Odds & ends

• YES!!!!!!  Casting for three of the four main roles in the movie version of Richard Osman's "The Thursday Murder Club" was announced on Tuesday:  Helen Mirren as Elizabeth (the ONLY person I could ever picture in the role!!), Ben Kingsley as Ibrahim (on my casting list as a possibility), and Pierce Brosnan as Ron.  Never would have thought of him! -- but I think he will work out fine! Joyce, still TBA. (I've always pictured Penelope Wilton, or possibly Julie Walters.)  I love, love, LOVE these books!  I am so happy with these casting choices, and I CANNOT WAIT!!! to see the movie! ❤  (Haven't been to a movie theatre since pre-pandemic -- this would be worth risking covid for!  lol)   
• Links to my reviews of the books in the series, in order of publication:  
• "The Thursday Murder Club"  
• "The Man Who Died Twice" 
• "The Bullet That Missed" 
• "The Bullet That Missed (re-read)" 
• "The Last Devil to Die" 
• I kind of forgot (as I often do) that this was National Infertility Awareness Week. I've been busy and I haven't been on social media as much this week as I sometimes am, so I didn't realize it until I was looking at some Instagram posts -- "oh yeah...!"  It kind of feels like it doesn't apply to me anymore, as someone 20+ years out from fertility treatments, and permanently childless. 
• Except that it DOES apply. I'm (still) infertile, and always will be -- nothing has changed in that respect. And I saw a great Instagram Story from Katy at Childless Collective, pointing out that a good chunk (probably the majority!) of the billions upon billions of dollars in profits made by the pharmaceutical companies who are the major sponsors of NIAW actually came from US -- the people who did fertility treatments (often multiple cycles) that never worked, and eventually, ultimately, walked away with empty arms. If those companies invested even just a fraction of those huge profits into providing better support services and counselling and other such off-ramps for those of us whose treatments were unsuccessful and who had to stop, it might make a horribly fraught and jarring transition just a little bit easier to survive. (But I won't hold my breath...!) 
• "Fertility clinics in Ontario are desperately in need of government oversight," says an opinion piece in the Toronto Star this week. (Surprise!) (Not sure if this is behind a paywall, but unfortunately, no gift links apparently available.)  
• Got my first opt-out email related to Mother's Day last week (from Ancestry -- see the screenshot, above). May there be many more!  (But I haven't noticed any since then... and I'm not holding my breath...!)  
• Have you seen the most recent TV commercial for Priceline with Kaley Cuoco (Penny on "The Big Bang Theory")?  
• "Hey, with Priceline VIP Family you can unlock deals five times faster... you don't even have to be an actual family," she chirps. (!)
• The guys she's talking to immediately start arguing, "Oh, I'd be the dad!" "I'm the dad!" etc. -- until Kaley says "Okay, which dad is paying?" -- and they all start pointing at each other. 
• Okay, you don't have to be an "actual family" to qualify -- i.e., no discrimination against singles or non-parents -- which is good (I guess?). But that phrase -- "an actual family" -- has me grinding my teeth. (Define "an actual family," right??) 
• (In fact, if anyone can get the deals, why is it even called "Priceline VIP Family" in the first place??)  
• Rosalyn Scott, who runs the NoMo Book Club on Instagram, has a new website featuring interviews with childless & childfree writers. Check it out at Other Words! 
• Mali has an essay in a new book that's coming out soon!  "Otherhood" is a collection of essays from New Zealand writers on being childless, childfree and child-adjacent, edited by Kathryn Van Beek, Alie Benge and Lil O'Brien. It's being released in NZ on May 9th. I checked a couple of North American bookseller websites, and it seems the e-book/Kindle version will be available here that day too, but we will have to wait until August for the paper edition. More details in Mali's recent post. 
• Infertile Phoenix is stepping away from her blog for a while. :(  Go leave her some appreciative words!  
• I am really enjoying Kirsten Powers's Substack, "Changing the Channel," and her most recent post really struck a chord with me -- and I suspect it will with many of you too:  " 'Winners' Know When To Quit:  Why we need to understand the power of letting go of what is not working." It's free to read (and the interview is free to watch -- there's a transcript you can download too) for a week (i.e., until about May 1st), and then it will go behind a subscriber paywall. (I'm just a free subscriber -- so far... can my budget afford yet another Substack subscription??  Hmmmm....)  
• I haven't watched the video or read the transcript yet -- and from what I can tell, there's not a word said about infertility treatments &/or childlessness -- but there's a line near the end that summarizes the message in a nutshell:  "We all need to learn how to quit before we hit rock bottom."  AMEN!  
• "Is It Okay To Dislike Children?"  Jill Filipovic, who is childfree by choice, ponders this question on her Substack. A couple of excerpts (but do go and read the whole thing -- I don't think it's paywalled):  

In the US, it’s overwhelmingly the same people who style themselves as pro-child and pro-family who are the most politically hostile to the actual well-being of children. Conservatives have for decades emphasized their love of children and babies, while cutting funding for public education and children’s healthcare, doing nothing to stop the gun murders of children in schools, opposing paid leave for the people who birth and raise those children, stripping school lunches of any nutritional value, and sometimes putting deadly weapons in their own children’s hands and then taking family Christmas photos. These are not generally people who identify as “child-free.” They are overwhelmingly people who say they love kids. But they are people who are really, really bad for children....

Most child-free people, as far as I can tell, do not hate children. Many adore children, they just don’t want to raise them; others don’t adore children and generally avoid them but don’t hate them either. And no doubt many people who really dislike children or are hostile to children in public spaces are also parents. But regardless of the reality, the childfree are generally the ones presumed to be hostile to children. So it’s interesting to look at the demographics of the child-free in America, where not having children is disproportionately common among highly-educated city-dwelling liberal women and gay men, and realize that the same people being tarred as child-haters are also the ones overwhelmingly voting and advocating for the policies which most benefit children and mothers. If that goes along with preferring a dog-friendly child-free local pub and allowing a look of annoyance to cross one’s face when one hears a screaming baby in a fancy restaurant, honestly, I’ll take it.