Hasta La Gadget!

Here comes Peter Bilby-Tail, hopping down the marsupial trail. That’s what Aussies have in mind as spring approaches and they prepare to to shun bunnies again and celebrate an approaching holiday with their own native Easter Bilby. 

It’s been a long battle, and largely successful. Locals have taken the  rabbit-sized native with huge ears and a pointy nose to heart.  Australian kids now devour chocolate bilbies (which are also called rabbit bandicoots). Companies like Haigh’s Chocolates, which created the first chocolate Easter Bilby over two decades ago, donate a portion of their proceeds to helping save the species.

Bunnies are generally not beloved Down Under. They were imported by Europeans almost 200 years ago to become an invasive, destructive pest. The rapacious rabbits famously inspired a six-year construction project resulting in the world longest “rabbit-proof” fence in western Australia. It didn’t really do the trick. 

The idea to dethrone the Easter Bunny was born in 1968 when a 9-year-old Queensland girl wrote a story called “Billy The Aussie Easter Bilby,” which eventually became a book. The campaign was officially launched in 1991 by members of a group called Rabbit-Free Australia, who approached artist/author/environmentalist Kaye Kessing in 1993 to create a children’s picture book called “The Easter Bilby.” The bilby of the book does everything the Easter bunny does, but it’s a native Australian. Lots of other bilby books by other authors followed.

Rabbit-Free Australia is deadly serious about the Easter Bilby. Backing the seasonal hero is listed as one of the group’s key projects on its web site to “ensure [that] the ‘bilbies not bunnies’ message is widely promoted and understood.” 

 Even Britain’s baby Prince George was wooed into the bilby camp after one of the animals in the Sydney Taronga Zoo was named after him. 

There are only an estimated 600 of the creatures left in the wild in the west and central deserts of Australia currently, due to predation by feral cats. But they have been also hunted by foxes and driven from their burrows by the aggressive rabbits. Bilby backers hope elevating their status during Easter will help.

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Even though Samsung has established a cause for those Galaxy Note 7 flare-ups, the device’s story is not over. Korean outlet Hankyung reports that the company will sell the “refurbished” phones, but with smaller, less-explodey batteries inside. It do…

The latest iteration of Amazon’s Fire TV Stick, first launched in the US last October, is finally UK-bound. While the little streaming dongle still won’t admit 4K is a thing, it boasts a quad-core processor that Amazon says makes it 30 percent faster…

Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder will lead Uber’s investigation into sexual harassment claims made by an ex-employee, the company told its workforce on Monday. 

In an email obtained by Reuters, The Guardian and other news organizations, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick told his employees that Holder will lead an “independent review” of the claims that former Uber engineer Susan Fowler made in her now-viral blog post, as well as broader diversity issues at the company. 

“It is my number one priority that we come through this a better organization where we live our values and fight for and support those who experience injustice,” Kalanick wrote in the memo, according to The Guardian.

Fowler, who wrote about the year she spent working at the ride-hailing company, described an office culture that permitted rampant sexual harassment and gender discrimination, and a human resources department that did little to protect her and her female colleagues.

At one point, Fowler says, she was told she was on “thin ice” and in risk of being fired if she continued to report cases to HR. 

“I reported his threat immediately after the meeting to both HR and to the CTO: they both admitted that this was illegal, but none of them did anything,” Fowler wrote.

Holder will be joined by his colleague Tammy Albarran, who is also a partner at the law firm Covington & Burling. Kalanick also said Uber board member Arianna Huffington, as well as the company’s human resources chief, Liane Hornsey, and the company’s associate general counsel, Angela Padilla, will help conduct the internal review. 

After reading Fowler’s blog, Kalanick responded in a statement to HuffPost, “What she describes is abhorrent and against everything Uber stands for and believes in.”

In his memo to employees, the Uber CEO said that women make up 15 percent of the company’s employees. Fowler said that just 3 percent of the engineers were women at the time she left.

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If you had x-ray vision, what would you do with it? Look through walls and spy on your co-workers? Find your dog’s lost ball under the couch, or lazily peek through your fridge to see if you’re almost out of your favorite Greek yogurt? Or maybe, like a traditional superhero, you would wander your town looking for clues behind the doors that no one can enter, and use your powers for the greater good.

What if your x-ray vision allowed you to not just see through things, but to see the invisible? I was given that super power, in a way, because of my life with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).

As many patients know all too well, the difficulties associated with IBD are often invisible to others. It’s the hours when no one is around as you traverse from your couch to your bathroom; it’s the pain and fatigue that lurk in your body; it’s disappearing from your friends as you drive to the doctor’s office; and it’s the emotional pain too – the loneliness and isolation – when it feels like no one understands your experience.

My journey with IBD dominated my college experience. I realized, during that time, that one of the most important tools I needed was support and understanding. It hit me one time, on a particularly symptom-ravaged day, that no one I knew understood my experience and my pain. No one knew what it was like to be me, living with a chronic disease. I needed those around me to use their x-ray vision and see the invisible illness inside of my body and mind.

Slowly, I gained the power and confidence to allow people to see aspects of my disease and the effects they had on my life. I learned to be more open and vulnerable, allowing those around me to know about the painful and embarrassing aspects of my IBD experience. I learned to tell them about my daily life, my struggles, and how my disease changed me, sometimes for the better. To my surprise, letting people see the reality of my disease didn’t drive them away, and the more I learned to tell my story and make it visible, the more I built a strong support system around myself.

The importance of telling my story while also being sensitive to the stories of those around me was not lost. I began to pay closer attention to small details of everyone’s experiences. I paid attention when they showed signs of tiredness or sadness, or even those of strength and pride. I looked through people’s exteriors and saw them not just for what was immediately visible, but as a complex person who lives a complex life, potentially with a disease like I do.

I began asking others about their experiences, what they want others to know about their lives, and what they most need in terms of support. I wanted to know what they want to make visible to others. I grew my x-ray vision of empathy and awareness, because I know just how much it can matter.

This is the superpower that IBD gave me and now I work to give everyone around me the same superpower. Together, we can influence the world and that’s not something in an alternate universe. It’s something we already have the power to do.

To help reveal the true impact of IBD and highlight the strength and resilience of the patient community, Takeda launched IBD Unmasked, a global awareness initiative launched in the U.S. in partnership with the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation of America (CCFA) and IBD community members. Join our community at IBDunmasked.com and together we can unmask the truth behind this incessant villain.

Megan has ulcerative colitis (UC) and is one of the co-founders of The Great Bowel Movement (GBM), which aims to empower those with IBD “to embrace their disease, be proud of their experience, and spread awareness throughout their communities.” Megan is very interested in athletics and fitness, and takes on IBD with a mix of strength and humor. Building on her experiences facing even the toughest circumstances, Megan has worked to provide a voice to others, becoming a fearless force in the IBD community. She is a veteran participant of CCFA’s Team Challenge and Camp Oasis.

Follow Megan on Twitter: www.twitter.com/thegreatbm.

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