Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.

Mid-morning in Winter and the sky already looks like this. New Town. August 2010.

Crikey Moses, it is Theme Thursday yet again, and – all things being EQUAL – it was forty years ago today that Betty Friedan lead a US-wide Women's Strike for Equality. This strike was held to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment, which effectively gave women the right to vote in the United States.

This timing inevitably causes raised eyebrows to those of us down here at the arse-end of the world.. Unrestricted women's suffrage in terms of voting rights was granted in New Zealand in the 1893!

The [then] self-governing colony of South Australia granted both universal suffrage and allowed women to stand for the colonial parliament in 1895. Upon Federation, the Commonwealth of Australia provided this for women in Federal elections from 1902 (except, of course, Aboriginal women).

So that puts us Antipodeans a good twenty years ahead!

Spare a thought for the bon Mademoiselles of the home of Liberté, égalité, and fraternité. They had to wait until 1945 to piss about and moan about how they had no-one to vote for and that elections were all a load of rubbish!