Two Minutes of Your Life

Happy birthday to me. And yes, I survived it. After that I've been busy, a clash of reports, exams, evaluations, and everything else. I don't mind the pressure provided it doesn't go beyond my limit and I can get a lie in on Saturday. I'm also an aunt again so it hasn't all been stress.

I'm sure you are wondering how we all survived without our name on a bottle of sweet brown liquid for so long. I've purposely avoided buying it because I would feel such a corporate tool, yet more than once I've seen someone pull out a bottle with their name on with a palpable self satisfiable sense of ta-da! Yes. Its my name on a bit of plastic round a plastic bottle.

It's that ghastly false personalisation much like being asked for my name when buying a coffee. All I want is a hot drink at a price I consider acceptable for what I'm about to receive, I don't want a meaningless non relationship with an anonymous corporation. It does seem a pointless thing to get riled about and you're perfectly right, a bit like complaining about the word cis or someone putting ed onto the end of transgender. My little winge has probably taken you less than a minute where as hundreds if not, thousands of words were spilt on those two subjects, taking many long minutes I wont get back.

The One With A Cheese Roll

Hello, I'm back with a working broadband connection and if I were hiring a comedian for the PFA awards I might check their act before rather than faking outage after the event.

It has been pleasant weather, for a lot of people this has meant taking out the bike, or having a barbecue in fact I couldn't walk far without smelling one on the go. I don't get the idea behind ignoring a perfectly good cooker in favour of greatly increasing your chances of contracting food poisoning, smelling of smoke and annoying your neighbours in the process. Then again, being a vegitarian I'm usually the one with the cheese roll.

The imminent demise of Google Reader will annoy loyal users but it's not the end for RSS or their readers.
Google Reader is my second most used product after Gmail, it provides a feed for dozens of sites without having to open dozens of sites and follow good writers who don't follow a regular predictable editorial schedule.

I guess there's the desire to find the perfect algorithm which will serve up the articles you want but as someone whose tried these services it's some way off serving even slightly relevant results.

1-800-just-a-crossdresser

Oi tranny's! Fed up with listening to professional opinion or your own knowledge and experience. Why not have a diagnosis from a complete stranger on the internet!

Our team of self diagnosed, self anointed, largely anonymous individuals will gladly label you. What is more its FREE! And you needn't have to ask for it, our highly knowledgeable team will just tell you whether you want it or not.

But don't take my word for it, here's a satisfied client.

" I believed I was a transsexual for many years and many highly qualified professionals were also of that view, but after being told by your service, I now realise that I was just a HPW all the time. Thank you complete stranger off the internet"

See! Don't delay call -

1-800 just a crossdresser

or just hang round an internet forum for a few minutes.

White Horse Pacified

 

Julie Livesey photographed, above, with her sculpture "White Horse Pacified" just after completion in 1987. It stood clearly visible from the busy Mead Way on the new Shaw estate

 

25 years on.

The sculpture funded under Thamesdown Council’s per cent for art scheme where public money matched the developers contribution. Today its got the likeable signs of aging and the regrettable tagging, the tree's have grown round, almost enveloping and its not so visible from the (even more busy) road.

It was one of many pieces of art dotted around the western expansion that appeared during the 80's to the early 90's.

Recently Hideo Furuta's "Nexus" at Freshbrook Village Centre had to be repaired after some of the wood supporting the Pembrokeshire stone became dangerously rotten where it will continue to stand for another three decades surrounded by the good and bad of late 70's, early 80's design and town planning.

Everyone Goes To The Toilet

It's been a noisy, crowded time here in Lucie towers. I painted a room pink, then suddenly a lot of women turned up and started dancing. I really should have paid attention to the warnings in the Dulux advert but I was too open mouthed after having seen the Andrex one before.
Whether you scrunch or fold your expensive brand of toilet roll is entirely up to you and not something I want to know. Everyone goes to the loo, except perhaps the queen and the Dali Lamar.  Mainly in gender neutral toilets like trains, coaches, garages, portable loos and their own homes without any fuss.
There are benefits for example if you're a parent with a child of the opposite sex, do you take them in to "your" toilet or send them in alone. The latest panic concerns Brighton Councils decision to install gender neutral wc's one news report invoked "women and children" as if males are never involved in parenting or that no mother has had the awkward choice of either sending her son into the men's alone or into the ladies and vice versa. Its fair to say, with some exceptions, that people go to toilets for one reason, they may fail to lift the seat or have shocking aim (and that's just the women's) but it's just one reason and to do it quickly with no fuss.
Even attractive women mesmerized by pink paint.

The Reader Editor Writes

As the readers reader editor of the Park South Bugle it was understandable that they failed to realise that employing a very provocative, abusive writer would lead to the writer penning a provocative, abusive column that the targets of the provocative abuse would object to.

Also in no way are we benefiting from the increased traffic to our website from said column by outraged people putting up links to the piece saying how outraged they were. We also didn't plan to remove it after we had received the bulk of ad revenue from the clicks enabling Toby Jug of the Lawn Shopper to create visits to his own provocative nonsense. A lesson has been learnt and if we do receive a rebuke from the PCC then it will prevent it happening again in the same way misinformed slurs and abuse about other vulnerable communities has been prevented.

MMXIII

A happy new year.

Normally at this time I would make some foolish predictions and hopeless resolutions for 2013, instead I'll just enjoy the fireworks and hope your dreams come true.

When you're young you find inspiration in....

Boys and Girls Toys

I have three loud, excitable and incredibly wonderful nieces and nephews to buy gifts for. So recently I've stumbled into the unfamiliar territory of the toy section armed with a vague idea of what the parents have bought and what they like. The first thing noticed is how divided a lot of it is divided according to gender and traditional ideas of gender roles. For girls it's all pink and other pastel colours, and for boys its so many shades of blue. Sometimes it is a case of same toy, different colour, other times it actively promotes gender stereotypes. Try finding a toy vacuum that isn't bright pink.

A Swedish toy retailer gained attention for publishing a "gender-neutral" catalogue, including a boy in a Spiderman costume pushing a toy buggy. Thinking to my own childhood I eschewed the many attempts to play with Action Man-type boys toys in favour of my sisters toys which I borrowed in the same way I "borrowed" their dresses. Children don't know about the gender rules or what they should or should not play with until it gets socialised into them later they will take what they enjoy playing with use imagination and be loud, excitable and incredibly wonderful.

Christmas Ads

Ah December, early nights, seasonal songs in the shops and the incessant blast of Christmas ads. There is nothing more likely to suck the seasonal spirit out of me than doing Christmas shopping it doesn't stop the marketing industry from trying to persuade me to visit a store.

Following the success of John Lewis' ad campaigns there does seem to be more "emotion" centric campaigns. ASDA are the the latest to try this route, ditching their long-standing "hey we're cheaper" campaign for a little movie featuring a mother figure organising Christmas.

Except it's horribly ill conceived and patronizing to both sexes even in a world of sexist advertising. While their previous campaigns were hardly inspiring or right on, they clearly conveyed the message, were probably cheaper and didn't smell of someone trying to ape a campaign that revived a lot of buzz. 

If I stumble into the nearby ASDA I can see males manage to push a trolley, I can also guess some will happily wrap presents and so on while their partner rests or watches the football where the fan is portrayed as a mindless "passionate" male lad to be sold gassy larger, takeaway pizza and cars.

Roundabouts, First Days and a Niche Sexual Proclivity

Just come back from the Co-op between the large Christmas display and Halloween items I'm grateful they still have enough space to stock some milk. bread and other frivolous items....

Hello. It has been a while, a result of the colds you inevitably pick up at this time of year, new courses and work and the realisation that my first day nervousness doesn't diminish with time.

On the first day of college you get there far too early and dressed well but by December you're turning up late in second best pyjamas and dressing gown. Unless you are one of the few who turns up to lectures in a suit and are well on their way to their first million.

Another thing walking around a college is that you can feel old among those who opted out of sixth form, and I wonder why you would stay and choose to wear a school uniform for another 2 years. I took great delight in burning my green school tie after my last GCSE exam, which succumbed  to the flames worryingly quickly considering the times I was mere centimetres peering over a Bunsen burner.

One of the searches that directed to my blog was "Swindon girls porn". Now there's a very niche sexual proclivity for you. Somewhere there's someone  getting turned on when a local pronounce Primark, premark. While someone else is offering to show his DMJ Tower?

Considering I pronounce the aforementioned Reading based value clothing retailer that way and understand how to get through the Magic Roundabout you could say I've become a naturalised citizen. The Magic Roundabout, which has just celebrated its 40th anniversary. Like the offside rule its unnecessarily complicated and simple to understand. Originally given the prosaic name of the County Road Junction the local nickname stuck it was an innovative piece of traffic management and continues to handle large numbers of traffic and baffle the unfamiliar to this day.

The Dandy

I've held off commenting on the demise of The Dandy's print edition because as Charlie Brooker pointed out in his Guardian column recently it's not like I've been buying copies recently.

It's not that children are no longer buying magazines, the recent ABC'S showed Moshi Monsters to be one of the country's biggest selling paid for magazines and other print publications are still selling by their tens of thousands. Its just that a product has reached the end of its life cycle and no longer appeals to the children of today.

It was already old fashioned at the time I was reading and hasn't changed much in the strips set up and obvious pay off in the final panel. Take away the smoking and overt racism not much had changed from the 50's.

All of this hasn't stopped a wave of misty eyed nostalgia, the same who point to a so called golden age of children's comics/ television/ books. Ignoring the many great artists producing fantastic stuff today.

Marlborough Workhouse

Opposite Marlborough Common on a lane leading to the hilly beauty of the Marlborough Downs, where assorted horsey and other rural types live, there's what was the towns former workhouse. Today, the listed building has been converted into up-scale retirement flats (although rather haphazardly, as one writer noted) with a few more crammed in for good measure.

After the workhouse was closed it spent several decades as a children's convalescence hospital and a special educational unit mainly for intellectually disabled children called St Luke's.

 

Behind the site is a overgrown graveyard with forgotten graves, this small acknowledgement of what was there.

No Place For Bullying

A few weeks school inspector's from the Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) released a report into bullying at school entitled No Place For Bullying.

As a child I was bullied and the three schools at secondary level I had different attitudes to how to tackle the problem ranging from its your fault for being bullied to a proactive style from staff with clear lines that were not to be passed and repercussions if transgressed.

In the report half claim to have been bullied or picked on, though inspectors could not delve deeper in classroom situations for fear singling out. And nobody will express surprise children pick on those who deviate from the accepted norm or have the latest branded sports goods and so on. The best schools it found combined their behaviour and anti-bullying policies, and were lead by example, pro-actively by the teaching staff.

Sadly it seems disabled children often ignored in anti bullying policies and words like spaz, mong still common. Again unsurprisingly children often reported picked on because of their sexuality or perceived sexuality gay, lez, batty man all mentioned. The modern evolution of "gay" to mean something crappy was also discussed.

What was interesting was how schools went about tackling this especially in areas where parts of the local community are less than sympathetic to the idea and inventively addressing non nuclear families (“mum Pat and mum Dawn” in the case of same sex parents).

The comments on transgender and non gender conforming seemed to have grabbed most of press headlines. "Schools are labelling children as young as four as 'transgender' simply because they want to dress up as the opposite sex," says the Daily Mail adding that the report "provoked disquiet". The Telegraph online ran a similar piece highlighting another example of the six year old boy who wore a pink tutu to school.

In a world where children are told at. too young an age what boys and girls should and shouldn't do its marvellous that he is not beaten down with all gender role bullshit. Though it's hard not to feel a sense of tut tutting in the article and while many do grow up not transitioning or further down the transgender spectrum, thats not an argument to say they should be forced onto the gender binary or will grow up binary.

Children can be wonderfully honest, they can also be total bastards. Schools can show the way and encourage acceptance of our rich and diverse world. Not just in weekly PSHE classes but throughout the entire school despite prejudice from parts of the community and media.

Five Year Plan

Time for the bloody-hell-have-I-really-had-a-blog-for-that-long moment when I realise I started this blog five years ago. There's better advice out there on how to build audiences, attract advertising and so on. The only slight gasp of wisdom I'd give is that you should take time to find your voice and be authentic. Also don't play around with the layout so much that you disable comments for the first 6 months.

Hardly Yoda like wisdom I know, anyway, enjoy the sport but if you don't there's always BBC 4, the Food channel or listen to some Spice Girls and admit to yourself that they recorded some really good pop songs.

Femfresh and That Icky Area

"Mini, twinkle, hoo haa, flower, fancy, yoni,
lady garden...
Did you know that regular shower gels and soaps, if used on your privates, can strip it of its natural defences causing dryness and irritation?
With its pH-balanced formula specially developed for intimate skin, femfresh is the kindest way to care for your va jay jay, kitty, nooni, la la, froo froo!"

Femfresh has been under social media attack from feminists some justified others not.

Labelled as a feminine hygiene brand designed to clean that horribly icky evil area known as the vagina. As we all know the best way to cleanse that area is with fire but some slightly sensitive souls consider that a little painful. We should ignore those considered people who have studied the area say that while it may be of use to very niche segment you don't need such products, mild soap and water is sufficient. Further they may cause damage but hey what do the NHS know? Especially when there's a happy woman in the advertising with copy saying you need this to deal with your bad part.

As I've said before it is an invented want, much like sports drinks they have their niche for a tiny number but are not helpful for the rest of us.

As for objecting to euphemisms, its an advertising campaign not your gynaecologist and the intention was to be light hearted even if the impression I get is jaw dropping cringe making. Yes some can be a bit ropey but some for all private parts can be fun and display the inventiveness of language.