TG Predictions for 2007

Oo-er, that curry made from week-old turkey didn't agree with me at all. I've been feverishly slipping in and out of conciousness all day.

On the up-side, I've been having some incredibly vivid and accurate visions of the coming year!

Read and take heed.

Television
Realising that "TG sells", Endemol populate the 2007 Big Brother house entirely with transsexuals, genderqueers and bonkers transvestites. The winner will be a tripolar male to female to male to female (MtFtMtF) pantranssexual who smokes constantly, faints when asked anything more complicated than "what's your name?" and speaks at a pitch only audible to dogs.

Births, Marriages and Deaths
The joyous marriage of Becky and Jane is marred when a criminal investigation is launched after eight tranny bridesmaids are "accidentally" poisoned during our wedding rehearsal.

Events
Friction between TV and TS camps descends into sectarian violence during Sparkle. Tempers start to fray on Friday evening when a Northern Concorde meeting is fire-bombed. A group calling themselves the "Provisional TVA" claim responsibility. On Saturday a snide comment about a contestant in Miss Sparkle being "hormone assisted" snowballs into rioting on Princess Street. By Sunday night the area has been brought under control by a joint Roses-Angels peacekeeping force, and work begins on removing the corpses from the canal.

The Web
In late January I finally give up dreaming up original content, and just start wholesale cutting-and-pasting Tranniefesto from 2004. Nobody realises until May. Including Siobhan.

Roses Forum will experiment with a new form of RSS feed that sends forum threads directly into the subscriber's brain. Calls to the Samaritans quadruple overnight.

Science
Theoretical gender scientists discover a fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth sex. They provisionally name them Up, Bottom, Xena, Strange, and Joanna.

World Events
Due to the drain on the country's budget (caused by a small but extravagant minority), Finland bans cross-dressing during the hours of daylight. All five Finnish trannies decide to go on holiday during the three effected weeks.

That's all I've got for now. 2007 awaits, let's all get out there and make it happen!

Hooked on phonics

Wanna try something I've been playing with today?

Siobhan's recent flirtation with anagrams reminded me of an idea I had ages ago for a follow up to Flickr Sudoku.

It's called Flickrebus, a rebus being a word puzzle made out of pictures, and Flickr being... well you know what Flickr is.

So having some free time today, I sat down with my well-thumbed copy of The Ladybird Book of Flickr API Programming, and tried to make it work.

I'd like you to beta test, and maybe have a smidgen of fun doing so (though more likely they'll cause teeth-grinding frustration).

There are 5 test puzzles so far. To make it easier for you, these first ones are all names of blogs I frequent.

Here ya go:

Puzzle One

Puzzle Two

Puzzle Three

Puzzle Four

Puzzle Five

A small-print clue to get you started if you're stuck on number one:

The first one is "becky's web": "beer" + "keys" + "web".

Battle of the girl bands

Remember when I got you all to ask me some questions? Well I really do plan to answer them all. Here are some more.

Vicki_cduk asks:
Girls Aloud or the Spice Girls?

With the risk of sounding terribly fuddy-duddy, I suppose I'll have to say the Spice Girls. On the basis that I could identify all of them in a line up, and also hum a few of their tunes.

And of course, they all gave trannies so much to aspire to. What T-girl of a Certain Age can deny wanting to emulate Ginger's frocks, Scary's makeup, Baby's cuteness, Posh's bling or Sporty's... er... energy? (The first person to comment "Not me!!" gets an official BeckysWeb "I don't understand sarcasm" sticker.)

I've got nothing really against Girls Aloud, but I couldn't tell you any of their names without going and looking it up, and can anyone hum "Love Machine"!?

To my colleague...

Hi NorfolkNGood!

Sincere thanks for leaping to the defence of Trannykind in this thread on a forum for Middlesbrough supporters. :-)

Don't worry, I'm not stalking you! When you linked to my site in your mention of your "colleague Simon aka Becky", it caused a spike on my web logs, and I followed it back to it's source.

Of course, now I'm wracking my brains trying to remember anyone at my workplace mentioning they were a Middlesbrough supporter, to figure out who you are. :-/

Anyway, thanks again. And maybe if you're comfortable dropping a hint about who you are, either via email or comment, please do! :-)

12 months 12 posts

2006 was my first full year of blogging, 12 months of stuff from my head transferred onto the web by the miracle of fingers.

As a bit of an early Christmas present I thought I'd share with you some of my favourite posts from the past year, one per month. Okay, so it's not much of a present, but it's nice sometimes to dust-off blog posts that deserve another airing.

Back in January I was in an equally reflective mood, which led me to try and sum up what transvestism is like for me. Reading it again just now, I still feel like that. I've probably dressed less this year than at any time since I first came out, and at the time I was worried that my lack of dressing would lead to a collapse of the cross-dressing "scaffolding" that was holding a lot of my life together, but that hasn't happened. Which is good.

February saw me featured in the premier organ for UK Transvestism, and having a little rant about some of it's more toe-curling features in Working on my Repartee. I popped up again later in the year, which of course meant buying another copy, which also made me squirm. I realise I'm probably not the target market for Repartee, but also I wonder if actually UK trannies get the special interest magazine they deserve.

In March I discovered that blog material can be found in the most unexpected places. Who would have thought that the remainders shelf in WHSmiths would be the source of material for probably my most popular blog entry yet: Conversational Ebonics? Sadly the freakish vanity publisher of "Off The Hook", Protea Publishing, is now defunct. Shame, I used to enjoy perusing their back catalogue!

Earlier that month I'd bought my first Apple Mac after 13 years in the Wintelness, and by April Apple had met me coming the other way by allowing Macs to boot in Windows mode. Something about "dual booting" chimed in my head with transvestism and led me to explain how to dual-boot your gender.

That's probably my favourite kind of blog entry: write about one thing (usually transvestism) by comparing it to something not obviously analogous. I'm not good at writing "straight" blog entries about what's happening in my life or how I feel about something, I need to filter it somehow. There's some good examples of that in May, and also an example of another favourite activity of mine: gently taking the mickey out of Siobhan other trannies, in Now a major motion picture.

Like a lot of trannies, Sparkle was occupying my mind in June. It's rapidly become the UK tranny scene event of the year, and a lot of t-girls have even started making their débuts there. I decided to let them know what they were letting themselves in for by producing a Sparkle Spotter's Guide. Of course, it can be also be used at Trans-mission, Angelic, the Way Out Club...

I had loads of fun in July writing this: Well , I'm enjoying myself, that's the main thing. The title kind of sums up my attitude to blogging really. I post something that I enjoy, and then hope that other people enjoy it too. It would be a lie to say that I blog purely for my own benefit, I like showing off my occasional bursts of cleverness to others. Why blog at all, otherwise?

2006 was the year of Tranny and TV, the silly little non-cartoon I did initially as a parody of the "Mac vs. PC" adverts, which evolved into something that threatened to take over my whole blog for a while. By August they'd started to really his their stride, with one of my personal favourites so far: Pneumatically-breasted Supermodel. I think I managed to get the timing of the last joke just right, which is a tricky thing when you're dealing with inanimate objects in a static strip!

By September Tranny and TV was sapping most of my creative juices, so much so that it's hard for me to choose a favourite non-T&TV post. I did manage to get uncharacteristically ranty about the masses of crap snaps that are the unfortunate by product of combining drunken trannies and digital cameras in dark and sweaty locations.

There was a apparently a resurgence in my tranny levels in October, if the number of pictures of me dressed up that month are anything to go by! I even managed to write a post that ticked all the boxes at once. How to make your own fetish PVC witch costume was humorous (well I thought so), informative (er, kinda) and featured pictures of me in a frock. Result!

Partly this blog has been a quest to answer the question "why?", and in November I nearly cracked it. And all it took was copious amounts of alcohol and a visit to Milton Keynes. I like that post, if only for the phrase "clutching desperately at slippery gobbets of meaning as they skitter giggling into the shadows", which I'd never have dared to use while sober.

If I worked purely by number of comments solicited, there could only be one favourite post in December: the one announcing my engagement to Jane (who has been helpfully plying me with dry roasted peanuts and wine while I compose this). But let's end on a festive note and remind you all of the true meaning of Christmas.

That's it. My year in a nutshell. Re-reading my blog to compose this has been strange. I've never kept a diary before, so being able to dip back into forgotten occurrences and lost states of mind has been a new experience. Enjoyable though.

Well, enjoyable for me. As always, if you also enjoyed it, that's just a bonus.

Merry Christmas everyone. Thanks for reading this year, thanks even more for commenting. Thanks for everything. I love you all. And that's not the wine speaking.

Although it might be the peanuts.

I've created a monster!

The original movie version of Frankenstein is a classic, but the sequel is much better, The Bride of Frankenstein.

I think it's writers were aware of something that I've only recently realised myself:

Brides are scary, scary things.

I've created a monster, and it didn't need any body parts and arcing electricity, it just took a small band of platinum. From the moment it slipped onto Jane's finger something apparently awoke for the first time inside her.

This new Jane has bought magazines with pictures of dresses on them. Jane never buys magazines like that. There's talk of what food we're going to be eating late next year, I'm not sure what I'm having for breakfast tomorrow! She's asking my opinions on stationery!

Stationery!

I've managed 34 years without forming an opinion of stationery. I'm not sure I'm ready to start now.

All this has lead me to realise this truism regarding the difference between trannies and real girls:

When little trannies learn about weddings, they start having the occasional fantasy about big bridal frocks. When little girls learn about weddings, they start planning what colour the napkins will be. And what music will be played at the reception. And where they'll get married.

And fantasize about a big frock.

I'm not complaining, though, honest. :-)

Cutting edge interactive DVD action

Utterly pointless T&TV quiz.

Follow that

I'm not deliberately leaving that last post current until I've squeezed every last congratulatory comment out of it I can (thanks for each of them by the way, I'm truly touched!), it's just that after blogging about something so important it seems frightfully bad form to replace it with the usual mindless drivel. :-)

But the show must go on, so...

...um...

Is anyone else as annoyed at I am with that advert for DAB radios on the BBC? The one where the guy buys his wife a digital radio for their wedding anniversary?

In it, she thanks him for the present but then waits expectantly for her "other" present, because a DAB radio isn't big or expensive enough to compensate for their years of marriage.

Leaving aside the obviously distasteful sentiment that an anniversary present is some form of recompense for being married, and the fact that DAB radios have taken so long to get going they're effectively old-fashioned technology before they've even taken off, this advert annoys me on two levels.

Firstly, it's bollocks to suggest that a DAB radio is a cheap present. They're not, they're still bloody expensive compared to, say, a DVD player.

Secondly, the advert fails completely at it's intended purpose: getting us to buy DAB radios to wean us off our perfectly good analogue sets. Had you been considering buying one as a present (which I presume is the reason a fair number of DAB radios are bought at this time of year), you'd be put off by the suggestion this advert gives that only thoughtless cheapskates give digital radios as gifts.

I suppose that's why the advert writer is working for the BBC and not in the cut-and-thrust world of commercial advertising.

"I've had a great idea for how to sell your product! We make out it's a shitty gift bought only by inconsiderate arseholes in loveless marriages!"

Announcing the engagement of...

... me.

To the beautiful Jane.

I proposed yesterday evening, and she said yes. Which is a relief!

It's funny, I can blog for a page and a half about pointless meaningless things, but when something wonderful, important and life-changing happens I find myself strangely lost for words.

I can sum it all up in one sentence: I'm very happy. :-)