Transform

Transformeh

As a bit of a lad's night out with the guys from work (including honorary lad Mrs. Y, but not Jane, who really didn't fancy it!), I went to see a 2 hour special effects shot called "Transformers" last night.

I really wanted to like it, I knew that it would have no story, and was actually looking forward to the mindless nostalgia and OTT-ness of it all, but it left me completely cold. I was actually falling asleep near the end, despite the noise!

Shame really. I suppose I shouldn't have gone to see it, because I can't really put a finger on why I disliked it. It was everything I expected it would be... except enjoyable.

For a considerably more positive (and no less valid!) tranny Transformers review, check out Connie's blog. :-)

I never owned any Transformers toys as a kid, but I used to play with my brother's collection, and I absorbed the whole Autobot vs. Decepticons mythos through my brother's enthusiasm for the whole thing. We even went to see the original film (featuring the final movie performance of Orson Welles, non-obscure trivia fans), and my probably faulty memory tell me it was in a double-feature Saturday Matinee with The Care Bears Movie (god forbid Michael Bay ever gets hold of that franchise).

In a way what Bay has done with Transformers reminds me of what my brother used to do with my toys when he was little.

When I was a dodger of six or seven, I'd be told to share my precious toy cars and soldiers and dinosaurs (which I'd given characters and stories to, and cared for deeply) with my younger (by 3 years - an eternity when you're seven) brother. Who'd then, with considerable relish, not play with them properly. Tyrannosauruses would be ridden on tanks! Matchbox cars would be used as building blocks! Lego men, who under my benevolent charge had suffered little more than occasional head and leg transplants, were bashed together and made to fight!

Last night I watched Michael Bay take some cherished childhood toys and, like a four-year-old younger brother who doesn't know better, bash them together and not play with them properly.

Two Veg

There's nothing quite like fresh vegetables from your own garden.

Well, actually, slightly better than that is fresh vegetables from someone else's garden. Because then you don't have to bother with the whole tedious seeding and growing and weeding bit.

My granddad is a gardener, and has a fine garden with a plot put aside to growing veg, and a small highly but productive greenhouse.

We visited him over the weekend, and came away with a great haul of onions, shallots, and radishes. Plus two of these lemon cucumbers.!

They have a wonderful, tangy taste. Not at all like a lemon, really, but so much nicer than your bog-standard Cucumis sativus "Tescos".

Do you wanna be in my gang?

It's called the "we didn't watch Heroes on any other channel, but we are going to watch it on BBC2 and pretend that it's new" gang. It's very exclusive.



Last night the first two episodes were given their first "terrestrial airing", a term that seems to be becoming increasingly meaningless in this age of near-ubiquitous satellite, cable and computer downloads.

Because I'd missed the start of the series on satellite, and I'm still taking the tenuous moral high-ground against pirated downloads, I decided to cover my ears to the office Heroes gossip and wait for the series to appear on BBC2.

I was also relishing it as an opportunity to bring back an "event program" into the EnVérité household. The only program that Jane and I made a point of sitting down and watching "properly" was Doctor Who, and now that's ended it's current run, the TV has gone back to being the noisy background wallpaper while other innumerable distractions are being taken care of.

It seems strange to be nostalgic about the golden age when the TV was the focal-point for household social interaction. After all, older generations are equally nostalgic about the days before watching the goggle-box was the default home leisure activity. These days computers and digital entertainment are gradually taking over broadcast telly's role as the leisure-time staple, but despite all its multi-player and social network potential, the digital world is often remarkably single-player and antisocial.

Just sitting and watching broadcast TV, rather than partaking in an interactive and personalised experience, is almost seen as a failing these days. As if you've settled for being passively "spoon fed" entertainment. But taking out the individuality and interactivity from entertainment often frees up other forms of interactivity. Talking about it to the person sitting next to you, for example, or the people in your office the next morning.

It turned out this morning that two other people in my office had watched Heroes for the first time last night, and it was great to discuss it's potential, and try to guess the future plot-twists. A few other guys in the office had watched it variously on copied DVDs, UK satellite (both live and recorded), and downloaded from the net. Their conversations in previous weeks were limited to ones that started with "have you seen that bit yet where..."

So that's 3 people in my gang already.

As for Heroes itself? Here's my review from the universe where the first series hasn't already finished yet.

It looks like it's got great potential, it does feel a lot like "Lost", with it's numerous plot threads, coincidental links between the characters, and intriguing loose ends. I'm hoping it doesn't go down the Lost route of just adding more and more loose ends until the whole thing resembles a frothy dessert of plot holes, with no real chance of them ever all being filled in.

It will also be interesting to see how they prevent it evolving into an X-Men-alike, or similar. I'm guessing that in the first series it will be fairly easy to maintain the premise of it being ordinary people with fairlt ordinary lives (who just happen to have extraordinary powers), but what about when they've become more of a cohesive group and their powers are more well known?

If you're already half-way through downloading series two, please don't answer that question!

Bring me the head of Robyn Rihanna Fenty

FACT: The British summer this year so far has been a complete wash-out, with almost two months of rain.

FACT: Rihanna has now spent over two months at Number 1 in the UK Charts with her song "Umbrella", featuring the lyric "now that it's raining more than ever... you can stand under my umbrella".

FACT: The last single at number one for this length of time was Wet Wet Wet's "Love is all Around" in 1994

FACT (probably, although I admit this fact is based on Thought Research): 1994 was an equally wet summer.

Conclusion: Rihanna is making it rain.

Solution: She must be stopped by any means necessary!!!

That Fictional Bear IQ Scale in full

It bothered me that I referred to the Fictional Bear Scale of IQ (more properly known as "Pooh's Scale of Thickness") in that last post without actually linking to the list itself. After extensive googling, I realised that no-one has actually placed this information on line!!

So, after extensive Thought Research*, I've compiled the list in full:

Pooh's Scale of General Thickness

1. Gentle Ben - Pretty smart as bears go, but not one for higher thinking.
2. Pooh - The original "bear of very little brain", but could talk, which is more than most bears.
3. Paddington - Could dress himself, but frequently misunderstood situations.
4. Fozzie - Failed continiously at stand-up, a profession requiring above-average wit and intelligence.
5. Baloo - Overflowing with jungle-smarts, but lacking in basic knowledge about the human world.
6. Yogi - "Smarter than the average bear", but only just.
7. SuperTed - Teddy bear imbued with superpowers and above-average intelligence.
8. Iorek Byrnison - Kick-ass armoured bear, skilled blacksmith, leader of his race... bit of a piss-head.
9. Rupert - quite intelligent for a youth, but lacking the wisdom that comes with age.
10. Smokey - visionary who spread the message of conservation and environmental responsibility before it was "cool".

How to use this scale
Much like it's geological counterpart (developed by Frederick "Diamond Geezer" Moh) Pooh's Scale of General Thickness is based on comparison. If an individual is, say, thicker than Fozzie but cleverer than Paddingdon, he would be recorded as being about 3.5 on the Pooh's Scale.

So now you know.

*Philosophers use "thought experiments" in place of real experiments, I do "thought research" in place of real research. It's quicker and cheaper, and the results are often more impressive.

An open letter to the Guardian "Quick Crossword" compilers

Dear Sirs,

Completing your puzzle in the G2 section of your organ is one of the small pleasures of my day. I find it pitched at my level of intelligence (somewhere between "Pooh" and "Paddington" on the Fictional Bear Scale of IQ), and generally witty and well-designed.

I have noted from time to time you have "themed" periods where a few major clues each day are based around the same topic. Often these topics seem to be beyond my sphere of knowledge (for example "poets" featured heavily for a while), which means I am often unable to complete your crossword for several days in a row. But I have in the past been reassured in the knowledge that these "themed" seasons never last more than a couple of weeks.

Imagine then my disgust and horror on discovering in today's Guardian you have begun a third week of crosswords themed around horticulture, specifically the names of flowers!

I am a predominately heterosexual male, and therefore I obviously know bugger all about flowers and their names. I wouldn't, for example, be able to name flower of primrose family (7) if my very life depended on it!

Please please please end this madness and get back to running normal crosswords for normal red-blooded men!

Yours,
Becky EnVerite (Mr.)

P.S. How about a week themed around make-up? I have some great clues if you want them.

Sample: Door-to-door cosmetic company - Blake's killer (4).

Good eh? There's more where that came from!

Words fail me

I'd love to be able to reply properly to this in the forum itself but unfortunately it was written in a private forum with closed membership.

(That's a snapshot of the page, I couldn't link to the original, for obvious reasons.)

I'm not going to even attempt to engage. I'd write something about how the only people who could have taken what I wrote personally was if you identified yourself in the group I was ranting about... i.e. stupid, sexist, false, self-centered morons. I'd write something about being accused of not making my comments in a "public forum", by people writing in a private and locked community that I couldn't even access to view myself.

I could write something like that, but I'm suffering from an overdose of irony at the moment.

Thanks for all the positive replies to the last post, I don't need cheering up really. I'm still happy, honest. :-)

An open letter to the stupid trannies

Hello,

I'm addressing this to all the stupid trannies. You know who you are. You're the ones on Flickr who post 1000 identical pictures to 1000 groups because all the other stupid trannies have posted 999 pictures to 999 groups and you want to be even more conspicuous. You're the ones in the forums who spout stupid, sexist, false, self-centered crap to anyone who'll listen, and then take it personally when people dare to disagree with you. You're the ones who think pressing the period key on your keyboard continuously while you think of the next thing you want to say is how punctuation works.

There comes a time when you have to admit defeat. You've won. Well done.

I should have realised long ago that any online place where more than a few people are able to contribute, will inevitably become over-run by the lowest common denominator. The liars, and the fakers, and the bigots, and the nutters, and the plain simple morons.

I used to think I could change things. That by taking part I could show that not all trannies are like that. Make links to other intelligent, self-aware trannies who shared my values. And that, somehow you (the morons and the loons) would see the light and either raise their games, or move on.

It was basically a naive hope, I know.

I happen to believe that trannies are, basically, decent normal people. But any trip to any forum where trannies congregate nearly always leaves me depressed and severely doubting that belief. There are just too many of you (reminder: I'm talking to the morons, nutters, bigots and liars) for it to be a statistical anomaly.

I should keep trying. Join in, make myself heard, but I'm tired. Tired and bored. I don't want to be one of the little sane voice among the screeching horde of lunatics and morons. Because it's starting to abrade my sunny disposition.

So I'll hand in the towel. Withdraw from the forums where the great unwashed of trannykind congregate. There'll be others along like me, maybe they'll have more luck in turning the tide.

I'll stay here, on my little blog. Talking about the things I want to say, and reading the comments and blogs of my friends and the online acquaintances I make who are also a bit like me.

Not totally like me. That would be sad. I admire a lot of trannies online who are nothing like me. A lot of non-trannies too.

And if this post sounds terribly conceited and arrogant... well, I suppose it is. If you're a stupid, sexist, unhinged tranny then I'm basically saying I am better than you. Live with it. You can have your forums, your flickr groups, your mailing lists, enjoy them. I'll stay here. You can come and see me here if you like, if you play nice and don't make a mess, but don't expect a return visit.

I did went to the ball

Jane's work are great for arranging excellent morale-boosting events for their staff, and the Summer Ball we attended last night was no exception. The theme this year was "The Oscars", and different teams had been been given the job of decorating their sections of the building to movie motifs.

I've been to several of these things with Jane now, but this was by far the most impressive. There was a huge buffet themed on "Titanic", a whole room set aside to showing movies on a wide screen, with comfy leather seats and free popcorn and ice cream, a "Star Wars" themed room with free arcade games, a "Cocktail" bar with vats of serve-yourself tequila sunrise (and the ubiquitous chocolate fountain), a funfair with rides and sideshows (Jane won a coconut!) and too many free bars and food places to count.

My diet went out of the window for a night, but it was worth it. :-)

Today we have mainly been recovering. At lunchtime we visited Jane's mum to help her with her new PC, which gave me my first proper taste of Vista (they should have called the interface "Windows U-boat" because it's sub-Aqua [geddit?]). And then we went to John Lewis and pointed a scanny-thing at stuff.

The scanny thing magically puts products on our wedding list. Yes, there was a fondue set involved.

Stiletto flippers

I wonder if I can get a set of these for my holidays. :-)

(BTW: not my pic, it was just doing the rounds at work under the title "what the girls in Hull have to wear now".)

Back by non-popular non-demand

My, hasn't the year flown? Tomorrow is Non Non Photography Day again!

Yep, once again, to counteract the worst excesses of the frankly evil Non Photography Day, I ask you all to spend July 17th photographing everything and anything, just like last year.

Once you've filled your flash cards with images documenting the minutiae of your day (and hopefully thoroughly pissed off a few Non Photography Day adherents with your incessant shutter-clicking) you can upload them to the resurrected Non Non Photography Day Flickr Group which has already started to buzz in anticipation. (Well, a few people have mentioned it, anyway.)

Lets make NNPD 2007 the happiest, snappiest one yet!

Stages

A Boy Named Si

First recorded live for "Becky EnVérité at HMP Whitemoor", 1992

Now my daddy didn't leave when I was three,
In fact he's great to ma and me,
And he's been kind as all these years go by.
So I know he had the best intentions,
(he was only following gender conventions)
and because I was a boy, he went and named me "Si".

Well, he must o' thought he was doing me a favour,
As "Simon" has a boyish flavour,
And I guess he thought it the best name for a guy.
But if he'd been a bit more canny,
And known that I would grow up tranny,
He'd know I'd hate to be a girl named "Si".

Well I grew up quick and I grew up tough,
My hands got big and my face got rough,
My voice dropped and my balls... they did the same.
I knew in my heart I was a dude,
(I only dressed when in the mood),
But I still felt lumbered with that dumb boy's name.

And then one day I met my dad,
And told him why I felt so bad,
To not have a name a bit more like "Becky".
He looked at me for quite a time,
and said "look son, Becky's hard to rhyme,"
And I had to admit that, well, he had a... point.

My Dad was right, and I forgave him,
I'll keep Becky as a pseudonym,
As girl's names go, it's really no damn good for rhymin'
My boy name's worked for all these years,
And I think that if I have an heir,
I think that I might call him... something sensible! If he has a
problem with that, let him sort it out himself!

On muggles

On the eve of the last book and the latest film in the Harry Potter franchise, can I launch a campaign to expunge a particularly irksome Potterism from the Tranny Lexicon?

The word is muggle.

In the Potter universe it's uttered to describe non-magical humans, i.e. most of us. It's an ugly-sounding word, and it's designed to be. It's used normally in a derogatory sense. Muggles are generally seen as bland, ordinary and so stupid as to not realise the whole magical sub-culture of witches and wizards going on under their very noses.

In trannydom the word seems to have been adopted to mean "non-trannies", i.e. everyone supposedly not blessed with the magical ability to tip-toe merrily across the gender divide, like a wizard tip-toes merrily through brick walls at train stations (you can't tell I've only read one book, can you?).

To my ear, the tranny muggle still has the derogatory connotations of the Harry Potter muggle. It smacks of an elite looking down on a lesser class of people. I can kind of understand how it's a reaction by trannies who want to overturn the misconception that they are a lesser class of person, but I still think it's misguided.

And I don't really see why we need a word, when there's a perfectly suitable, albeit hyphenated, one in the form of "non-tranny". Or, how about this radical idea? Just call them people, which is what they are.

I'm sounding terribly lefty and right-on, aren't I? :-S

Let me phrase it another way for the trannies who are reading: we all know we're a little bit special, we don't need to rub it in to all those who aren't!

And to the non-trannies reading: Call me a tranny if you like, because that's what I call myself, but if you don't use derogatory words for me, then I'll practice the same courtesy to you. :-)

Get away

The wedding, while not extravagant by any standards, still seems to consist of a thousand things that need organising.

We're getting there, slowly but surely. The shape of it is more-or-less planned out, we now need to just go back and fill in the fine details.

One big thing that wasn't organised until tonight was the getting-away-afterwards bit. We had some vague criteria: we wanted something lazy and beach-based (which meant far enough south to still be warm in early November), somewhere we'd both not been before (which, between us, rules out a fair proportion of Europe and elsewhere), it had to be for a couple of weeks, and it had not to break the bank.

Tonight we narrowed it down to the Canaries, and eventually the southern tip of Fuerteventura. We just had to find a suitable travel company to book through.

I always find that the most stressful part of booking holidays. All the online travel agents seem to have their own way of doing things. Every site seems to have it's own unique set of criteria before it will even begin to suggest holidays to you. And then you have to play the "price that it says compared to the price it actually is" game.

You fill in all your criteria, tell it your budget, click the "find holidays" button and a screen appears:

"Finding your ideal holiday... please wait!"

Which actually means "making a list of all the places we've not managed to fill yet and desperately want to flog, and then sticking a random number next to it which bears no relation to the actual price of the holiday when you take into account Fuel Tax, Bed Tax, Window Tax, and a surcharge that changes the price from what initially appeared to be some kind of fantasy once-in-a-lifetime bargain which would have in reality made us bankrupt into the kind of figure we'd actually make a profit on... please wait!"

And then when you do find a decent holiday, you find that you can only take it if you're willing to travel from Lerwick airport, or as seemed to be the case with all the holidays we found, only flew out on a Wednesday. Which would have left us twiddling our thumbs for 3 days because we'd stupidly booked our wedding for a Saturday, not realising that the travel market isn't really geared up for couples wanting to go away on holiday just after they get married. You'd think there'd be a market for it, maybe even a special word for that type of holiday!

In the end, in slight desperation, I chucked all our details into Expedia, fully expecting it to also draw a blank. But amazingingly it chucked out just what we wanted: 13 nights in a nice resort for well within our budget. Fantastic!

So now we're all booked, one less thing to worry about, and because I've more-or-less sorted it myself without recourse to a package operator, I can confort myself that we'll be travellers, not "holidaymakers".

Well, actually we'll be honeymooners... Honeymoon! I knew there was a word for it!

Noctilucent

One benefit of waking up at 3:00 AM, you get to see some rather beautiful noctilucent clouds.

I hope you won't think less of me...

...but there is actually less of me. Less than there was a month ago, when I started dieting with Jane.

A whole eight and a half imperial pounds less, to be exact. A fact that I'm quite inordinately proud of.

I've been wanting to lose weight generally for a while, but there's a difference between wanting and actually doing anything about it. The impending wedding (plus the fact that a lot of the skirts I'd bought a couple of years ago really weren't fitting any more) was enough of an impetus to really knuckle down and do something.

That "something" turned out to be visiting a weekly slimming group, complete with a jolly lady called Jean who tells us all creative uses for cottage cheese and how to make a pizza out of bran.

Don't laugh, it's working!

I even got my "half stone" sticker tonight, and a bag of fruit for being Slimmer of the Week. Yay me!

Jean says she wants us all to fit into our sexy little black cocktail dresses by Christmas, "except Simon and Pete of course, ahahahaha."

I dunno about Pete, but I might just surprise them all. ;-)

Dundecoratin'

...for the day. Making the most of the weather to have a little barbie on

the mini-balcony overlooking the river.

Don't eat the prawns

Spacer

I've got nothing really to say... I just didn't think it was the done thing to post two T&TVs next to each other. :-)

This was meant to be posted tomorrow night, to help people through the withdrawal symptoms, but I'll be decorating at the old flat all weekend, which is an internet dead zone at the moment!

Maybe the world's not ready for an all-transgendered-appliance girl band

Special relationship

The author of Flat Out Norwich might not have lived in Norfolk long, but he's quickly and astutely got the measure of my home county. I really enjoyed reading his musings on Norfolk and Norwich, particularly the passage:

Norfolk is near lots of places but is mainly quite far from most places. This means that the people who live here have a special relationship to the rest of the country. They watch, read and listen a lot about the places they are not near, get the best ideas, reject the worst ideas, consider themselves to be both cursed and blessed by geography and then there is a collective unconscious decision to be glad that they are not near most places after all and a sense of relief that comes from being here and not anywhere else.

Nicely said, sir!

Luck be a tranny

So what with me stupidly leaving my wallet in the car and having it nicked (with about £200 more in it than I ever usually carry), Valerie lost in London without her luggage, and Joanna having a pretty bad day recently... are there any trannies out there having a particularly good luck at the moment?

On second thoughts, don't answer that. If you're having too good a time I might have to strangle you.

With a Friday the 13th just around the corner, and the British Summer apparently already over, I'm tempted to hibernate until September.

Ho hum.

A warning from history

For those who are already getting over-excited about the prospect of a certain diminutive female singer turning up in Doctor Who, I have two words of caution:

Bonnie. Langford.

I'm not saying it will be that bad, I'm just saying it rang alarm bells, and the scars are still deep. So very deep.

(If you're reading this then my blog posting problem is fixed... yay!)