Housekeeping

There are three things I have to mention here. I've made a minor change to the template, and added a few things to the sidebar (that's two), and a post of mine has been chosen for the 21st Skeptic's Circle (that would be the third).

Firstly, template. The time of posting at the bottom of the posts no longer links to the post. Instead, the title of the post does. I find this much more intuitive.

Secondly, sidebar. I've removed the Einstein quote, because it was getting on my nerves. I had intended to collect a number of them and ask Dave or Q. Pheevr to write something that would display a different quote each time the page was loaded, but I've changed my mind. Instead I'm providing links to resources for women in North America who need a bit of help. The abortion in Québec link points to the Morgentaler clinic's homepage, and the one for the rest of Canada points to Planned Parenthood Federation of Canada's find a clinic page. I also provide a couple resources for women in the US who need emergency contraception. Those last two links, as well as the idea of providing these resources, were stolen directly from Bitch, Ph.D.'s sidebar. The button that serves as a heading was made with Adam Kalsey's button maker.

I've also added Pharyngula and Pooflingers Anonymous to the Us section of the blogroll. These are two excellent science blogs that inspire me to keep thinking and acting and stay skeptical.

And, thirdly, Skeptic's Circle. I submitted my posts In Defense and Why do we Bother to the Skeptic's Circle, and the latter one made it in. This is very exciting to me, as I only learned about the Skeptic's Circle very recently and am still not a hundred percent sure what it is. Being part of something I don't entirely understand is always fun! As far as I can tell, the Skeptic's Circle is a monthly (weekly?) collection of skeptical posts by skeptical people about things of which they are skeptical. It's not at all clear to me how the posts are chosen, but I understand it's quite popular; certainly having been chosen has driven more traffic to this site than anything else. My daily hit count has just about doubled! For a little while I was considering holding a silly contest, a la litigious moron and offering to send a cookie to my thousandth visitor, but then I realised that that was too silly, even for me, and furthermore it wouldn't work because if my thousandth visitor was Australian (you never know!) then I would have to insist that they send me a cookie instead because we can't get Tim Tams in Canada and it's just Not Fair. So that put an end to that idea.

Ultimately I decided that the only thing to do was to write another post. This one doesn't count, obviously, as it's rather devoid of content, but I've had one brewing for a while about why providing women with the resources mentioned above is so damned important. I have thrown reams of metaphorical crumpled paper over my shoulder in trying to compose that post and I make no promises about when it's coming, but it's definitely brewing.

And that's all she wrote.