Things you find in dusty corners of your office

The World of C++ includes two VHS tapes, featuring David Intersimone and a fabulous cardigan...



I just wish I still had a VHS player!

Things you find in dusty corners of your hard drive

Working out the PROBO

We went for a very nice meal last night at a rather posh Chinese restaurant, that sits rather incongrously in a quite seedy part of town, rubbing shoulders with a car wash, a crummy nightclub and an electrical sub-station.

About half-way through the meal the owner came over and gave me a quizzical look, saying "do I know you from school?"

I then immediately knew his name, as there weren't that many Chinese people at my school (which was in a different, more rural, part of Norfolk). His family owned the local Chinese there too, and the empire had since expanded to include a couple of King's Lynn restaurants.

I would say the name of the restaurant but I've just worked out the "Potential Route Of Being Outed" (PROBO) if I do so. A PROBO is a hypothetical series of events that leave one open to being found out as a tranny by people who you didn't want to know. Having been on the recieving end of several PROBOs that actually came to fruition, I've learned to be a little cautious about them. I don't mind people knowing, I just prefer knowing that they know.

For information, in this case the PROBO is:

Owner Googles the name of his restaurant -> 

Owner finds my site -> 

Owner remembers speaking to me -> 

Owner tells other old schoolfriends that I'm a tranny -> 

Torch-wielding mob from old school descends on my house.

Okay, I might be over-exaggerating the last step.

And hey, what do I care if a bunch of people I never see anymore find out I occasionally wear dresses?

But still, I'd rather not have the hassle, really.

If you're a local to Lynn you'll probably work out which restaurant I'm talking about anyway, and I recommend it wholeheartedly. Tell them Becky sent you.

Cerulean

A panoramic shot generated from some Fuerteventura pics I'd not got around to working with. A new version of Photoshop and a cold winter's night provided the impetus.

It looks great on the new iMac, especially when I decluttr it.

Faceborked

The backlash was inevitable, really. Facebook had received so much coverage in the press as a Big New Thing, it wouldn't take long for columnists and journalists to start scrabbling to be the first to claim it had jumped the shark. I've read two such articles this morning alone.

And in many ways, I think they're right. As "Web 2.0" social networking sites started to take off, Facebook appeared at first to be the Great White Hope among a sea of lurid MySpace pages. It interface was far cleaner and less cluttered, and it appeared to be much more focussed in it's approach.

I have a natural aversion to anything trendy (Exhibit A: my wardrobe) and I normally jump on bandwagons just as the smart money is jumping off. I'd avoided signing up for MySpace on principle, Twitter seemed too focussed on the kind of minutiae that I have trouble caring about in my own life (let alone other people's), but something about Facebook appealed. So I signed up, recklessly inviting my entire address book to do the same.

I joined just after Facebook's first great revolution: the enabling of plug-in applications that enable third parties to leverage it's social database. At the time it seemed like a genius idea, Facebook would become a "Social Network OS". The only social site you'd ever need, because all the social networking functionality you could think of could be slotted in via an application.

If only it had lived up to expectations, apart from a few genuinely useful applications there emerged a slew of annoying, frustrating and utterly pointless ones. I'm flooded by invites like these every day:

"Dave has given you scrofula! Sign up for 'LurgyParty' and start spreading your own infectious diseases!"

"Jocasta has rated your fragrance in 'Smellrater'! Find out how other people think you smell, and rate your friends' stenches today!"

And so on.

I wonder if Richard Dawkins has a FaceBook profile, because I think he'd agree it's an almost perfect example of selfish genetics. The applications that spread the most don't do so because they're "good", they do so because they're good at spreading. The most ubiquitous apps are the ones written in a way that force you (surreptitiously or otherwise) to forward them on to a load of your friends. Like a successful selfish gene, they don't care what good they do, they just want to replicate.

The better FaceBook apps draw you in like a flower tempting a bee, "yes you can have my delicious nectar... but only after helping me spread my DNA", the bad Facebook apps are more like parasites or viruses, spreading without any reward for their victims at all. There are hardly any apps that I know of that rely on people spreading them because they want to let other people know about them.

So Facebook is broken, groaning under the weight of worthless apps that add no value and ruin the clean MySpace-for-grownups aesthetic which attracted me to it in the first place. I'm on the market for an alternative, but I won't hold my breath.

Sky One in Good Tranny Doc Shocker

So did anyone watch "Transvestite Wives" the other night on Sky One? Having "Sky-Plussed" it mid-week, I watched it last night. I was all ready to be shocked, appalled and toe-curled, but it was surprisingly good. The couples featured were all sensitively handled, allowed to get their points of view across and it wasn't overly editorialised.

All kudos to the trannies and partners who agreed to take part, if someone had come to me and said they were making a tranny documentary for the same channel that brought us the unforgivably awful "There's Something about Miriam", I wouldn't have touched it with the proverbial.

I have seen some TG forums complaining that "Transvestite Wives" is part of a documentary strain featuring programmes about the wives of BNP activists and polygamists, which they think tars transvestism with the "sickos and perverts" brush by association. But to my mind that's a bit like dolphins complaining that they're lumped with the Nazis on the Discovery Channel.

My only minor complaint was the title suggested it was going to feature trannies who thought of themselves as wives, which is a bit beyond the remit of the average transvestite.

I'd have called it something much less snappy like "Wives of Transvestites", which just goes to show why I don't have a job working for Sky One. Well, that and not thinking that programme planning consists of working out how many back-to-back episodes of The Simpsons will fit in 3 hours of prime time.

The remorse of the middle class drinker

So we had a few too many lagers in the pub and suddenly it seemed a very good idea to go down to the docks to get tattoos.

Well, actually...

Replace lager with half a bottle of rather agreeable red, pub with a nice Italian eatery, docks with John Lewis, and tattoos with... er... a brand new 20-inch iMac.

It's that sick feeling you get the morning after... that one that comes from realising you've become middle class beyond cliché!

Trannybaloo

With a few years experience under my belt, in many ways I'm looked on as a wise old bear of the tranny scene. Young tranny-cubs come up to me with questions like 'what can I do when I'm in a strange town, with a chance to do a bit of "girly shopping", but I don't know what shops to try?'

Which is a question best answered in song, I think.

So, the next time you are a tranny alone in a shopping centre, looking for something to spend your Lavender Pound on, I suggest you...

Look for the Claire's Accessories,
that little Claire's Accessories.
Forget about your New Look or your Gap.
Because it's Claire's Accessories,
where you'll find all the best pretties,
to satisfy your need for shiny tat.

Whatever your look needs, whatever your taste,
they've made outta hooks, beads, and flour paste.
Chinese are sweatin' in their shops,
to make you all these sparkly rocks.
When you look on the bangle rack,
and take a pack of the pink and black.

And maybe try a blue...

The Claire's Accessories life is one for you!
Is one for you!

Look for the Claire's Accessories,
that little Claire's Accessories.
Forget about your New Look or your Gap.
Because it's Claire's Accessories,
where you'll find all the best pretties,
to satisfy your need for shiny tat.

Now when you stick a clip-on,
on a sensitive ear.
And you find it's grip on,
you hard to bear.
Don't clip a pair that hurts your ear.
When you clip your ear,
use a grip that's fair!

But you don't get pain so severe,
When you pick a pair for your new pierced ears.
Have I given you a clue?

The Claire's Accessories life is one for you!
Is one for you!

It's a Mexican Knock-Out New Year

Thanks to my brother and his wife visiting from Mexico, we had a slightly unusual New Year's night. My bro's wife is a native of the country, and wanted to show us a "traditional" Mexican New Year, possibly to pay us back for plying her with traditional sprouts and traditional bad cracker jokes for the preceding week.

It started with a feast of Mexican snacks, even the rather British Cathedral City cheese-onna-stick was sporting little red, white and green tricolours for the occasion. That was followed by various delicious combinations of chillies, meats, beans and starchy things.

At midnight we were instructed to write down 12 wishes for the New Year (I got to about seven before running out of ideas and resorting to stuff like "a Nintendo Wii"), and were given a bowl containing 12 grapes. At the stroke of midnight, on each chime of Big Ben, we had to eat one grape for each wish.

Now, it's actually quite hard to eat 12 grapes in a time limit, especially when you've got a fit of the giggles and grape juice has started coming out of your nose. I soldiered on bravely though. I really want that Wii.

After the grapes, we had to run outside, grab a suitcase by the handle and run in circles around it. It was about now the whole thing seemed to take on an "It's a Knockout" vibe. All it needed really was some giant foam Comedy Mexican costumes and Stuart Hall providing a maniacal commentary. "He's tripped over his sombrero!! Hahahahhaha haahaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!"

The suitcase-running was apparently supposed to ensure foriegn travel in the coming year, but I wonder if by this stage it was just "lets see what stupid things we can get the silly English people to do".

Still, a lot of fun. And we got a free fireworks display from the hotel up the road, result!

P.S. In a very brief foray onto the web just now to research the New Year traditions of Mexico, I turned up this article which states that for good luck in the new year, you should wear knickers like this...



Why didn't anybody tell me that two days ago!?