alexsarll | If you ooze masculinity like some of us do, you've no reason to fear pink

'Norma Jean', by Billy Mackenzie and Yello, complements the March picture on the Christina Aguilera calendar very well.

The BBC site has an article about the supposed increase in acceptability of a p0rn career. It has two principle points of interest:
1) There's someone in it with an uncommon name shared by one of my friends, so one can giggle at captions like "Francesca says she is seizing an opportunity".
2) The first piece of feedback:
P0rn degrades women - it's mainly run by men and revolves mainly around ideas of male sexuality. It serves to reinforce the women as a sexual object and it objectifies women to mainly being passive roles around a man's sexuality. How harmful it is remains to be seen - but it's a wider symptom of a society which treats women as second class citizens.
Jock, Blackwood, Gwent
'Jock' appears to be a primitive anti-p0rn-campaigner AI, given he utterly fails to note that the women in the article offer specific and pre-emptive rebuttals to these tired and generic arguments.

I have heard tell that at the Scarlet Soho concert I attended on Saturday, several members of Razorlight were turned away. This clearly makes me Cooler Than Johnny Borrell. I was also almost certainly Drunker Than Johnny Borell; this may or may not be connected. Good show, but while

renegadechic is certainly a worthy addition to the line-up, I will have to see them somewhere less snided than Glam-ou-rama to fully appreciate it.

Which brings me to something else from Saturday. Before the club I was at

alexdecampi's birthday drinks, where it was suggested to me by a reader of this thing whom I don't see often enough that, though I certainly keep busy, I don't actually seem to enjoy myself. That's the sort of thing which is bound to give one pause, and set off all sorts of soul searching as to whether one actually is happy. And in so far as is possible given I think this world is fundamentally a bit dud, I think I am. Any contrary impression probably owes a lot to a phenomenon identified by Dostoevsky: "Every happy family is the same," he declared, "but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Now, I don't actually think that's true, but I do think it's a lot easier to anatomise and express unhappiness than happiness, the bad than the good. I sometimes worry that my talents lean that way but frankly, if Dostoevsky found himself making excuses for the same problem, there's no real shame in it. Still, bear in mind that when I begin a paragraph by saying that something was 'great, but...', the 'but' may make up most of the paragraph by word-count, but the 'great' probably accounts for more of the sentiment.
And it probably doesn't help that I'm usually updating from work, where even the happiest of recollections will always be tinged with a certain bittersweet quality simply by contrast to the circumstances in which they're recalled.

Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale have made their name on fanboy-fr0tting 'Year One' style stories about big superheroes, which fit in all the classic villains and are very pretty but fundamentally hollow exercises in retro. On a whim, though, I decided to try their first collaboration, Challengers of the Unknown Must Die!
And it's a revelation. Using characters they're allowed to change, they change them. They deal with the Challs as has-beens rather than the novices they usually favour, and then take them to strange (or should that be Strange?) and marvellous (with the emphasis on the Marvel) new places. Instead of their usual trick of taking characters where we're assumed to care already, they make us care about obscurities. And some of the design and art tricks would almost be worthy of We3.
So yeah, what I'm essentially saying: Loeb and Sale - I preferred the first album.
(Plus, it has the inevitable bit which got nicked for The Incredibles, and the obligatory moment which prefigures September 11th 2001)

Current Mood: hungry
Current Music: Daddy (Don't Touch Me There) - Noblesse Oblige