Xmas Curses

It's that time of year again. Yes I know Hallowe'en hasn't been and gone yet but apparently everyone needs to give us horribly gendered and ageist present recommendations! Yay for us!

Amazon thinks Mums like perfume, clothing accessories and easy listening. Dads just love bestselling electronics (illustrated with a Kindle - obviously a man thing), golf gear and whisky. Grandpas are the real losers, poor bastards, they get Crossword solvers, aftershave and socks. At least Grandmas get mystery books to enliven the umbrellas and foot care products. Umbrellas? Because every Grandma needs more than one. Stylin' it Granny needs one for every outfit.

Apparently as a Wife I like romantic comedy (you can fuck right off), earrings (ok, maybe, depending) and straighteners (er, no) and my Dear Husband would like a compact camera (only if he's allowed to take pictures of my arse with it), multi-tools (admittedly convenient for impromptu torture) and watches (er, no. Why does he need one when he has a mobile phone with the time on it? Who gives fuck if Pierce Brosnan is advertising it? Who the hell's Pierce Brosnan anyway?).

Hang on a moment...  it looks like Husband and Dad with their electronics are having a whole lot more spent on them than Wife And Mum. You bastards. Of course Grandma and Grandad can make do with stuff from the pound shop. They're old.

Fuck easy listening and romantic comedy. But not mystery books, they rock.

***

Please excuse me while I find a wall to beat my head against for a short while.

Pink! It's someone's new obsession.

Who the fuck though I have no idea. Someone in marketing stuff somewhere. Maybe it's just me - is there a rise in the amount of self-consciously 'girly' crap being sold?

 

Don't get me wrong, there are places I love pink; roses in the garden for example. I just hate it when it, and it's pastelly brethren are used for some kind of sugary sweet pseudo-femininity marketing bullshit:

"Oh yeah like we need to sell more screwdrivers but like I think we need a new market"

"How about marketing them to women I mean women need to mend their cars and put up shelves too now that they've emasculated all the menfolk. Bitches."

"Uh yeah but how do we market to women?"

"Make them in pink!"

Yeah I buy stuff because it's pink and sparkly, not because I need a decent screwdriver. Fuck you screwdriver marketing people. Pink wellington boots is another one that gets me. Ok market pink wellies for those dumb enough to not make the connection pink + mud = unattractive, but when it gets to the point I can't buy any wellies that don't have pink or lilac trim, that's when someone needs to keep away from me and my NOT PINK screwdriver set.

Have you seen the baby-yarn section in a yarn shop recently? Pastels. Wall-to-MFing-wall. What happened to primary colours for the sprogs? And recently I walked round the corner into the kids section of a well-known clothing retailer to find it was all sugary sweet PINK. I may have said a bad word loudly. There was a time I envied kids because they got the coolest clothes in the best colours. Apparently my childhood with it's bright red dungarees, blue t-shirt and yellow wellies was in someway not rigid enough in its training for gender roles. Must be why I'm not a simpering fucking moron then. And why MrK is making the tea, the poor emasculated bastard.

Disappointment

Well my skirt's not going great. :(

I have a little pouchy belly ...

**Intermission for the purposes of clarification - I'm not saying I'm fat at all. If I said that several of my friends would lock me in a box and force feed me pies. But a little belly is an inescapable feature of my figure. That is all.**

... and the muslin of my skirt is really doing unflattering things with that belly and I cannot see a way to solve the problem. Now I'm stuck a little because there seem to be two options here:

1) A-line skirts are fundamentally not going to work well on me. I need to give up and find another shape for my skirts.
2) There is some miraculous pattern magic way to fix this that I just happen to not know.

But as I don't really have any A-line skirts in my wardrobe I can't prove or disprove 1) and the basic problem with 2) is I don't know whether there's something I don't know! ARGH!

It's disheartening because I was so fired up and buzzing with ideas and this was going to be my perfect skirt (yeah that should have been my warning sign there - perfect? ha!) and going to be the basis for more skirt shaped fun in the future. And now it's made me feel crappy. Boo.

Would the sunshine please Fuck Off?

In sunny Essex it's, well, sunny right now and has been for days, nay weeks, and probably will be for days or weeks more. We haven't had significant rain since February. We're in a drought. I'm sprinkling the lawns already. I've been wearing shorts, hats and lots and lots of suncream out there. The May flowers are starting already and the soil is cracking. And you know what I'm hearing a lot?

Oh isn't the weather lovely oh I wish it would stay this way forever!

Gah!

I'm hearing from farmers that if it doesn't let up soon the wheat crop will be drastically effected. I bet people won't be so damn sunny when the price of bread goes up later this year.

People are so divorced from the soil that they cheer for a drought during the time of year most important for the plants getting growing large and strong. Don't get me wrong - I'm enjoying a cold beer in the evenings, reading in the garden, but I'm also anxious about the state of the soil and the plants I'm in charge of. It's easy for people to go 'ooh isn't nature ferocious' when a tsunami has just wrecked Japan or they found their driving skills insufficient for 6 whole inches of snow (I coped last winter in a Peugeot 106 on icy single-track country roads ffs) but when their food crops are being threatened they're like ooh sun! giggle

Bah fucking humbug is all I can say.

Pagans and Pseudo-Science

Yesterday I went to the Leaping Hare Pagan convention and, apart from my hacking cough, had a nice time. There were just one or two minor niggles and here I want to put a plea out to Pagan speakers:

Steer the fuck clear of science unless you're a scientist. You only make yourself look like an idiot.

When you're talking about some energy you think spiritual entities might feed on, don't choose a well known form of easily detectable energy. Electro-magnetic energy might sound 'woo woo science kewl' to you and anyone who knows eff all about science but to anyone else (even me with my ickle bit of science) it makes you sound crazy.

If you're going to use the structure of the atom/structure of the solar system to make an 'as above, so below' point, you might want to know that electrons don't actually 'orbit' the nucleus in neat little ellipses like planets. In fact, steer clear of subatomic anything if you're doing the 'as above, so below' thing because the whole problem of Quantum science is that 'as above' doesn't work like 'below'.


So please, Pagan speakers either learn your science or steer clear. It's particularly disappointing when the speaker's reasonably credible from a religious point of view.

Oh and I know I broke my own rule because I'm not a scientist either. MrK's a science teacher and a lot of my friends are science types but my own qualifications run to a Physics A-level and occasionally reading New Scientist magazine. But what the hell, I'm not making easily disprovable claims.

Goddesses in bikinis

Interesting how we project our current culture onto the gods, isn't it? Do a google image search for Freya, go on I dare you. There's no actual porn on the first page, you're relatively safe. In fact type in the name of pretty much any goddess and you get the same thing. For the less SEXAY ones you get more pretty pretty girliness than T&A, but search for Freya or Aphrodite you get a lot of tits and fake tans. Not that the somewhat wet pretty pretty stuff is much better in my book. At least the bikini goddesses are probably having a good time, not just sitting by a brook and sighing a bit.

Where's the power in all of this? It sure as hell isn't being portrayed by most of these pictures. It's being made safe, neutralised, turned into something our culture can understand with it's teenage-boy understanding of sex. It's so one dimensional. Real life women are so much more than T&A and if it's true for us, how much more true must it be for our goddesses?