The Martha Machine
I can’t say I am a giant fan of Martha Stewart. Oh I know, she’s done great things to encourage craftiness, which I’m always in approval of, but as a presenter, she’s pretty lacking. Now that Australia has digital TV, in amongst the Corrie repeats we have the Martha Stewart Show, and I don’t get the fuss. I tried to get the fuss, and I can’t.
First of, uh, all she’s uh.. um not.. uh that eloquent with uh her presentation uh style. I know public speaking is a tricky deal, especially when you’re being internationally broadcast. I know also that “keeping it real” often means skipping the autocue, but seriously, if you can’t get through one sentence without an “uh” “um” or “ooh” then maybe you should be working from notes.
I can overlook that as a personal style, I really can. What I can’t get my head around is how wealthy she is, and how she reminds her audience of her wealth. “I had guests over for dinner, and it was a disaster. I had to send them out to look at the stables while I fixed it”. “Today we’re looking at peonies, which are a beautiful flower and so easy to grow – here’s one of my gardening team from my farm to explain” “This is my property in Maine, it’s about 600 acres…”. Okay we get it, you’re rolling in cash. I suppose if you’ve got it, then flaunt it, but it does get old really fast.
As for WHY she’s rolling in cash, I suggest you go look at the Martha Stewart Range in any craft supply shop. I can get glitter at my local discount store for a buck. OR I can buy the exact same glitter with “Martha Stewart” written on it – same size box, same quality glitter – for $4.95. I can get plain, flat fabric flowers for less than half the price of Marthas’ range. A burnisher – used for making crisp folds in paper is $14.95 from Martha. Christ on a cactus, no wonder she’s got gardening staff.
Finally, I take issue with her “crafting”. I totally agree that making hand made items should be accessible for anyone. Crafting should not be an elitist activity. Anyone should feel that making something is something they can do. However, when you’re the “crafting queen” and your idea of “making easter baskets” involves hot gluing premade birds to premade nests with premade eggs…
So there’s why I don’t watch the Martha show. Coz she shits me with her expensive supplies and her 47 farms and her gardening team. If anyone needs me, I’ll be up to my elbows in fabric, making stuff.
Confessions
I’m pretty harsh on young Justin Bieber. Mostly because he’s a no talent upstart with a legion of girlfans who consider him marriage material. However, it’s true that in the early teens and pre teens, a persons tastes are not entirely … developed. Would you like some proof? Okay.
Now, at 31 I would like you to know my tastes are highly refined and excellent. All of them. Who said Right Said Fred? Get out. (I love the Freds). But if we were to wind the clock back to around 1990, you’d find me adoring the following.
1. Corey Feldman.
Lord I was obsessed. Some magazine printed a list of all the movies he’d been in (there was no IMDB back then) and I kept it and highlighted them as I hired/copied them (VHS baby WHOO). We were going to get married. Totally. Yup. Gunna happen.
How did it end? I still think he’s alright looking, but it became increasingly apparent that he’s not a particularly good actor, and is also a total douche. These things, combined, put me off the corey train. I still love “Stand By Me” and “The Goonies” though.
Ratcat
I was in the fan club, I got up early to watch The Factory and Rage to see if they were on. I thought they were AMAZING. Maybe they were, my newly aged ears hear a lot of off key shouting, but that’s youth. Blind to the shouty lyrics. Cheesy too. Terribly cheesy, cliched and loud. Just like music should be, dammit.
How it ended. I think I just outgrew it.
3. Alex Papps
He’s the one in the red robe at at the start of that clip. He was DREAMY, even with mullet. He played Frank in Home and Away. I watched the Frank and Bobby wedding episode 9 million times, had the wedding poster on the wall. Oh Alex Papps.
How it ended. He fell off the television for a while and I moved on.
So that’s three. I was going to add Tiffany to this list, because I thought she was awesome. I Youtubed and guess what? I’m right, she was awesome. Also, as someone in the comments for the vid that’s coming pointed out “Oh wow, a teen singer who is fully clothed”. Those were the days, my friends.
Don’t flatter yourself, Akker.
Jason Akermanis of footballing fame has stated that gay footballers shouldn’t go around telling people they’re gay, because it will make everything uncomfortable in the change rooms, what with all the naked men and whatnot.
It reminds me somewhat of a conversation between two male friends who had just finished High School. I shall call them Henry and Steve. So Henry tells Steve that a third guy, Wayne, is gay. Steve freaks out and says “No way, I spent HOURS with him in the edit suite!”. Henry replies “Yes, and he was probably thinking of your cute butt the whole time”. Steve cries. Well not really, but almost.
See, the thing about homophobia that stems from “I don’t want some gay guy looking at me” is this: Pretty big ego you have on yourself there, isn’t it? Let’s clear up some factoids.
Gay men do not just jump on anyone.
Okay some do, but so do some straight men. See, just as being a straight man doesn’t mean you figure every woman wants a ride, being a gay man means you don’t figure every MAN wants a ride. Do you see?
You might not even have to worry.
Why assume that a gay man will even find you attractive enough to look at twice? Do you find every single member of the opposite sex attractive? No, of course not. It works JUST the same way for gay people you know.
It’s a compliment, actually.
If a woman looked you over, you’d be all tingly. Gay men are just as good at checking out hotties as women are, so take it as a compliment. Someone thinks you’re hot enough to check out! Doesn’t mean you have to go home with them.
How doubled are your standards?
If you have no issues with two women getting it on in a bedroom setting, then you should have no issues with two men doing the same. Seriously, it shits me up the wall that lesbians are “hot” and gay men are “disgusting”. Think about it, you doofus.
As for Akker, well I really hope he gets himself sorted out, the man has some issues.
Theme Song
This isn’t actually a song. I can’t sing. I’m sorry to have raised your hopes. What I am currently doing is looking for a new theme, one for a newish blog (revisited) and one for this blog.
Now, a blog theme says a lot about the tone of the blog. Is it sleek and professional or is it a bit like a worn out pair of slippers? I lean to the second, so here’s why I’ve rejected the 10,000 or so themes I’ve seen today:
Huge RSS Buttons
I get that having an RSS button or link is a handy thing for when people see you as a kind of mini messiah of the subject, but if it’s the biggest most obvious thing in the theme, then blah.
Huge Headers
I’ve seen a lot of themes with headers so big that you need to scroll to start to see the content. That’s fine if you like it, but I feel it’s a bit of a space waste.
Too Too Two Point Oh
I know I know, we’re all supposed to be shiny buttons and slidy menus and various other trappings of 2.0, but this is my splodge of the web and since I am not a very 2.0 sort of a person (one could hardly call me glossy) I’m most certainly looking for something a bit less shiny.
Too Unchangeable
I don’t much care if you’ve called your theme “Grunge HeadShot” or whatever, if you’ve got it on the header image and don’t include a blank for people to add their blog name to, you suck. It’s not unreasonable to assume that some people might want to make the theme a little bit more personalised.
Too Black
This might be more personal preference, but I cannot stand reading light text on a dark background. I usually have to highlight the whole lot so it’s dark blue on white so I can read it.
Other variations of personal preference: too pink, too flowery, too 1998, too small, too big, too boxy, too fluffy.
So I go back to the theme pages, avoiding the ones that now embed spam in the footers (you bastards) and hope to find something nicely breakable for fun and… well no profit.
Standing Up.
I spent most of my time in High School waiting to be tripped, spat on or otherwise abused, which happened a lot. I spent a LOT of time at work waiting to be yelled at, yelled about or corrected for nothing. You could say I know a little bit about bullies.
Someone I used to know is a bully. She thinks nothing of belittling, ridiculing or out and out attacking people who disagree with her. She surrounds herself with “Yes!” people, deleting anything that shows her as maybe not the wonderful person she thinks she is. Feeding on these compliments and applause she stands herself tall and feels she can do no wrong, ever. In the middle of this circle of people who think she’s amazing, she is always right in everything she does. She is quick to accuse others of being bullies.
Everyone can do wrong. Not a single person in this universe is a perfect human being. Everyone, at some point, handles something badly or says a stupid thing to someone or runs over the tie of the CEO. Things happen, it’s being willing to admit we messed up and to learn from those mistakes that lets us grow as people and become, hopefully, better.
A couple of days ago I posted a thing about the Weight Police. I had it in draft for a while, I ummed and ahed and reworked and changed and eventually decided this: This is my little place on the internets. If I want to post 40 pictures a day of my big toe, I can do that. If I want to say Danni Minogue looked better before surgery, I can say that. And if I want to say “I want treatment for my medical condition” I can do that.
I am not in any way a perfect person. I have been a bully. I have been a bitch. I have hurt people, and I have been thoughtless and careless with emotions. I am no better than anyone on this planet, but I am no worse either. I am tired of wondering if what I am going to say is going to upset someone who clearly doesn’t care about anyone but herself, so this bully who has stepped out of my life is not terribly missed. Because I just realised, I’ve been editing my plurks, tweets and blog to make sure I don’t incur her wrath.
And I don’t have to do that anymore.
If you’ll excuse me, I have 40 pictures of my big toe to take – gunna be a big post tomorrow!
We can all be friends
My friends and I don’t always agree on everything. Like, Matt thinks Batman is the most awesome thing ever, which is clearly wrong. Angela thinks sewing is boring, so she’s not right in the head. Julie claims pandas are the cutest things in the world, when it’s clearly frogs. Mark hates horses, so that’s nuts. Hell, Angie, Brian and Crystal are Mac People even. Eeesh. You see what I’m getting at here.
Within my “circle” of people I like to spend time with either online or real world there’s a whole range of political, religious and personal views. And yes, we generally all get along alright, though there’s the occasional shouty match which is soon forgotten. Or in Matt’s case remembered word for word and used against him later when he least expects it. Muahahahaha.
Thing is, we’re all capable of having our own opinions and thoughts and disagreements without it damaging or destroying the friendship. We’re adult enough to say (usually) “Hey, you’re wrong, and here’s why” without turning into a little personal drama.
Just some things happened today that threw into sharp relief the awesomeness of my mates, so to each and every one of you, with all your weird and crazy ideas, I send love and thanks for being able to hold a reasonable debate, discussion or out and out argument without letting our friendships crumble. Yes yes, even you mac people.
The Weight Police
Body shape is something that cannot be changed. Oh sure you can change your weight, but the basic shape of your body will stay as it is, just smaller or larger.
Ideal body weight is largely predetermined by genetics and medical conditions, and varies from person to person. Generally speaking, if you’re taking a good amount of exercise and eating a reasonably balanced diet, you’re around where you should be. Now that might be a size 8, or it might be a size 20 or whereever, but it’s not really up to YOU what your ideal weight is, your body knows where it should be. Bear in mind that a balanced diet does include cakey things, which are as much for mental health as to offset all those salads. Avoid Rice Cakes, they be pretty blah. You can of course become even thinner than ideal, but it takes a lot of hard work, a lot of self denial and a lot of starvation.
Anyway. There’s plenty of fat acceptance blogs out there, and there’s plenty of thin acceptance. There may even be standard Body Acceptance, I haven’t really looked. I am a fat acceptance failure, in that I am about to restart treatment to control my insulin resistance. The upshot of this is that I may lose weight.
Granted, not all fat acceptance movement members judge or belittle people who do lose weight, but plenty do. I stopped bouncing around the fat blogs a while back, feeling like even thinking about treatment for the PCOS that I have was a shameful horror. I should be happy in my fat skin, and frankly I’m pretty okay with my fat most of the time.
Health and fat are linked in the minds of about everyone, from those who want the world to see that you CAN be fat AND healthy (and you can too, no argument here) to those who want to explain to fat people that fat = unhealthy. Which is not always true.
Sometimes it is. Yes, there are gray areas. Let’s take two fat people I’ve made up. We’ll call them Stella and Lola. Let’s pretend that against all the odds, they’re the exact same body type and weight and are both size 22. So let’s say Stella takes spanish dance lessons once a week, swims regularly and does other interesting body moving things almost every day, as well as watching her food and making sure she takes things like cheesecake in moderation. Medically, she is in fine fettle – blood pressure great, cholesterol great – everything that should be fine is fine.
Lola on the other hand takes no exercise, has a diet that leans more to the fast food end of the spectrum and tends to snack on less than great for her foods. You can’t argue, in this case, that she is a healthy fat person, because she isn’t. She’s overweight because she eats too much crap and never works it off.
I guess what I’m trying to get at is this: What should come first, the consideration of health or the fat acceptance? Should I be okay with my insulin resistance which caused my obesity because there’s a strong and growing movement to accept all body shapes, or should I seek treatment for it, therefore becoming a failure in the fatlove circles?
Bear in mind I will never – ever- be skinny. I’m not built that way, I come from a long line of curvy ladies and there’s no reasonable way I could ever be a size 4 or whatever the ideal is (not that I would want to anyway. Winter would suck without some extra insulation).
I’m at the stage here where my doctor blood tests me quarterly to make sure I haven’t developed diabetes. Now before you get up on your high horse about that, there’s a good chance I WILL develop diabetes since my insulin is all screwed up – she’s just keeping an eye on me so we can catch it early.
Regardless of how I feel about my body, I HATE my PCOS. I seriously hate it, I hate everything it did to me and everything it took away from me and I’m tired of just letting it go. I want to do something, and there’s another treatment available to me which I wish to try.
So why the guilt? Why the shame and the horror and the self loathing? Surely taking control of your health is a GOOD thing? Maybe. Maybe not. When fat acceptance goes too far, and when people are discouraged from taking the best care of themselves they can – at ANY size – then it’s become a Weight Police Issue, and that’s not right.
Shut up, naughty woman.
Catherine Deveney has been fired from her column at the Age newspaper for tweeting jokes about the Logies.
For my American readers, let me explain the Logies. The TV Week Logie Awards are held annually and celebrate Australian Television. Good so far. There are two types of award, the “Outstanding” type (eg, “Outstanding New Talent”, “Outstanding Actress in a Drama”) and the “Most Popular” type (eg “Most Popular New Talent”). The Outstanding awards are decided by peers and critics and other people who know what they’re talking about. The Most Popular type are voted for by people who buy TV Week Magazine.
TV Week Magazine is a glossy, sloshy publication that is purchased by people who don’t want to do too much thinking, and probably feel that soap operas are real. You can tell this by the winners of the Most Popular awards – they are generally pretty insubstantial.
I digress. Catherine Deveney is a ranting, feminist, athiest, euthanasia supporting firecracker. I don’t always agree with her, and I don’t always agree with her way of expressing herself, but overall I find her to be the kind of dynamite we need to spark discussion, thought and consideration of ideas that are generally not touched on in mainstream media. She’s passionate, loud and expressive. She is not afraid to say “This is wrong!” or “this is right!”.
During the logies, she tweeted some jokes. Some off colour, some funny (some both) and as a result has lost her position at The Age Newspaper. She’s also having all kinds of shit flung at her by readers and commentators. Why? She made a joke about Bindi Irwin (OMG NOT BINDI).
My friend Deb posted this to Facebook “more shit is being thrown at Deveney than ever gets thrown at Andrew Bolt. I guess you have to have a penis in this town to be outrageous.”.
She makes a good point. Andrew Bolt has said some stunningly horrendous things over the years, yet no one really touches him. He’s a repellent little so and so, but that’s his right to expression. If he had tweeted anything offensive, upsetting (or funny) it would have been okay, I’m pretty sure of this. People would have been upset, he would have told them to shove it, and the world would move on.
So is it because Catherine is a woman that makes her so “unbearable” to people? Women are still not expected to be loud, passionate and angry about society? Well, fuck that.
As I said, I don’t always agree with her opinions, and I don’t always agree with her statements, but as a society we need women like Catherine Deveney to light a firecracker under people, to make them think, consider and wonder about their opinions, to validate or shatter or to simply express new and dangerous ideas.
Screw YOU, The Age.