody therapies so exciting is that unlike conventional cancer treatments, such as radio and chemotherapy, they work by reviving the power of the patient’s own immune system – something that has evolved to efficiently dispose of infectious, foreign or abnormal tissue. “They treat the patient, not the tumour,” he says. – New Scientist

All three drugs are now the subject of larger trials involving people with skin, kidney, lung and brain cancers. The third antibody trialled has already shown promising results with early trials of kidney and lung cancer.

So in a nutshell, scientists are working out how to get the body to heal itself from cancer, simply by being able to see the cancerous cells and then just do what it is already really good at. Healing itself. It’s exciting stuff.

TMI

TMI

My corner of Australia is rife with head colds at the moment. I tried to dodge the one after me but have succumbed gracelessly. Winter is officially upon us and while is sunny and crisp, bugs abound, so I’ve had time to lie around reading the paper and surf the world-wide web.

Because of all this downtime, I made it all the way to the technology pages of the newspaper and discovered a couple of interesting blogs:

STFU Parents is hitting the news at the moment as the blog author, Blair Koenig has just released a book of her posts. People send in snips from social network sites like Facebook and tumblr with parents’ status updates that are the very definition of TMI (too much information).

There are entire categories for different over-sharers, such as Sanctimommy (my personal favourite), Onesies, WTF of the Day, Woe is Mom and MommyJacking, where someone may post a note that they got a job promotion and in comes mommyjacker with a comment about how that’s “nothing compared with raising kids!”.

stfu parents stfu momyjacker 1

Then there is the Gross Out Factor section, not to be viewed while eating.

stfu parents gross

Most of we Generation X-ers who are on Facebook, the last of the adults to reach adulthood without the Internet, know that there is a line not to be crossed when it comes to over-sharing – so far I haven’t had any look-my-toddler-pooed-all-over-the-room shots show up in my news feed. Then again I have very few friends whose kids are still toddlers these days.

But is there a place for mummy-sharing online that isn’t going to get you a featured spot on STFU Parents? It’s a question Koenig gets asked often. Can I share my ultrasound photo or is it going to end up here?

As she says “We’re entering a new phase where placentapics may occasionally inspire more organ appreciation than nausea.”

Good thing or bad thing? It’s up to you. I agree that we are becoming more desensitised to the over-share than we used to be however for some this is the forum for which mums and dads share baby news with their distant family.

If the snippets of parents who should probably not own a computer or smart phone (or be parents) fills you with dread for the future of civilisation at this point, perhaps don’t read on.

The Bun in the Oven section of STFU, Parents is just plain gruesome. Here we have the pleasure of mu-to-be Stormie’s update regarding the approaching birth of baby Memphis by C-Section:

stfu parents c-section

You don’t really get the whole picture just by reading these snaps. What makes the blog un-put-downable are the comments by Koenig that accompany each morsel. Her writing is clever and funny and while cutting she isn’t cruel. More incredulous.

The other blog is Reasons My Son Is Crying by Greg Pembroke, a 32-year-old New York father. If it wasn’t so funny it would almost qualify for a spot on STFU Parents, but as you look at each photo and the caption it gets funnier and funnier. Pembroke has two little boys and has started a blog in which he captures a photo of one of the kids in tears along with a single sentence caption describing why.

This one is titled “his sock wouldn’t come off”:

why my son is crying sock

Others have captions such as “A fly landed near him”, “He saw a beetle”, and “I wouldn’t let him get a tattoo.” The blog has only been around for a month or so and has already gone viral and earned him a spot on Conan O’Brien. It’s raised some interesting discussion about bringing parenting to the online world. Is Pembroke damaging his little fellas in some way by publishing their every tear? There are plenty of mommy bloggers up in arms about how despicable this is, and others who see it as harmless fun:

At GeekMom in the comments section of a blog post entitled 3 Reasons To Detest “Why My Son Is Crying” Suburban Snapshots writes:

“Let’s not assume that the rest of these kids’ days aside from the 4 seconds it takes to take and post a photo of their tears is not spent full of love, reassurance, giggles, discipline, play, and everything else that nurtures kids. I’d guess that they spend a LOT of time laughing, because their parents clearly have excellent senses of humor. I’d rather my child be raised knowing how to laugh at herself than raised to write blog posts critiquing the parenting of strangers.”

While Lisa Quimby counters with:

“What a despicable thing to do to a child! Toddlers face each day being shorter, slower, weaker and less coordinated than most everyone around them. They are trying to figure out the rules of a world that seems so unpredictable. Of course there will be meltdowns when expectations (a favorite cup, for example) aren’t met. As parents, it’s up to us to recognize the struggles that seems so small to us and help our children learn to handle their emotions. If we don’t treat them with respect, how will they learn to respect others? And what about when this kid grows up and finds his crying toddler face all over the internet?!”

My vote goes to Pembroke who told Today.com

“Kids have meltdowns 20, 30 times a day. You can drive yourself crazy or you can laugh and just accept it.”

He is now taking submissions if anyone reading this happens to have a camera and a crying toddler on hand…

As for frowning at Pembroke or laughing with him, I’ll take laughing. He sounds like a genuinely nice guy having a bit of fun with sweet, normal little boys.

Blog Love

Blog Love

If you’re serious about wasting time there is no better way than following heaps of blogs and there is a site that lets you do it all in one place: Bloglovin’. You just go to the site, type in the names of the blogs you like and each day a summary will be sent to your inbox in a single email with all your favourite blog updates.

Here are some of the blogs the sensible friends are lovin’ right now:

Man Repeller: This is how she defines the title: “outfitting oneself in a sartorially offensive mode that may result in repelling members of the opposite sex. Such garments include but are not limited to harem pants, boyfriend jeans, overalls (see: human repelling), shoulder pads, full length jumpsuits, jewelry that resembles violent weaponry and clogs.” It’s pretty cool.

Who What Wear: Whoever runs this site is a hard worker; it’s updated constantly with fashion trends and style notes. It includes style tips from stylists, what the celebs are wearing, various blogs within the blog, look of the day and product of the day. Fashion mecca.

The Sartorialist snaps uber-cool people on the street and posts them up. I can never even aspire to the level of cool I see in these pages but it’s lovely photography and gorgeous clothes. Today there are gorgeous New Yorker’s in pyjama style clothes. You’d think it would be comical but it somehow is beautiful instead.

Flourish Magazine is one I have mentioned it before but worth another shout and not just because it’s run by my good buddy Jane Willis. I was searching for someone to make a proper party cake the other day and asked Jane for a recommendation. She threw the question onto her Flourish Facebook page and within minutes there were about 14 replies with great local suggestions – the advantage of having a successful, well-connected local blogger on the books. If you want to source something in Perth, just flick Jane a note.

A Subtle Revelry is the go to spot for party DIY ideas, craft ideas (my house is a craft-lover’s wasteland, but it could be for you) and there are some interesting recipes – for instance today is how to make your own bagged microwave popcorn.

Olivia Palermo is a mainstay of fashion blogging but be warned, that sweet little cardi you think you will source for Autumn is liable to set you back eight hundred dollars. For cheaper fashion links look toward The Londoner or Buy Now Blog Later (although if you’re over 40 you also run the risk of becoming the proverbial mutton dressed as….).

Smitten Kitchen is gorgeous and the name says it all. She has a book which I haven’t got but looks lovely. Very popular food blog, like What Katie Ate. I sometimes judge a food blog by how boring/tricky the muffins look (muffins should be simple, delicious and easy) – check these out for beautiful Greek-yoghurty coconutty easy muffins. Beautiful.

Cheating with Bellini is a fairly new local blog by a pretty young mum I run with, Rosie. She has great taste in food and recipes so it’s worth following for those thermomix types who are interested in a variety of interesting tips, hints and dishes such as David Lebovitz’s Fresh Ginger Cake.

Style and Focus is a local Perth blog discovering and showcasing local style and creativity.  It is a newish blog by two highly accomplished women, Jo Carmichael, stylist and Jody D’Arcy, photographer with seriously lovely photography, a great eye for beauty and fascinating interviews. These bloggers also have their own sites. They find stuff we all wish we had and post it up…. I think I might need a bar cart for my veranda.

Stockholm Street Style – It’s a little bit like The Sartorialist but it’s Scandinavia, home of the best TV series’, best clothes, happiest souls and my pin-up guy (apart from you of course Rob), Alexander Skarsgard….it’s where I will be born when I am next reincarnated.

Hej då.

One in 80 000

One in 80 000

Apparently says Seth Godin, blogger extraordinaire, there are 80 000 new blogs created every day. It’s a bit sort of depressing, isn’t it? Just when I was struggling with relevance, there’s that figure. I almost want to post a picture of a cat doing something funny:

Onwards and upwards.

This post is just to briefly sing the praises of some other blogs among the millions (millions I tell you!) out there that have been recommended to me by my sensible friends that I keep going back to, again and again for either advice or a laugh or because I really don’t want to be doing what I should be doing.

First up I should point out that I am not specifically primal or vegetarian or sugar-free or anything-arian or religious (perhaps not at all) or atheist. I really hate the idea that I might be a fence sitter though: Instead I see myself as taking a little wisdom from all of the above.

Here are some people on the Internet worth checking out.

Sarah Wilson: She has a blog that “makes life better, sweeter” – without sugar. It’s a pretty scary concept but her science is sound and she isn’t fanatical in her approach. You read her little book and her blog and you almost think you could do it. She also puts why good fats are good in very simple, easy to understand language.

sarah wilson

Mark’s Daily Apple  Mark Sisson is pretty much the king of the primal, or paleo, eating movement and also has some good science on his blog, Mark’s Daily Apple. I really like that while he is devoted to his pathway he is not a purist. I was delighted when I read his advice to someone who was terrified of being offered fresh-baked bread that they’d be a fool not to have some (slathered with butter), even though his main gig is “grain-free”. For an older guy he is also very easy on the eye.

mark sisson 2

Recipe Rifle: I haven’t been reading this for long but what I have seen so far is hilarious. As one of MSF’s said recently “I want her to move to my town and be my friend”. She offers a recipe with each post and a funny, irreverent update on life in her world. I love her style.

recipe rifle

Flourish Magazine: This one is the work of one of my treasured sensible friends. It’s a wealth of recipes, advice, product info, reviews and fashion all based around the idea of living positively. I have a few articles floating around there but what you won’t see is gossip or celebs. A fresh approach to women’s stuff that leaves you feeling a bit better about yourself instead of hopelessly inadequate.

New Scientist Magazine: This isn’t a blog but there are loads of blogs in their blog section. It’s a magazine I love reading and I have zero science cells in my brain so that’s saying a lot about how hard they try to hit a wide audience. It is packed full of absolutely fascinating information like “cannibal insect sex caught on video” and how allergies could serve an evolutionary purpose, and “gut instinct” about the brain that is our stomach (Sarah Wilson talks about this in her blog too).

The Vine: “brings you all the latest news and rumours, facts and hard-hitting opinion, wanton gossip and downright lies, from the world of pop culture, music, fashion, art, entertainment and more..” I wish I was this cool.

There is more.  Jude Blereau for instance, Sally Fallon. My lovely friend who I have never met in person; Blayney Colmore. The Cool Hunter, Remodelista. I will get to them another day, soon. But there is no more time on this frantic summer’s eve to get it all down and who wants information overload? It’s enough that there are 80 000 others like me out there today another 80 000 tomorrow (it can’t be true!).

I would love to hear of the ones you follow.

 

%d bloggers like this: