A little bit magical negro, but really interesting: How the Peanuts Comic Strip Got Its First Black Character.

About Lentil As Anything, the pay as you feel chain, and how people are cheap. Stephanie adds: contact me privately for LAA gossip, which we shan’t publish cos it’s gossip from ex-employees of LAA.

We’re mad that this isn’t a No Award post: Buzzfeed goes to Canberra.

Regarding Side-Eye, at The Lifted Brow. No Award acknowledges that this is an excellent response to being called out on a thing, and that The Lifted Brow is choosing not to make money on a word that has come to English from AAVE is great. And this has led us to asking questions about the USAmericanisation of language. Stand by for later, I guess.

Relatedly, as Australians we might not know this term, and I think it’s one we need to know: Strange Fruit. You might know it as a Billie Holliday song, or a song that your favourite band covers. Do you know what that strange fruit is? Have you ever thought about they lyrics? Steph didn’t, until recently. It’s African-Americans having been lynched. They are hanging off trees.  It’s a song and poem about lynchings, and racism. Dead African-Americans are the strange fruit. Which is why it’s amazing that a bar (in the USA) named a cocktail Strange Fruit.

Speaking of: Why NBC didn’t need to make The Slap. This article veers a bit into the ‘woooo Aussie tv is so diverse’ territory, which obviously is untrue. It makes some great points about US tv, too. And also I would suggest she’s slightly incorrect: it’s not that US tv refuses to air non-US English programs; it just won’t air the ones set now. It will air the period dramas.

Somewhere in Sydney lie the remains of a man many South Africans regard with the same kind of reverence as Nelson Mandela.

SURPRISE: Spike in number of fatalities from shark attacks could be related to human population increase.

US thinktank asks if TAbbott is the most incompetent leader of an industrialised nation. Click through to the original piece as well, the comments are hilarious.

Sorry more US stuff, which defeats the purpose of NA’s purpose, but VERY IMPORTANT because we suffer this stuff in Australia, too: #chapelhillshooting. A white atheist fanatic shot three Muslim people. Reporting has been pretty terrible, all ‘a white man’ and ‘their religion may have had something to do with it.’ REALLY? Some media outlets are reporting it as ‘a parking dispute’, which is one way to refer to it when you can’t bring yourself to understand reality. The most common type of American Terrorist is a white man with a weapon and a grudge.

Bill Shorten spoke about Closing the Gap, and several Coalition MPs walked out in response. More thoughts at the Hoopla.

FOUR SPICE GIRLS SONGS YOU MAY NOT HAVE EVER HEARD?! !!!!