Computer says no

When I bought my strawberry iMac in 1999, the Bloke immediately christened it Pink Patty. When I replaced it with the white eMac in 2004, the new model seemed to me to be a boy (possibly because it wasn't pink), and was therefore inevitably christened Patrick White.

(Who was, of course, gay, or as he would have preferred to put it, homosexual -- which is often also signified by pinkness, though not pinkification, which is reserved for full girliness. How's that for a little gender identification construction problematisation clarification valorisation.)

Now Patrick White is one of the many computers dotted about the country who that think daylight saving finished over the weekend. So every time I look at the on-screen, erm, time, I have to add an hour.

Yes, of course I know how to fix this. But I have a sort of atavistic fear of contradicting and correcting any entity called Patrick White. The old poppet has been dead for over seventeen years now, but the idea of gainsaying him still makes one shake in one's shoes. So I might just leave it alone, and by next week the time will be correct again with no intervention from me. Patrick White is merely ahead of his time; 'twas ever thus.

Don't call me Mrs

Dear [insert name of CEO of relevant charity here],

Thank you for your letter informing me that I have so far not made good my telephone pledge of $20 to your charity.

Unfortunately there are a couple of problems.

For a start I have no memory of making any such pledge. I work at home and am enraged by disruptive, intrusive, unsolicited telephone calls from strangers trying to get between me and my money. (Even charitable strangers. My modest budget allows for contributions to my charities of choice and they do not include yours, worthy as yours may be.) It is highly unlikely that, having got up from the middle of a now-doomed sentence and answered the phone to such a solicitation, I would have been in a mood to offer $20 to the person responsible.

(Yes I'm on the DO NOT CALL register, but they make so many exceptions it has hardly been worth doing, and people have begun to get around it by making automated calls which one answers only to hear a recorded voice, and an oleaginous male American voice at that.

And no I can't leave the phone off the hook; I am a freelancer with an aged parent and need to be contactable at all times.)

As I say, I have no memory of making such a pledge. It would have been utterly unlike me. Are you people flying a kite and trusting that at least some of the targets of your mailout will say Duh, silly me, fancy forgetting an important thing like that, and bung their credit card number or cheque in the mail?

Even if I take you at your word and assume that I did indeed, during some sort of major brain fade, make a $20 pledge of which I have no memory, we still have a problem.

I don't know where you got my name from -- no doubt some sold-on mailing list, a practice of which most poor suckers members of the populace are quite unaware, but you have made a terrible, terrible mistake in addressing me, most presumptuously, as Mrs Pavlov's Cat.

I know there is still a large section of the populace that believes that all adult women are currently married and wish to be known by their husband's names, and if they aren't and don't well then they're beneath consideration and hardly even people at all really, but if you want our money then you are probably going to have to change your tune.

I think it very likely that there are many, many women about who would agree with these sentiments, and if you want to raise the maximum amount of money for your charity then I would strongly advise you to remember that this is the 21st century, not the 19th.

For future reference, not that it will help as your charity is now already on my blacklist, here are some guidelines. As salutations go, I prefer Dear Pavlov's. If you cannot live without an honorific then you may address me as Ms Cat. If you object to Ms (in which case you are of no interest to me), there is always the option of Dr Cat. If you absolutely cannot live without addressing me as Mrs, I believe that as une divorcée I am still technically entitled to call myself Mrs Insert Surname of Child Husband Now But a Dim Memory Here.

Failing any of those, you may call me Comrade.


Yours most sincerely,

Pavlov's Cat (Ms)


PS: Injury to insult: you misspelt Pavlov's as well. Everybody does, but it's still a bad look.

PPS: Don't waste your time looking for an enclosure. There isn't one.

Y is it so? Naming Australia's women, 1950-1955

Okay so I'm under massive multiple deadline guns and I got up at 5.30 am to try to cope, and here I am at 7 am, blogging. Call it a very early coffee break.

Back there at the crack of dawn I was writing a review of a book in which two major characters are, to my mind, very anachronistically named, and it's reminded me of a conversation I had with my sisters on Christmas Day about my theory that all Australian women born between 1950 and 1955 have a Y in their names. The two exceptions to this are Helen and Susan, though even then you probably have a Y in your middle name, which is most likely either Kay or Joy.

The more I think about this theory and the more I think about women I know in that five-year time frame, the more likely it seems that there was some powerful unwritten law. If I look around among family and friends for examples, I can see -- without (as it were) even moving my feet -- a Wendy, a Sally, a Robyn, a Lyn, a Mary, a Dymphna, a Jayne and a Lynne (and, of course, moi), plus several others with middle names dominated by variations on the Kay-Joy theme.

There's a thesis in it, if not an ARC grant.