Veronika Wild

Clown Doctors at Work As usual I missed a couple of things this week. The first was the National Day against Bullying on March 16 th and the second was World Water Day on March 22, both important issues, but I have had a bit of difficulty getting on the Web lately (Was it something I said?) and I feel like something a bit lighter myself today, so I thought I might get in early for once and talk about something cheerful. April 1 appropriately, is Smile Day, a fundraising day for the Clown Doctors who have been bringing laughter and joy to children and the elderly in our hospitals.  Anyone who has ever been confronted by a hospital procedure as a child will appreciate what they do. It has also been found to have physical and psychological benefits. In Australia there are 55 Clown Doctors working with around 100,000 people in major hospitals. Their motto is: Smiling is highly infectious. Help spread it around. Easy ways to help are to have a fund raising morning tea, ...

A small window of opportunity still exists to protect access to information, freedom of speech and the democratic processes of the World Wide Web. (Redacted Edition) see note at end Congratulations to Google, Facebook, and other major tech companies that refused to co‑operate with authoritarian regimes seeking to install surveillance systems capable of tracking dissidents — systems that, in some countries, have led to arrests, torture, and even death. Thanks also to Facebook for taking a stand against employers demanding access to users’ private passwords, helping to preserve the right to individual privacy. Legislation such as ACTA, SOPA, and PIPA — framed as copyright protection but enabling mass tracking of online activity — has been defeated for now, but it is far too early to celebrate. In the space left by companies that declined to participate in such surveillance, other multinational firms stepped in, supplying monitoring technologies to governments with troubling human‑righ...

One of the things I missed while I was busy, was International Women's Day on March 8. It seems that a lot of other people missed it too. In fact there is a petition by a man, yes, a man, saying we should commemorate it more. Usually the event is celebrated here with a breakfast or luncheon and a rosy picture in the morning paper of the handful of women who have made it in business or public life.  When I think back to the days when I was the first female 'counterboy' in the insurance company I worked for, when married women could not sign cheques or obtain a loan, or how my mother was a 'temporary' public servant for twenty three years with no raise in pay or status, because married women could not advance, I think for a moment that we have come a long way, yet by lunchtime there will be a discussion about closing childcare facilities or why having paid maternity leave as other OECD countries do, will lead to even more women becoming part of the underpaid, unpr...

(Graffiti in the Rivulet) I am supposed to be fixing up the bad formatting in some of last week's posts, but there have been a couple of distractions. In the first instance, while trying to contact a human at Discovery News.com to request permission to use the lovely cartoon which was featured in Mad Magazine in 1974 , I typed Contact in the search box and all I got was news about Alien Invasions and a bit about Contact Lenses. It looked rather like this: _________________________________________________________________________________________ SETI 2060, Do We Make Contact By Then? : Discovery News Will SETI observations be successful 50 years from now? We imagine possible scenarios. Do Aliens Exist? If So, Will They Kill Us? : Discovery News In a new Discovery Channel documentary "Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking", the world-famous physicist goes on the record about his concern for Spooky Eye Contacts Can Damage Eyes: Discovery News Those spooky lens...

A couple of lighter stories so that it's not all Gloom and Doom (Thanks for this one T!) No it’s not spring. It just feels like it, so I have been out inspecting the “garden.” I was so inspired by my son’s magnificent strawberry patch, that I planted some myself.  I am pleased to report that the sole survivor is at last getting new leaves. The orphan tomato seedlings are also doing well as are the companion weeds. Despite the fact that I use tons of rosemary on things like rosemary potatoes and Portuguese chicken, the rosemary plant also continues to thrive. Anyway, I took some to a garden swap last week and one of the ladies gave me an excellent tip. Use it instead of skewers when making shashlik or satay beef and the flavour will go right through it.  Haven’t tried that yet, but I’m sure it will be delicious.  Not my Strawberry Patch I love the garden swap, not that I ever have much to bring except rosemary, but you always find interesting things you ...

Redacted Edition: Standing With Those Who Stand Up  (See reasons for redaction at end of post) It was a grey, rainy day yesterday, and as I looked through the bleak square of window, I found myself thinking about people in prison. For them, the world must often look like that too — except without even the hope that tomorrow’s view might be brighter. So I began writing a message of support to a man in the United States who was awaiting trial for taking photographs inside a marine‑animal facility. At the time, some states were considering laws that would make it illegal to document conditions in agricultural or industrial settings — laws that would have prevented the public from ever seeing how much of our food is produced. It felt important to reach out. But then I thought: perhaps it would be even better to help someone actually get released. So I began looking through the many petitions circulating at the time — petitions on behalf of people arrested for speaking out, defending o...

One of the main reasons for the survival of these Southern Right Whales and their young is that their breeding grounds are protected. It also helps that they are a long way from human habitation and that they do not rely on echolocation to find mates or food.   For some places and species it is already too late. There has been no recovery of Canada's gigantic  Newfoundland cod fishery, even though fishing has been banned there since 1992 and, despite ever lower catch quotas, the northern cod fishery continues to plummet too. Likewise the catch of bluefin tuna. The yellow fin appears to be fished out. Yes, we can and we must continue to sign petitions. We  should continue to ask national governments to set up reserves, stop destructive practices and prosecute offenders effectively if they disobey the rules, but it is all too apparent that our efforts are fragmentary and that we are putting out spot fires, rather than dealing with the ongoing problems of ocean degrad...

  Fishing vessels, Hobart So far we have mostly looked at the direct effects on fish and the fishing industry. Even in remote places such as the west coast of Western Australia or the most southerly fishery in Australia, I hear the same complaint: that the fishing industry is no longer viable for small fishing enterprises like these. Despite this, there are still 35 million people in 20 million boats ploughing the oceans in search of fish. But it's not just the fish or the fishing industry. Every day there are new groups or individuals raising the alarm about this maritime creature or that  -from seahorses in Malaysia to sea lions in Chile , from sea turtles   in Indonesia to the Gulf of Mexico and Cap Verde in Africa, to polar bears and seals in Alaska. Those which are not dying directly as a result of destructive fishing practices, or because they are competing for diminishing supplies of food, are dying because of enormous changes in their habitat.  Apart fr...

The Pacific as seen from the air en route to Vanuatu I doesn’t take much reading to discover that oceans are in trouble all over the world. Just trying to write a bit of a summary about the main issues seems to be taking forever, so I am going to do it in three parts. The first part will be about some of the threats to the marine environment itself, the second will be about some of the effects on marine life and the last one will be about things we could do. At the end of each post there will be some petitions related to topics raised. Links to source material  and or further reading, will mostly be shown in orange The Closing of the Commons There was a time when everyone believed that the earth was flat and that if you ventured too far out to sea, you would fall off the edge. Then, as ocean -going technology improved and the Magellans of the world ventured ever farther from shore, most people eventually came to understand that the world was round and much larger than previ...