Important and relevant to the interests of No Award: at Spoonflower, an Australian cities design contest. There’s some racist poo in there, but mostly it’s hilarious fun.

The 7 Wonders of Reservoir.  (Liz is moving in a few months, and has given serious thought to the fact that she can afford a two-bedroom house in Reservoir.  Only the fact that she neither owns a car nor drives is keeping her in the inner suburbs.)

At the Guardian, on Boko Haram.

You can submit poetry at The Lifted Brow!

Steph enjoyed this profile of Wayne Denning at BRW – Denning got Australian Indigenous talent onto Sesame Street.

A teaser at Kill Your Darlings, about the absence of cricket in national literature.

This Stormtrooper was saved from a deadly snake bite by his Storm trooper armour. #straya

And multiple Australian men have been arrested for driving motorised eskies.  #heroes

The Medicare rebate slash we better not have: Latika Bourke at the Guardian; Sophie Scott at the ABC.

Official No Award stance: Do not sing the National Anthem on Invasion Day (known legally as Australia Day).  Can you even. This is beyond even the cultural cringe. (Steph had a moment when she first opened that article where she thought ‘NADC’ said ‘NAIDOC’ and she was like WHY WOULD NAIDOC SUPPORT THIS. Don’t worry. She was wrong.) And a thing at En Passant.

Australia’s ridiculously terrible Human Rights Commissioner thinks the Racial Discrimination Act is essentially censorship.

The horror of a pineapple of clowns descending upon Sydney.

Manus: Security guards attack Manus compounds and are total shits.

‘Indigenous Australian’ was one of the most read Wiki pages of 2014.

Language Tips for Cis Feminists Speaking on Trans Issues: Liz very much wishes she had read this before doing the Ancillary Justice post, and unreservedly apologises to anyone she offended.

NASA has released the world’s largest photograph, a high-definition panoramic view of the Andromeda Galaxy.  Warning: may trigger existentialist crisis.

Translating Shakespeare in China:

The other Chinese favorite, perhaps less expected, has been The Merchant of Venice, which debuted as a silent film in Shanghai in 1927. Called The Woman Lawyer, the film highlighted what has particularly interested Chinese audiences about the play, even up to the present: its proto-feminist heroine Portia, who dresses as a man and brilliantly defends Antonio in a gripping courtroom drama. That scene later became, and still remains, a staple of the Chinese middle school curriculum. The Western focus on Jewish-Christian relations means little to Chinese audiences compared with the way that Shakespeare dramatizes a classic battle of Confucian ethics, between li (profit motive) and yi (loyalty to friends).

(Liz would argue against the suggestion that China is unique in using Shakespeare to advance its ideology!  But it’s an interesting article nonetheless.)

The free market won’t stop climate change, but its failure is inspiring the people who will. A comic at by Sam Wallman at The Nib.

No Awarding Around:

Steph’s post from last week on Appropriation and Racism in Melbourne Restaurants has been linked eleven trillion times, so you should definitely read that. There will be a follow-up post eventually to tell you all the restaurants she has been told about following that.

Cranky Ladies of History, featuring fiction by Liz and Steph, is up on GoodReads!  It’s not available for pre-order yet, but keep an eye out.