Lili Wilkinson's Blog, page 19

Jellyfish

I have a friend who is a jellyfish*.
I've known her since I was born (she is a couple of months older than me).

We used to play a game called Hawaiian Grandmother. It involved some wire-rimmed glasses and a hula-skirt.

When we were about 4, we climbed up her chest of drawers, pretending we were scaling a mountain. We pulled the whole thing down on top of us.

Now we are grown up, my friend Jellyfish lives next door to me. Sometimes mean people pull her tentacles, and that makes her a sad Jellyfish...

NaNoWriMo

When I was in the UK I read an article in one of the Sunday magazines. And like the very best lazy-Sunday morning reads, I thought - that'd make a great book.
So I've put the murder-mystery-in-a-natural-history-museum on hold for a month, and am delving into NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write a 50 000 word first draft in the month of November - 1667 words per day.
So Michael (who has also signed up) and I headed down to the Great Ocean Road for a few days to get...

Alan Turing and Bletchley Park

When I was in the UK, I made a special visit to Bletchley Park. This was part-research for a percolating book-idea, but mostly I went there for wholesome nerdy awesome. And Bletchley delivered.

Ever since I read Neal Stevenson's Cryptonomicon I've wanted to visit Bletchley Park. It's an hour and a bit out of London, and there's a fascinating (and pleasingly lofi) series of museums and things there, including the National Museum of Computing. Also, Ian Fleming used to work there as a gopher, a...

Three things you might not have known about SLOTHS

1. There are two kinds of sloth, the Two-toed Sloth and the Three-toed Sloth. The Two-toed sloth, rather confusingly, has three toes (but two fingers). The two kinds pretty much look the same, do the same things and live in the same places.
2. The sloth is the only animal in the world to not have seven cervical (or neck) vertebrae (apart from manatees). BUT the Two-toed and Three-toed sloths have a DIFFERENT number of vertebrae. The Two-toed has six and the Three-toed has NINE.
3. This crazy...

The E-word

I'm currently reading Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth. And it's awesome. For those of you who get offended or irritated by Dawkins' attitude towards religion*, fear not! He barely mentions it**.
The book instead is a fascinating, straightforward and entertaining explanation of evolution. And I have to say I'm confused. Not by the evolution thing, but by the people who say they "don't believe in it". Because, well, here:
1. Dog breeders select dogs that carry desired traits to mate a...

Analyse THAT

Last night I dreamt that the Nazis built a huge 40-storey circus on the steps of Capitol Hill in Washington. Made from bluestone. Then President Bartlet and CJ, under cover of night, climbed up the outside bluestone circus, where the President set a chair on fire with his cigarette and then distracted the Nazis by pretending to be God. Allowing CJ to throw a snake at Hitler and kill him.

Coming out young

This is a really great feature article from the New York Times about how more and more kids are identifying as gay or bisexual in middle school, when they're 11 or 12 years old.

A new kind of gay adolescent was appearing on the page — proud, resilient, sometimes even happy. We profiled many of them in the magazine, including a seventh grader in suburban Philadelphia who was out to his classmates and a high-school varsity-football player from Massachusetts who came out to his teammates and was ...

A Very Zombie Weekend

I'm in Western Sydney at the moment, spending the week doing talks and workshops with secondary students. And a question I get asked a lot is: What do you do in your spare time?
Well, this is what I did last weekend.


(more info here)

Very clever ad about gay marriage

Scotland

So I did three wonderful events at the Edinburgh Book Festival back in August, and then the awesome folks at the Scottish Book Trust took me out into the country for a day to meet some young Scottish folk.

One of the towns we visited was Brechin, about 2 hours north of Edinburgh. Now Brechin is an interesting town (populatioon about 7000) for the following reasons:

1. It has a very nice 13th Century cathedral, with a round tower dating from about 1000AD.
2. Robert Watson-Watt, an important pione...