Weekend Things, W08–17
The Fair Work Commission cut Sunday and public holiday penalty rates by 25% for workers in hospitality, retail, fast food and pharmacy industries. This is just a straight-up attack on the wages of the most vulnerable — people who trade away their weekends in order to make ends meet, in a country with troublingly low wage growth and a high cost of living. It’s set to hit women particularly hard.
“First, Trump will ban The Washington Post from the White House pool. That will be ridiculous and even invigorating at first, but in a little while, once he has kicked out every media outlet that he perceives as critical, we will learn that there is no good way to cover a presidency that is a black box.”
This was Masha Gessen’s prediction in July 2016, and it took mere weeks of the Trump presidency for it to come to pass. “Invigorating” is the perfect word to describe the righteous outrage that flooded my little Twitter niche this morning when it was reported that Trump had banned a bunch of outlets from a press gaggle, but what are we actually gonna do about it?
Other things from the Trumpiverse this week:
- immigration agents are expanding the scope of their raids, after years of operating under an Obama directive that restricted them to focusing on serious criminals — Muhummad Ali’s son was detained at a Florida airport and questioned about his religion, and even beloved Australian children’s book author Mem Fox didn’t get through customs unscathed.
- two Indian engineers working in Kansas were shot, one fatally; even though the killer had previously made racist comments to the men, the act is yet to be classified as a hate crime.
The Guardian is running a series on Indigenous incarceration at the moment called Breaking the Cycle. “Just 2.4% of Australia’s population are Indigenous but more than 28% of the country’s prison population is Aboriginal.” We are doing so terribly here.
I’ve been shopping at the Victoria Market Minh Phat for 20 years and have never failed to find the necessary secret ingredients for Asian recipes; in recent times I’ve even finally broken through with the notoriously gruff checkout women. A couple of weeks ago, the Therry St shop closed (forced out by the redevelopment plans for that part of the market), and will no longer be part of our shopping routine as a result. Very sadface.
Speaking of Asian ingredients:
Down along the Mekong River, Khmer and Vietnamese fishermen introduced them to their fish sauce, a pungent liquid with a beautiful caramel color that they made (and still make) out of salted and fermented anchovies. This fish sauce is now called nuoc mam in Vietnamese or nam pla in Thai, but the Chinese seamen called it ke-tchup, “preserved-fish sauce” in Hokkien — the language of southern Fujian and Taiwan.
Ketchup is Chinese! Well, kinda. The Brits added tomatoes, and the Americans made it sweet. Obviously. (via Michael Hart).
Do sea slugs know maths? This Aeon article compares the expression of hyperbolic geometry in animal forms (shells, corals) with human music or dance — mathematics that is performed, rather than rationally understood.
Khan Academy is offering a Storytelling unit as part of a partnership with Pixar.
This article from 2009 about the history of The Godfather has lots of good stuff in it, even if it’s annoyingly written. I watched the first couple hours of Part II during the week, and gosh it’s good.
My super-hero friend Anna Doubell is preparing to swim the English Channel next year, and is writing a blog about her progress. I feel pretty bloody pleased with myself when I swim 500m, so I’m in total awe of her multiple 5k sessions per week. Just this weekend, she did the ferocious Rottnest Channel swim in WA (for the second time), which is 20k through probably shark-infested waters.
