A Thing About My Brain. I realised cycling through the town on Saturday just why I hate the American phrase "Happy Holidays" so much. It's because it's a shorthand for "Happy Christmas / Hannukah / Kwanzaa / Diwali / Solstice / Fill-in-the-blank". As in, "I don't know you well enough to know which particular festival you celebrate, so I'm going to ( Read more... )

September appears to be the month of birthdays. Happy birthday to mjl, polyfrog, bethdeth, chrismoose, jhaelan and serenejournal belatedly, and happy birthday in advance to jenett, emperor, wispfox, lindsical and 36 for your forthcoming birthdays, for my track record suggests I won't get round to posting anything about it on the actual day unless someone else reminds me. Happy birthday to anyone else who has a September ( Read more... )

There are lots of kinds of physical beauty. Modern Western society has decided to focus on a particular type that, for female-bodied people, is tall, slim and willowy. This idea of beauty is a comparatively new thing. If you look at portraits painted at various times over the past few centuries, you'll see that curves were most definitely in ( Read more... )

Still at BiCon. Still having a good time! This is unusual for me - my history with BiCons past has been, at best, "mixed" - which is why I missed the last two on purpose ( Read more... )

From yesterday's Evening Standard, a review of the tv programme "Big Love" by Terry Ramsey:

As if life for Mormon polygamist Bill Henrickson wasn't complicated enough - with three wives to keep happy - tonight things get even more complex when he starts up an illicit relationship. And just to make it really bizarre, it is with one of his own wives ( Read more... )

So, there is apparently a bit of a war going on because livejournal has deemed a woman's default usericon as "inappropriate". The icon apparently showed her breastfeeding her child. It's now been removed, so I don't know what it looked like ( Read more... )

Mitch and Max were on my bus on Friday ( Read more... )