As you can see, we have new digs. Told you I was busy.

Work is still ongoing and, inevitably, there will be things to tidy or hammer into shape. Or at least cover with a rug. If you spot anything scandalously up-buggered, do let me know. I’ll add it to the enormous list.

While I faff and tinker, and grumble about plug-ins, by all means pass the time by poking through the Reheated series.

Do make yourselves at home. And oh yes, open thread.

With my brief absence having resulted in the rending of hair and garments, it seems a good a time to remind patrons that this rickety barge is kept afloat by the kindness of strangers. If you’d like to help it remain buoyant a while longer, and remain ad-free, there are buttons in the sidebar with which to monetise any love. Debit and credit cards are accepted. If one-click haste is called for, my PayPal.Me page can be found here. As requested, I’ve also added SubscribeStar and Ko-Fi accounts, via which love may also be monetised, whether as one-off donations or monthly subscriptions.

Additionally, any Amazon UK shopping done via this link, or for Amazon US via this link, or via the buttons in the sidebar, results in a small fee for your host at no extra cost to you. Feel free to buy things wildly and in bulk.

For newcomers wishing to know more about what’s been going on here for the last decade and a half, in over 3,000 posts and 150,000 comments, the reheated series is a pretty good place to start – in particular, the end-of-year summaries, which convey the fullest flavour of what it is we do. A sort of blog concentrate. If you like what you find there… well, there’s lots more of that. If you can, do take a moment to poke through the discussion threads too. The posts are intended as starting points, not full stops, and the comments are where much of the good stuff is waiting to be found. And do please join in.

As always, thanks for the support, the comments, and the company. Consider this an open thread.

Genevieve Gluck brings news from Scandinavia:

A man in Norway is sparking outrage on social media after he was sympathetically interviewed about his decision to begin identifying as a disabled woman… In the interview, [he] stated that he had always wished he had been born a woman who was paralysed from the waist down.

So not just a woman, but a woman in a wheelchair, which confers bonus points. So many intersections. So many opportunities to impose on others. The gentleman in question, Jørund Viktoria Alme, is a 53-year-old senior credit analyst for Oslo’s Handelsbanken. He is of course able-bodied, if a tad high-maintenance:

“In the same way that I experience being a woman in a man’s body, I experience that I should have been paralysed from the waist down. This is not a desire to be a burden on society. It is about the wheelchair being an aid for me to function in everyday life, both privately and at work,” Alme stated.

Unsurprisingly, many actually disabled people, whose use of wheelchairs is not recreational or a prop in some theatrical psychodrama, have aired their reservations about this new frontier in the world of make-believe identities. Among them, Noomi Alexandersen, a woman with cerebral palsy, who told Norway’s TV 2 that Mr Alme’s professed “identity” is an insult. Mr Alme, however, prefers to think of himself – an activity well-practised – as an activist of sorts, overcoming prejudice and facilitating “diversity and inclusion.” It’s all terribly selfless and heroic.

Oh wait.

As Typepad is only intermittently functional at the moment, and with some “additional maintenance” occurring this weekend, and with attempts to get anything done during that process a recipe for meltdowns and mood stabilisers, I’ll be taking a few days off. By Monday, the worst of it should be over and normal service will resume.

Until then, play nicely. Use coasters.

Oh, and remember, sometimes one person can make a difference.  

From the pages of Scary Mommy, where ladies of a progressive bent share their fever dreams,

Could Witchcraft Make You A Better Parent? Real Witches Say ‘Yes’

I suspect the word real is creaking under the strain there. Other creaking may occur during our travels. Still, the author of the piece, Annie Midori Atherton, is keen to entice us with the prospect of paranormal parenting:

As a new mom fumbling through the daily grind of work, caregiving, and what little social life I can manage to eke in, I often find myself wondering how other parents pull it off… Some days I’m so worn down… that I feel I’d need to summon supernatural energy to thrive — rather than just survive.

And so, obviously,

For a growing number of people — including many mothers — witchcraft doesn’t begin or end with Halloween. According to one scholar, the number of Americans who identify with Wicca or paganism has risen from less than 200,000 twenty ago to nearly two million today.

Uncorrected narcissism, or fears of being an uninteresting person, or both, will do that, I suppose.