Marina Hyde, taking as her jumping off point Pippa Middleton’s reported £400,000 advance for writing a book about party planning. She points to an earlier article that Middleton wrote a few years ago, and how utterly, utterly vapid it was. My particular favourite quote:
A hibiscus margarita looks just elegant garnished with a caramelised slice of lime.
Obviously.
Don’t mind if I do!
Honestly, you buy underwear for the girlfriend a few times, and soon your inbox is full of subjects like the above. Not that I’m complaining, although I’ll have to wait until I get home from work before actually opening the email…
Oh, and why is everything nowadays a “solution”?
Well, if my sister wasn’t going to move to South Korea in pursuit of some bird, the last half hour we spent on the phone has probably made up her mind. As an older brother (and one who has spent a year living abroad) I gave her my counsel, but minds are made up, it seems.
It is really, REALLY fucking difficult to act as the intermediary/translator between your parents and your sibling. I did my damnedest, but it seems both sides are at loggerheads
Christmas this year is going to be fucking depressing. My sister will be in South Africa, and the girlfriend and I are only going to be at my parents’ house for 48 hours before shifting to her parents’ place on Xmas Day itself. Ructions? No doubt.
2012 is going to be a “great” year, I can feel it.
The subject of weight has come up in the pub after work, and there was general incredulation at my admission that I weigh 14 stone (90kg or 195lb). I’ve weighed the same for at least 12 months, despite hitting the gym incredibly hard in the last 6 months in particular. My body shape has changed massively, although the overall weight hasn’t changed one jot.
But then one of my colleagues said something which made me feel pretty fucking spectacular: “Yeah, but I’ve seen you in the gym and you move some serious weight on your back”.
What can I say? I fucking love doing squats, and I’m half-decent at them. The weight I do is nowhere near spectacular (110kg for 5 reps, for the record), but I really enjoy them, and my upper limits have increased so much in 6 months.
This would be a self-congratulatory post, by the way.
Sneak Preview of the new Farringdon Station Entrance and Ticket Hall
Yes, I am this geeky.
If you’ve tried to use Farringdon station at all over the last year, you’ll know that it’s a pain in the ass because of all the building work in progress as it connects to Crossrail and extends the Thameslink platforms. Well, in two weeks’ time we finally get to start using the new entrance, as they begin work on the old entrance and ticket hall. This video shows the progress so far, and what will happen over the next 6 months or so.
Is it a bit sad that I’m excited to see the changes? Yes, yes it is.
(Source: networkrailmediacentre.co.uk)
Jan Moir, writing in the Daily Mail about Jimmy Carr’s recent joke which took the piss out of Down’s Syndrome and the charities which organise events for those with the condition.
For the record, the one-line joke is “Why are they called Sunshine Variety coaches when all the kids look the same?” Not a bad joke, but not a brilliant one either. It’s funny, but it’s not particularly original.
Anyway, this is the same Jan Moir who wrote of the death of Stephen Gately, the former Boyzone singer who was openly gay: “Whatever the cause of death is, it is not, by any yardstick, a natural one”, and “I think if we are going to be honest, we would have to admit that the circumstances surrounding his death are more than a little sleazy.”
The article was originally titled “Why there was nothing natural about Stephen Gately’s death”, whereas Gately in fact died of natural causes, related to an undiagnosed heart condition. You may remember the outrage at Moir’s article nearly two years ago, in one of the first examples of a Twitterstorm.
THE SHEER LEVEL OF HYPOCRISY THAT MOIR ILLUSTRATES IN THIS WEEK’S ARTICLE IS MIND-BLOWING.
Does she not see how the exact same words apply 100% to her own homophobia regarding Gateley’s death? Is she that un-self-aware? Did nobody at the Daily Mail think to point this out to her?
It is utterly staggering that someone can write such an horrifically sneering, homophobic article about one subject, and then attempt to take the moral high ground when somebody else does something vaguely similar about a different subject.
Ladies and gentlemen: the future of our great nation. And yes, there’s a photo.
As I was sitting on the train earlier, reading my shiny new Kindle (thanks to a birthday present from the girlfriend), the guy next to me tapped me on the shoulder and pointed out that we were on the exact same page of A Dance With Dragons. Seriously, the exact same page. What are the odds?
We had a quick chat about how good they were, and how quickly we’d each got through the whole series until this point, before diving back into our respective screens. I said we’d probably see each other in a week or so, still ploughing through, although with the speed I’m reading it at and how much I’m enjoying it, I might be done by the weekend…
