Everybody's talking about those Kinky Boots

I might be setting myself up for disappointment here, but I'm starting to really look forward to seeing Kinky Boots, a comedy movie based on the real-life story of a failing Northampton shoe factory that changed it's fortunes by launching a range of fetish footwear for men.

There's a good interview with the film's star in today's Guardian, and some of the reviews I'm read have been quite positive. A slight worry is it's written by the same guy who wrote "Calendar Girls" and has been described as "heartwarming" in places, but hopefully it's not been too watered down to give it mass-market appeal.

We shall see.

Look, it's me!

My friend Summer sent me this, trés cool!

Web Curiosities

These are all things that have made me go "hmmm" recently but not quite warranted a full blog entry. Please allow them their brief moment in the limelight before they're forgotten forever.

• The spellchecker for blog posts on blogger.com doesn't recognise the words "blog", "blogging" or "blogger".
  
  
• The most popular tag word for the images on the trannyflickr photo pool is "me".
  
  
• There is no possible reason for the popularity of some of the sites in the Top 100 UK Tgirl Websites listing other than "people are idiots".
  
  
• On average, I get 3 hits a day to my site from people miss-typing theangels.co.uk as theangles.co.uk. I suppose technically I'm typosquatting.
  

The Greatest Tranny Anthems Never Written

No. 1: Don't Cha (for closet tranny fanciers)

Don't cha wish your girlfriend was fun like me?
Don't cha wish your girlfriend was hung like me?
Don't cha?
Don't cha?

;-)

Transpocalype Now (well in two months, actually)

Ok, the teaser campaign is over...

...it's time.

So, who wants to come? :-)

Five random things from Wikipedia and how they relate to me

Here's an idea I just invented. Go to Wikipedia, click on the "Random Article" button, and write about how that thing relates to you, skipping stub articles and anything that doesn't resonate at all. Do this five times.

1. I've decided I'm not an Ascetic. I like pies too much.
   
2. I've never been to Iverville in Quebec. In fact I've never been anywhere in the Americas. I was planning to go to North America an Canada about 5 years ago, but the friend I was going to go with got made redundant the day before we booked the trip.
   
3. I've never used a total station, but I do know how to work a Theodolite and a level. In a previous life I used to work as a surveyor's assistant. Have you ever noticed the grave-like painted wooden crosses along the sides of roads that are being built? I used to make those, and I know how they work. It's all to do with ground levels. Oh yes.
   
4. I bought Semisonic's, "Feeling Strangely Fine", but I only really liked "Secret Smile" and "Closing Time".
   
5. Because I've never been to the US, I've not had the opportunity to sample the cuisine of California, except from it's exports. Big Mac anyone?
   

Jane

Jane came around at the weekend, which was nice. :-)

I've been avoiding blogging about Jane, because a) although I'm happy to write about most stuff in my blog, some things I'd like to keep private, at least until I understand them better; and b) I thought that if I made a Big Thing about dating a girl who had her own blog and who was already known to the tranny blogosphere, it would somehow make it seem like it was only being done for the novelty value, and lessen what it actually represents.

But the fact that we've deliberately not been talking about it has become the novelty, so it's time to get things out in the open.

So yes, Jane and I are "an item". It's great. :-)

Now I'm not going to blog a lot about it, not because there's nothing to say, but because there's too much to say, and I'm nowhere near getting my head around it all, just yet. I've started to unpack a box of thoughts and feelings that got put away when I split with my last proper girlfriend, over 2 years ago. I know that some of the things in there still have the potential to hurt me, and that's scary...

... but you're worth it Jane. :-) xxx

Monday morning answers type thing

The answers were:

1. The alphabet was all there, apart from K. So it's Miss K.

2. A Christmas hymn is a carol, and it was written as a cross, therefore Karol Cross.

Congratulations to "Ursa Minor" who got it right first, but wished to remain anonymous. Well done to everyone else who entered!

Sunday night puzzle type thing

Number one in a series of one (because I did these two and ran out of ideas).

Can you work out what the two things below represent?



I'll turn off comments on this one, if you can guess, email me. First person to get both right wins a mention and the kudos. :-)

I hate Hunstanton

Can we start some kind of blogger campaign to wipe Hunstanton off the face of the planet?

I've decided that it is the one place on the planet that is totally and irredeemably without merit. I spent only two hours there today and I was on the verge of topping myself. I found myself sitting in a god awful nautical-themed pub and vaguely wondering which of the sailor's knots on a diagram on the wall would be best used to make a noose.

Actually after two hours I wasn't just intent on topping myself. I was making plans to take a lot of the people in Hunstanton out with me. Those poor unfortunate proles for whom Hunstanton is a holiday destination! I realised that a lot of the people in the pub with me had chosen to be there, and that put me in a deep state of depression regarding the British public.

It's not because it's a brash fish-and-chips seaside town, other seaside towns are just the same, but they add a healthy dose of camp and kitch to the mix. Hunstanton somehow manages to be tacky, old fashioned and noisy without for a moment managing to be camp or kitch. I pride myself at being able to find a level where I can enjoy a situation. "Yes, this is naff... but it's enjoyably naff!" Hunstanton hasn't got a level. It's a bottomless pit of awfulness.

I realise this post is pretty pointless, you've likely never even heard of Hunstanton or you've heard about it and have no intention of visiting. But I needed to get that out of my system.

Come friendly bombs and rain on Hunstanton!

Big in Zagreb

Did you know that hr is the international country code for Croatia? I found out recently when I got five thousand visits from a site ending ".hr" and was trying to work out where it was based.

Apparently the Croatians love sudoku!

The reason why I tell you this stuff because I really want to boast to the programmers at work that I wrote a game that's a Slavic sensation, but I can't because they'll want to see it, and then they'll want to see what's on the rest of my site...

I was kind of pleased that I'd proudly put Hamster Sudoku on my Becky site. It felt good to say "I'm a tranny, this is a tranny site, but look I made this".

But conversely, to people I'm not "out" to, it means I have to avoid saying... "Look I made this! Oh yeah and it's on a tranny site... oh yeah and I'm a tranny."

Guess I can't have it both ways.

Mystery Mosaic

This took a lot more work that you might think! :-)

Women are from Venus...

... and men are from Venus too, so there!

Just been reading in The Guardian that the supposed psychological differences between men and women are, by and large, a myth.

So does this mean trannies can no longer claim they "think like a girl"? I hope so. Saying things like "my parking's terrible, I'm such a girl!" is basically reinforcing sexual stereotypes we should have abandoned years ago.

The report claims that in the only major differences between the two sexes are in motor skills and frequency of masturbation.

So I hope when I hear trannies claim feminine traits in the future it will be limited to claiming that they "throw like a girl" or, um... no the other alternative I something really don't want to hear!

Shooting for the Moon

Selina's been whining about the cost of America returning to the moon. In my opinion America has to go back to the moon. The Apollo missions were declared a success at the time, but it was conveniently forgotten that we'd completely failed to find or topple the Moon Government!

Now the moon's a breeding ground for space terrorists (probably), and it has a stranglehold over the largest cheese reserves in the solar system.

Have we forgotten that the moon is the ejecta of an massive and unprovoked collision between a fledgling Earth and a planet-like object the size of Mars? (I'm not making this stuff up, this is Science Fact!) Can we stand by all these epochs and do nothing in the face of what was basically "Earth's 9/11"? I think not!

Apollo was just for starters. America needs to go back and finish the job.

Coat

Yay, Jane posted a great pic of me in my new suede coat!

(Jane... the important word in that sentence was "my".) ;-)

What I did at the weekend

I was in a bit of a quandary about what to blog about the weekend just gone. In some ways it was just a run-of-the-mill night out at a club with a few close tranny and non-tranny friends. Great fun, but nothing that I’ve not blogged about before.

In some way it was very special, I just that it was special in a way that I don’t personally want to blog about just yet, for my own reasons. So once the mundane and the private have been taken out of the weekend, there’s not much left to blog about.

So brief items of vague interest:

• NG1 in Nottingham is a great club. I highly recommend it as a Tranny Night Out


• I bought a cool suede jacket with a fluffy collar. Expect to see it a lot this coming winter!


• My grandfather’s funeral went well, in as much as a funeral can go well. The highlight for me was finding out that my 21-year-old female cousin is a lesbian. She brought her “friend” to the funeral and they make a very cute couple. It was all I could do not to shout out “brilliant!” when I found out. Not really the done thing at a funeral service.


• Apparently texting your mates during a funeral service to tell them your cousin is a lesbian isn’t the done thing either¹. :-/

¹ No I didn’t really do this.

My Grandfather's clock

Mum just showed me this. A little Bakelite clock, steeped in memories. It's electric, mains powered, and was always called 'The Owl Clock' because it has a round face and little feet. As a child my mum was taught how to start it if the power failed. Apparently it took a really delicate touch to trip the mechanism back into motion. It will never run again, but it's always going to chime memories for my mum.

Maids

Ooh, while I was fishing that bib picture off that camera I discovered that I had taken a few pictures at Reparty after all!

Enjoy!

Anti-smoking bib

A whole box of these turned up at work today as part of an NHS anti-smoking campaign.

Completely useless, it barely fits around my neck and the lettering looks like it's done by a 3-year old!

I'm sorry, I'm all for health promotion but I refuse to wear it! :-)

Second God

Ok... so I may have gotten a little carried away with creating stuff in second life.

I'm well into my second day, just nipping down to Do-It-All to buy some extra firmament.

Ten things that trannys should never be allowed to write

1. “have a girly chat” – Girls chat about the same thing that boys do! When was the last time you heard girls endlessly banging on about makeup and clothes?


2. “dress for comfort reasons” – I’ve come home more times than I care to remember with my fishnets threatening to make the balls of my feet into chips, my falsies making strange pressure patterns on my chest and my wig feeling like a horse-hair bobble-hat. Dressing en-femme is not comfortable!


3. “giggles” – Argh! No sane person writes “giggles” as if it was some kind of personal stage direction.


4. “hugz” – Okay, so I write “hugs” in emails sometimes. But I don’t change letters in words if I can help it. Changing letters in words is the typographical equivalent of making little hearts over the I’s in handwriting.


5. “lesbian trapped in a mans body” – No you’re not. A lesbian is a woman who’s attracted to women. And somehow when I see T-girls write this I know they’re imagining themselves as some kind of mythical lipstick lesbian, and definitely not the scary butch bull-dyke type.


6. “ickle” – No. Stop it.


7. “feel bi when dressed” – Wow. During which point of the dressing process precisely do you start fancying men? Can you turn it on and off, for example, by repeatedly removing and replacing your left slingback?


8. “random thoughts” – Google don’t even index these words in blogs. They’re too common. No, honest. “Random thoughts” turns up more than “the”. I checked.


9. “does anyone ever read this blog?” – No. Stop writing now.


10. “dilation” – Eww! Post-op TS's: I know it has to be done, but I don't want to hear about it!

Eeep...

Statistical Report for: beckysweb.co.uk
Search Engine Phrases: Report for Single Day

Start: 12 September 2005, End: 12 September 2005

Phrase	Search Engine(s)	Total Referrals	% of Total
sudoku	Google, AOL, Yahoo	255	48.4%

Here's to shamelessly exploiting a fad! I really aught to get my Texas Holdem Cricket game sorted soon. :-)

An idea...

One of the cool things about the weekend just gone was meeting up with many of the great and the good from the "Tranniesphere", that loosely-formed group of tranny (and tranny-friendly) bloggers that has recently blossomed on the web.

This got me thinking: wouldn't it be cool to have a proper Tranniesphere get-together? I'm thinking of maybe a meal and a boogie at a club.

We could even give it a name! "The Tranniespherical Ball" was the best I could come up with in bed this morning. It's strange, I normally do my best thinking whilst putting off getting out of bed, but this morning obviously not. :-/

As for venue, I was thinking maybe the Pink Punters club near Milton Keynes. It's fairly well connected, transport-wise, relatively central (well for the British members of the tranniesphere anyway), and it has the hotel next door.

So really, this is a "what say you?" posting. Is there any interest out there amongst my readers? Any suggestions? Please comment below!

Arthur

I've been meaning to talk about this since Friday, but I've not had the time until now to write about it, or to get my own thoughts about it marshaled into a form where I could write about it.

My mum's dad, my Granddad, died on Thursday afternoon. He was in his eighties, and he'd been reasonably healthy up until recently until he started to have some problems that needed stays in hospital. On his last trip it because obvious he wasn't coming out again.

He didn't suffer too long, and he slipped away with people who loved him around. I hope I go like that.

Arthur was evacuated from Dunkirk, and he fought in Burma, but didn't really ever talk about it. I never got close to him, for as long as I can remember he was an old man who was a bit frail and you had to shout at to be understood (the big bangs of the war had left him quite deaf). He wasn't as "fun" as my other Granddad, who is a lot younger and was a lot more involved in my life. I'm not ashamed that I never got close to Arthur, it's just the way it was.

I went and saw him a couple of weeks ago when he was in hospital for the second time.

We chatted awkwardly for a bit, me trying to shout loud enough to be heard. He seemed quite healthy but at the end as I stood to leave I got struck by the strong sensation that I might not ever see him again, so I leant down and kissed him on the forehead. He looked startled, and I immediately felt weird about it, but now I'm glad I did it. I felt like I said goodbye.

Allow me to tell you one, slightly silly, story about my Granddad. It's a happy memory I'll always have of him.

Quite a few years ago, in December, my dad was taken ill with gallstones and had to have emergency surgery to have them removed. As a rather gross momento, he was given the stones to keep afterwards, in a little plastic tub. They looked kind of like small brown pebbles.

My dad found a morbid glee in showing this tub off to anyone who wanted to see it. As it was Christmas time, we had a big family gathering in the house one evening. Granddad was there, along with loads of aunts and uncles and cousins and stuff. In large groups my Granddad always tended to turn off his hearing aid, as with so many voices it got a little too confusing to hear properly anyway. He was just happy with the company, sipping on a large sherry and taking any Christmas snacks sent his way.

My dad was holding court about his operation. To mum's groans and protestations, he dug out his pot of stones and passed it around to show everyone. Everyone was suitably disgusted, until it reached my Granddad who obviously hadn't heard what this tub full of brown things was...

"Mmmm... nuts!" he said, reaching in to pick one up.

I've never seen a room full of people move so quickly. :-)

...

I don't believe he's looking down from heaven reading this. But I do believe he was a good man who did his bit for his country, and that deserves celebrating. If it wasn't for the sacrifices that he and his generation made 60 years ago, I know I wouldn't enjoy the kind of freedoms I have now.

Mind the gaps

Siobhan and I had talked about doing some kind of joint post on what we got up to at the weekend, but web technology hasn't yet caught up with our brainwave of a collaborative freeform blog-space (AFAIK), so you'll have to put up with this effort instead.

She's already posted a nice summary of the Reparty weekend, leaving me with the easy job of filling in the gaps.

So take it away Siobhan..

...I was slightly narked that we couldn't check into the hotel for a few hours — only slightly mind, as it gave us the chance to do a bit of shopping. I'm not (you might recall) a great fan of shopping in, um, shops — mainly because of the sheer number of people it involves — but it was worth it, considering I found The Most Cutest Bag In The World, Ever™, a purple furry thing that Jo insisted I had to feed, water and generally look after...

It is very cute. Heaven knows how many Muppets had to die to make it though.

I also had a very successful shopping spree. A lightning visit to Top Shop on Oxford street turned up a really cute skirt. I've been looking to get some Boho bits ever since it came into fashion. The trouble is that long flouncy gypsy skirts aren't really me. This one's kinda gypsy, glammed up with sequins, grunged about 20% with denim, and most importantly cut off some way above the knee. In short, very Becky! I got loads of positive comments on it too, which is always nice.

... So, right, we eventually get up to our hotel room, and that's when the Trannie Explosion™ happens. According to Becky's Second Law of Tranny Dynamics: Transvestites expand to occupy any given space, and with fifteen seconds, the room was awash with every single article of clothing and make-up that the pair of us possess...

Yep, I really must formalize that law sometimes. Basically: trannies are like gases, they expand to fill the space available. If Siobhan was a gas I think she'd probably be... um... a fart, not because of the smell, or because she's unpleasant (she's actually quite fragrant and exceptionally nice), but because if she's present in a room everyone soon knows about it, and no-one ever wants to take responsibility for her. :-D

...I was rather surprised how small the venue was. I've never been out in London before, but I had visions of a much bigger club in my head. I know that Trasnmission is held in a different place and everything, but it was a tiny place. Cool though...

I was quite surprised by it's smallness too, along with a lot of people I spoke to. Although looking back at the information given no-one ever said it was a huge venue. I think the hype surrounding it had made me assume it was a great big place. A nice venue, although I'd maybe have expected something a more than some (admittedly very groovy) visuals and some nibbles on a napkin to justify a door price nearly three times that of Trans-Mission.

But that's not a complaint really, the music was very good, it was in good company, and I felt I got my money's worth. :-)

...I'm rather chuffed that Vicky Valentine gave me the pleasure of my own little Trance Bubble...

Yep, and I've rather chuffed that I got to say "I know the DJ, I'll try to sort you out some trance!"

Okay so maybe Vicky was gonna play a trancy set anyway, and I probably had no more sway over her than most the people in the room. But the point is that Simon, being a bit geeky and terminally shy, never used to go to clubs and never in a million years would know the DJ well enough to ask for stuff. Becky¹ does, she's connected in the tranny scene, people recognise her and do stuff like come up and ask to have their picture taken with her.

It might be horribly shallow and vain, but occasionally I allow myself to be a little bit smug about that. It's a nice warm feeling, and one that I never got to have as a boy, so I'm allowed.

Among many other things discussed at the weekend, Siobhan and I had a stab at the perennial tranny topic "what do I get out of it?". I've decided that one of my Things is "being a little bit of a Big Fish²", and I'm not ashamed of that.

...and I'm sorry if I bumped into anyone on the dance floor, but I was really enjoying myself...

See my "Siobhan as a fart" analogy. We all knew she was there, and I completely and utterly refused to take responsibility for her. :-) You'd have to be blind not to avoid Siobhan in full Trance Bubble flow, anyway.

Things like our taxi driver on the way home waiting until after he got a tip and was just driving off to ask "Are yous wearing panties or boxers?"...

The cool thing about that, for me, was that until that moment I'd been completely non self-conscious about hailing a taxi in the centre of London in the middle of the night, and not even considered that from his point a
view a load of pissed blokes had just piled into a taxi wearing frocks and demanded to be taken to "the Chambermerlernerlain on Minnories pleasemate". I hadn't been worrying about passing, or steeling myself up to brazen out the encounter with the taxi driver, I'd just been being me. And it's not like the driver burst some kind of happy delusion-of-passing bubble that I'd been in,
I'd just not been worrying about it. And it was a funny authentic cheeky London cabbie comment, so we all laughed.

...Today was about two things really: Getting over the hangover, and meeting Miss K.
Who was fab. As cool as I'd imagined...

Agreed.

'Nuff said!

¹Sorry for slipping into the third person there. I generally hate it when I hear trannies referring to their girly persona as if they were different individual, saying things like "I decided it was time for Stephanie to go for a walk around town", etc. But sometimes it becomes a necessary evil when comparing what the boy me would do compared to what the same person would do when wearing a skirt. They are, for all intents and purposes, both me, but "Simon" and "Becky" become shorthand for my different aspects.

²Alright, so maybe I am just a Medium Fish, but even medium-sized fish look big in such a small small pond. :-)

Gherkin and bendy bus

Guess where I am. :-)

Sonic Meme Experiment

Oops, I nearly dropped this meme baton that was passed on to me a few days ago by Miss K.

5 songs I'm diggin' this week:

"Starman" sung by Seu Jorge from The Original Soundtrack CD for "The Life Aquatic"
I recently watched and really enjoyed Wes Anderson's film comedy "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou". Part of the films appeal for me was it's soundtrack. I loved the jaunty jazz numbers that gave Bill Murray's aquatic documentaries in the film an authentically Cousteau-esque feel, and the bare-bones electronica used in the action sequences. Wes also cast Seu Jorge as an guitar-playing sailor with a remarkable repertoire of Bowie numbers, all sung entirely in Portuguese! There's something very pure about listening to a Bowie piece like Starman played completely acoustically and with a unintelligible lyric.

"Sleeping in" by The Postal Service from their album "Give Up"
I don't know too much about these guys other than like a lot of my fave groups there were brought to my attention by my brother, who is the muso of the family. Their sound is best described as a laid-back breezy synth-based Pet Shop Boys. I love the lyrics to the track "Sleeping in": "Last night I had that strange dream / Where everything was exactly how it seemed / Where concerns about the world getting warmer / The people thought they were just being rewarded / For treating others as they'd like to be treated / For obeying stop signs and curing diseases / For mailing letters with the address of the sender / Now we can swim any day in November."
There's an appealing naivety of the idea that global warming is a reward for being nice people, so that we can go swimming even in November.

"Wheels On Fire" by The Magic Numbers
A great track from their eponymous first album, and not as you might have thought a cover of the Siouxsie and the Banshee's song. I was going to buy this on iTunes but I'd become increasingly frustrated by their refusal to list the full album, so I went out and bought the CD instead!

"Jessica" by They Might Be Giants from their EP "Why Does the Sun Shine?"
I've been in love with the Two Johns since I heard John Peel play "Birdhouse in Your Soul" as a teenager (JP's verdict: "any band who can get the word "filibuster" into a song has to be good") and while I own all their albums, this EP track had passed me by until recently. It's a cover of The Allman Brother's track (that everyone knows best as "The Top Gear Music"), re-done in a polka style, and it's TMBG at their irreverent best!

"The Book of Right-On" by Joanna Newsom on her album "The Milk-Eyed Mender"
I first heard this on Jools Holland's show and was entranced by this elfin girl with the Bjork-esque voice accompanying herself with enormous skill on the harp. The CD has been knocking about in my car ever since.

How about you Kat, Jane, Jessica, Joanna and Siobhan?

Life, but not as we know it

Okay, so I decided to see what all the fuss was about with Second Life, the online "world" that Miss K and others, have been raving about for ages.

My first thought was "ooh... you can dress up in all kinds of outfits and stuff, and spend hours on your makeup! This is very tranny!"

After that it seemed to lose it's appeal. It wasn't obvious what you're supposed to do. A couple of trips to some busy clubs and I was beginning to wonder if it wasn't just a glorified chatroom.

Then I started to play with the editing tools, and then I realised that everything is editable. Almost everything you see, hear, and touch in the game has been created by another Second-lifer. It's incredibly rich and complex.

Although it is great fun for trannies (and regular girls and boys) who want to lose themselves in an alternate personality, I've actually had the most fun so far designing my home, here's it is...



It has a very powerful 3D editing tool, with which I've only just begun to scratch the surface of what's possible.

Suffice it to say, even if you've played a Massively Multiplayer game like Everquest or World of Warcraft you wont' "get" Second Life until you've tried it. Why not try out their free trial? If you do, give "Peony Candour" a shout, I'll come and say hi! :)

Piracy

You see, this is what happens when Siobhan takes a break from blogging. All her displaced commentators, starved of insightful commentary, set up camp on my blog expecting me to nurture and encourage intelligent debate. Come on people, you know that's just not going to happen!

Regarding the download piracy debate that seemed to have evolved out of my discussion about TV yesterday...

I was going to get on my high horse about this today. In fact I had it re-shod especially with extra-high stiletto horse shoes. I had the blog entry all worked out in my head last night, but then I read the comments this morning and everyone else had made the points that I wanted to make. Which has kind of stolen my thunder somewhat.

The point I wanted to make was this. It really annoys me when I hear things like:

"I download TV shows off the net because I'm fed up off waiting for it to be shown in the UK."

or

"I download films off the net because I don't like sitting in a noisy cinema with a load of chavs to see the latest films."

Bollocks. You download stuff off the net because it's free, easy, and most importantly you're very unlikely to get caught.

Of course downloading a TV show or film is a quicker and more convenient way of acquiring it than finding a way to pay for it. If it wasn't, no-one would bother. Coming out with arguments like that is basically saying "stealing is a cheaper quicker way of getting stuff than paying for things."

Wow, really? Who'd have thought it!?

I'm not whiter than white in all this, I'm not taking the high ground. I've downloaded a few MP3s and TV shows before now, but the point is I've never tried to justify my actions as legitimate. If I'd have wanted to, I could have found a way of legally acquiring the same items. Even the rare ones. Or, in the case of shows that hadn't arrived in the UK yet, I could have waited.

What's wrong with waiting for stuff? Will the world come to an end if someone tells you the plot of a film before you get a chance to see it? Can't you find something else to do until the last episode of Six Feet Under comes on? Look, it's sunny outside!

There's only one real difference between downloading a file illegally and shoplifting a CD or DVD: the chance of getting caught. You're a lot more likely to be prosecuted for half-inching something from HMV than you are for downloading something on Bittorrent. The fear of getting caught is what stops many if not most people from shoplifting, and the ones that do shoplift don't tend to boast about the fact as if they've done something very clever and justifiable:

"Yeah, I nicked that Lord of the Rings trilogy DVD box set yesterday... I got fed up of waiting for it to come on TV, and of course I get to watch it whenever I want now."

To summarise, I'm not saying "downloading stuff you don't own is wrong and you're all going to hell," I'm just saying "do it if you like, but don't tell me about it as if you'd done a Good Thing."

(Looks down.)

Er... how did I get up here? Woooah... easy Lighting, you'll break a stiletto. Um... can someone find me a stepladder?

More about telly

Why don't people watch TV properly any more?

I was chatting in the office about Lost, the American drama serial currently being shown in the UK on Channel 4. One of my work mates had just bought the whole first season on Region 1 DVD, and another guy had downloaded the entire series off the internet.

So, basically, we couldn't actually talk about the program at all. One of us had watched the whole thing already, the other one hadn't started yet, and I was in the middle having watched the episodes shown so far on Channel 4. The nature of the programme (with it's slow-build secrets and plot twists that ruin the show if you find out too soon) meant that our conversation mainly consisted of people sticking their fingers in their ears and going "laalaalaalaalaalaalaa".

I tried to explain to them that a lot of the pleasure of a TV series like Lost is, well, lost if you don't watch it slowly, at a pace dictated by the broadcaster. I don't watch much TV, but the programmes I do watch I like to share with someone else. I live alone, so normally it consists of texting mates who are watching to with pithy comments during the show. As a kid one of the things I used to love doing with my Dad was sitting down in front of a bad sci-fi show and joyously ripping the plot to pieces. At the weekend I spent a pleasurable few hours watching The Ultimate Film list with Jane. It was a repeat, but discussing the shortlisted movies with another film fan made it a whole new experience.

The point is that TV programmes are best experienced communally, but the trouble is we live in a time-shifted world where broadcast television has become an anachronism. Even I often end up watching Lost about 5 minutes behind everyone else because I missed the start, and rely on Sky Plus to catch the beginning for me.

Everyone wants to do things when they get the time, not when the broadcasters want us to watch. As a consequence we've losing out on that great social bonding exercise of "talking about the telly around the water cooler", which in turn was a replacement for the lost art of "talking about the village tart while at the well".

With DVDs, thousands of satellite channels, the internet, digital recording and so forth, everyone's started making their own entertainment, when they want it, how they want it. It makes me nostalgic for the Golden Age of Television when half the population of the UK sat down to find out Who Shot JR, and VCRs were the size of trucks and only programmable by NASA engineers.

Eee... we didn't have any of this "making your own entertainment" in my day, we watched television!

A man walks into a bar... wearing a frock.

Cathii Scott had taken my jokey piece about trannies on telly and made some good points about the way that "blokes in dresses" are used as a joke on television at the moment, and how this may be part of a process where trannies gain the same kind of growing acceptance enjoyed by the gay community.

I want there to be jokes about me and my kind on television. I think that it is a Good Thing. It will be a sign of a positive attitude evolving when the media makes jokes about trannies, rather than makes fun of people because they're trannies. In the same way that Will and Grace makes jokes about gay people, rather than laugh at them because they're gay.

Trannies are intrinsically funny, a man putting on feminine apparel and mannerisms is funny. In the same way that gays are intrinsically funny. So are black people, and Asian people, and disabled people, and of course white middle class straight people. We all have our own idiosyncrasies that can be the basis of great humour.

The only way trannies are going to stop being the butt of jokes is by taking ownership of those jokes. Laughing at our own idiosyncrasies and stereotypes.

An analog to this in the Asian community was the UK television sketch show "Goodness Gracious Me". It made fun of many of the stereotypes that British Asians have (clinging mothers, large families sharing one house etc.) but because it was Asians themselves making the jokes, it made it acceptable. It made non-Asians see that the stereotypes were just that, cliches that do exist but don't necessarily represent the community as a whole.

Trannies are often in danger of being too sensitive to jokes and jibes. I know of t-girls who want to start a campaign to take the Bounty advertising campaign off the air because it features two (unashamedly obvious) blokes in frocks. They want it stopped because it "paints a negative picture of transgenderism". This is bollocks.

It's time for trannies to start saying "yes we are blokes in frocks. It's fucking hilarious! I had a good old belly laugh at the outfit my mate wore last week."

If there ever comes the day when there's a sitcom or sketch show by trannies about trannies, I'll applaud. Because once people start laughing with us, they've stopped laughing at us.

TV Telly

TV Producers! With transgender potters, girly-boy Big Brother contestants, tranny comedians and burly housewives flogging kitchen towels, you know by now that Trannies Sell Telly. And I'm full of ideas for future tranny-based shows, each available to you for a modest fee!

• Cash in the Closet - Car boot experts help transvestites sell all the clothes that they never wear, in order to pay for a special treat. First Episode: Clare, a TV from St. Albans, is mildly surprised when the 1800 wedding dresses she sells at car-boot fund a trip to the International Space Station.
  
  
• "Becky" - Talk show hosted by no-nonense transvestite, Becky EnVerite. Featuring such episodes as: I'm Excruciatingly Normal and I Need You To Know. Three guests who have absolutely nothing strange or unusual about their sexual preferences or gender orientation decide to tell their loved ones live on stage. In front of an audience of braying freaks, ladyboys and adult babies.
  
  
• Does He Wear Sugar? - This might be more suitable for radio. Weekly news magazine introducing "Transgender Issues" in an teeth-grindingly worthy and PC manner.
  
  
• The Tranny Years - Each week takes a year from the last few decades and looks at it's celebrities, news stories and culture and how they influenced the trannies of today. Featuring misty-eye transvestites talking about "that brass bikini what Princess Leia wore" and "didn't every tranny want to own a Girls World head?", and bloody Raul Ross enthusing about Raleigh Choppers and Space Dust. Again.
  
  
• Pages from TeeFax - Overnight text service for insomniac trannies. Featuring the Transvestite weather, recipes for false boobs, Repartee in Welsh, and information on makeup that's suitable for coeliacs.
  
  
• Changing Wombs - Gender Swap EXTREME! Need I say more?

I await your offers of development funds. Cash only please.