Bellevue, Ky

This is where I live. It feels like it's in the middle of scenic nowhere! If you want to go shopping, you have to leave Bellevue and go to Newport on the Levee, a sort of mini mall, or out to Florence where there is a big mall.

Here are some pics of my hometown.

Was Sacred Heart Church, but then became Divine Mercy Parish. The priest there is a guy fro Ireland named Damien Hils. He even has an accent too!!

View of the Daniel Carter Beard Bridge, or to locals the Big Mac Bridge. This is a view of it from the Riverfront Park most of the locals call the Bellevue Beach Park

The old Marianne Theatre. They talk about reopening it, yeah, those plans are really in action, aren't they? Yeah right!!

Along Fairfield Avenue. Alot of little shops opened up not too long ago.

The local football team, the Bellevue Tigers, for the local high school, Bellevue High School. Graduated in 2008. It was nice, but the drama of teen relationships kind of ruined senior year!

Another good pic of the Bellevue Tigers, #25 is Alex Hegge, I graduated with his older brother Adam.

Virgil's Cafe, a gourmet restaurant that probably no one in Bellevue can afford except for the rich and wealthy living in the new condos!!

St. Anthony's Church, which they are now turning into condos! How sad is that? Turning a church into condos for profit!

The new Holiday Inn they opened behind Frisch's

The gate to Bellevue Beach Park

The high school I attended. Since our town is too small to have both a junior and high school, the 7th and 8th graders go here! And crap I hated them, they were so rude and acted like they knew everything when they didn't know Jack squat!

Cozy Corner Daycare

Our own little resident bed and breakfast

Right around the corner from my house. This Spanish-style hacienda is going for a good $200,000

Local watering hole called Miller's Fill Inn. This place from what I hear is a nice place. Every Thursday and Friday night they have live local bands play

The local chili parlor

The Medical Arts building

The local Vets bar

This is from Schneider's Sweet Shop. If you ever come to Bellevue, make it worth a trip to this place. They got the greatest candy and ice cream EVER, and also ice balls, basically like snow cones.

My sister also works here!! She has to work 6 days this week, poor her!

This is from the Newport Aquarium, which is in Newport, not suprisingly!

The local liquor emporium!

This was my aunt's old apartment building

Are the kids alright?

You might not guess this at a glance, but somewhere underneath the Hollywood styling, designer accessories and buoyant coiffing is a little girl of ten years old.

... And if that's not scary enough, this photo was actually taken when she was nine. Her name is Willow Smith, and she's widely touted as the Next Big Thing on the pop music scene after the success of her first single, Whip My Hair. She's not the first child in her family to hit the entertainment scene in a big way before she even hits her teens;

Recognise him? That's Jaden Smith, as he appeared opposite Jackie Chan in the remake of The Karate Kid. If the parental penny hasn't dropped yet, here's a family portrait to jog your memory:

Yep, Will Smith's kids are looking to end up as famous and successful as their Mum and Dad. And not everyone's happy about it.

Author Terry McMillan recently tweeted that:

The Smith children already act like child stars. There's an arrogance in their demeanor and behavior. I find it incredibly sad. It feels like the Smith children are being pimped and exploited. Or, they're hungry for fame. What about 4th grade?

She further hit out against the gushing descriptions of the children in public media - often from the children's parents - describing their prodigal talent and enthusiasm:

These kids don't already know what they "love". Total bullshit. They're not prodigies. They think Hollywood is real.

And it was in this comment that she tapped the vein of the issue. The coverage of the Smith children has always been carried out with a considered, kid-glove professionalism that ensures a message of their empowerment and stomps upon the merest suggestion of exploitation. The army of managers, choreographers, songwriters, agents, stylists and make-up artists behind the scenes are played down as far as possible, and the resulting efforts touted merely as each child's "individual style", as though it was arrived at in the usual course of nine year-old experimentation, during an afternoon with Mum's pilfered makeup and jewellery.

Not pictured: realistic styling by a 9 year old.

In September 2009, then aged 9, Willow Smith told radio host Ryan Seacrest, "just be an individual, you can't be afraid to be yourself... and you can't let anybody tell you that's wrong". Neat, both in the sense that it would seem to both prove the child's utter commitment to their public image, and absolve any adult stakeholders in Willow's career should things go down the proverbial shitter. Listen to the child, people! She's not being exploited or marketed, she's a talented child, expressing her individuality!

Now, naturally the world is full of little girls and boys who would love to be actors, singers, rappers or the like. In fact, this trend is so common that in a recent survey of British schoolchildren, the most frequent answer to "what do you want to be when you grow up?" was simply; "Famous". Many of us remember our abortive childhood fantasies of rock stardom or Oscar acceptance speeches, and dreamed feverishly of "real" parents who would pick us up one day and turn out to be rich and famous, paving our way to the red carpets and superdomes of the glamorous people.

No doubt, offered the deal that the Smith children have been born into (mega-star parents, unlimited access to the gears of fame creation) we would have jumped at the chance as well. We would have recorded the singles, we would have starred in the movies. We would probably have loved it - and we probably would have said so just as enthusiastically as Willow and Jaden.

We probably would have thought pretty highly of ourselves, too. Not in our scene, the busboy actors and taxi-driving musicians looking for a break in an industry where it's always been about who you know. Not for us, the cattle-call auditions where children are seen and dismissed in their hundreds per hour. Not for us, the agony of forging a new brand in an industry already splitting at the seams; the talented rubbing elbows with the mediocre, the beautiful frantically exercising their advantage over the ordinary, the rejects by their thousands lining the exit corridor, bitterly stroking the fantasy of a big break that never came.

I can imagine any of us, styled to perfection and adopting our image as our individual style, sitting on a couch with Jay Leno, saying how we were "born to do this", speaking of our love and passion for our work. I can imagine us believing in the adoration, in the money, in the fame, perhaps even until it became integral to who we were. Would we ever be able to be happy without the flash of the cameras and screams of the fans? Would we ever know another desire for our future lives?

So is this exploitation? Or, as McMillan would have it, pimping? Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith didn't respond publicly to McMillan's tweet, but it's clear that their intention is to give their children the best possible foothold in the slippery Hollywood market. Talented though the children undoubtedly are, it is understandable to criticize the way that coveted movie roles and recording contracts have fallen to them as a birthright, and at an age where they will be more likely to internalise their success as the deserved recognition of serious talent than to recognise it as a lucky side effect of their parentage.

But yet, the sheer volume of tickets and albums sold seems to speak for itself in that, for now, the Smith children are at the top of their games, and we are happily spending plenty of money to see them play. Perhaps someone is being exploited, and perhaps it is us.

What do you think?

Daily Thoughts 12/21/2010 (Keith Richards, Life, Library)

Wilhelm Menzler (1846–1926): Ein Plausch im Park. Signiert. Öl/Lwd., 65 x 50 cm, 1918

Daily Thoughts 12/21/2010

I checked the displays this morning. I also spot checked the shelves.  I might try and do a job search hour for job boards on the internet as a program for the library patrons.

I also spent some time reading Booklist and Publishers Weekly.  Hopefully, it will keep us ready for when we start ordering again.  There is always hope.

I also spent some time talking to the Friends of the Library about all the different articles on websites from the Mount Vernon Library Website to the Mount Vernon Inquirer to the Westchester Journal news.

This is a link to the talk which Keith Richards gave at New York Public Library about his book Life on October 29, 2010.  It is one of the reasons I am reading this book.
http://www.nypl.org/audiovideo/keith-richards-conversation-anthony-decurtis

Notice of Open Trustee Positions, Mount Vernon Public Library
http://www.mountvernonpubliclibrary.org/node/200

Daily Thoughts 12/20/2010 (With A Little Help, Life, Keith Richards, Ebooks)

Lesender Mann beim Lampenlicht (Man Reading by Lamplight), 1814 Georg Friedrich Kersting, Oil On Canvas

Daily Thoughts 12/20/2010

I am finishing weeding my section in the oversize books.  I'll probably start weeding in the storage area or mezzanine as we call it.  As always, I checked the displays to make sure they were in order and read some newsletters on publishing in my inbox in email.  The newsletters give me heads up on what is being talked about in the media for books, especially Shelf Awareness and the Ingram alerts.

I am thinking of reading the e-book version of With A Little Help by Cory Doctorow.  http://craphound.com/walh/e-book/browse-all-versions  Right now, I have a little bit too much to read.  I have a pile on my desk, and a bag at home of books which I have not read yet.


Our library system has added the ability to download public domain ebooks from Project Gutenberg in alliance with Overdrive.  This means most of the classics will be available as ebooks in our library system. http://westchester.lib.overdrive.com/33558BCD-6444-4CFB-B6B6-07B23E6051B5/10/411/en/PublicDomainCollection.htm

Library Value Calculator from Mount Vernon Public Library
http://www.mountvernonpubliclibrary.org/node/212

On the way home, I read a little bit more of Keith Richards autobiography Life.  There is a very steady rhythm to the writing almost like the steady movement of a train.  It is very smooth.  At times, it can abruptly pick up speed especially when the writer is talking about violence or sex.  There is sex, drugs, and rock and roll; but there is also violence, guns, lawyers, and a strong streak of anti-establishment behavior and actions.  We learn about the Rolling Stones global network of lawyers and how they were expelled from one country after another during the 1960s.

Some things surprised me.  Right now, I am reading about Keith Richards spending time in Jamaica with the Rastafarians.  It is more than a little over the top.  The pace can be relentless.  Keith Richards describes times where he doesn't sleep for days.  This is not for people who don't want to be shocked.  At the same time it is shockingly libertine, it is also full of life and music.

This is an article from the London Times, Its Only Books N' Shelves But I Like It.  Keith Richards makes the claim that he loves reading in this article.  In a couple of other articles he also visited New York Public Library.  In the book Life, he also describes reading history books several times and lending them to people.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article7086815.ece

Web Bits

Zen and the Art of Self Publishing by Cory Doctorow
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/cory-doctorow/article/45565-zen-and-the-art-of-self-publishing.html

The Future According to Tim O'Reilly
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/12/10/the-future-according-to-tim-o-reilly.html

For the record, I am a fan of both Cory Doctorow's and Tim O'Reilly's articles on publishing and copyright.

Daily Thoughts 12/17/2010 (Budget, life)

Angela Georgina Burdett-Coutts, Baroness Burdett-Coutts 1840

Daily Thoughts 12/17/2010

I have been reading some more of Keith Richards Life.  It is a wonderful book; honest with music, soul, and hard driving ambition.  He does not leave out the harder bits and the darker side of life which makes it even more intriguing.

This morning, I spent some time putting together a list of job links for the website.  I tried to focus on local job resources in Westchester County and New York.  I also did some weeding and checked the displays.  I still have to work on a how to section for the website with my colleagues.

In the afternoon, I've been working with a colleague on a how to section for the library website, or in computer terms, a f.a.q. (frequently asked questions) section.

I sent some follow up emails to the people who were at Tech Drinks XXmas today.  I always like to followup.  I am thinking about my experience.  I will probably write a little more tomorrow.


Budget

Sometimes, you find interesting statements in places.  There are issues which need to be brought out into the open.  In November 2010, the city decided that money that was paid out to the staff for raises was not appropriated from November of 2009.  It is a sudden move that was unexpected.  The money was already paid out in January of 2010.  I distinctly remember getting the check with back pay.  This would amount to an additional $350,000 which was already paid out to the staff.  This would add to the debt from the city. 

There was also the $180,000 year end charge this month in December which led to termination of three staff, three retirements, and six demotions.  This brings the actual to cut to over $1,000,000.

I am also hearing a number of different opinions on the city budget.  There was a tax increase of 5.54% which is higher than inflation which in November was 1.1%.  The Fire Department and the Police Department budget stayed close to the same as last year with new equipment and there were increases in the Department of Public Works which went from 12,505,756 to 12,563,153 and the Recreation Department went from 1,859,817 to 2,335,874.  The two departments that were hit hardest were the Department of Planning which recieved an approximately $1million dollar cut and the library which recieved an approximately $500,000 cut.  There were also ten new positions added including an Inspector General position which some people question.  On November 19, 2010 the mayor promised no layoffs for people who work in the city. 

The library is in a kind of nebulous state between the city and the school district.  Next year, the library may come up for a vote. The vote would remove the library from the cities control and make it a school district library which would have a budget that was voted on and a board of trustees that was voted on. The budget amount of the vote will be based on the last years cost of the library.  The city could be trying to cut the total amount being voted on next year.


 This budget is not about pain, it is about priorities.  Do the taxpayers want recreation and infrastructure like streetlights, bridges, and roads or libraries, education, and planning.  It seems infrastructure building and  recreational activities are what people want right now.   Not everyone feels the pain in this budget. 

Mount Vernon City Budget
http://cmvny.com/cmsget?exporturi=/export/sites/cmvny3/pdf/public-notice/budget/2011ProposedCityBudgetWeb.pdf


A Message From The Board of Trustees of the Mount Vernon Public Library
http://www.mountvernonpubliclibrary.org/node/210

Terrifying Search Terms

Sometimes the details dished out and presumed necessary to our lives can be far, far too much. For example, despite the media's insistence that I find this out, I never needed to know that Prince Charles murmured to Camilla that he wished to be her tampon. I have no idea what possessed my grandmother furnish me with a detailed description of the premature rupture of her hymen. I never needed to see Tara Reid's botched breast and stomach surgery. Or to hear that John Mayer waxes his pubic hair into the shape of a lightning rod, Lindsay Lohan is a "fire crotch", or that Lady Gaga thinks her creativity can be stolen through her vagina. I could have happily lived my life without any of this information.

But the very apex of my list of things I didn't need to know were some of the search terms that lead the net-surfing public to my humble little blog. With occasional blog titles such as Jew Skin Lampshade, In case you ever wondered what humans taste like and An Historical Compendium of Dick Jokes, some may argue that I brought this upon myself, but the fact remains that I was much, much happier before I logged on to Google Analytics.

The first few entries are misleadingly vanilla. For example, Jim and the Indians comes in with a healthy 121 searches this year. Variations of What not to name your kids and Vengeance is Mine Inc. total up to several hundred each. And then it starts getting more abstract.

Bitches

People must love us bitches cause over 300 individual search terms featured the word. Most were prosaically along the lines of bitch girl names, clever bitches or hot bitches take it up the (name your orifice) but some solo-handed surfers out there managed to go one better.

My favorite, terrifying search terms including the word bitch were fortunately limited to one search each, and include;

- Can you name your kid 'bitch'?

My response: "no".

- LBJ was a jew bitch

I wanted to put this in the next section but the "bitch" part seemed rather more operative than the "Jew" part.

- Zeus was a bitch

Totally agreed.

AND THE WINNER:

- 5pm is bitch raping time

Actually, this came up four times. I'm terrified.

Porn

Most readers will not be surprised to hear that this simple concept was elaborated in nearly 500 different search terms, most also including the words bitch, secret or nasty. And then there were some other somewhat inexplicable keywords, including:

- clever porn

This came up almost 50 times. Can someone please explain what makes porn clever?

- vengeance is mine porn

Did Roald Dahl sign off on this script?

AND THE WINNER:

- Admit it bitch, you were porn

I have no idea what this is meant to mean.

Tattoos and Jews

It seems that, despite my mother's horrified reaction to the idea, there are many sick individuals out there who have also toyed with the idea of preserving their tattoos after death, as I discussed in my first-ever post Jew Skin Lampshade. Over 50 searches were based on variations of "preserve tattoo after death", but the true horror only becomes evident when you scroll down and discover that variations of Jewskin, and Jewskin lampshade were searched OVER 100 TIMES. In addition, some charming individuals searched terms including:

- Where can I buy Jew skin?

I wouldn't have guessed you could, except...

- Jew skin for sale

Now I'm officially horrified.

AND THE WINNER:

- How to skin a Jew

Honestly - is there somewhere you can report this sort of thing?

Historical sex

On a lighter note, some people just can't get enough of Zeus' sexual shenanigans. The exact term Zeus rape appeared 17 times, but variations on the phrase pushed searches into the hundreds. Some stunners on the topic included:

- Did Zeus rape Danae?

- Did Zeus rape Europa?

- Did Zeus rape his mother?

Yes, yes, and - sadly, yes.

- Ron Jeremy as Zeus?

I can't scrub my brain clean enough, I tell you.

AND THE WINNER:

- Beatrice's tits in Dante's inferno

Searched twice to lead to this blog, despite no references anywhere here to Beatrice's tits.

The taste of humans

Sounds like the grand taboo is no longer that taboo. 12 searches were run using humans taste like pork? as keywords, an equal number for pork taste like human, and dozens more referenced cannibalism, pork, crackling, firemen, William Seabrook and "long pigs".

AND THE WINNER:

- Rump girl meat cannibal

This was searched up to A DOZEN times - by someone sick, no doubt.

Tony Abbott

Dozens of people came across this site whilst searching for Tony at election time, mostly with keywords including misogynist, abortion, adoption, shocking and hypocrite. Yet it seems that Tony is never without his fans, and thus;

THE WINNER:

- Tony Abbott sexiest ioning board (sic)

As I previously pointed out, his abs would look great at Mardi Gras.

And then...

There are those keywords that defy any decent categorisation - or even an explanation of how they lead to this site, such as:

- Clever masturbation

Is there a "smart" or "dumb" way to rub your dick until jizz comes out, dude?

- receding hairline beer belly sexy

And then finally...

THE WINNER:

- live donkey show

Somewhere on this blog I must have mentioned one, or this search term wouldn't have lead you here. I'm sorry... really.

Is "Sorry" Ever Good Enough?

"Zoe" furrowed her brows as if in physical pain while she told me the story, and asked me, almost imploringly;

"What could I say to her? I was supposed to disagree - to take control of the situation, somehow - but everything she said was true."

Zoe is finishing up her training as a psychologist, working in a psychiatric clinic where she is responsible for running group therapy. There are a range of personalities, backgrounds, and clinical presentations amongst her clients - many have mood disorders such as anxiety and depression, some have addictions, whilst others suffer from post-traumatic stress. All are on shaky ground in many respects. There's a lot of pain in the little room from which she runs the afternoon groups. And a raw nerve was touched last week.

One group member, "Rachel" told the group about how she had been a bully as a teenager. She related in detail how she had emotionally, and occasionally physically brutalised a particular girl she disliked, isolating her socially and effectively running her out of the school. Zoe sighed as she told me this part of the story, because, in her words, "She said she felt sorry, but Rachel sounded a lot sorrier for herself than for the things she did to that other girl. She was trying to relate it back to how troubled a teenager she, herself, had been. She had a point, but... well, I can see why it triggered what happened next."

What happened next was that another group member, "Jane", threw a chair at Rachel. As Zoe frantically tried to calm the situation, Jane screamed that bullies like Rachel had ruined her life, and that she didn't want to sit here listening to a sob story about how hard it had been for them to do it. And it was right then that Zoe faced her worst professional dilemma so far. She was obliged to defend Rachel - but she secretly agreed with Jane.

I can understand how torn Zoe must have felt. She, I, and many millions of other people around the world can remember only too well what it was like to be on the wrong end of a high school bully. When I was 15, the new Queen Bee pulled a Rachel-style attack on me, and it's painful to admit that, a decade later, I still have occasional nightmares about that time. Within a few short weeks, she had orchestrated a coup that permanently cost me the girls who had previously been my best friends. Of course, she didn't stop there. In typical Queen Bee Bully style, there were my secrets to disseminate, nasty rumours to be spread, and boycotts to be organised. To this day, I'm still not sure why I was the particular object of her wrath - but then, the motives of bullies are generally mysterious to their victims. All I know is that she was wrathful, ruthless, and extremely efficient in her stated aim of destroying my confidence and shrinking me into a miserable wreck for the remainder of my high school years.

Two years after I was shredded by the bullies, my old best friend, who had not spoken to me since, decided to try to apologise. I was at an end-of-school party when she approached and asked rather nervously for "a moment to talk". For a moment, I was so happy I nearly choked on my beer. Maybe, after all this time, she was going to say she was sorry for how she had treated me, and maybe try to patch up our friendship which, despite everything, I still missed. Maybe she was going to admit that Queen Bee had been wrong.

She did apologise, in a sense. Once we got out of earshot of the other partygoers, she told me that she felt "pretty bad about everything". She hoped I could forgive her, she said.

I was caught somewhere between happiness and indignation. I tried to keep my voice steady.

"After all this...? Well, I mean, if you want to sort of make an... effort to --"

That's as far as I got. Her eyes flickered nervously as she stammered;

"Oh no! I mean, not like that... like, make an effort or anything...", she trailed off lamely, and suddenly there was almost a nakedness between us of perfect understanding.

"You don't actually care what you did to me, do you? You just want me to forgive you so you don't have to feel bad, right?" My voice shook a little and a tear dripped down my nose during the long pause before she shook her head, sadly, and walked off. We never spoke again.

Would sorry have been good enough if it had come with reparations?

I can't say. All I know is that it felt empty to hear her ask for forgiveness without ever needing to suffer, or acknowledge the suffering she caused me. Jane must have felt the same way, listening to Rachel talk about her past and ask the group to acknowledge her experience. Jane's life had been scarred by people like Rachel, and now Rachel was asking for forgiveness, sympathy - all the things she had not shown her victims. To Jane, these were the crocodile tears of an unrepentant predator.

In the end, Zoe had managed to defuse the situation, calm Jane down, and get the group back on track. But she was shaken, having realised a weakness she hadn't known would affect her professionally. Part of her had wanted to stand up with Jane and yell at Rachel that Sorry wasn't good enough, and that No, she was not understood. She was Not Forgiven. Of course, she didn't. Her years of training served her well, and she ran through her usual spiel about how the group was a space where we had to show respect for others and allow them to express themselves and how criticism should be brought up in a respectful way and yada yada yada.

"But the whole time," she said to me later, "the whole time, I felt so wrong inside."

In case you ever wondered what humans taste like...

Admit it, you've probably wondered about this ever since Hannibal Lecter sneered about eating an auditor's liver "with fava beans and a nice Chianti". But, let's face it, there are a paucity of people to ask, and those in the know tend to be close-lipped on the subject. In the modern age of broken taboos, the last one left intact might be the frank admission that you chowed down on a person.

So what do we taste like? Game? Chicken? If we use Lecter's choice of wine as a barometer, we might taste like beef, which matches well with a hearty Italian red. Or perhaps, if we listen to Fat Bastard from The Spy Who Shagged Me, we taste like pork (the other other white meat). Actually, the pork hypothesis is a strong one - Christopher Hitchens elaborates on the similarities between humans and pigs in God Is Not Great, in an attempt to explain why so many religions eschew pork products. Basically, he surmises, we aren't supposed to eat pork because pigs are much, much too like people.

It makes some sense that we would avoid eating an animal so much like ourselves - pigs are balder than most stock, and a lot more intelligent. Their organs are so much like ours that pig insulin was given to diabetic patients until a synthetic type was developed. Pigs are said to cry tears of grief, and to scream in a very human manner when trussed up for slaughter. The slang term for roasted human amongst Papua New Guinean tribes that practice cannibalism is "long pig", and Hitchens notes that firefighters tend to dislike pork, and especially pork crackling. Apparently, once you've smelt a burned human carcass... well, I'm sure I don't need to finish that sentence.

So we taste like pork, right?

Wrong, according to a New Yorker called William Seabrook, who decided to break the last taboo and try human flesh whilst travelling in West Africa in the 1930s. Finding that it was not uncommon for the locals to munch on roasted people from time to time, Seabrook approached the village chief and asked if humans really did, as he had heard, taste like pork. The chief was puzzled by this question, stating than that he had eaten pork many times and that human flesh was nothing like it, nothing at all. (We can suspect that he must have followed this up with "you dumb-ass whitey", or similar). Seabrook bided his time and waited for the opportunity to find out for himself.

Soon afterwards, he found that opportunity, in the form of a freshly killed 30 year old man whom the locals assured Seabrook was "not murdered". Seabrook never bothered to ascertain the man's cause of death, but instead set to work in cooking a small rib roast and a "sizeable rump steak". "I proposed", he wrote, "to make a meal of it as one would any other meat, with rice and a bottle of wine". And make a meal of it he did, as well as taking meticulous and detailed notes on the texture, colour, smell and taste of the raw and cooked portions.

If you're still with us, then here is the crux of what he had to say:

"I took a big swallow of wine, a helping of rice, and thoughtfully ate half the steak. And as I ate, I knew with increasing conviction and certainty exactly what it was like. It was like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef...

"The roast, from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender, and in colour, texture, smell, as well as taste, strengthened my certainty that of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable... as to the 'long pig' legend... it was totally, completely false".

Seabrook, the man who referred to himself "thoughtfully" chewing on a dead man's cooked buttock, wrote that he felt "a sense of pride in having carried something through to its finish", and congratulated himself upon "a long-standing personal curiosity satisfied at last". At the time of writing his memoirs, he noted that "Neither then, or at any time since have I had any serious personal qualms, either of digestion or conscience". That said, he became known as The White Cannibal of New York, and eventually committed suicide in 1945 amid speculation that he was going insane. (It took people that long to notice something was wrong here?)

But one man's pork is another man's veal... and another man's tuna, if we listen to Issei Sagawa, the "Cannibal of the Bois de Boulogne", who famously murdered and ate his unrequited love in 1981 in Paris. Sagawa related that her flesh was "soft" and "odorless", "like tuna". However I think we can assume that any dickhead who considers tuna to be "odorless" (not to mention, any dickhead who thinks he can emulate the health and beauty of a woman by ingesting her) can be safely written off as complete whack-job with too much time on his hands.

So to return to Lecter - take a bow! According to Seabrook, our most credible source on the subject, his wine choice (a nice Chianti) is a stylish match with the regional Italian speciality of tender veal.
Or person.

Purgatorio

Throughout the drawn-out process of moving house, it seems that almost everyone I know has sympathetically opined that "it's the second most stressful thing you'll go through in your life", with the first being divorce. I'm not sure where everyone has apparently sourced this piece of information, but it's become a modern axiom - at least in well-fed Western countries where the fear of war, starvation, extreme poverty or genocide has receded into a comfortable background. In any event, I disagree. Moving house was far more stressful than my divorce.

"It's like the fifth circle of Hell", Clever Colleague suggested helpfully.

"What gets punished in the fifth circle?" I asked, warily.

CC furrowed her brows. "Actually, I don't know. It just seemed like a good, mid-level sort of Hell. Would you prefer the seventh circle?"

Unknowingly, CC was right on the money. The fifth circle of Dante's Inferno is where the wrathful and slothful are sent for punishment. (I'm a prime candidate in both departments, alternating my spare afternoon hours between road rage and siestas.) Of course, that's not the only place that us lazy bums can end up. The other is Purgatorio.

Dante envisioned purgatory as an island of concentric terraces rising upwards out of the Southern Oceans. Each sin gets its own terrace, where the wicked endure various degrees of tortuous suffering in the name of spiritual growth. The punishments, ironically, fit the crimes, and therefore we find the Proud struggling to hold their shoulders up under the weight of huge boulders, the Gluttonous abstaining from food and drink... and the slothful, running in perpetuity to atone for their laziness on Earth.

I was struck by the comparison. Rather than being Hell, moving house is basically a form of Purgatory on Earth, where we are forced to confront our months or years of slothful housekeeping and haphazard storage. Thus, for over a month, Clever Partner and I were constantly running to atone for our sins. We marvelled with the hindsight of a soul in Purgatory - didn't we know that the oven should have been cleaned every six months? Could we not have forseen the problems inherent in simply shoving unwanted items out of the way to the top of bookshelves or underneath tables? Should we not have realised that our failure to properly clean out five years' worth of accumulated junk from various expat flatmates would result in a mountain of detritus that would take the council three collections to dispose of?

Well, apparently not. We didn't, and, considering the degree to which comparisons between moving house and Hell are readily accepted, nobody else does, either. And now that we have worked out way through Purgatory to the Paradise of the New House, let us bow our heads and pray:

"May we always remember to scrub the grout,
Have the wisdom to unblock the downspout.
Free us from rising damp and insect hordes,
From leaking taps and rotten old floorboards.
May we never seek to store things overhead
Atop shelves and cupboards, or below our bed.
Deliver us from black-spot mould
And, please, before this house is sold
Shall we ever strive to clean, and then
Roll up our sleeves and clean again."

Amen.

Being Right When Nobody Will Listen

Modern history is strewn with the carcasses of women who died for their cause.

This is not their story.

This is the story of a man whose life was also laid down to advance the lot of women. His name was Ignaz Semmelweis, and his name should be better known than it is, because women out there, everywhere, owe him big time.

Incidentally, "strewn with carcasses" is a good way to start this story, because Semmelweis was a doctor in a time when medicine wasn't too advanced. In the 1830s, a time before antisepsis, anaesthetics, germ-theory, or any of today's medical trimmings and trappings, Ignaz made his way from his native Hungary to study medicine in Vienna. By 1846, he was the head of Vienna's General Obstetric Hospital, where, incidentally, maternal deaths averaged at about 10% of admissions. They all seemed to display the same symptoms; a high fever, abdominal swelling, and skin pustules. Semmelweis wrote that he was perplexed by the death rate - even women delivering in the streets were dying less often than women in the clinic. But by 1847, he had discovered something brilliant - and unprecedented.

A colleague of old Ignaz had cut his hand whilst conducting an autopsy, and within a few days died with the same presenting symptoms as the mothers in the clinic. So Ignaz Semmelweis concluded that "cadaverous particles" carried on the hands might actually be causing the deaths. He instituted a policy which was to see him hounded out of the medical profession: compulsory hand-washing in a chlorine solution.

Within a few months of his policy's implementation, two things had occurred in a noticeable fashion. Firstly, women were dying at radically lower rates - the death rate had dropped from 10% to less than 2%. Secondly, Ignaz's popularity and credibility had plummeted. Many doctors considered the idea that they carried disease-causing particles on their hands to be both nonsensical and the highest form of insult. Semmelweis was dismissed from his post at the hospital in 1848 on the spurious accusation of political activism, and openly ridiculed by the medical profession to the point where he returned to Budapest.

As his credibility wore through, so did his sanity. Semmelweis began writing angry letters to anyone who would read them, and eventually published in 1961 a book of "Open Letters" lambasting the entire medical profession as well as many famous individuals. In the last decades of his life, he became a man obsessed. All conversations were turned to childbed fever. He began stopping unknown couples in the street and tearfully begging them to ensure, should they ever have children, that the doctor washed his hands. He began drinking heavily and visiting prostitutes. Some believed that his brain may have been succumbing to syphilis.

Eventually, in 1865, he was sold out. A colleague persuaded his wife to allow Semmelweis to be committed to a mental institution, where he was subjected to beatings, placed in a straitjacket, and administered laxatives and enemas in the customary style of the day. A slight wound sustained in a beating from the guards turned gangrenous, and in an ironic twist which would be glorious were it not so terrible, Semmelweis died from precisely the disease he had spent his lifetime attempting to beat; septicaemia.

Had he only lived a little longer, Semmelweis would have seem himself vindicated by history. With the work of Pasteur and Lister, germ-theory became accepted and the sensible policy of handwashing made compulsory practice. Semmelweis' name now graces a university, a museum, and several medical facilities, whilst his visage has graced European coins and postage stamps. In Hungary he is known as "the saviour of mothers". Oddly enough, the psychological catchphrase "the Semmelweis Reflex" is sometimes used to denote the kind of knee-jerk reaction people take to things that fall outside their accepted frame of reference.

I guess the take home lesson here is that it's hard to be right when nobody will listen. Ignaz Semmelweis was by no means the first person to find that out (just ask Socrates), but his story is particularly ironic and painful because he wasn't actually asking that much. The man lost his life and his sanity because people didn't want to wash their hands.

So, like I said, we owe him big time.

GirlForce: It's all about Girl Power!

Isn't amazing the things you run across when you go Blog hunting? Today, Teen Seen is featuring author and female extraordinaire Nikki Goldstein. Read the next paragraph and you will get to know her a little better. But I don't necessarily want to focus on the woman as much as I want to focus on what the woman has to offer, so read on, then get into the really good stuff.

Nikki Goldstein has worked as a beauty editor and writer for Marie Claire, Vogue, Elle, InStyle and Cosmopolitan. Motivated by her own experiences, she decided to share the positive impact of Ayuveda - and in doing so help millions of girls across the world to feel fantastic about themselves.

The web site name says it all. GirlForce. It's all about the girls. How they think, how they act, how they feel, everything. There is so little focus on what happens in a persons life before they become an adult. Is it any wonder that there are so many women who hit adulthood and have no idea who they are or what they want?

Nikki Goldstein has established a place for the girls to get a better feel for themselves and to know how to deal with the things life throws at them, so they are better prepared for womanhood. Knowing yourself through your own eyes is so crucial to stable personal growth. Nikki addresses these issues and so many more on her web site.

Body Type. A little quiz to help you view things from your perspective.

Once you've pinned it you can take a look at the Body Type Snapshot. I wish I had had someone to offer me positive influence when I was hitting "that" age.

Next we give a listen to our Voice. It's not just how you say or how you sound saying it. It is more about what you are saying.

I love the Quiz page. Always a bit of a fiend for them in the magazines, Nikki targets things that are important to girls, not so much what is important to the people in a girls' life.

Need a little time to chill? Visit the Meditation page and let yourself regroup. Personally this isn't something I would have thought of for girls, but life is hectic for everyone, not just those over twenty. Focusing on your inner self is equally as important as the shell and Nikki makes sure that her readers and viewers get that.

With a special Forum for the girls, Nikki offers a place to ask questions and delve into those topics that are important to every girl, no matter what.

But Nikki doesn't stop there. She's plenty of stuff for the parents dealing with the their daughter's changes from childhood to womanhood. When you visit Getting To Know Your Daughter, you know you aren't alone.

I encourage every parent or aunt, or relative or even just a friend to buy a copy of GirlForce
for a Special Teenage Girl in Your Life.

Karen Syed, former teenage girl

The Sad Stories of Hoover and Lotto

Ten years ago, a young man of my acquaintance made an interesting decision. Well, two interesting decisions. The first was to experimentally apply a vacuum cleaner for the purposes of sexual release. The second was to tell all his high school buddies about it.

It must have come as a big surprise to this young man that his friends didn't think his idea to be as clever and revolutionary as he did. Rather than congratulating his creativity, they merely pissed themselves laughing, dubbed him "Hoover", and continued to call him that until the end of high school.

My Very Clever Polyamorous Friend notes a similar situation which arose in his single-sex boarding school. Apparently a young man was overheard telling an unknown party on his mobile phone that; "I've had a look around, and I'm pretty sure I've got the biggest one in year 9". The unfortunate youth was evermore known as "Lotto" (The Big One).

High school was riddled with bizarre and cruel nomenclature, which prompts me to wonder; what would you do if the world at large knew your high school nickname? Could Hoover, an attorney nowadays, still hold up his head at the office if his colleagues knew?

Here are a few other examples which might be difficult to explain:

- Clever Sister's friend "Babs" (thus named for looking "like he works in a kebab shop")

- Clever Bitch's ex-boyfriend "Scrotum" (so named, ironically, by a peer support leader who looked down on the shivering year 7 and guffawed; "Hey, this kid looks like a scrotum!").

- Clever Bitch's friend "Bald Eagle" (a word to the wise - never let your friends see your junk until there's some grass on the pitch).

Luckily, Babs had a shave and Eagle grew some pubes. Scrotum still looks a little like one, but is a financial adviser nowadays. Still, I wonder if any of them live in vague unrest, fearing the day that someone finds out their high-school nicknames. Those things stuck for five years - if you let them back in now, they could be for life.

What are the worst nicknames you recall from your high school?

"Straight Preferred"

The advertisement hanging at my local cafe was one of those handmade types with little tear-off phone number tabs at the bottom. Someone was looking for a new flatmate, and specified some important information for potential applicants; price, location, and "preferred criteria" for the new roomie. He or she should speak English, hold a professional job, have no pets, and only smoke outside. And then, my mouth fell open. Did that really say "straight"?

It did. Someone had, apparently without shame, publicly stated their unwillingness to consider a gay person as a flatmate. Not content with simply meeting some applicants and having a chat, the advertiser was so uncomfortable with or afraid of homosexuality that he felt the need to deter gay applicants at the first opportunity.

To some minds, this is fair enough, as the advertiser has a right to choose their new flatmate, and that they might as well get their prejudices out in the open in order to spare any potential gay applicants the time and trouble.* To me, it feels like plain old discrimination. Let's not forget that we have laws against this type of thing; if the advertiser had have been looking for an employee rather than a flatmate, his eligibility criteria would have gotten him into a lot of trouble. However it appears that whilst his prejudice would not be tolerated in a professional context, it is entirely acceptable in his personal life. And the fact that he didn't hesitate to post a discriminatory advertisement in an inner-city coffee shop speaks volumes about the attitudes towards homosexuality in our society.

The elephant in the room here is that discrimination against homosexuals has in recent years become far more socially acceptable than the old-school bastions of racism or sexism. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the Opinion pages of the broadsheet newspapers. Whereas no respectable paper would dream of publishing a radical treatise on why women are inferior to men, or white people smarter than black people, it is all too common to flick the papers open and find a long-winded article or letter defining homosexuality as a sin, linking it to paedophilia, or declaring it a mental illness. Despite our legislation, it seems that gays are an easy target, particularly when you invoke your religion as an excuse for your prejudice.

Unfortunately, there isn't much we can do about the kind of person who has a blanket opposition to gays, or any other minority group other than tolerate them in the way that they refuse to tolerate others.
Or maybe just scribble "Hate Criminal!" at the bottom of their advertisement.

* The situation is similar at my university, where international students commonly advertise for flatmates, specifying "Asian preferred" on the posters. If this is defensible, it is so on the basis that people may feel more comfortable living with people who are from culturally similar backgrounds, however I somehow doubt that this argument would save me from being called racist if I had posted an advertisement stating "white preferred".

Is it reasonable to specify your preference for a particular racial group or sexual orientation when advertising for flatmates, or is it just discrimination?

Wax On, Wax Off

Clever Bitch had a nasty cold the last few days, and spent some time recuperating in front of re-runs of Sex and the City. Leaving aside the question of what a feminist is doing watching that particular show, there's a moment in the second season where Samantha, having recently trimmed her hedges, wonders aloud just what is so appealing to men about women with no hair "down there". Miranda, ever the cynic, responds acidly; "Because they want little girls."

I've never had a Brazilian, less on moral grounds than due to the triple deterrents of pain, expense, and humiliation (think getting down on all fours so that a stranger can rip hairs out of your arse-crack - then paying for the privilege). However, a girl I know (let's called her "Christine") marches into the beauty salon every fourth Tuesday and parts with forty-five dollars to have her pubic hair ripped out with hot wax. I've met Christine a few times after emerging from her ordeal - wiping her eyes, muttering in a horrified tone of the expense and wincing in recollection of the pain. Yet, Christine insists, she has the Brazilian for herself. I've never been brave enough to point out to her that she never used to wax "for herself", until she started dating Angry Restauranteur.

So, why precisely do both women and men want to wipe Tassie off the map? It's not a modern phenomenon- ancient Greek women depilated their entire bodies, including pubic hair, and various cultures have been doing the same ever since. It's as popular in high art as low-grade porn, with solicitors and strippers, with mothers and maidens. The artist John Ruskin never consummated his marriage with his first wife due to a general disgust with her body, and in particular her pubic hair. In all his years examining art, he had never seen such a thing depicted in a statue or painting and found it repulsive on his wedding-night. From these fascinations spring an entire industry to groom women's pubes into submission - but why?

Desmond Morris, the author of The Naked Ape and The Naked Woman amongst others, writes that women's bodies have evolved to be more neotonous - that is, resembling their childlike forms - than men's. Women's bodies are softer and rounder, our body hair finer, sparser, and paler in colour. Because males are instinctively protective towards children, they are suckers for women who look like children. Most women and men have even played this card consciously - women love men's clothes both for the comfort and also because they point out to the man just how little we are in comparison to them - just how vulnerable and cute - the little woman drowning in the giant track-pants.

So what about pubic hair? Morris also dispels the myth that pubic hair serves a protective or hygienic function. In fact, he states that pubic hair is entirely useless to a woman - it is there solely as a "flag" to indicate sexual maturity to males, much as the man's beard indicates maturity to females.

So, here we find ourselves at an impasse - men love women who look like children, but use pubic hair as a marker that they're not in fact children and can be approached in a sexual manner. Women want to look neotonous, so they shave their legs and underarms, and wax off their maturity flag. Bringing us back to Miranda's question - is the net result of all the pain, effort and trouble anything other than to look like a little girl?

Ladies and gentlemen - what do you think about Brazilians? What are your reasons for getting one or not getting one?

Year Of The Bimbo

The Year of the Ox is upon us again, and the women's magazines are once again packed with glossy star-charts depicting our fortunes for the year ahead.

Horoscopes, and other such pseudo-scientific chicanery, have somehow wormed their way into our most respectable newspapers, as well as our most flimsy tabloids and glossy magazines. I don't remember a time when one could pick up a publication and not be faced with shrew-faced con-women with pseudo-mystical names such as Athena Starwoman posturing their "talent" through writing "predictions" so nebulous as to be applicable to virtually everyone. That is, unless one was leafing through a publication which is aimed exclusively at men. It seems to the publishers that the exclusive consumers of this brain-rotting diet must be women.

It doesn't even seem to matter what type of woman you are. Everything from the celebrity rags (e.g. New Idea, Woman's Day, Who) to the fasion-and-sex glossies (Cosmopolitan and Cleo) to the brick-heavy mixes of journalism and haute-couture (Marie-Claire, Madison, Vogue) contain pseudo-scientific content as regular features. Whether women are bored housewives, teenage schoolgirls, high-powered executives, or anything in between, the horoscopes are provided.

Now, I can't really blame the celebrity rags - even their "factual" content is a heady mix of lies, conjecture, and inside information from anonymous "pals", "insiders" and "neighbours". Cosmo and Cleo can't be blamed either - they would be unreadable even without the inclusion of astrology (well - that's unless you want to know about 58 babe-a-licious ways to make him climax using only a feather, an ice cube and your elbow). The real villains are the top-shelf women's mags, that target young professionals, and apparently credit women with independent incomes as well as independent thought. They present dense, well-written articles on important issues - but expect that after you've read about the systematic use of rape as a weapon of war in the Congo, or female circumcision in Somalia, signed their tear-off petition and sent it to Amnesty International - well, what else would you desire but to read your horoscope?

Flipping through equivalent men's magazines such as GQ one finds no such equivalent patronisation of their readership (unless it's the pages of advertisements for sex toys - but you'll find those in women's magazines too). And, I can't help but wonder, are millions of young women around the world developing interests (and often expending precious time, money and energy) in pseudo-science just because it continues to be shoved down their throats? In a bizarre twist of usual economic principles, it looks like demand is actually being driven by supply. In effect, we read - and believe - our horoscopes, just because they are there.

Naomi Wolf, in her incredible, seminal work The Beauty Myth, points out that as women have become more independent and gained more rights, new ways have to be found by patriarchal structures in which to keep women subjugated. She argues that the focus upon physical beauty, which requires massive expenditure of time, money, physical effort and psychological energy, effectively allows women to subjugate themselves more effectively than men have done for centuries.

Would it be too much of a stretch to apply this argument to the presentation of pseudo-science in women's magazines? Perhaps horoscopes, moon-calendars, feng-shui charts, numerology and so-called clairvoyants are yet another insidious way of keeping women's minds from the important issues at hand, or misplacing our energies in fixing them. Who cares if you're not earning as much as your male colleagues at work, when moving a pot-plant into your Money Corner will see you rolling in the bucks? Why end a relationship with an abusive or inattentive partner, when Venus is on the rise, bringing with it a mystical new age of love and mutual respect?

At best, the magazines are patronising us with facile explanations for the complexities of our lives.
At worst, they're deliberately dumbing us down.

Do you read your horoscope? Does it annoy you that publications targeted at intelligent women still expect us to be interested?
Or is the Bitch just being a Bitch this week?

What Not To Name Your Kids

I'm getting to that age where my friends are beginning to breed en masse. Fortunately, I like children. I'm happy to babysit, change nappies, visit hospitals with armfuls of flowers, and to smile and nod at the interminable explanations of feeding patterns, sleepless nights and developmental milestones. In fact, the only thing that makes me want to scream and tear my hair out is what my friends are naming their children.

Ridiculous child-naming practices are de rigueur nowadays, apparently in every social sphere from billionaire celebrities to dole-queuing teenage mothers.
Below, I've attempted to list some of the most egregious trends in child nomenclature.

1- The Boy's Name For Girls
Step 1: Find a boy's name that you like, such as James, William, or Charles.
Step 2: Give birth to a girl instead.
Step 3: Call her Jamie, Billie or Charlie and congratulate yourself upon your individuality.

2 - The Surname
Hands up who has recently met a child named "Mackenzie"? What about "Taylor"? If I had ten hands, they would all be up. In celebrity-land, Brooke Shields and Nicole Ritchie have jumped on this bandwagon as well, naming their daughters (respectively) Grier and Harlow.

3- The Name You Spell Yourself
Tay-lah, Tayla, Tailagh, Taylhar... oh, excuse me but I think your bourgeois pretensions might be showing...

4 - The Mis-spelled Foreign Name
A girl I know named her daughter "Channelle". Yes, that's right. Like Chanel, but with some extra letters thrown in so that the child can feel individual despite her obvious namesake. (In fact - this one breaks the surname rule as well - but I guess it's preferable to calling a child Coco. Are you reading this, Courtney Cox and David Arquette?). Another friend of mine, apparently shying away from all the boring normality implied by Chantelle introduced me to her daughter Shontel. I weep for the future.

5 - The Name You Invent Yourself
Mnemonics are bad enough (think "Taome" - The Apple Of My Eye), but the worst of the worst must be the laughable attempt of those bastions of elegance and understatement, Peter Andre and Katie Price (AKA Jordan) to create a name for their daughter. Princess Tiaamii, the poor brat's name, is a merging of the names of Andre's mother (Thea) and Price's mother (Amy), with "Princess" whacked in front for good measure. In the words of Price herself; "we added some extra letters to make it unique, and some accents to make it look interesting". A class act all the way.
Apologies - My computer does not seem to have the functional capacity to include the various accents over vowels in Tiaamii.

6 - The Common Noun
Apart from the names of flowers and jewels, common nouns as names are, thank goodness, largely restricted to celebrities (who could forget baby Apple Martin?). However, we will know that common nouns-as-names have crossed over to the common domain when we eventually meet a child named Wingnut or Ashtray.

7 - The Celebrity Tribute Name
Apart from the aforementioned Harlow, dishonourable mentions go to Geri Halliwell for naming her daughter Bluebell Madonna (extra demerit points for Bluebell), and to the US couple who couldn't get a birthday cake inscribed to their son Adolf Hitler Campbell.

8 - The Celebrity-Offspring Tribute Name
Until Lleyton and Bec Hewitt named their daughter Mia, it wasn't a name you heard very often. Now it's in the top 5 most popular baby names in Australia, and overused to the point of sticking in your throat. Ditto Bindi (Irwin). Ditto Matilda (Ledger). But not, strangely enough, Sunday Rose...

9 - The Reminiscent-of-Conception Name
Whenever my friend Airlie tells someone her name, it's as likely as not that they will make the same joke I did; "What, were you conceived at Airlie Beach?". The answer is yes. The New Zealand registry of Births revealed that in recent years, it has barred parents from naming their newborns such epithets as "Midnight Chardonnay" and "Number 16 Bus Shelter". Please. We don't need to know the details of the conception. The baby's enough proof that you had sex. Ok?

10 - The Joke Name
Those New Zealanders are at it again! A few months ago, a judge allowed 13-year old Tallulah Does The Hula From Hawaii (last name suppressed) to change her given name, ruling that her parents were irresponsible to give it to her in the first place. In France, a court refused to allow Mr and Mrs DeFrance to name their daughter Marie-Antoinette Reine, which would have rendered her (in English) "Marie Antoinette, Queen of France".
I've been assured that Ashlee Simpson and Pete Wentz's baby, Bronx Mowgli, is not a joke. However, I remain to be convinced.

Anything to add to the list? Anything you would remove?
What's the worst name you've heard someone give a child?

The Princess Litmus Test

I'm by no means the first person to note the problems with what fairy-tales could be teaching kids. Veritably, fairy-tales are rife with infanticide (Hansel and Gretel), incest (Many Furs), cannibalism (Hansel and Gretel again), genetic determinism based on birth order (anything featuring a Seventh-Son or -Daughter) and maleficent or outright murderous step-family (Cinderella, Snow White, etc.). Some of the more unpalatable devices have been omitted from public consumption in recent years; for instance, it's difficult to find a current copy of Cinderella, which depicts the public torture of the evil-stepmother and -stepsisters which featured at the end of original versions. In another act of housekeeping by Disney, Ariel the Little Mermaid traded her voice for legs, whilst Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid endured legs which were paid for in agonising pain - every step she took on them was enchanted to feel that she was walking on upturned knives.

What the modern fairy-tales don't omit, however, is what I consider to be the most dangerous device of all - the notion of innate royalty. And, more frighteningly, how royalty is operationalised to children to, socialised by ideas of tiaras, pretty dresses, castles and white horses, are taught to aspire to it.

The Princess and the Pea instructs young readers that a Princess can easily be identified from a "commoner" through the application of a simple test - a Princess Litmus Test - where she is put to bed on a boiled pea beneath twenty mattresses and twenty feathered-eiderdowns. The take-home points from this engaging story, regarding the properties of a Princess (that is, as repeatedly emphasised, a true Princess), are as follows:

a) She will be beautiful (with tiny hands and feet, flaxen hair, and skin as white as milk, in most translations), mild-mannered, and pliable enough to allow herself to be subjected to bizarre experiments designed to determine her lineage.
b) She will be "delicate" - to the point where she is unable to sleep on a boiled pea, even when this pea is underneath twenty mattresses and twenty eiderdowns.
c) She will suffer from a bizarre skin condition which will cause her to break out in bruises after spending a sleepless night in said pea/mattress/eiderdown arrangement.
d) She will complain heartily of her mental and physical stress from the event, in front of the people who did her a favour by putting her up for the night.
ERGO: This will hook her a royal wedding and "happily ever after", as only a true Princess could exhibit such delicacy and fragility.

Take-home points for little girls (who are taught to idolise Princesses) include:

a) Princesses really are a whole different species to you and me.
b) Princesses are, without question, beautiful (and blonde, and thin, and white).
c) Princesses should not be able to cope with anything.
ERGO: The ultimate aspiration presented to little girls is to be pretty, wear a nice dress, and marry a prince after demonstrating the ultimate in physical inferiority and self-indulgent hysteria over creature comforts.

Recently, when I asked some little girls I was taking care of for the afternoon what they wanted to play. The answer was, of course, "Princesses!", and was the same when I asked what they wanted to be when they grew up. I caught myself, for one moment, trying to explain to a five-year old in a pink tulle dress-up skirt that Princesses are just like you and me, but with more expensive outfits.

"They're not," I explained,"really any different to other people. You're just the same as them."

The little girl didn't believe me. Why would she, when everyday, imagined princesses are presented to her in their rosy, golden glory, complete with storybook Prince. I suddenly had a sneaky idea. I pulled out a glossy magazine from another room, and flicked through until I found a royal; Princess Beatrice, looking pallid and unattractive at a London event.

The little girls were unanimous in declaring that she didn't look like a Princess at all. Crown Princess Mary of Denmark, playing with her children in a parka on a beach, was judged the same way. In fact, the only person that the little girls agreed did look like a Princess was Hilary Duff, in a pink dress on a red carpet.

Even real Princesses were failing the Litmus Test.

In the end, I don't think I managed to rid those little girls of their illusions about royalty. In their hearts, they know quite well that Princesses are beautiful, pink-clad, and better than real people. Instead, I think that the only take-home point I provided to the little girls that day was that they wanted to be Hilary Duff. OK by me, so long as it doesn't imply skin trauma from sleeping on a boiled legume.