Mags and Fags

Up at the very crack of dawn - yeah, no, don't go there - in any case, 'twas not I but the bloody crow, and even earlier, at three I was awoken by an aircraft that sounded as though it was landing on our house, bear in mind that YVR has a midnight curfew. I can understand that delays sometimes make the curfew an impossibility, however Kevin's brother Trevor flew in on a flight that was actually scheduled to arrive at one am the night before.

But...I was out of the house quite early this morning, needing to get to the Post Office which, like many in Britain is situated inside another shop, in this case Shoppers' Drug Mart. Shoppers' is like Superdrug with aspirations towards Boots. I like aspirations and I like Boots, ergo I like SDM.

So...anyhow, I decided to check out the magazines because Austen has asked Ben to bring him back an American Football magazine, or a Canadian Football mag, or.....whatever, we haven't been able to find one. This is odd really. The range of magazines on the shelves in stores here is unbelievable. But in spite of this, no football of any nationality. I found two dedicated to snowboarding, and one called 'Real Simple', I didn't bother to check this out, I assume it was a minor interest mag for people who uphold the right to use bad grammar.

Then there was a men's mag called 'Details' with a picture of Ashton Kutcher looking quite grown up on the front. Ashton, claimed the headline, may be the best husband in the world. Not quite sunshine, not quite, can he solder your network card back together in his lunch hour and bring it back in his coffee break? Yeah see I'm thinking maybe not.
Nonetheless, let's recap, a mag with Ashton on the cover and another headline reading, 'Are straight men victims of heterophobia?' Come again squire? Yes, I'm always passing women and gay men hissing 'STRAIGHTY' as a term of abuse at non-gay men in the street. Straight men have absolutely NO rights to civil partnerships in Britain, they have to get married. They are constantly getting straight bashed by marauding feminists and their gay friends.
Give me a break.
I would however mention a good read and as ever an interesting slant on the topic of homophobia by Sleepy.

One of Sleepy's readers had never heard the term fag hag. Strange. They might as well not learn it, because it may soon have another meaning. In Britain, people are being asked to spy and tell on smokers who light up in public places. Quite apart from the obvious concerns about this, why would anyone bother? You can't scratch your bum in Britain without it being caught on camera, the difficulty is actually dealing with all the information that comes in. Imagine the convo.
'Yer but, no but, right, this is Vicky 'ere, I seen Jimmy Riddle smokin in a pubic place, yeah, public place, tha's wha' I said anyway, 'i sarw 'im fingerin' Stacey Moffat an I know they done it once when 'er mum was down the pub cos like 'e told us all the next day. Anyway, 'e was smokin'.'
'Thank-you Vicky, do you know where Jimmy Riddle lives?'
'Yeah, but no but, right....'

What are they going to do? Have a flying fag squad waiting for the call, to rush out and arrest Jimmy in the middle of the street?

Still, as ever, the point of any of it is to make us think twice before doing it and by and large that works.
The article ends by telling us that when the hotline was introduced in Scotland, calls were down to 14 a day by the end of July.

Coming off the topic and back from the shop this morning, I noticed that the legend 'Yes, we eat pussy!' had been removed both from the primary and secondary school walls. I'm impressed with the efficiency of this. But I'd be more impressed were it not for the fact neither school has any boundaries. Both schools occupy grounds that are public areas. So, when I walked back to our house, the primary school was on break and I simply went straight through the children playing. I personally have been police checked into oblivion during the process of coming here, but it isn't stamped on my forehead.

At the school where Sleepy and I worked in Portsmouth, and where Austen still works, we had a problem of keeping the pupils on site, but I think it would be fair to say that the danger was to the public and from them (the kids), not the other way round, so we had occasions for example when we had information that pupils from another school were coming down for a fight, when the school fields would be flooded with staff members and police cars parked in the road.

It only needs one incident, one kiddie being taken or interfered with or even spoken to by a stranger. And please don't think for one second that my title applies to this. It is not gay men, (or smokers, or readers of magazines) who harm children. It is just damaged people.

Still on education, I noticed that in Education Guardian this week, the government seem to have decided to go back to having children learn their tables and learn the sounds of letters before they learn to read whole words. Hmmm... where do I remember that from? Oh yes, childhood. The article isn't saying that children haven't been learning tables just that they need to do it earlier. Well, in my mind, that's what we did as soon as we started infant school as rising fives, however one of my friends who reads this actually started primary school with me and she has a MUCH clearer memory of those days than I, so she may want to correct me on that.

And with only a very tenuous connection to what I've written about today, if you did read Sleepy's post that I linked to, she mentions heroines. One of mine is Hillary Rodham Clinton and yesterday I greatly enjoyed this article sent to me by Ree. May she go from strength to strength and from sea to shining sea, and that goes for Hillary too ;)

I almost forgot, but not quite, that Adam and Lisa's site, 'Posegate' now opens in Firefox and Safari, which helps me a lot since I use Firefox. Yesterday Adam posted about one of my anti-heroes, Tom Cruise or more to the point, Cruise's alleged child Suri. Adam thinks Scientology plot clone, I think adopted from across the sea. Look at the picture and see what you think.