Read and noted

• Elaine Morgan, on childcare and feminism, in today’s Guardian:

“What really went wrong is this. Everyone agreed that women should be free to work outside the home if we chose. We didn’t foresee that that would gradually morph into the obligation to do it, whether we wanted to or not. A world-famous economist once defined women’s role in the economy as “facilitating consumption” (ie, shopping). We have now become an indispensable part of the productive workforce in a shorter time than anyone predicted. That is OK up to a point. Most aspects of running a house have been transformed by technology (washing machines, central heating and so on) or farmed out to commercial providers – fast-food producers, supermarkets, restaurants etc.
But raising children is one service that cannot be improved by mechanisation. What has happened is that, collectively, employers have doubled the size of the workforce by hijacking long hours of parental time that used to be devoted to the children.”

• Harry Pearson, on footballer’s cars, in the sports section (but read it anyway) of the same paper:

“I’m sure I was not alone in being both repelled and delighted by last week’s pictures of the world’s most tattooed centre-back, Rio Speedwagon, reclining semi-naked on the bonnet of his new Navaho Ninja Deathstar Fighting Dog SUV. The six-wheeled Ninja comes with a 94-litre engine that generates more horsepower than Sheikh Mohammed and burns so much gas that, when you turn the ignition, you can hear the gurgle of a Pacific Islander drowning.
Or would Sir prefer “the 22-cylinder Priapus, a car so overtly masculine the firm produces a circumcised version for the US market.”?

• Not very funny at all: a Jeff Sharlett piece in Harpers about American fundamentalists and their view of history. But darkly brilliant and very frightening.

"It would be cliché to quote Orwell here were it not for the fact that fundamentalist intellectuals do so with even greater frequency than those of the left. At a rally to expose the ‘myth’ of church/state separation I attended this spring, Orwell was quoted at me four times, most emphatically by William J. Federer, an encyclopedic compiler of quotations whose America’s God and Country—a collection of apparently theocentric bons mots distilled from the Founders and other great men ‘for use in speeches, papers, [and] debates’—has sold half a million copies. ‘Those who control the past,’ Federer said, quoting Orwell’s 1984, ‘control the future.’ History, the practical theology of the movement, reveals destiny.
"‘Those who control the present,’ Federer continued his quotation of 1984, ‘control the past.’ He paused and stared at me to make sure I understood the equation. ‘Orson Welles wrote that,’ he said."