Loving the labyrinth

I have a prediction. By the year 2012, movie DVDs will come out 6 months before their cinema release. Based on current trends. It seems that there's already barely any time between a film appearing at the multiplex and appearing at the Megastore.

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I don't get to go to the cinema as much as I'd like, so I rely on DVD releases a lot more these days.

One film I missed on it's cinema release was Pan's Labyrinth, so I eagerly snapped it up when it appeared on DVD, and watched it this week.

It's absolutely stunning. By far the best film I've seen in ages. My spoof (it's a pan... geddit!?!!?) really doesn't do it justice!



The film starts with a young girl, Ofelia, finding a ancient statue in the wilds of 1940's Spain. My first thoughts were this is like a live-action Spirited Away, and that turned out to be reasonably accurate analogy. Guilliermo Del Toro seems to have the same masterful feel for fantasy and fairy tales as Hayao Miyazaki. He realises that good fairy tales are scary. His eye for detail is also very Miyazaki-esque, the sets for both the real and fantasy worlds are fantastically rich and intricate. If Studio Ghibli made live action, they'd make films that looked like Pan's Labyrinth.



I was also reminded of another director, Pedro Almodóvar. Like his fellow spaniard, Del Toro seems to have an innate understanding of how to portray strong female characters. Even the "weak" character of Ofelia's mother, wearily resigned to be the complaint wife of the monstrous Captain Vidal, is portrayed in a sympathetic way.

If you've not done so already, beg borrow or steal Pan's Labyrinth! It's left me with a desperate urge to see Del Toro's other Spanish fantasy films. I'm off to steal Sophie's box set!

Colorsync, again

If you're a regular reader, you'll know that one of my pet bugbears is the lack of ColorSync support in Firefox. ColorSync (in the form of ICC profiles) is Apple's technology for ensuring colour fidelity across browsers and media.

If that last paragraph made your eyelids droop, you may leave now. :-)

I'm currently using a great browser which does support ICC profiles (and is generally The Browser that Safari Should Be) called OmniWeb.

But occasionally I hanker for the nice little plugins and stuff that come with Firefox, so I go off on little research expeditions to find out a bit more about ICC support in browsers.

It turns out that lack of ICC support in Mozilla has been a known issue for quite a while, it was reported as a bug back in 1999. Although reading that thread it sounds like it is being actively looked at.

To give you some idea of how much of a difference it makes, take a look at this page using a few different browsers. If you're using a ICC-compliant browser like Safari (or IE6, I think), it will look normal. If you look at the same page in Firefox, it will look like it was screen printed by Warhol on a bad day.

That's an extreme example, but it makes the point. Colour fidelity is important, not quite important enough that I'd go demonstrate about it yet, but still pretty important.

Thai ladeez-b

I think I first heard about these girls from Supernaut. They're an all-ladyboy girl band from Thailand who are having some success. They look amazing and their blog is kinda fun too.

Here's hoping they make it over to the UK some time!

Vestidos bonitos

iTunes see sense

Playlist: Apple introduces 'Complete My Album' on iTunes

This is such a good idea I wonder why they haven't thought of it before. I also wonder if they'll count purchases of separately released single tracks that are identical to the album version.

Quite often I'll buy a single via iTunes before the album comes out, only to end up getting a duplicate version when I eventually buy the album.

Somehow I doubt they will. It would take effort and planning to actually track which individually-released single tracks are identical to album tracks, whereas this system probably does nothing more than check album purchases against a database of previous track purchases.

Shame, I could save, oh... tens of pence!

Making history

There can be little doubt that transvestism has had a huge impact on the world. Transvestites have excelled in every sphere of human endeavor, from arts and entertainment through to politics and technology.

But many of the biggest questions have yet to be answered fully. Where did transvestism come from? When did it start? Who started it, and more importantly, why?

To answer these questions, and many more, I have begun my greatest endeavour ever on this web site. To tell no less than the complete and utter history of transvestism in the world. To lay out the grand arc of transvestite influence over the ages.

Without further ado, I give you:



1200Ma (Million years ago) to 450Ma - The beginnings of transvestism

One area that has been avoided by the Intelligent Design debate is the evolution of transvestism. This is mainly because no-one is prepared to admit that the design of transvestites is in any way intelligent. This means that theories surrounding the origins of transvestism are almost exclusively evolutionary.

Fig. 1: Paramecium Brancastrium.
Female (a), Male (b) , and Male Pretending to be Female (c).

What is known is that at some time in the distant past, primitive organisms began to differentiate sexually, possibly to increase the amount of genetic mixing within species, or possibly to give themselves something to bitch about. Shortly after this time some of the newly male organisms realised they'd been drawn the short genetic straw and demanded a recount. Thus transvestism was born.

It should be noted that during this time the Earth was highly hostile to transvestite life. The planet was spinning much faster than it does today. Nights were only 9 hours long, making it almost impossible to get ready in the dark.

450Ma to 250Ma - On to Land

Fossilised footprints of the first land animals. Note (b) was clearly wearing overly high stilettos.

The arthropods become the first creatures to move onto land, mainly to get a bit of peace and quiet. They were closely followed by the marthropods, who came to see what the arthropods were up to.

Palaeontologists studying the fossil record have discovered a third species somewhere between these two, which displays traits of both. They've tentatively named these "Neither-arthr-or-marthr-opods".

250Ma to 65Ma - The Dinosaurs

The explosion of life onto land resulted in an "evolutionary arms race" amongst transgendered species to come up with the girliest body modifications.

The dinosaurs took an early lead with fripperies such as frills that ran the entire length of the body, and some early experiments with feathers. Then the mammals trounced them by inventing boobies, which depressed the dinosaurs so much that they died out.

It was also about this time that the Y chromosome was invented, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

No need to apologise

UK slave trade apology 'needed' (from BBC News)

Apologies (from Sad, Sweet Songs & Crazy Rhythms)

Yes, the slave trade was shit, and it's effect is being felt to this day. But I can't apologise for it, because I wasn't responsible for it. Neither do I want someone else apologising for it on my behalf. For an apology to be meaningful, it has to be from the person or people responsible.

Look at the past, and learn from it, but take responsibility by the way you act in the future, not by empty words of contrition.

Because of the lack of hands

The best thing Canada ever did

You know those little facts that are blatantly obvious, but don't really hit you until you actually think about them?

I've just realised that the dog who played The Littlest Hobo must have died years ago.

I'm sad now. :-(

. . .

There's a voice that keeps on calling me
Down the road is where I'll always be

Every stop I make, I'll make a new friend
Can't stay for long, just turn around and I'm gone again

. . .

I loved that dog.

*sob* :-(

Car-less talk

And so ends the week-long experiment where Jane got to be the car user, and I joined the massed ranks of the pedestrians.

(An as aside: isn't pedestrian a strange word? It means simultaneously "a walking person" and "a bit slow and boring". Which is a bit of an insult to pedestrians, if you ask me.

I have a great joke that makes use of this dual meaning. I'm waiting for someone to ask me "how do you like the new zebra crossing?"

So I can reply "quite frankly, I found it rather pedestrian."

...

I have a feeling I might have to wait a long while.)

Anyhoo... back to my fascinating musings on being sans-automobile. I should start by saying that I'm not a car fanatic. I basically see motor vehicles as a means from getting from A to B without having to look at, listen to, or smell, C.

I can't get excited about cars because I don't have enough money to buy a car that's exciting, and if I did have that much money I'd find a lot more exciting things to spend it on.

But it's been an eye-opener this week just how much my quality of life relies on my four-wheeled friend. Take shopping, for example. I live in a nice-ish new housing estate on the edge of a much larger estate of mostly council houses. The old estate, built mainly for London Overspill (quite how they managed to get spilt this far isn't really clear), was planned with an central convenience store, because it's quite a way from the town centre. When they bolted on my housing development, even further out of town, the planners obviously thought we'd get in our cars and drive to proper supermarkets, supposedly because we're wage earners and can afford cars, unlike those workshy council house types.

That means that the only shop within walking distance of me is the estate convenience store. That would be fair enough if it was anything like convenient. I went there on Wednesday, to do the kind of mid-week shop I'd normally hop in the car and do at the local Tescos that Steg practically lives in (go on, deny it!) ;-).

I'm trying not to sound snobbish about this, so I'll avoid mentioning the 3 separate gangs of hoodies in the shop, or the man filling his basket to the brim with cans of lager. They've got just as much right to go shopping as I have.

What I do have a problem with is a shop marketing itself as a "grocery store" and not stocking the most basic forms of grocery.

I found myself in what appeared to be the "cook-in sauces" aisle. A fine selection of ready made cooking sauces greeted my eye. Great, I thought, I'll have something in sauce!

I then spent a fruitless (and more importantly veg-less and meat-less) ten minutes trying to find the something. There was no fresh meat, no fresh fish, and the fresh vegetables consisted of a few sad potatoes. There was some frozen meat and fish, but it was the kind of stuff that comes in bags and has already been processed in some way. I have a fairly broad palate, but I draw the line at Chicken Nugget Tikka Masala.

So basically, the cook-in sauces were there to fill shelf space with things that don't go off too quick. Everyone has the odd jar of Dolmio or something tucked away in their kitchen cupboards for emergencies; if the shop owners were truly trying to run a convenience store they'd have stocked the stuff to go with it. But no. Shit shop.

Anyway, all this has gone to show me just how much I realise I need a car in this neck of the sticks, unless I fancy catching a bus to do even a basic shop, and practically cutting myself off from my friends and relatives. Which I don't, so sue me.

On blog readers and blogroll etiquette

I use Bloglines as my day-to-day blog reading tool. It looks vaguely "Web 1.x" in it's design (I mean, who uses frames these days, tch!), and the colour scheme is awful, but I've yet to find another feed aggregator that matches it for speed, ease-of-use and robust functionality. There are probably readers out there that are better, but the ones I've tried aren't so much better that they make me feel like surmounting the inertia of "staying with what I'm used to".

If you're not yet using a blog aggregator to keep track of updates to this site (and all the other blog and news sites you read) I recommend setting up a free account with Bloglines. And once you have you can click this link to subscribe to this blog. Clever eh? ;-)

One of the things keeping me with Bloglines is that it runs my blogroll for me. A blogroll, for those not steeped in the terminology of the blogging, is that list of other blogs on the left hand side of my main blog page.

Basically I have set two folders of blogs in bloglines, one called (imaginatively) "Blogs", and the other called (slightly less imaginatively) "Other Blogs".

Using Bloglines's built-in Blogroll Wizard I've set it up so the list of blogs in my "Blogs" folder is replicated on my home page. And with a bit of CSS wizardry from Jessica I stripped out the tell-tale "Made by Bloglines" bit they stick in by default. Hey, I feel I've already given them enough plugs!

Because the folder in Bloglines is sorted by updatedness, my blogroll does too. Barring some glitches, the blogs at the top of the list are the most recently updated. I feel this is a fairly even-handed way to share out my "onward traffic". :-)

From time to time I look through my entire blog list in Bloglines and decide which items deserve promoting to the "Blogs" folder, hence getting a mention in my blogroll; and which should be demoted to the "other blogs" folder.

It's tricky. If I just listed all the blogs I subscribe to the list would be twice as long as the blog page. So I have to use a mental points system to decide who stays in and who goes. Points are scored for blogs that are:

• a good read
• being regularly updated
• relevant to my interests
• reasonably well-established (at least a few weeks old)
• linking to me

That last one is a bit of an awkward one. It would be wrong to only ever link to blogs that linked to me first, but equally it's wrong to link to someone just because they link to you. I'm a bit of a stickler for people at least linking somewhere outside their own site, even if it's not to me. I kinda believe that you only deserve traffic if you're willing to share it with others! So I usually make a judgement call based on that plus all the other criteria.

I went through the list today. Some blogs got promoted, some got dropped. If your blog's not on the list, then it's probably because it's fallen foul of one or more of my criteria, or I've just had a brain fart, or I don't know it exists. It's nothing personal. :-)

I probably worry about this kinda stuff too much. :-S

I wish I'd had my DSLR

Or any kind of camera, for that matter. I could have proved to you what I held in my hand this morning...

The holiest of holy grails. The most elusive and wondrous foodstuff known to Man. The legendary, mystical all-chocolate KitKat.

Little things...

...please little minds, as is so often said.

But it's often also the little things that can annoy the hell out of you the most. Like the 'eject' key on my MacBook Pro. It's right next to the backspace key, and so very easy to hit with a misplaced finger. Every time it's pressed, the CD ejects from the front tray with some force, or at least it tries to. Normally, as the laptop is being used on a lap, the CD is poked into your stomach with some force, and a complaining whine from the eject motor.

So I got into the habit of automatically holding the laptop up in the air every time it happened, waiting for the CD or DVD to eject, pushing it back in again, and getting on with what I was doing.

That is, until I downloaded the latest version of OSX. Which, with absolutely no fanfare in the patch notes, altered the way the eject button works. Now you have to hold it down for half a second or so before the CD ejects.

That tiny little alteration has improved my laptop experience by about 10%. Nice one Apple, someone's been listening to my silent screams!

Vauxhall Kon-Tiki

It is, according to my Far Side calendar, the first day of spring.

But the British weather doesn't own a Far Side calendar (it probably wouldn't get the jokes anyway) so I walked to work in an Arctic gale.

Why was I braving the elements rather than crusing serenely to work in a car ushered gently by a cloud of confortingly warming CO₂? Because Jane has it.

I suggested yesterday that, rather than her getting the train back to hers, she could borrow my car (my car, I've not signed anything away yet!) and drive down. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

So while she was re-tracing the route of the legendary West Passage from Norfolk to Cambridge, I was left dodging hailstones and displaced polar bears, and worrying about my poor little car, who's never been off with strangers before.

Jane rang to say she'd made it okay, successfully proving that ancient Norfolkians could have colonized the Cambridgeshire Massif Centrale. Expect a full write-up on Jane's blog and a documentary on the Discovery Channel.

And all the wheels are intact, despite her getting accidentally ensnarled in Wisbech. Relief!

Almost exactly two days

The Uncle Bob Question

It's one of the topics of conversation surrounding The Wedding.

I imagine that almost every family has an Uncle Bob. My Uncle Bob is the stuff of legend. But, to fully describe him, I'd better start at the beginning.

His name's not really Bob, I've changed it, in some half-assed attempt to assuage the guilt I'm feeling about relentlessly mocking him in the following blog post.

Uncle Bob married into my mum's side of the family about twenty years ago. My dad enjoys recounting the tale of the time he first met him, at some kind of "welcome to the family" get-together.

He decided to break the ice with "so Bob, what do you do for a living?"

"I take an empty sack... and put it under a chute... and when the sack is full I put it onto the truck."

Now... at this point I should say that my Dad is not snobbish about occupations. He's done some pretty working-class jobs himself in his time, so he wasn't humouring Bob when he inquired...

"What's in the sacks?"

Blank look.

"... I don't know."

My dad's a lot like me (not in that way, he was a lumberjack, and he's okay, but the dressing up in suspendies and a bra skipped a generation), and my brain works a lot like his brain. So I can imagine the abject terror he must have felt when he realised I've got to continue to navigate this conversation without laughing.

For all my Uncle Bob knew, he could be carting about toxic waste in those sacks. British Nuclear Fuels would probably pay good money for a worker like Bob. "Just take the glowy stick-type things and drop them down that big bottomless shafty-type thing until you start feeling a bit hot and bothered, thanks!"

It hadn't occurred to him to ask his employers what was in the sacks. That was beyond what was required to do his job.

Although, thinking about it, the fact that he worked for a malt factory should have been a big clue.

Uncle Bob kept budgies. Uncle Bob likes Country and Western. A lot. His idea of the height of sartorial elegance was a full Rhinestone Cowboy outfit. And not just for special occasions.

My family is pretty spread out. In fact, by Norfolk standards, we're practically a diaspora. So Uncle Bob and his wife (which would be my Aunt... do try to keep up!) were the only relatives of mine who lived in the town where I went to High school. This was fine while I was safely locked away inside the school during the first to fifth years. However, in the Sixth Form we were allowed out at lunchtimes to terrorise the town's cake shops and newsagents.

Then Uncle Bob became a real problem.

I'd be hanging out next to the War Memorial, trying to look and sound as cool as my friends (trying being the ever-operative word) when...

"Isn't that your uncle behind you Simon?"

I'd look round, and there he was, his grin nearly as wide as his stetson. Texas belt buckle gleaming in the East Anglian sunshine. Radiating uncoolness like a glowy stick-type thing.

"Hello boy!!"

Groan. "Hello Uncle Bob."

You know those poor kids who had parents who were teachers at the same school? Even those kids felt sorry for me.

One day, we were walking back to school at the end of lunch when I espied Uncle Bob and my aunt heading towards us. To my surprise they were pushing a pram.

I guess they were both in their late forties at this time, but that doesn't really excuse my first thought: oh my god... he's bred!

"Isn't that your Uncle Bob, Simon?" one of my mates helpfully pointed out.

"Yes... should we just cross ove..."

"Hello Simon's Uncle Bob!"

"Hello boys!!!"

"Er, hi Uncle," I said. "I didn't even know you two were expecting..."

"Oh no," he said, giving us a conspiratorial wink. "It's not a baby."

He lifted the blanket, underneath half a dozen tiny little puppies blinked at us.

"Vet says they're not supposed to be out of the house yet. Might catch germs and that," he explained. "But we had the pram so I thought..."

"You thought you'd push a pram full of puppies through the town centre... whilst in full cowboy gear."

"Yep!"

...

So yeah, back to the Question. Should Uncle Bob be invited to the wedding reception? It's an open vote.

I fully expect you to all vote "yes" about twice over, because I know you're all evil bastards! :-)

The comic relief blook...

...is out!

My entry didn't make the final cut, but it's all for charidee so no sour grapes! :-)

And Tranniefesto is in there, so you know it's gotta be good. If you've not done anything for comic relief and feel like doing so, I humbly suggest buying it.

Let's face it, it's got to be better than sitting through the TV show. ;-)

TG equality in healthcare

My workplace (an NHS Trust) is currently carrying out a public consultation on "gender equality", with the aim of producing a Gender Equality Scheme. This scheme will explain how my organisation intends to "eliminate unlawful discrimination and harassment on the grounds of gender or sexual orientation", and "promote equality of opportunity between men, women and transgender people".

I'm helping to get a questionnaire to the public in electronic form, and the bit that caught my eye was several specific mentions of transgender, so I thought I'd throw one of the questions open to you:

If you're a transgendered user of the NHS in the UK, what are the main issues that in your opinion need to be addressed by UK hospitals, and what would you like to see done about them?

If I get some responses, and they're relevant to my particular organisation, I'll make sure that they get included with the consultancy process. Hopefully we'll be able to positively influence my Trust's future policies towards - and services for - TG folk.

What would you do, if you were me?

It might not be obvious, but invest a lot of emotion in this blog. Hell, I invest a lot of emotion into a lot of things. Like any investment, sometimes it pays interest, sometimes not. Sometimes I invest emotions in people and things that don't deserve it.

But, every time I post something here, from the deepest "serious" posts to the most frivolous throwaway ones, you're seeing a piece of "me". I put it out there, a little bit of me for you to see. If it's liked, it gives me a great rewarding feeling. I'd be lying if I said it didn't. I wouldn't be blogging if I didn't get a personal sense of reward from it.

Take "Tranny and TV". It's fun to do. I've blogged before about how much I enjoy doing them. Probably more than they're enjoyed by my readers.

That's kind of my point. I realise I'm rambling, but I do have a point. Honest.

The point is, "Tranny and TV" is meant to be "fun". It's not meant to be deep and meaningful. Okay, so sometimes I use it to make semi-serious points about the nature of transgendered folk, but if it's pissing people off more than it's amusing people, then it's really not worth doing. If each one is going to come with pages full of rants aimed personally at me (and my other readers), then I don't think I can stand the stress, and I'm pretty sure you won't want to read it.

This is all brought about by the comments on the last cartoon particularly the one by Pia [since deleted by me - if she posts it somewhere else then I'll link to it here].

For the record, I don't think people getting beaten up is funny. Whether they're transgendered, gay, lesbian, asian, white, whatever. Of course I don't. But I still think that cartoon is funny, because it's not about that. It's about trannies acting like idiots, and getting into a ridiculously surreal situation. They got beaten up in the same way Tom gets beaten up when he chases Jerry unthinkingly into a dog pound... they're be perfectly alright in the next cartoon, honest. You'll note that they survived a Millwall game and a cock fight unscathed... they're perfectly capable of handling themselves.

So, what I want you to do is to say what you think. Did that T&TV or others overstep boundaries? Did it make light of violence in an inexcusable way? If the balance of opinion is that it did then I'll probably delete it. I don't want to do that. I'll also have a good think about posting T&TVs in the future. Perhaps I need to learn that just because I can say something that I should.

The other alternative is of course my preferred one: that the cartoon, while not necessarily hilarious, wasn't that bad. If you think that, then say so. If the balance of opinion is that T&TV is relatively harmless "fun", then I'll delete the rants and take great pleasure in telling Pia to... leave ... and voice her opinions elsewhere (preferably on another Grayson Perry interview, the last one was hilarious). T&TV can go back to being what it's supposed to be: a comic strip, with occasional lightweight digs at trannies.

So just voice your opinion, please. This is about what you think.

Comfort zone

Good, despite lack of dinosaurs

"Lets go to the Raptor Foundation!" Jane said. She always itching to get behind the wheel of my hot-rod Vauxhall Corsa to test her newly restored driving skills.

After being patiently convinced that not all raptors are two-legged dinosaur killing machines, I agreed.

It was a jolly good day out. I took some pictures...







There are a few more on Flickr, if you're interested.

Shaggy Blog Stories

Got any ideas for how to raise money for this year's Comic Relief? Don't worry, Troubled Diva has had a huge one. Go help! :-)

Unexpected child... in the bagging area

I've not quite got my head around these self-service tills that have sprung up in supermarkets throughout the land. At first it appears to be a laudable attempt to wrest power from the grasp of the checkout girl overlords, and there's an amazing sense of power that first time you run an item past the scanner and see it's price appear on the screen and the friendly voice say:

"Beep. Please place the item... in the bagging area."

"Ha! It's all so easy! They wanted me to think it was hard! No longer will my every purchase by scrutinized by hatchet-faced matrons! I can buy anything! As God is my witness, I'll never go hungry again!"

Then you scan your second item. A pair of girl's pants. The kind of thing you'd think twice about buying if you had to run it past the checkout person first.

"Beep. Please place the item..."

(There's always a slight pause here that's just long enough to make you wonder if the system is going to rebel against it's programming and shout something like "where the sun don't shine!")

"...in the bagging area."

"Yay!"

Third item.

"Beep. Approval needed."

"But... it's only gin! I like gin! I don't need your steenkin' approval if I want to sit around my house wearing nothing but girl's pants and drinking gin!"

"Please wait for an assistant."

So you wait for a surly teenager (who's about 2 years away from being able to legally buy gin himself) to come over from his master console and swipe his Magical +3 Card of Shopping Approval against your terminal. And have a good smirk at your girl's pants.

Then you realise that the feeling of shopping independence is entirely illusory. At any moment, and seemingly at random, your purchases can be inspected by the Shopping Gestapo.

Take last night's brief trip to the local Tescos. I'd collected a trolley of fairly innocuous goods, nothing I thought would raise the suspicions of the Shopping Gestapo, so I decided to use an automated till.

First item, a cheapy set-top FreeView box (to temporarily replace the dead Sky box).

"Beep. Approval needed. Under television licensing laws we are required to take your name and address on purchasing this item."

"But... it's not a television!"

I think the Surly Teenager agreed with me because he swiped through the approval without making any effort to take my name and address (although for all I know, the Tescos Central Customer Database was already displaying it on his ops terminal, along with my medical history, hat size and favourite flavour of yoghurt.)

The next few items go through with no complaints. Then I scan a 'fair trade' mango.

"Beep. Approval needed."

"WHY??? It's a mango! It's not alcoholic! It's not vaguely pointy! I'm not going to ferment it down the back of a radiator into a rudimentary mango hooch! I'm not going to harden it in the oven, whittle it into a dagger and use it in a gangland killing!"

"Please wait for an assistant."

"Is this a 'Fair Trade' thing? Are you worried that I'll re-sell the mango at a artificially low price to undercut and further impoverish the Burmese mango farmers?"

I'll never know. Surly Teenager swiped through the item with no explanation. I've decided I'm going to hollow out the mango and make it into an unlicensed television.

. . .

I was talking to the guy I work with about this and he reminded me of the time his wife was using an automated till and the message came up "unexpected item in the bagging area". She looked down and saw one of her kids was sitting in it. :-)

Transmission interrupted

If you're part of the UK tranny scene you may have already heard that Trans-MISSION has been suspended until further notice. The organisers have really been messed around by the Masque Bar, and it looks like they're going to have to seek another venue.

Vicky and Jasmine have worked really hard to make the club a success, despite this and other setbacks. But of course that doesn't stop people kicking them while they're down.

It really narks me when I see this kind of thing. Okay, so everyone has different tastes, and Trans-MISSION can't possibly appeal to everyone, but to say things like that about Vicky and Jasmine just because of a perceived slight makes me despair at the vacuousness of some trannies.

For the record, Sparkle did grow out of TX's annual birthday bash. I don't think even Kim Angel would want to deny that. She used a lot of savvy by building Sparkle around the kernel of an already popular tranny event. Saying that doesn't lessen what she and others achieved with Sparkle. The tranny scene in the UK is very interconnected, and despite some monstrous egos, remarkably collaborative.

I hope that TX gets it's issues sorted soon. If only because if they don't I'll have to re-write my standard form letter reply to closeted trannies who write to me to ask how to get out of the closet! At the moment it basically says "get a makeover... go to Trans-MISSION".

But it does sound like an end of an era. Nevermore possibly will the sparkly curtains be hung from the windows of a bar next to the Barbican!

Kobayashi Maru

The story so far: Tranny is a transistor radio with a penchant for dressing up in women's clothing. TV is his erstwhile (and currentwhile) companion, who also enjoys cross-dressing. Although we never actually see them wearing dresses, we just kind of assume it all goes on in the gaps between the strips.

Together they explore the gamut of transgendered experience (through the medium of sarcasm) and fight international organised crime (again mainly between-strip).

In the last thrill-packed episode they decided to test whether a television can exist in a simultaneous transvestite and non-transvestite state by putting TV in a box. With a cat. For some reason.

Now read on...

The word that's sweeping the internet

Well, according to the Guardian. *dismissive shrug*

Breaking things

My BPpW* rating feels way down at the moment. Dunno why. Not got anything interesting to write about, but that's never stopped me before.

The "engine emissions" light on the car is still on. I know, according to some panicmongers I should immediately drain the petrol from the car, and then take it out into a field and shoot it between the headlights with a pistol... but I can't afford to. So I'm going to do what the garage told me, which is to let the bad batch work through the system and hope for the best with the next batch. I don't think my car's expensive enough to actually be laid low by dodgy fuel, it's just letting me know how selfless it is by keeping running despite being fed tainted nourishment.

It seems to be my week for breaking things. Switched on the telly this morning to be presented by a black screen and an ominously unresponsive Sky+ box. Eventually I switched it off at the wall to reboot it, and now it's making the occasional grinding noise and little else. Eep. Time to invest in a decent aerial and a FreeView box I think.

Not much else to report, I'm writing this whilst waiting for a chilli to cook which should be pretty glorious. Vegetarian, with about 11 varieties of bean in it. Smells good, anyway, so here's hoping.

Meh... you read this far?

*Blog Posts per Week

Re: Fuel

Yesterday evening one of the top stories on the local East of England news was about an apparent fuel problem causing cars to break down after re-filling at supermarket petrol stations. By this morning it had become the main national news story. But, as my low fuel indicator light was already blinking urgently as I got in the car to head to work, there was little I could do to avoid filling up on the way in.

I decided not to risk it too much, and used a Texaco garage, rather than the local supermarket. I filled up, the fuel light went out... and another light came on. The "exhaust emissions" lamp.

Eep.

I made it to work OK, the engine doesn't seem to have any problems. I've spoken to my local car dealership and they're getting loads of similar reports. They say it's not just supermarket petrol causing it, fuel from all kinds of local forecourts seems to be knocking out the oxygen sensors. The advice I got was to run the petrol through and see if the light stays on after the next re-fuelling.

So I'm hanging on to my receipt and hoping for the best. Be warned if you're filling up in England today.