Generally, the notion of pigs as pets seems bizarre or repellent. ¶ Why? There’s nothing rational about the view that taking a pig for a walk on a leash is weird, while eating a pork chop, if you so choose, is reasonable.

¶ Meanwhile: “One of Melbourne’s biggest dog-training clubs has endorsed the inclusion of a pig.” One day I will have a pet pig.

We seem to see a donation of $5 million or $10 million from a billionaire, or one with many hundreds of millions, as something wonderfully generous and worthy of a national honour. Very simply a gift of $5 million from a billionaire is less in pro-rata terms than the average giving of a normal Australian on a normal average salary. ¶ So either we stop lauding thanks for the crumbs offloaded by our most wealthy, or we start offering similar thanks to Mrs Smith whose $100 donation is a greater proportion of her net wealth.

La Central de Abasto de la Ciudad de México is enormous. It sprawls across a 327 hectare site on the eastern edge of the D.F., dwarfing fellow wholesale food markets such as Hunt’s Point (24 hectares), Tsukiji (23 hectares), or even the massive Rungis, outside Paris (232 hectares). ¶ La Central has its own postcode, its own 700-member police force, and its own border-style entry gates, but during my visit, its enormity truly hit home only when we had to take a taxi to get from flowers to fish. It was a solid fifteen minute ride from one section of the market to another!

My first thought was “I want to go to there!” but that awe gave way to anger. With a turnover of $8 billion and individual stallholders who keep half a million dollars in cash on hand, it’s a travesty that the workers who cart boxes of produce are paid just $8 a day. [via]

• It’s fine for Julia Gillard to live with Tim Mathieson, but she’s setting a bad example for most women, who are too stupid to make life decisions.
• Unmarried women “slide into it” accidentally when their lease runs out. They’re whores who screw a series of blokes in lieu of rent.
• Don’t “waste precious breeding time”. Get hitched to the first man who shows a passing interest, or you’ll die rejected and alone.
• Many women get pregnant to trap their partners into staying. These women are stupid and the men will leave anyway.
• De facto partners are just “playing house”. It’s not a real home until you’re married and making the most of your precious breeding time.
• It’s fine for Germaine Greer to have a baby without a husband, but she’s setting a bad example for most women, who are too stupid to make life decisions.
• Pat Rafter is not married, therefore he doesn’t love his children.
• Gee, I miss John Howard. Life was so much easier with a man at the top telling women what to do.

¶ As a matter of fact, Pat Rafter married the mother of his son in 2004 — as if further proof were required that Bettina Arndt is living in the past.

So-called tactical voting in open primaries, here and elsewhere, is a perennial possibility that mostly fizzles come Election Day, voting experts say.

¶ Even if sabotage is uncommon, open primaries can lead to unusual results:

Around the state, Democratic activists were facing the smacking electoral truth that a non-campaigning, unemployed, black, country-living, coo-coo-for-Cocoa-Puffs nobody who’d been kicked out of the Army and was currently facing federal sex charges had just beaten — in the Democratic primary, and by 17 percentage points — a well-known former legislator, judge and current Charleston County councilman who’d raised a quarter of a million bucks for the race and for months been campaigning his ass off.

Australia’s system of closed preselections and factional stitch-ups certainly has its problems, but as Alvin Greene shows, it could be worse. [via]

Transparent models like this one are the only typing instruments available to inmates in some state and federal prisons. A single company, Swintec, continues to manufacture typewriters made of clear plastic, and sells them to correctional institutions in 43 states. ¶ Wardens frequently ban inmates from using computers out of concern that tech-savvy convicts will hide illicit files from guards, and require see-through housings so guards can easily check for contraband.

Want. [via]

When I go to libraries or archives, I make notes in a continuous form on sheets of paper, entering the page number and abbreviated title of the source opposite each excerpted passage. When I get home, I copy the bibliographical details of the works I have consulted into an alphabeticised index book, so that I can cite them in my footnotes. I then cut up each sheet with a pair of scissors. The resulting fragments are of varying size, depending on the length of the passage transcribed. These sliced-up pieces of paper pile up on the floor. Periodically, I file them away in old envelopes, devoting a separate envelope to each topic. Along with them go newspaper cuttings, lists of relevant books and articles yet to be read, and notes on anything else which might be helpful when it comes to thinking about the topic more analytically. [...] ¶ The truth is that I have become something of a dinosaur. Nowadays, researchers don’t need to read early printed books laboriously from cover to cover. They have only to type a chosen word into the appropriate database to discover all the references to the topic they are pursuing. … ¶ Yet as I pick my way through my accumulation of handwritten material, I don’t feel depressed. The thousands of used envelopes themselves give me a good deal of nostalgic pleasure; they remind me of old friends, of institutions with which I have been associated and of the secondhand booksellers who have sent me catalogues over the years.

When I was researching my history thesis, I transcribed excerpts with my laptop, but then printed each on a separate page, stored them in lever arch files, and tagged them by topic with colour-coded labels. [via]

Vegetables have become more popular than flowers in British gardens, according to figures of seed sales. ¶ In 2005, 60% of seed packets sold were for flowers, but since 2007 sales of vegetable seeds have soared, according to seed supplier Suttons. Last year 70% of seed packets sold were for vegetables.

Welcome to the future.

The whole point of having friends, as opposed to “friends,” is that you don’t have to relentlessly keep up appearances and strike poses. … Pretty soon I was only using [Facebook] to send private messages to actual friends, and what’s the point of that? I already knew e-mail was a great invention.

Exactly. Good riddance. If you need to reach me, I’m here.