Friday femmes fatales No 20

Where are all the female bloggers? Here, in my weekly "top ten" collection.

Starting on the serious side, Pandora's Blog offers a reasoned defence of experimentation on animals in the light of the closing, under the pressure of sometimes-criminal protests, of a guinea pig farm in England this week. I fear, however, this is not a subject on which some people are amenable to reason.

Et. al is horrified that pupils are being issued with E-books as textbooks. "The pleasures of the library must be learned," she argues.

The D Spot provides pithy anecdotes about life in New York, including its so-not-tactful ladies who shop. Kat on Ratblog, meanwhile, has been encountering some not-so-tactful men in her lab. My first degree was agricultural science and her post reminds me of the lecturer who used to intersperse slides of naked women in between those of cow uteri, "just to liven things up".

Shorty PJs is musing on the place her occasional journal plays in her writing life, which sould seem to be a tortuous one, judging by the accompanying picture. (I don't know where she gets the illustrations from, but they are brilliant.) Becky's Journal's author meanwhile, has turned her hand to poetry for the first time ever, and it was published on Salon. (Regular poets out there are not allowed to turn green with envy - read it and you'll see she deserved it.)

Still on the literary side, but very much at the cutting edge, Jill/txt is musing on the possibilities unleashed by the release of the source code of the early 3d first-person shooter Quake. The idea, as I understand it in my largely "old literature" mind, is to turn it into a three-dimensional narrative. I'm interested in this because it seems to me there must someday pretty soon be a real breakthrough in the nature of popular fiction into a new form exploiting all of the possibilities of the web. But it doesn't seem to have happened yet.

Broken Clay Journal, meanwhile, is cleaning out her wardrobe and finding lots of black skirts. I guess most of us have a fashion "tic" like that - mine's black jackets.

Are We There Yet meanwhile, provides Reasons to ride your bike. Not a new post, but as you may have noticed, it is one of my areas of interest.

The Daily Blog with Kelley Bell, who might have some links with the Mary Daly school of feminism, is trying to start a debate on The Da Vinci Code, saying she finds it attacks the "wicked step mother and seeks to put men and women back on equal footing". I can't in all honesty see it myself, but read the post and make up your own mind.

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Last week's is here if you missed it.

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I've now made a collection of 200 female bloggers: I've already collected the first hundred together, and I'll soon put up a collected list of the past ten weeks.

I'm going to take it easy for the next couple of weeks - Femmes Fatales will continue, but mostly revisiting some of the old favourites. I'll probably pick up the hunt for new bloggers after that. Nominations of new blogs to include are still, however, highly welcome.