Young scallywags

Been tinkering with this all week, but it doesn't quite work in the way I wanted it to. The "joke" is that young trannies, when given an opportunity to dress up, always make a load more effort than they need to.

Either that or they're too afraid to be seen to be making effort and therefore read as a tranny that they avoid getting into the situation completely.

And also I feel like I'm doing halloween to death now.

Meh. Anyway, I like TV's costume. And the gag in the first frame; which no-one will get.

How to make your own Fetish PVC Witch costume

Hello boys and girls!

With Halloween rapidly approaching, you might be stuck for costume ideas. A lot of outfits can be quite expensive, but I’ve got an idea for a great costume that you can make cheaply at home. This outfit would make an ideal present for a tranny in your family, so you might want to make sure that they leave the room before we continue.

Are they gone? Great!



Take a look at this outfit that Becky’s modelling, looks fantastic doesn’t it? You’d expect to pay at least 2 guineas for an outfit that good from a posh PVC shop in Knightsbridge. But would you believe it cost less than 20 pounds? That’s right!

First you need to make your PVC dress. For this I used a standard PVC maid’s uniform, of the kind that everyone has stashed away somewhere! If you’re not sure where there’s one in your house, just ask mummy or daddy!

One you have the PVC maid’s uniform, discard the satin pinny and badly-made lace headband, as it won’t be needed for this costume. You might want to wash off any obvious stains, although these add to the character of the final outfit!

Next, you’ll need to make the underskirt or “petticoats”. For this you will need about 4 metres of gauzy material, which you can get from that shop in town with the faded sewing patterns in the window that’s been going for donkey’s years and seems to keep afloat even though hardly anyone visits apart from little old ladies on market day who go in for bizarrely coloured wool and a natter with the strangely fey elderly gentleman who’s worked there forever.

He’ll also sell you some black ribbon, about 3 metres will do. He’ll also try to show you some pictures of him and his young gentleman friend on holiday in Tuscany, but politely decline and leave the shop swiftly.

You might want to get an assistant (sometimes called a Tranny Wallah) to help you with this part. You need to fold the material twice along it’s whole length, so that you have 4 metres of quadruple-thick gauzy material. Pin the material near the folded edge to keep it in place, and then sew along the whole length about 1 inch away from the folded edge.



Now you can feed the ribbon down along the sewn edge of the material and gather it together. The gathered edge can be adjusted so that it fits neatly around the waist, and then the ribbons tied and cut to length.

Next the hat. Like me you’re probably thinking “there’s bugger all chance of me sourcing a PVC witch’s hat”, but actually I found one in the first costume shop I walked into. Which just goes to show that children today are all going to grow up perverts.



Finally, add a pair of 5-inch heeled shoes that you just know are going to be torture after about 10 minutes, a set of cheap false nails from a joke shop, and a pair of expensive tights that cost extra because some “designer” put extra holes in them, et voila!

As promised...

...to everyone I handed a moo card to last night: here's a link to the photos I took, along with everyone else's, on that fancy Flickr thing I raved about.

Halloween New Road 2007

The photo's of me need to be sent to NASA for intensive image processing. I'll post them when I get them back. ;-)

Witching hour minus one

When I was ickle we used to go swimming on a Sunday, and one day at this time of year we turned up an hour early for the pool. So no Siobhan, I think the clock change has always been on a Sunday. ;-)

But in those halcyon days of youth, it often didn't matter what time it was at the weekend, time was something Grown Ups were concerned with, and the fact that the clocks had changed didn't kick-in until Monday morning and the call for school.

On several occasions as a Grown Up I've actually been denied the pleasure of a lie-in on this day. One of the ancient computer systems at the place where I work isn't clever enough to know the difference between GMT and BST. So it doesn't like it when the time suddedly jumps back an hour, and things appear to be happening before things that have already occured. By "things" I mean stuff like "person feeling a bit peaky" and "person dropping down dead". Paradoxes like that can really screw with a computer's noggin and make it go a bit HAL.

So one of my jobs was to go into work at 1AM and shut down the system, which was a bit like stopping a nuclear power station. Then wait around for a hour for 2AM (when the clocks jump back to 1AM) and wake the whole thing up again. As far as the computer's concerned the clock change never happened, as far as I'm concerned I'm two hour's kip down on a one-hour-extra-in-bed deal.

But these days it's all done with wires and bits of string, so I'm free to go to halloween parties as a PVC witch and awake freshed faced the next morning to blog about it for you.

Which I will do at some point, I promise, I'm just gonna be a bit busy today. I've got to get from Derby to Reading via King's Lynn and March by tea-time.

March the place, not March the month. I've had enough time travel for one day.

Witching hour

It was great fun. Expect full blog post later this week.

Caw!

According to PRBlogger i'm 74 in the UK100 list of influential UK blogs based on Technorati rankings.

It's not exactly the most accurate way of measuring Blog importance of course, Steven Davies admits as much in the post, but that's not going to stop me crowing about it for a bit.

Crow.

Crow.

Crow.

That's it, I'm done. :-)

Practical Parenting

I work with a guy (who I told about Becky earlier in the year) who has 3 young kids, all girls. I really admire some of his parenting methods.

For example, he treats the official age ratings on DVDs and TV shows as guidelines, and prefers to use his own judgement as to what they'd enjoy, and what's not too violent or sexual. He checks out the films himself first, and is usually on-hand to make answer any questions that might arise. As he points out, Terminator was an 18 when it came out, but it would hardly merit a PG these days.

They watched Torchwood as a family earlier in the week, and I was interested to find out what they'd thought of the (tastefully done) sex scene in the club toilets.

'They thought it was "yucky". And when the alien made the guy explode in a cloud of dust at the end, I said "and that's what happens when you have sex".'

Genius. :-)

Actually his kids are growing up with a very healthy attitude to sex and sexuality, because he tries to be honest with them and be open to any questions they might have.

'They already know about stuff like gays and lesbians,' he said to me the other day. 'Even transvestites.'

'Transvestites?' I asked, fearing the worst.

'Of course, I had to explain about you, didn't I?' he said, smiling.

It was a bit shocked, but I should have realised that the spirit of Glasnost would have included stuff like that. Shocked, but pleased. I know he's just trying to instil open-mindedness in his kids for all things.

But apparently I might have to use a false name if I ever meet his kids in the near future, especially as one of them apparently has an enquiring mind and no concept of 'improper questions'!

More Moo freebie goodness

I think everyone's agreed now that Moo are the best thing since cheese met Branston. And now you can get even more freebie cards, courtesy of a brand new promotion with Skype.

Simply go to the Skype page on the Moo site and use the promo code "freebie".

The designs are completely different from the Flickr ones, but pretty funky in their own right.

(Thanks to pajLog for giving me the heads up on this one.)

Almost totally painful

Special bonus extra only available on this web site: The Breadmaker Theme!

Okay, now I'm worried about me. :-/

China Girl

I have a habit of pinning things to the notice board in my kitchen and never taking them down, so that new items get pinned to the strata of old ones.

I had a bit of a clear-out yesterday and re-disovered this little gem...

er...

Some explanation may be necessary.

I was working on multimedia learning package in the late nineties, and we were looking through a set of stock photography for pictures of rabbits. We came across this picture of a bunny lounging on a cushion in what looked liked Chinese boudoir.

The rabbit seemed to have a strangely sultry expression. Someone (probably me) suggested that it looked like high-class porn for bunny fanciers. And from that this spoof magazine cover developed.

Don't look at the close up, whatever you do.

Yeah, I know, it's wrong. I'm not into rabbits. Honest. :-/

Drawing a line

Nazi gold resurfaces in Switzerland.

Okay, so Nazi is too strong. But this is proof, if proof were needed, that not all trannies are raving lefties.

I like Gillian, she's been a friend in an emails-and-forums and occasional chats at clubs kinda way since her difficult birth onto the tranny scene. But, sometimes I realise you don't always agree with your friend's beliefs.

I wish I was better at verbalising my own political beliefs to properly present a counter-argument, but I'm not. So I guess this is me just drawing a symbolic line and then going and standing the other side of it.

I guess Gillian has done the same thing, except her line is the Swiss border.

My name is too long...

... for me to ever become a blockbuster author. To do that you need a snappy name like "Dan Brown". Preferably two syllables, with one word smaller than the other so that it can be made big on the cover.

I saw a book on Tesco's bestseller shelf today by an author called "Sam Bourne". I didn't check out the glowing recommendations on the sleeve but I imagine they'd be something like.

"Sam Bourne is possibly the author with the most similar name to Dan Brown alive today -- The Daily Express"

"Using two different fonts, the cover designer has truly managed to capture that suggestion of modernity mixed with ancient rites and stuff that is the mark of a bandwagon expertly jumped apon -- Angling Times"

PicLens

I've been trying the beta version of PicLens, a groovy little plug-in for Mac Safari browsers. It basically makes photo sites like Flickr a much more immersive experience, allowing you to browse pages of photos in a full-screen slideshow format.

After installing the software, mousing over an image on a site that's supported by PicLens presents you with a small extra icon. Click it and after a few seconds the picture grows smoothly to fill the screen with the high-definition version. PicLens then starts pre-caching the other images that were on that page, and you can navigate through them with an interface similar to an iPhoto slideshow. It makes surfing Flickr a completely different experience as each picture is show at it's best.

Currently it's OSX Safari only, although a PC version is promised. I'm hoping for a version for my current browser of choice, Firefox.

De-Gauss

Holiday '06

That was a fun week. :-)

It started with a Very British Tranny Night down in London. I looked like this:



For about 5 minutes before we went out of the door. Then as usual it all went a bit rough round the edges. The outfit was kinda built around the gold lamé skirt, which I found a couple of weeks ago in Milton Keynes. It sang to me.

Amazingly, I sucessfully recognised and chatted with everyone I was supposed to at Trans-Mission. Including the delegates from Tokyo, Sydney, Finland and All Points Not King's Lynn.

Then a brief Thistle Full English Breakfast and a snooze and it was off to Portugal. The bit at the bottom they call the Algarve.

Which was great. I've never done a "beach" holiday before, normally I like to keep busy and go places where I can point at architecture and say "that's interesting" in a John Major accent. So it was a nice change of gear.

The Algarve during the summer season must be absolutely heaving, judging by the number of bars and restaurants there are to cater for tourists. The great thing was they were all still open despite the lack of customers, so we were spoilt for choice for places to eat and drink. At the same time the weather was still very good, so it seemed like the best of both worlds.

We spent most of the time lounging on the beach. I caught up with some essential work: reading a Pratchett Backlog and finding the entrance to World 4 on Super Mario Brothers. You know, real important stuff that tends to slip if you don't make time for it.

I also took some nice pictures, I'm not going to bore you by showing you them all.

I am going to bore you by showing you some of them.

This was the view from our apartment.



The cars really did whizz past leaving lines like that. But only after the third or fourth glass of Port.

Here's a shot taken on the beach that I'm kinda proud of.



And finally, a shop for Lady's Things.



Oh yeah, that reminds me, I've also been reading the most astonishing piece of transgendered fiction ever commited to paper. I've got no idea how or when I can blog about it though.

Or if anyone's even interested. I always get the feeling after coming back from a blog break that everyone might have wandered off to do Other Things. ;-)

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