Please, take my uterus :: 08:10 PM :: easyjetsetter

Consider the child.

From its conception it can only make your life a misery: first it makes you sick, then makes you fat. As if that's not enough, it gives you hemorroids and cracked leaky nipples and damages bits that make you eventually into one of those old ladies that smell constantly of pee.

Once it's born, assuming no complications like scarring you for life or poisoning your blood, it will be for quite a long time, to paraphrase chomsky, a shit-and-vomit production unit, with not a word of thanks or apology. Ever.

Even once it starts talking it won't have anything interesting to say until it's about 22, and that's assuming you spent about double the £100,000 it takes to raise a child theses days so it could go to a decent school.

No matter what it does with its life, it will almost certainly not be able to live up to your hopes for it and end up doing something (and married to someone) unutterably dull and pointless, like a biochemist (as spouse OR career.) This is assuming it didn't all go wrong around age 12 and got (if girl) pregnant or (if boy) imprisoned.

And even in the best case scenario where they have a decently paid job and a not too retarded spouse and children of their own, once you start giving them a taste of their own medicine by losing control of your bodily functions, talking utter rubbish at them and needing financial support because you spent your pension on that pony/quad bike for its tenth birthday, they'll pat you on the arm and lead you gently into a boat, which will be floated out into international waters and sunk with you on board.

The worst bit is, there is nothing I can do about this process.

In seven, eight years or so, I'll start melting into a simpering smile every time I see something pink or undersized. I'll look wistfully at the kind of people I once pitied and wish I had their baby-spew covered clothes from primark. It's hideously inevitable.

I was reminded by an event that occurred during the holiday season, however, that there is a solution.

When the overactive toddler in front of my standard class eurostar seat vomited in the first twenty minutes of the journey, while my delightful boyfriend was locked by conscientious staff away from the plebs in his first class seat enjoying champagne and a pheasant terrine, I realised that a hysterectomy is urgently required.

Please, take my uterus.

The shame! :: 11:08 PM :: easyjetsetter

I once sat in a linguistics class and listened to my German professor say that he was forgoing the use of teh word "schmuck" which, despite its everyday usage in mainstream America, actually means penis in Yiddish (presumably, an uncircumcised one, as schmuck is no compliment...)

I put my hand up, little Hermione Granger that I am, and suggested a raft of British insults that have no dirty meaning, such as pratt, twit or....twat. Which, as every American knows, means vagina. Admittedly, it works the other way too, with Americans calling what I would call a bumbag (though I don't mention them often, or own one, honest) a "fanny pack."

Apart from the fact that in British English this would require a whole different orientation of straps in a bumbag, this is what enlightened me to the fact that "fanny" in American English refers exclusively, and more politely than, say, butt, to the fleshy (well, mine it anyway...) protuberance behind you that you sometimes use as a shelf on which to store extraneous objects.

Having sorted this out in my first year in the States, I am now mortified to learn three new confusions.

First: "sloppy seconds" As a girl who went to boarding school and has heard this phrase used by many Americans in polite company and work situations and so on, I assume this meant nothing more innocuous than, say, getting a second helping of food from a cafeteria where the trays have sat out under the lights a bit too long.

Alas, it apparently has something to do with semen and gang sex in Britain, but in the few months I have resided here since returning from the States, I cannot count the number of times that I have used that phrase and now understand why i got some funny looks.

Second: "glad rags" In Britain, your glad rags are the glitzy, slutty clothes that you wear to go out in. Disco-wear. In America, it is apparently an alternative to a tampon. I assume everyone I know in America is extraordinarily self-controlled and polite, or they put my consistent use of this phrase down to being a nutty foreigner who didn't know any better.

Third: "down low" This is a phrase that me and the wife use regularly, and so I have extended it to use with everyone else, forgetting that the wife is unshockable, and that we think it's appropriate to call each other "crackwhore."

Because of course, while "keep it on the down low" means "keep it quiet" I have learned, thanks to a rash of articles inspired by the shenanigans of a former candidate to lead the Liberal Democrats, that to be "on the down low" is to be a black man in a commited heterosexual relationship and having bum sex with men on the side. Although, of course, Mark Oaten is about as white as you can get.

So, I've basically been making disgusting comments for five years. I'm frightfully sorry everyone. I'm normally quite a lady. I have a tweed skirt and pearls you know.

Oh and :: 11:10 PM :: easyjetsetter

Go here. One of my favourite comic book reporters, Joe Sacco (there's not many of them actually...) has done his thing on Iraq. The power of this medium to emote never fails to amaze me...

Me, me meme! :: 08:27 PM :: easyjetsetter

Via

Seven Things To Do Before I Die
1. Be in a motorcade. And not as an outrider.
2. Take the Trans-Manchurian Railway while reading A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.
3. Eat at the French Laundry in Napa Valley. And someone else pay.
4. Take a class from either Harold Bloom, Stephen Pinker or Niall Ferguson.
5. Learn how to plumb and wire a house.
6. Have the self-discipline and the money to read both the New Yorker and the Economist weekly. I tend to be in the mood for one or the other, even when I can afford to spend £10 plus on magazines every week.
7. My own tax return.

Seven Things I Cannot Do
1. Cut in a straight line. Not even with a guillotine paper cutter thing.
2. Cry in front of you. That's the worst thing I could do.
3. Sew. But MTF can. Or knit. But the wife can.
4. Directions. And take measurements. And counting.
5. Throw, catch or bat. Ball games are dead to me.
6. Woodwork. See 1.
7. My own tax return. See 4.
I'm basically a chocolate teapot. Utterly, utterly useless.

Seven Things That Attract Me to… books
1. If they have that nice, musty, old, papery smell. And little white flakes falling out of the inside...
2. If the words "tour de force," "journey," "thriller" and "powerful" are not in the review blurbs. In fact, no review blurbs is best.
3. If there is no photo of the author.
4. If there's an inscription inside from the original purchaser for the original recipient.
5. Large font
6. Lots of pictures
7. Chewable.


Seven Things I Say
1. I'm such an idiot.
2. I don't let fashion get in the way of being stylish
3. Natch. (short version of naturally)
4. Generally speaking (followed by anecdotal evidence)
5. Pfft. (With pout and shrug)
6. I have no problem being selfish. The world would be a nicer place if more people admitted that they were selfish.
7. I can lose weight any time I feel like it.

Seven Books That I Love (and a pithy moral for each, so that you get the gist)
1. House of Mirth - Edith Wharton: Pride in your beauty may cause death from laudanum overdose.
2. Washington Square - Henry James: It's better to be loved for your money than not to be loved at all. No matter what your Father thinks.
3. Arcadia - Tom Stoppard (Yes, I know, it's a play): Despite entropy, the world is nevertheless a fascinating place.
4. His Dark Materials - Phillip Pullman: Humans are touched by the divine, animated by their own consciousness, but there's no such thing as God and anything else is an anthropomorphic delusion
5. The Leopard - Guiseppe Thomasi di Lampedusa: in order for civilisation to remain the same, everything must change
6. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov: what morality condemns, poetry can redeem.
7. Any Asterix from before Goscinny died. Ostensibly Gauls resisting Romans but actually, in my opinion, a metaphor for the French cultural struggle agains the cultural empire of the American export of globalization and commercialism. Honest.

Seven Movies That I’ve Loved (at different times and in no particular order)
1. Royal Tenenbaums
2. Election
3. The Sound of Music (a masterpiece, and anyone who says otherwise is horrid)
4. Apocalypse Now (and accompanying documentary)
5. Rear Window/Charade (a tough one this, basically, any film with jimmy stewart or audrey hepburn)
6. Amelie
7. Being There

Seven People To Tag (in no particular order)
1. Petite
2. Armin
3. Antipo
4. Small Town Diva
5. In Actual Fact
6. Just Dazzle
7. Justin

British Political Podcasting :: 01:49 AM :: easyjetsetter

Recess Monkey and Guido Fawke's 2nd beta podcast gave me a frisson about what life must have been like before the BBC started letting people on air with regional accents, but one line intrigued me...

When discussing the Conservative Party's attempt to convert itself into a "nice" party, it was posited that if you were going for a "nice" candidate, you couldn't get much "nicer" than Tim Henman, all round decent chap and dreadful British tennis player (is there any other kind?)

I think Mr. Lineker begs to differ.

Creepy :: 02:40 PM :: easyjetsetter

So, I have a new job, which is terribly exciting, but I need to find a flat by Monday 6th of February and while I will be making a living wage, it's not living at the level I am accustomed to.

Still, I don't think even £16 p/w rent would induce me to live in this particular flatshare:

"Fun room 2 share. im 40 y/o and looking to share all with a fun girl.the cost of the room can be discussed ;o)"

Ewwww.....

SUVs :: 02:21 AM :: easyjetsetter

I see that Jeremy Clarkson agrees with my "cars and guns" analogy, but takes it one step further.

"But the trouble is that 4x4s are like nuclear weapons. Because you’ve got one, I can’t put my kids in a normal hatchback, because if we were to crash into one another yours would survive and mine wouldn’t. So I have to have one too. "

Pillow Talk :: 01:23 AM :: easyjetsetter

"You're hogging the duvet"
"It's made for midgets"
"The length is fine, it's the fact that my right arm and side is freezing that I'm worried about"
"Yes, well, you're one of them"
"One of what?"
"The midgets. It's only fair that since you get more of your legs covered you should also get less of your arms covered."
"What utter bollocks."
"It's to each according to his needs. I'm bigger, so I get more duvet"
"The duvet is an equal human right. Fair division between all persons"
"That's socialism that is. You hate socialists"
"Right, fine, capitalist version: I've earned my half of the duvet"
"Free-market economy: competition between firms and survival of the fittest"
(At this point, I am pushed out of bed entirely)
"That's a monopoly that is!"
"How tall are you? In cms"
"160. What about it? Apart from the fact that you're disgustingly tall"
"Hmm, 187.5/160. I get 58% of the duvet"
"That's bollocks"
"I need more, comrade"
"No, because the duvet length isn't altered by how much you share the width of it with someone. Surely you need at least your leg length of duvet no matter whether you give me 58% or yourself 58%. Using height is useless. Width is much more useful"
"We could do it by weight then"
"Now, bearing in mind that I'm fatter than you, and that I have more volume, albeit in my short frame, I have a larger circumference to be covered by the widthwise dimensions of the duvet than you do. bearing in mind that an arc of the circumference will be at any one time on the bed and not needing covered."
"You weight ten stone, I weigh 12 and a half (but I'm on a diet)...."
"At my widest point, my hips, I am 40 inches in circumference, assuming that a third of me is on the bed at any given time that means I need at least 27 inches of duvet. And that is not counting arms which are perhaps one third of their circumference on the bed and one third against my body (assuming they are by my sides)"
"Yes, but you have wee, stumpy arms (he said gentlemanly)"
"I'm talking about circumference, girth"
"You have to decide, weight or height?"
"Sorry, circumference is what matters in terms of distributing the linear width of duvet, and I need a MINIMUM of 35 inches of duvet to cover what is not against the bed. 35 inches of duvet will meet my basic needs."
"If you have 35 inches of duvet, can I have 58%?"
"If we ever have a duvet over 83 inches wide, yes"
"That's all I was saying, I wanted my 58%"