Lavender Hill Mob review

Continuing through our box set of Ealing Comedies, last night's selection was The Lavender Hill Mob. Again, a great film, very silly with wonderful humour and thrills. The class divide was particularly amusing, with the middle class orchestrators assuming complete authority over their lower class "professional criminal" associates, despite the criminals having all the experience.

Alec Guinness was fantastic as Mr Holland, carrying out his mastermind plan to steal a million pounds in gold bullion. Insane and ridiculous, but great entertainment all the same.

She's Such A Geek review

Some time ago, Dave pointed me towards a submission request from some people who were putting together a book of essays about female geeks. I submitted an essay and didn't hear anything more. A few days ago, an Amazon package arrived in the post and, when Dave opened it, it turned out to contain the book itself, now a reality.

She's Such A Geek contains a variety of interesting essays by women who are physicists, biochemists, software programmers, astronomers, role players, video gamers, fanfiction writers, scientific journalists, etc, etc. They are mostly very interesting and well written, and I enjoyed the majority of the book immensely.

However, I realise that the reason my essay wasn't considered is because I have no tales of overcoming adversity in geekdom because of my gender. All my experiences of male geeks have been welcoming and enjoyable, and the overall point of my essay was that the communities of geeks I have met have almost without exception been very tolerant and open-minded, and not in the least phased by the fact of me being female.

Clearly, this was not what the editors of the book had in mind, since every essay is about the difficulties of being a female geek and the unfairness of male-dominated scientific fields. While I don't doubt for a second that the experiences related by these women are true, it rather seems to negate the point of the whole thing for the book to whinge about the lack of gender equality and be published by a company that produces books "by women, for women".

This is why I'm not a feminist.