Blog 133. Famous Fannies - Fashion Focus!

When did who goes in and what comes out of famous fannies become a ‘C’ list celebrity fashion frenzy?

There’s only one thing worse than Baby News and that’s Celebrity Baby News. Surely the fact that reproduction is done by lots of people all the time means it’s not NEWS. Baby NEWS worth reading is rare and would be - for example - the 4 month old baby pulled alive and well from the Nepal earthquake after 22 hours under rubble.

You notice it’s never ‘News of my idyllic teenager’. ‘My 14 year old (who either doesn’t wash or spends 4 hours at a time in the bathroom) is sooooo adorable’.

And any mother of a teen hoping to bask in the glow of wow comments about her ‘bikini body’ will be pretty sharply brought down to earth. If the hormonal offspring catches sight of bulges through a bathroom door not properly shut - god help you. Rebuild your self esteem after she’s sneered with contempt at your latest outfit which, judging from her expression, you may as well have cobbled together out of old bits of rope, cat sick and fag ends.

I know the royal bump is making folk crazier than ever BUT -as I was atrophying in a supermarket queue recently – there seemed to be nothing on the cover of the glossies other than gurning, over-made-up women claiming they desperately want babies – are worried about their figures / relationships (not sure what was most important) or have just delivered and are in heaven and full make-up. Or they had babies last week and have a fitness regime to tell you about. No haemorrhoids, no stitches – no cracked nipples?

But none of them say they want CHILDREN and especially not teenagers. Don’t they realise these critters are going to GROW?

It’s become another albatross round women’s necks – you have to be magazine gorgeous even during and immediately after pregnancy.Babies have long been fashion accessories but now it seems that women’s fertility and reproduction are overtly part of the whole ghastly circus.

Lying awake on a bottom bunk having cracked my head again getting into the unfamiliar bed, I’ve time to think about this. Above me is my 14 yr old (we are temporary roommates while the last in a litany of DIY horrors is completed on my flat).

Apart from feeling she is entitled to pass any opinion on my person at any time - physical appearance, dress sense, inability to appreciate the right kind of music – she also ricochets from high moods to low. This means that glowering murderously under her fringe (a la Manga chic) can suddenly be replaced by hurling herself at me for hugs and kisses and climbing on top of me on the sofa. She forgets she is taller than me and full of bones... The result is that as well as being verbally mangled I am often bruised and mauled.

She is absolutely wonderful, (I think this a lot when she is at school) but I couldn’t imagine how this would play out on the cover of a magazine. I would most likely be captured bleary, dishevelled and possibly weary and wary. She would be sneering or smirking or making a gesture to camera that would be far from OK.

Never having been a teenager, I was pretty floored by my first daughter’s teen escapades but managed the second without too much collateral damage. Third time round I can appreciate that - if I was not the mother – the roller coaster that is TEEN is kinda crazy and scary but cool and amazing as you watch the human metamorphosis happen right before your eyes. And teens are certainly more interesting than the poor unfortunates in designer dungarees absorbing the neediness and frenetic, desperate desire for attention of the latest celebrity breeders.

Couldn’t these folk go back to buying ridiculous handbags and silly cars?

Blog 132. BEST MANIFESTO

We’ll sort out the porn plague, dog crap crisis, car carnage and epidemic of on-line kitten videos – would be a manifesto worth reading.

Most folk in the UK live in open air dog toilets (we call them towns and cities). People are surrounded by roads that deliver annual motorised massacre and carcinogenic fumes, linked up to T.V. (a sewer pipe into your brain?) and the internet with its plague of porn and mind numbing epidemic of kitten videos.

Why are party leaders spending so much time and energy promising to sort out stuff they can’t sort out and know they won’t sort out (see last week’s blog)? They could actually positively influence lives by dealing with some or all of the above...

One doesn’t want to be extreme but surely rounding up the people who let their dogs foul up the pavements, walkways, parks etc selling off everything they own and using their mortal remains as fertilizer would not be too outlandish. Maybe I’ll feel less like a foot-fouled fascist when the memory of my latest stroll through the dog excrement has faded.

I like to walk. I walk early. That means I step out each morning onto a pavement where the rivulets of dog urine running from hedge to curb are mere feet apart and punctuated by piles of dog pooh. (Some look like T-rex turds) As the weather warms up the stench is choking, if I try to hold my breath past the worst bits, the buzz of frenzied flies gives it away. Obviously not in the very centre of Edinburgh. The ‘bits that show’ are kept nice.

If you are squeamish and think grinding down the bones of these arsehole dog owners is too unkind then let’s get biblical. Send them to hell. Hell being a lead lined room smeared with dog turds – no vents - and containing Jeremy Clarkson, Nigel Farage and Katy Hopkins (like I said – a room full of turds).

Politicians of all persuasions have been bleating on about the NHS because they know lazy disaffected members of the populous are relying on the poor creaking monolith to save them from their bad habits. It can’t.

Ban cigarettes – I mean just do it. Then all those third world countries growing tobacco to kill people (cheaply over there – expensively over here) could grow FOOOOOOOD.

In terms of a better deal for the young, let’s ban advertising which suggests that compressed guts and eyelids with salt, held together by fat is a Mac-treat. Parents sending their children to boarding schools to be brought up by strangers get a social worker each.

Treble the price of petrol for cars. Cut the price of public transport by two thirds with regular compulsory bus services to all rural areas

Block pornography so the guys actually have to WORK/PAY to get it rather than tripping over it every time they switch on (I think if we can land space probes on comets we can DO this) Then their actual real sex lives may recover and they wouldn’t be sluggish, depressed and vile.

Also – stop all the ridiculous soft focus ads claiming we are going to cure everything. Tell people the truth that they actually have to look after themselves.

Oh and obviously renationalise ALL the national resources and infrastructure from public transport to water.

Basically pass laws that mean we stop poisoning the population mentally, physically, spiritually, psychologically, morally and actually – and the rest will follow.

If you are young (under 40) do recommend this manifesto or ‘link’ it to stuff. On the other hand if you think this post just shows that I have finally imploded – send me some chocolate – it’s my birthday today.

Ok - I’m going to go and lie down now...

Blog 131. Cameron promises blood...

Yes – the blood of a unicorn foal for breakfast, for everyone over the age of 63 ¾ born in a crop circle on a Wednesday.

Miliband pledges to make a job for everyone under 35 with his toenail clippings and Miriam promises to show us how to sauté Nick’s cojones.

If you wondered why the electoral promises are sliding off political tongues like manure off a hot shovel or a bad production of Romeo and Juliet - it’s the coalition stupid.

Clegg proved (see last week’s blog) that faced with the possibility of government without a majority you can say whatever you bloody well like. Even the most clear and obvious statements of political commitment can be ditched later on the basis that you want to be in power.

Simple.

So Cameron attempted to top trump the others by claiming everyone would be allowed 3 days off a year to volunteer – contributing to his BIG SOCIETY. BS(!) is a Tory marketing term thrown out to counteract Maggie’s curse that there’s no such thing as society (for you younger bleaders) which was tantamount to claiming that human beings have no humanity.

Having not switched off the radio quickly enough I heard a bit of the blather on Question Time. The Tory wheeled out to defend this ridiculous notion claimed that people would feel better about themselves and the cost of – for example – losing a million working days, from nurses alone, in the NHS would be balanced by less sick leave. SERIOUSLY that was what was said. They would feel better about themselves because they would be contributing to society and helping people. Most of us think that is what nurses are supposed to do within hard-pressed hospitals anyway. Maybe they spend their shifts playing roulette and no one told us.

I half expect to turn on the radio and find that Cameron has promised to paint the sky turquoise every other Sunday and Miliband is going to make manna blow in from the sea. Clegg is going to make the birds sing at precisely 7am every morning but just at a level to sooth you and not so loud as to wake you up if you are having a lie in.

Politics was never a straightforward business but the smoke and mirrors are working overtime in the absence of anyone with a spine.

Osborne’s fatuous claim that we are doing great and are better off yada yada yada – just doesn't equate with the world most of us live in. I can, for example, count a handful of close acquaintances (and I really don’t know that many people and don’t do any modern social media) who have had to apply for their OWN JOBS at least three times in the last 5 years. They are made to feel ‘lucky’ to still have a job albeit with more responsibility for less pay.

Recently it was revealed that a significant proportion of supermarket workers have to claim benefits to live. So all that cheap produce that makes us feel we’re managing is actually being subsidised by the tax payer. You may be able to get a pint of milk for less than a bottle of water but it is being paid for elsewhere.

Bankers et al, who wrecked the economy, quietly re-grouped having never been punished for putting us all in the mire. Meanwhile, the acid clamour against immigrants and benefit claimants gets louder and more entrenched. Challenges are not made where they ought to be (blog111.)

It’s the conjurers, con-men and cojone exhibitors who have us by the short and curlies.

Blog 130. Getting ‘Clegged’.

Mischa Barton knows how if feels I suspect...

Weirdly Clegg still doesn't get why he is a pariah and the Liberals will be nothing and nowhere on May 8th.

Here let me explain.

‘Clegging’ will become slang for blighting youth or conning the young for personal gain. So for example a father found to have drunk the money gran left his son will be said to have ‘Clegged’ him. Ms Barton is apparently suing her ma for spending her childhood acting earnings.

Other than demonstrating the pointlessness of the TV debate, Nick’s defining Cleggacy will be that he epitomises the betrayal of a generation. His post-election treachery simply defines how tomorrow’s people are flung into a swamp with weights round their necks and told to swim. It also demonstrates why those least likely to vote are the ones who must. (So c'mon guys - get your faces out of fb and get involved in LIFE).

Clegg did not start the trend. That would be crediting him with too much colour.

I recall the 80s ditty “Thatcher Thatcher – milk snatcher” which evoked the essence of a leadership that ended the post-war ideology of caring for the vulnerable by stopping free milk for school children. The floodgates were open to an era of shamelessly levering up the living standards of the comfortably off at the expense of those at the bottom of society. Ironic that Clegg should grab onto the idea of free lunches for primary school children as a sop to young parents whose adult lives will be overshadowed by debt they had no choice in acquiring.

Thatcher gave us decimated mining communities, council tax (which helps fuel current housing inequalities) selling off council houses (so now in many areas there is no decent stock of social housing for those starting out in life) and orgiastic privatisation. For those too young to remember – gas, electricity and water etc used to BELONG TO US. But all subsequent governments have failed to climb out of the trench she dug Britain into.

Never mind religious conflict between Christians and Muslims – the God of Mammon is in the ascendancy – just in case you wondered why immigration is daily in the media stocks and the bankers/financiers who actually wrecked the economy got a tap on the wrist.

The thing that is lacking overall is humility, (may I suggest reading blog 4?)

Blair gave us entrenched and damaging PFI in the NHS (oh yeah – and Armageddon), Brown was soft on financial regulation. Cameron has just carried on mopping up what Thatcher didn't get round to and Clegg wiggled into power on the back of a promise so straightforward that even the disenfranchised young could understand it. Then he crapped on them.

I can only assume Clegg is a G.B. Shaw fan and literally believes that “youth is wasted on the young. Youngsters now emerge from university – however useless the course – with the kind of debt my generation only got when purchasing a house.

Government has failed to protect youngsters in ordinary families from the ravages of targeted advertising, pornography, cigarettes, pollution, debt, the effects of endemic gambling, toxic food and so on and so forth. We are leaving a legacy of decreasing living standards for the majority, greater disparity between the haves and the have-nots, lack of security, global conflict and global warming. But politicians still think they are worth their pay packets - and some think they deserve more besides...

To this generation of politicians I say ‘shame on you’.

To young people I say – ‘for god’s sake vote’. Then renationalise everything that used to actually belong to the people of Britain and introduce euthanasia for tax avoiders.

Blog 129. Katie Hopkins & Trending Trauma...

‘She accidentally got in my video’

As blogs go – this one’s been traumatic.

Deciding once again to venture outside my comfort zone (a small area three feet removed from what passes for where-it’s-at in modern Britain) I decided to point my modest blog in the direction of what’s trending. This foolish decision brought me into cyber space vicinity with a creature so ghastly in character she could be a plasticine monster in a Ray Harryhausen film.

And then things got worse.

I skimmed some youtube footage.

This Hopkins thing - top of Monday morning’s ‘trending’ list, is known not just for spewing vile poison but revelling in a sort of carcinogenic, internalised misogyny.

Then it got surreal. I realised that this social sister to Clarkson and Farage with her revolting attitudes, playground bully persona and toilet spirit was vaguely familiar. She’d snuck into my video for last week’s blog (Magazine Misery). 

She is one of the pointless celebrities scrumpled up in the background and just visible towards the end.

Apart from the usual thing that depresses me about these gremlins (i.e. WHY are they given so much media time) she seems to have made a name for herself criticising the appearance of other women. The teenager in me wondered why this moose-faced social dishrag who dresses like a 1970s granny, feels she has the right. I mean on any level?

Although irretrievable minutes of my life were gone, at least here is part of the answer to why the rich and powerful get to do pretty much as they please in this ancient democracy. The populous is too drugged up – almost OD’d on celebrity detritus and brain-clogged with the sewer end of media overflow to form rational thoughts.

The impulse, even for research purposes, to observe what was trending died a quick, miserable death just as this woman was replaced on the top spot by someone else I didn’t know who HAD A NEW PAIR OF SPECTACLES.

So here is a ditty about Richard III instead – whose monster status is at least a matter of conjecture. He only murdered potential competition – not the nation’s soul.

Discontented Richard

Richard of York gave battle in vain

Shakespeare wrote him off

But he turned up again!

(by my inner child!)

Blog 128. ‘New Boobs’ & Magazine Misery.

14 ways to get into celebrity magazines...

If you've ever wondered what gets a woman into a glossy magazine, some of the most likely reasons are listed below.

‘Research’ for this blog entailed leafing reluctantly through dog-eared, cast off copies of celebrity magazines.  I am now certain that there is a recognisable condition we should call Magazine Misery – a state induced by the relentless, masochistic, misogynistic poison peddled by these rags.

From the psychotic obsession with dieting to the normalisation of unnecessary cosmetic surgery (talking about  ‘new boobs’ now seems to take on the same tone as discussing the latest pair of shoes), these glossies sponsor women’s wretchedness.

Picking one magazine at random it appeared that – whatever your height - you were supposed to weigh around 8 stone. In one article featuring a dozen celebrity women ranging from 5ft 3 to 5ft 11, the majority were in the 8 stone bracket (including the one who was 5ft 11). Two were at or close to 7 st (yes SEVEN STONE) and one – the only one not baring flesh – weighed in at 9st 7lb. It’s weird because I recently had a medical, was pronounced healthy and yet would weigh in at about 2 – 3 stone heavier than most of these women – even the ones taller than me.

While torturing young females with images of popular women who have the BMI of an average 10 year old, these rags dangle the idea that if you just spend a little more money/effort, apply this make-up – if your tits were just that bit bigger, you too could be between these bright shiny pages and your life would be worthwhile.

And while young men are increasingly under pressure to live up to unrealistic body images, the main target for the sugar-coated image Kalashnikov remains young women.

This is particularly depressing because - well its 2015. Why do we give a shit that ‘Marnie’ “...lost 17lbs in 4 weeks” when we know she will only be note worthy again if she is “guilty about sugar-fuelled weight gain” or is looking “worryingly thin”.

The magazine mind miasma also explains why a recent campaign was able to label women brave for going without make-up (which I do 99.9% of the time) and why women like me who go round with their hair obviously turning grey might get the impression we are letting the side down. Getting older and not having a perfect appearance is definitely starting to feel like a crime.

We all know the list of events that will get a young starlet in the glossies and it’s not her talent.

1. Shagging a famous bloke still seems to be top of the list
2. Looking gorgeous / awful
3. Being too fat / thin
4. Exposing private body parts
5. Having non-medical plastic surgery or speculation about same
6. Having a public spat with another ‘celebrity’
7. Finding Mr Right
8. Getting married ostentatiously
9. Being pregnant in trendy clothes
10. Looking fabulous immediately after the birth
11. Publically acknowledging he was Mr. Wrong
12. Getting divorced
13. Having another boob job
14. Proclamation of ‘availability’ for the next Mr Right

It’s depressing just making the list. From a soap actress with her “Towie Hunk” (is that a brand of canoe?) to a princess with a “blooming bump” it seems that getting hooked up and knocked up – which I thought everyone did all the time -  is somehow noteworthy if you've ever been on the telly. And if you are female – regardless of whether your fame is earned or accidental, you are an object to be judged primarily on physical appearance before, during and after any life event - Help.

For a minute of silly fem-fun check out BG comedy poem for this week –

Magazine Misery

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nshj_cvX3zM

Blog 127. UKIP Black&Asian membership clemency – via Amnesty Inter-rational

Farage has ridiculed being PC preferring to be PD (politically disgusting). Surely a rescue/clemency campaign for Black and Asian members of UKIP is desperately overdue.

“I didn't realise I was black” cried one panicked ukipper.

Like the disaffected youngsters drawn to BABAL (the Blair and Bush Armageddon Legacy), these folk need some untangling. They were obviously not thinking clearly - or listening or looking or registering or comprehending. Far from condemning our brown and black brothers and sisters for joining the Big-on-Bigotry party, they should have the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they were suffering from mental illnesses, fantasies or racial amnesia causing them to forget they’re black.

Internet search UKIP and you’re overwhelmed by examples of racism, homophobia, misogyny and dangerously inflammatory islamophobia. But the mainstream media continues to allow poster boy Farage to paper over the chasms.

Surely it follows that ethnic minority members must be at best delusional.

Would sane Jews join the Nazi party?

One of the things I love about living in Scotland is that when Farage crawled out from under his rock south of the border, a significant vocal minority went ‘Hooray  – it’s OK to be politically disgusting - wohoooooo - party time’. Up here Farage was pretty much told to piss off.

Black and Asian Ukippers must be offered treatment at the Betty Ford clinic for Delusional Bigotry & Prejudice Addicts (De Big-Prejudics).

Post recovery they should be rehabilitated and accepted into society. Alright – neither you nor I would ever trust one of them to babysit the cat or go to the shop for a pint of milk but we can be kind and tolerant. They should be objects of our sympathy and mercy not our embarrassment, derision, disgust, disparagement, discontent, displeasure, detestation, disbelief, disapproval, dislike and disdain.

And – especially for the Big-on-Bigotry crew we really have to have this again...

Comedy performance poem by yours truly -

HOW TO BE A BETTER BIGOT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhVBSvac52c