My Name is Earl's.

A few years ago now I saw a cartoon in the paper that I found so funny that for days afterwards it would pop into my head and I'd laugh. No-one else thought it so hysterical so I guess it just found my funny centre. It was just a picture of two hippos swimming around in a river and one says to the other,
'I keep thinking it's Tuesday.'

A line from last night's 'My name is Earl' keeps coming into my head and tickling me. Joy - the absolutely brilliant Jaime Pressly - comes out to find the car being towed. Her forehead furrows and she shouts at the man,
'What you doin' towin' a car with the American flag on it? ARE YOU PART TALIBAN???'

So moving on, this is what happens when you don't pay attention. Kevin and I had 'discovered' Nando's excellent sauces for cooking chicken some time ago, and I think we had first found them in Sainsburys. After a while we realised we could buy them here. Last summer we went to a food event in Richmond, where local establishments come and bring samples of their menus and you go around trying them for some nominal sum of money. Once more, we were impressed by Nando's chicken. We had noticed a 'Nando's' restaurant every time we came back from Save-on, and it looked a reasonable size, so every time we went past it we'd say, 'we must go there sometime.'
Now, I had asked Kevin what he wanted to do for his birthday and he had maybe wanted to go out, just the two of us, but as close as possible, since he was likely to be quite tired after work. 'Nando's,' I said. It was agreed.
Well, we drew up in the parking space right outside.
'Restaurant doesn't look up to much,' said Kevin. We sit and look,
'In fact....ah...it's take-out...' BURNED. We went to Earl's.

I was a tad disappointed with Judi Dench's latest offering 'Mrs Henderson presents'. I had been looking forward to this, trusting Dame Judi as one does. The reality of the film was something less, the history of the Windmill theatre in London that never closed because of the Blitz. But if you can see past the fact that it's Judi Dench saying the words, what she actually said was the usual old woman-pimping rubbish. The programme had changed from Vaudeville to include tableaux of nude women. Mrs. Henderson tells us that this is because among her son's effects - he was killed in the Great War - she found 'French postcards' ie pictures of naked women and realised that he would have died without ever seeing a real woman naked. Well fucking guess what? Men don't have a RIGHT to see women naked. He probably also died without seeing a hippo swimming around in a lake wondering if it's Tuesday, or learned Russian or heard a nightingale or any number of things.
At a time when men and women couldn't be openly gay and married women didn't have the right to work and the school leaving age was 14, what does this over-privileged woman focus on? Making money pimping women to men. The women who were taken into the theatre were unable to make money any other way. That to me was something worth focussing on.
There are a couple of moments of tokenism in the film, yes we see some willies, but basically it's just about objectifying women for men. The politicians tell Mrs. Henderson that allowing the theatre to stay open represents an unnecessary risk since they are trying to minimise opportunites for German bombs to fall on assemblies of people. Somehow, in spite of, as you might expect, the theatre being full of servicemen, this is considered silly.
The only thing I found really worth watching in the film was the performance by Thelma Barlow, Mavis from long ago Corrie. How great that she was finally able to show her real acting talents. I hope this leads to more and bigger parts for her because she was just sensational.

And while I'm still on my feminist soapbox, where did Nepal come from all of a sudden? Yes, I know it has always been there, but for the past few weeks it has been in the news every day, rioting in the streets, demanding the head of their King on a plate. Well, not quite.
This week, I was intrigued by an article in the Guardian, showing how the disturbances may actually change things for women there.
As in the India of Deepa Mehta's film, 'Water', widows in Nepal are shunned and women in general we are told, 'stay at home'. Lily Thapa, a widow and feminist sees opportunity in the situation though. She looks ahead to peace and sees ways that it can and must be re-structured because it will by necessity be more female dominated. All power to her, I hope she achieves great things for the women of her country. Empowering women is empowering the country itself.

Lastly, I was not overly-impressed with Catherine Bennett's article about Sheer Hite's new book. I expect to be able to get a real flavour of the book from a Guardian review and all I get from this one is the distaste in Bennett's mouth from having to meet Hite. I can understand that Bennett may feel annoyed that Hite is still banging on about the female orgasm just as she was thirty years ago, but give us some credit, maybe if she had read the book a bit more thoroughly and passed some of it on to us we could see where Hite is going, after all, someone is still willing to publish her.

Quoting Hite, she says,
""Female orgasm is a metaphor for political change," she declares. "Changing our idea of coitus and 'how it should be performed' is key to changing the larger society.""

Well maybe what she is saying is something similar to the recent study that I have mentioned twice this week. People in more gender equal societies are more satisfied with their sex lives and gender equal societies are ones where women have been empowered. They are the societies where the debate is still open, where the difference between men's and women's pay is something that can be discussed openly and freely and where women are part of politics.

Personally, I don't ever want to NOT live in a part of the world where women can scream 'What's wrong with you, are you part Taliban?' and live to tell the tale.