New chapter heading: Married

Madrid Airport's wifi has given me the first opportunity since last Friday to fire a quick blog post to say a few things and allay any worries you may have had that Jane had devoured me mantis-like the moment vows were exchanged.

Yep, I'm a married man now. I don't feel any different, really. It still hasn't sunk in, even two days in. I did say to a cabin crew member "is it okay if my wife swaps seats to sit next to me?" which sounded kinda weird. Part of me expected her to reply "Wife? You can't be married, you're mentally still only six!"

Thanks to everyone who's taken the time to comment, email, text, phone, or write to congratulate us, it's been really nice and I'll reply properly soon! 

And the briefest text is as meaningful as turning up to celebrate in person (I should have really told Siobhan than before she knackered the car). 

Anyway, Fuerteventura beckons, so must go!

24 Hours

In just under 24 hours I'll be a married man.

I think everything is ready.

Just wanted to say thanks for all the nice words that have drifted in by email over the last few days. It really means a lot! Special thanks to "a blogg reader" who very generously bought us a present on our wedding list. I think I know who you are, but whoever it is, it was a lovely surprise! :-)

The blog might go a bit quiet for a couple of weeks, whilst Jane and I relax on our honeymoon. Depending on whether Fuerteventura has easily access to the internet, and depending on whether we can be bothered to get off the sun lounger. ;-)

Love to you all, I wouldn't be here today without the love, help and care of a lot of you. I'm gonna go now before my love-sick puppy act gets annoying again. ;-)

I haven't read Harry Potter, but...

I have seen a couple of the films and I've been following the furore surrounding JK Rowling's throwaway announcement that the character Dumbledore was gay. This post started as a comment on Gatochy's blog post on the issue, but I decided I was angry enough about it (and I'd written enough!) for it to merit a post on my own blog.

I agree with Mariana totally. I think that an author has no right to make claims about a character's background unless he or she actually writes it in the book. An author writing a novel has their hands on the levers and dials of the reality they've created. Once the book (or series) is finished, they lose that level of access. In a way the readers are then handed the controls, allowed to adjust the reality in their own minds by filling in the gaps left by the author with their personal interpretations of the characters.

It's part of the "magic" of books. In a strange way the more you leave out of a creative medium the more richness you leave for the audience to put in. It's often said that radio has better pictures than TV, because they exist in the listener's mind. In that sense, books are greater than both television and radio, because nearly everything exists in the reader's mind.

A gay Dumbledore would have been an impressive and courageous plot element, and you're free to now imagine Dumbledore as a closeted and celibate homosexual if you so wish, but it wasn't written into the books so it's no more "official" than me saying that I think Sherlock Holmes wore lady's undies.

The Toothpaste Affair

(henceforth known as "ColGate")

One wonders what the correct term is for large quantities of toothpaste. There are apparently whole lakes of wine and entire mountains of grain being housed in the warehouses of the European Union, and the words "lake" and "mountain" immediately conjure a mental picture of the vast amounts of surplus involved. But toothpaste is simultaneously too soft to form peaks and too gooey to effectively pool, which to my mind causes a problem. If overzealous European toothpaste producers ever did cause a glut of the stuff, what would we call it? The best I can come up with is the European Toothpaste Quagmire, but I dare say the boffins at the EU are hard at work coming up with a better term as we speak.

Whatever they decide to call it, we already have a small (but nonetheless substantial) version in our house.

On Sunday we decided to effectively divide labour I would continue cleaning the house while Jane did the weekly "big shop".

"Is there anything particular we need?" Jane asked as she walked out the door. "We've run out of toothpaste", I said.

Jane returned just as I'd made a start on the bathroom, clutching two tubes of toothpaste. "It was buy one get one free," she said.

I should explain Jane has a bit of a blind spot when it comes to buying in bulk. Her excitement at the potential savings from "BOGOF" and similar offers sometimes overwhelm other considerations, such as "do we really have room and/or need for two bouncy castles?"

I dutifully placed them on the freshly cleaned shelf and began clearing out some of the clutter from a set of bathroom drawers.

Which is where I found the spare tube of toothpaste from a previous "get one free" offer.

And then another fresh tube, possibly a refugee from the merger of households earlier in the year. Which brought the total up to four.

"Oh well", I quipped to Jane as she made a start on the packing for the honeymoon. "At least we won't need to buy toothpaste for the holiday!"

"We've already got a tube of toothpaste for travel," Jane said. "I just packed it."

Jane and Simon

I made this today...



Turn it upside down, and you get...



... which I thought was kind of cool. Soppy romantic fool that I am. :-)

Want

I want danger...

I want safety.

I want excitement...

I want predictability.

I want freedom...

I want responsibility.

I want to be masculine...

I want to be feminine.

Perhaps that's what makes me a transvestite...

Never wanting to choose one side,

always wanting both.

Two weeks

In two week's time, I'll be a married man.

This isn't a big deal. In five week's time we'll be back from honeymoon, back at work, both living in the same place with the same every-day lives. Things won't change.

Oh who am I kidding, this is a huge deal. In two week's time my life will change more in one day than at any other occasion in my whole life.

It's not about where I live or where I work, it's about what I'll be. About what we'll be.

I'm having trouble finding the words. Which makes for a pretty crappy blog post, I realise. But I'll try.

Twenty years ago this was something I never thought about.

Ten years ago this was something I thought I never wanted.

Five years ago this was something I wanted but thought I'd never have.

Two years ago I met Jane.

In two weeks time...

...

... nope the words just gave out again.

Expect the blog to get a bit weird and patchy over the next few weeks.

Voyages with my Sky remote

The little blue button is your friend. If you own a Sky satellite telly box, you'll know this.

It's the button you press to jump effortlessly from one "favourite" channel to the next. Well, I say effortlessly, because the blue button only jumps forwards, and for for some reason Sky didn't see fit to provide a button that jumps backwards through your favourites, meaning most of the time you end up doing a complete circuit of all your favourites just to get back to the one bloody channel you actually wanted to watch.

So these days when I go on that age-old search for "something good on telly", it mostly consists of jabbing the blue button until my thumb turns a similar colour.

Very occasionally though I decide to find out what's on all the other channels I'm paying for. It's easy to forget sometimes that between the blue-button oases there are vast tracts of unexplored territory. Featuring channels with exotic names like "xleague.tv", "Zone Romantica" and "S4C".

Last night, armed with a flask of tea and some Kendal mint cake I set out on an expedition to chart the complete passage between 101: BBC ONE and the furthest outpost of the blue-button, 0131: BBC Radio 7.

After leaving behind the familiar sights of the "terrestrial" channels and their various offspring, I came across the first oddity. 144: Sumo TV seemed to the television equivalent of YouTube, showing back-to-back amateur videos shot on wobbly camcorders and webcams.

I stopped for a while to watch a crippled house fly buzzing crazily across a desk, to the delight of the two young American guys taping it ("Dude! It's like totally spazzing out!") before deciding to see if there was anything slightly more intellectually challenging out there.

My next port of call was 191: Peace TV, which seemed to consist entirely of a very long shots of some kind of religious ceremony/festival with flashing messages about prayer. I moved on.

Then I alighted at 194: BEN, which was showing adverts for a record by an African band I'd never heard of (although admittedly I'm not really hot on African music). The advert suggested that it was the best album of it's kind ever, which seemed slightly incongruous as it seemed to be only available by visiting a single shop in North London.

But BEN seemed to be filling a niche, and I went online to find out exactly what that niche was. The "Bentelevision" site had a most helpful FAQ:

Is Bentelevision a Nigerian Channel?
Well it will not be totally correct to admit that Bentelevision is a Nigerian station, although founded by a Nigerian businessman, the station represents all ethnic minority groups.

In essence, Bentelevision is an Afro - Caribbean channel (Africa/Caribbean). True to it's ethos, Bentelevision is out to Bridge the Gap between all communities while glamorizing London as a city to the whole wide world.

I wasn't sure if I was looking for glamour, so I moved on again.

277: Wedding TV was the next channel to catch my eye, for predicable reasons. I was expecting similar fluff to the type you get in the wedding magazines, i.e. "Which colour sugared almonds are best to put in wedding favours? In-depth report!" Instead I was treated to "Prenup Challenge", a reality game-show in which three presenters dressed as judges (I have no idea if they were actually judges) forced three couples to hammer out pre-nuptial contracts, apparently as a test of the strength of their future marriage!

I couldn't believe there'd be any audience for this at all, so I flicked to the next channel.

Which was 278: Wedding TV + 1, showing an episode of Prenup Challenge from an hour earlier

This is a common feature I've begun to notice: even the most niche and obscure channels seemed to merit a sister "+1" channel. Quite how they find the audience to support one channel, let alone two, is beyond me.

280: Horse & Country was disappointly showing neither horses nor countryside, preferring instead to air badly-shot Handycam footage of a dog show in Birmingham (no not Crufts, another one).

By now I was tired and bewildered. It was late, and I'd not yet left the two-hundreds in my trek through the channels. I decided to take a new approach and tap random numbers into the remote.

Aptly, this technique took me to 875: Roulette TV, live roulette on the telly! And it wasn't the only one, there were a slew of imitators, all offering "the genuine Casino experience in your own home". Some seemed to be a bit more "live" than others, ranging from one that featured a real live presenter and a real live dollybird croupier with a real roulette wheel, all the way down to a show that seemed to consist of random clips of pre-recorded roulette spins interspersed with pre-recorded snippets of helpful advice from the presenter.

At last, I'd found something truly entertaining and informative! And, judging by the stacks of virtual chips appearing on the roulette table from people phoning-in their bets from home, I wasn't alone in thinking so! I wasn't confident enough to phone in myself and take part in a game that obviously demands huge amounts of skill, but I was in awe of the presenter. He was clearly an expert in roulette, and was willing to share his knowledge with me! In a few minutes I'd been treated to such nuggets of advice as:

"Betting on the first 12 covers all the numbers from 1 to 12, so if you think the next number is going to be low, this is where to bet!"

"We tell you where the previous balls have landed, so you might want to avoid these numbers!"

A cunning plan was starting to form in my mind... wait for the roulette ball to use up all the numbers except one, then place a huge bet on that last number and make a killing!

But, by now it was gone midnight and I was very tired. My scheme for breaking the bank at Roulette TV, along with my plans to explore the flesh-pots beyond channel 900, would have to wait for another night.

Hard cheese

I'm a big fan of the Thursday Next series of books by Jasper Fforde. Set in an alternate Britain in which supernatural happenings and Heath Robinson technologies are commonplace, they feature Thursday, a "literary detective" who gains the ability to travel within books.

It would all be rather twee if the "Book World" wasn't so imaginatively realised, and the stories so densely plotted. It's all quite grown up and clever, basically if you like Gaiman, Pratchett and Adams you'll probably like these.

In the England that Thursday Next inhabits, cheese is a prohibited substance, and highly desirable. Thursday has a side-line as a fencer of illegal cheese from Wales, which (in the books) is a separate and unfriendly country to England.

It therefore amused me yesterday when I discovered there's an actual drug called "cheese"! No doubt Jasper Fforde wasn't aware of this when he chose cheese as a drug-like contraband item in his books, but it seems a odd example of life imitating art.

Extreme Trannying, the next level

Hong Kong transvestite caught in nurses' washroom is jailed.

For those trannies seeking the next level of thrill, how about this for "extreme trannying"? Don't just dress up in the costume of your choice, but actually go to the corresponding environment and pose as the person you're emulating. So if (like Chung) you're a 29-year-old tranny who's into uniforms, don't just dress up like a school girl, get yourself down to the local school canteen and try to blend in!

And then get arrested and jailed, for obvious reasons.

That said, I kinda admire Chung's guts.

...

I wonder where I left my Princess Anne outfit...

Weird analytics

To keep an eye on who's visiting my site from where, and what for, I mainly use Google Analytics. It tells me lots of interesting stuff. Like yesterday I got a hit for someone searching for wisley common doggers photos, which is weird, because I don't even know where wisley common is.

And, for months now, I've been getting about ten visits a day via someone searching Google for "joanna's diary" labels debate.

It's not a whole load of different people. It's one person, living somewhere in the London area, using Internet Explorer 6.0 on an ISP called Newnet.

Is this you? My best guess is that you've bookmarked that google search and are using it to link to my site each day. For some reason.

Unless anyone can think of a better explanation? I've not discounted it being a weird Analytics bug!

Things that annoy me about trannies, part n*

*where n is an integer one larger than the total number of things that annoy me about trannies that I've blogged about so far.

Trannies that don't know how to spell their own names
This really grinds my gears. Being able to choose a new name that other people will actually use without laughing is one of the perks of being a tranny, one shared with certain music artists, novelists and movie stars. Picking a new name should be a fairly onerous task, one that's handled with a certain amount of research. For example, before picking a new name and proudly registering it on your first tranny forum, you should really learn how to spell it..

I'm amazed at the numbers of trannies I see online with names like "Hanah", "Pennie", "Raychel" and "Stefanie". One recent one that caught my eye was a tranny on Flickr called "Kimburly".

"Kimberly" is a nice name. It means "ruler", apparently. And although Kimberly sounds like "Kimburly" (with certain accents) it has one distinct advantage of not having the word "burly" in it, which you'd think most trannies would try to avoid associating themselves with.

It's an intrinsically blokish sound. Look, I challenge you to say the phrase "Hullo, my name's Kimburly" in your head, without it sounding like Bernard Bresslaw.

...

Look I have a cold. I'm miserable. I'm not this hate-filled in person, honest. This post is the result of the build-up of snot pushing on my brain. It was this or a post about Utah- The Beehive State.

Rsizr

Rsizr narrowly avoids being a vowel-chopping online photo tool too far by doing something rather clever: re-sizing pictures intelligently using seam carving, a technique which attempts to keep intact the detailed parts of the image whilst stretching or squashing the less detailed parts.

Which allows you to do clever stuff like take a picture like this:



And expand out the background into something a little more panoramic:



You can see where the background has been widened, but it's less distorted than it would have been if you'd done a basic image stretch.

The application allows you to mark which parts of the picture you particularly want left unchanged, like the stunning creature on the beach in the above pic. Alternatively, if you'd like a bit less Becky in the world, you can mark which parts of the picture you want removed, which turns something like this:



Into this:



Note that the picture still includes the full width of the surroundings, but with 100% less Becky. Some people would pay good money for such a feature in real life.

Okay, so the results aren't flawless, but it's worth a play just to see the clever seam-carving algorithm working on-the-fly. Running it on a portrait picture is quite fun too, if a little disturbing. I'll spare you the results here and let you discover that for yourself!

Bah baah baaaah baah baaaaah ba-bah bah

Ahh, nostalgia's not what it used to be, is it?