It's a slow news day in Norfolk...

... but they couldn't quite bury this story.

Badum-ching.

Delaying puberty

I occasionally dip in and out of the New Scientist podcasts, which are generally very good. This week features a interesting interview on new research into treating transsexuals, particularly by delaying puberty in teenagers suffering from GID.

I'm not going to get deep into the ethics of it all, but it generally does sound like a positive step, if the right checks and balances are carried out.

The medical practitioners working with young people with GID have very difficult decisions to make, but the overriding concern should be to do the least amount of harm to an individual. If early (and, if necessary, reversible) steps can prevent a person from long-term psychological and physical damage, then that's got to be a good thing.

You can download the MP3 directly here, the interview itself starts 7 minutes in. Apparently the interview also features as an article in this week's magazine.

The Last Risotto

I'm trying hard not to turn this into a blog exclusively about living with another person, because I realise it's not exactly an experience alien to most people. But it is the most interesting thing that's going on in my life at the moment, and (barring childhood with my parents and some time flat-sharing as a student) this is the first time I've co-habited. Ever. So it's interesting to me, if nothing else.

It's amazing the little unconscious singleton habits I've developed that are hard to break. Like trying to remember not to leave the key in the door when I lock it on returning home, making it impossible for Jane to get in!

Of course if Jane were like a fair percentage of female partners of trannies, this would be turning into a blog about "Incorporating Transvestism into a Relationship", but my transvestism is pretty much not a problem. It's not so much of worrying about her finding my stash as worrying about the creaking pile of super-compressed girly clothes in the airing cupboard exploding and taking out a fair proportion of east Lynn.

Compressed. That's actually how I feel generally at the moment. I've had to learn to live in a smaller place, both physically and mentally. Mentally because having another person in my life has made me realise the extra inertia that a couple have compared to one. On my own I was free to shoot off at all angles, acting or more or less any whim I wanted. With another person in tow, like two weights swinging around a new centre of gravity, it sometimes takes time to build up momentum to actually do things.

But, at the same time, things done as a couple rather than alone are much more fun and meaningful. It's a fair trade-off.

A clichéd question: does that feeling that your acting like a grown-up ever go away? Do you eventually just take it for granted that you're a grown-up and get on with it?

I thought I was a grown-up when first learnt to drive. After having sex for the first time (yes, it did happen in that order) I thought "okay, now I'm a grown-up". Getting my first mortgage was another occasion.

I thought they'd gone away, though. I didn't feel like I'd finally grown-up, it was just that the experiences that triggered the thoughts dried up.

That was until Jane moved in, and now they've returned with a vengeance. Drilling holes in the wall to hang shelves and things... doing a weekly "big shop" for two ... kissing Jane goodbye in the morning.

We bought a whole chicken at the weekend, something I'd not bother doing on my own. Between us we've cooked a roast dinner and chicken curry from it. Tonight I'm making a risotto out of the stock I made from the bones.

I'm eating proper roast dinners at home and making stuff from the leftovers! I'm a grown up!

Wall-O-Booze

Good old IKEA. This is just one of the handy metal things that have relieved the chronic space issues in our house now that Jane has moved in.

Of course, we had to buy enough wine to fill it.

Another couple of bottles and I might just start to buy Rebecca Romjin as a transsexual in Ugly Betty!

British Trannying: time for a rethink

So once again Britain makes an ignominious exit from an international competition. I was shocked and appalled, but not entirely surprised. It's just yet another example of Britain being outclassed in an activity that we practically invented.

It was hardly Leah's fault, she was up against insurmountable odds and huge competition, from countries with governments that take trannying seriously. A lot of those other girls were obviously the product of intensive training regimes from childhood (I also wouldn't be at all surprised if some of them were drug assisted)!

We might mock the Pacific Rim states for their high-pressure training techniques, but with results like that, who can argue with them?

Two problems need to be resolved immediately, in my view. Firstly, British Trannying needs to get wise to sponsorship opportunities. To cross-dress at an international level these days requires money, and lots of it. Leah may have been rightly lauded for being the only girl in the competition to make her own costume, but the day of the self-financed gentleman tranny is over. After all, would you expect Fernando Alonso to roll up to the starting line in a car he made at home? And am I the only one who saw Leah's fabulous unfolding fairy-light costume and immediately thought "there's an ideal spot in the middle for a Tescos logo"?

Secondly: education, education, education. Britain needs a national training programme starting now if we are to have any hope of competing in the world arena. National Lottery funding should be diverted into setting up several Academies of Tranny Excellence, to identify and nurture the promising tranny talent. Spotted young enough, and given the right tuition, our young girly-boys of today could be the world-class ladyboys of tomorrow!

Miss Concealed Reality

Essential UK telly tonight: Channel 4 is showing Mr Miss World, the story of what happened when Leah True went to Thailand to compete in the "Miss International Queen" TG beauty pageant.

I wasn't looking forward to it, but after reading some of the pre-write-ups it looks like it might be quite good. Of course, the greed-eyed-monster tranny in me hates her for being a superstar on the UK scene, having too much money to spend on fabulous frocks, possessing the body and looks that most t-girls would kill for, and topping it all off by not even having the decency to not be a really nice and friendly person!

(Er... the double negative in that last sentence might have masked the fact that she really is a nice person and I really like her. Bitch.)

Besides, I shared a limo with her once. And Vérite is French for Truth. True, Truth... see, we're practically related.

In fact there's a choice of entertainment from UK Tranny icons tonight. If you don't fancy ladyboy beauty pageants, you can always turn to ITV instead, which is showing Marbella Belles, a six part documentary on campanology hosted by Miss Michaela Marbella.

Only kidding, it's some crap about Brits in the Costa Del Sol. Watch Channel 4!

The big squeeze

2 into 1 will go, but it takes a bit of work. Today, while Jane busied herself consolidating and alphabetising our collected CD library, I set to trying to make a bit more room for her wardrobe in my... er... wardrobe.

One idea we had was to compress down some of the less-used items of Jane's and mine (both Becky's mine and Simon's mine), using vacuum-sealed bags specially designed for the purpose.

This is what vacuum-packed Becky looks like:



A lot of memories in that bag...

The best use of an old CD spindle... evah.

Fancy a flutter?

It's the Grand National this weekend, the only event I've ever bothered to bet on.

I'm not much of a gambler, so my technique for picking a winner is a bit random. This year I fancy Number 15... for some reason. ;-)

A message from Siobhan...

I've borrowed this from her flickr stream, just in case anyone missed it. Spoke to her earlier in the week. She aten't dead. She hasn't been taken hostage for straying into Iranian waters. Just a bit of a snafu with BT. Hope it gets fixed soon.

Nice

Jane took some fantastic pictures today, I thought they deserved bigging up. :-)

This one is particularly impressive, has a kind of hyper-real quality.

Stuff

It's kinda weird.

For the first time in N (where N is a number over 10) years, I'm sharing a house with someone. And, for the first time in my life, that someone is a Significant Other. Jane and I finally got round to moving in together. We've been talking about it for a while, and it made most sense for her to move in with me, rather than vice versa. Over the weekend we've been making it happen.

Which basically meant...

Buying lots of boxes.

Filling boxes with stuff.

Realizing we'll need more boxes.

Buying more boxes and filling them with stuff.

Taking some boxes of stuff to my Granddad's for temporary storage. Drinking tea and talking about stuff. Driving back to Jane's. Filling my car with more stuff.

Taking lots of boxes full of stuff to mine and unpacking them. Driving back to Jane's with empty boxes.

Filling boxes with more stuff. Driving back to Granddad's, unloading more boxes, drinking more tea, talking about more stuff.

And more driving. And more taking stuff in and out of boxes. And more driving and stuff.

The thing is, the more time you spend in one place, the more you accumulate stuff. Jane and I have been living in our respective homes for quite a while. We both had a lot of stuff. Now a lot of that stuff is at my place and, well, basically it's stuffed.

Moving in together is a big step. You have to make tough decisions. Like who owns the better spatula, and stuff.

But it's almost done now, Jane's place is still full of stuff, but it's stuff we don't need day-to-day.

Jane's now living with me, I'm now living with Jane. And we've remarkably found space for most of the stuff. Admittedly the space we've found for some of the stuff is owned by the Council and termed "land fill".

But I think we picked the best spatula.

A connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition

How Not to Argue, from Stephanie's Pillowbook.

Time marches on

2.5MYA (Million years ago) to 1.5MYA - The ascent of Trans

Fig 3: Excavated fossil of Trans erectus, showing tell-tale bulge (a).

The exact evolution of the genus Trans is unknown, due to many gaps in the fossil record. But it is known that Homo transvestis (the species that would eventually become the modern day transvestite) separated as a species from the Australopithecines about two and a half million years ago.

Homo transvestis quickly renamed itself Trans transvestis (because it didn't want people to assume it was gay).

1.5MYA to 300,000 years ago - Tools

Being out on it's own for the first time and allowed to dress up when it liked was pretty exciting, and Trans transvestis spent quite a lot of it's time as Trans erectus (Fig. 3).

Fig 4: One of two solid stone false breasts found in Olduvai in 1964. It is thought to date from around 1 million years ago, although the design persisted in some places up until the latter part of the twentieth century. One of the last examples appeared in a 1984 Transformation catologue (Issue 5, page 15, described as "ultra-realistic seamless silicon breast form").

After the novelty had worn off, Trans erectus evolved into a more settled species Trans aliquando ("Occasional Tranny"). This was the first Trans species to make use of stone tools, including the first ever stone breast forms (sometimes mistaken for geodes) (Fig 4.). They also domesticated the first grasses, for use as wig material.

300,000 years ago to 15,000 years ago - Diversification

It's a common misconception that modern-day trannies (Trans sapiens) evolved from Trans neanderthalensis ("Neandethal Tranny"), but in reality the two species were seperate and co-existed for many millenia. It was thought that Trans neanderthalensis died out due to competition with it's more flamboyant cousin, but due to regular (unconfirmed) sightings, many people believe Trans neanderthalensis still exists to this day.

Beachless

The Quality Coast Awards were launched today, along with an accompanying web site purporting to help you "discover the very best beaches in England".

One thing that immediately struck me, was the total lack of beaches in Norfolk. I'm not quite sure what the criteria they used, but it seems very odd. There are some fantastic unspoilt beaches near to me, some argue that they're among the best in the world.

Last year, there were more Norfolk beaches awarded Blue Flags than Essex beaches, and yet the Quality Coast awards for the East of England have gone almost entirely to Essex. This fact is made all the more bizarre when you realise that the Blue Flag awards were run by EnCams, the same organisation that runs the new Quality Coast Awards.

I've no doubt that there are some fantastic beaches in Essex, but I'd like to know why Norfolk beaches were apparently ignored. Are they not as good as I think they are, or did somebody forget to include them?

A web 2.0 far

I suddenly realised something yesterday: the Internet ran out of new and clever things two years ago. After that it just started inventing stuff that I don't want or need.

You're now thinking "ah, getting old, fighting progress, neo-luddism" and arching your eyebrows in that manner that I hate, and keep meaning to tell you isn't your most attractive feature.

No, you're wrong. I'm perfectly able to keep abreast of new stuff. It's just the new stuff that's appearing is pointless. I'm just a bit worried that no-one else can see this.

Some examples.

Example 1: "MySpace"

Why does MySpace exist?? It's awful! It' owned by bloody Rupert Murdoch! It's slow, confusing, badly designed, and seems to be populated by utter morons.

You're now going to snort (I hate the way you snort, too, BTW) and say "yes, but, Becky, it's great for bands to reach their audience, and not everyone has the skills to design their own websites".

Yes, but 99% of the people I know aren't in bands, and the ones that are only have a MySpace page because they felt they couldn't afford not to. As far as I know, there are only a handful of bands that have made it big via MySpace, and most of the time they seem to have been backed by some huge A&R department before they ever set foot on the site.

And as for "not having the skills to design their own websites", why not? MySpace is populated mainly by kids. Kids should be learning HTML in Grade 1 by now, surely? They should be watching jaunty Schools Programmes featuring Derek Griffiths singing

"I'm an ', come and take a look at me!"

They shouldn't need a dumbed-down advert-heavy monstrosity like MySpace!

Example 2: "Twitter"

I don't want to know what my friends are doing every bloody second of the day. And I don't want them to know what I'm doing all the time. If I did want to know what they were up to, I'd ask them. Not log on to some website to discover that they thought "just had a really satisfying poo" was worthy of sharing with the world.

What happened to the good old-fashioned process of writing an email to share your news? Twitter is destroying the art of conversation, and I refuse to have anything to do with it.

Example 3: "Joost"

Have you seen the crappy shows they've got on that thing? Well, probably not, it's not open to the general public yet. But you can still go to their website and metaphorically gawp through the TV shop window at the gaudy displays within.

A selection: Fight Network "Mixed martial arts programming", Braindead - "Crazy chicks, stupid people, fast cars, car crashes, dumb stunts and even dumber humour" and Off the Fence - "Docs on demand - sharks to stuntmen! Pandas to prisons!"

In short, utter, utter sub Men-and-Motors crap. I wouldn't take a beta key if they paid me.

. . .

I'm this far from setting up a walled compound, filling it with servers that emulate the Internet as it was in 2004, disconnecting it from the outside world and going and living there. Do I have any followers who fancy joining me?

Announcement

I can't keep lying to myself anymore, I must start living as the real

Visit my photos section to try out my new new scratch-and-sniff

Dear readers of Beckysweb, it is with great sadness that I must report that last night, peacefully in her sleep, Becky

Meh, I can't think of a good one.

And it's not like you believe anything I write on this site anyway!

Have a nice day. And don't forget to put your clocks back tonight! :-)