Guns, Roses and Buddha's Belly

Where do we get the expression 'Buddha Belly' from? I ask because I have been thinking about Buddha, though not in a spiritual or any way a religious sense, I have been thinking about his fat belly.

So I googled, or u-google-ised (I dunno, Zoolander just wandered into my head at that point)Buddha and Wikipedia reminded me of something, there's not just one Buddha. But it also gave me a picture of the sort of statue you see in Temples here and lo - no Buddha Belly. Hmmm.

Ok, this is why I am obsessing today about some guy's belly fat. On the radio I heard two interesting snippets. One was that the new Guns'n'Roses album is ready to be released and cost $13 million to produce. That seems a lot. Radio guy, DJ, said he had 'heard it was a wall of guitars, gone are the synths.' Hmm...you can buy a lot of Gibsons for 13 mill. And the album is called 'Chinese Democracy'.

The second thing was that some Canadian Health study had shown that people in South Richmond were among the fattest in the Lower Mainland, and yet people in North Richmond were the slimmest. Well, Kev and I live in North Richmond and whilst we're not Dan and Roseanne, we're not underweight either. Aside from that however, it didn't exactly defy comprehension. The south of the city is where a lot of Europeans live, and the North is where a lot of Chinese people live.
We are told that members of the Chinese community are now experiencing obesity, by their own standards of physiology, it's just that you wouldn't be able to tell by looking.

SO back to my question, where oh where did we get this idea of the little fat guy with a huge round tum? Probably some kind of status thing.

It seems that South Africa has now legalised same-sex marriage. That makes it sound like something exciting and secretive that people have been doing down back alleys for years. Yeah, well, good for them.
It is not without problems though. Firstly, being gay is considered a 'white disease' although clearly one that can leap happily across racial boundaries. I don't believe 'being on the down-low' originated in the white community.
But it could just end up bringing the end to some repressive, degrading and outmoded institutions, the offering of a dowry for example. This is referred to as 'destabilising tradition' but the words themselves are emotive. I don't remember anyone referring to Apartheid as 'tradition' because if they had, then destabilising it would have been a damn good thing to do with it.

In Save-On today, the Christmas chocs display is up and in there are.....Terry's chocolate snowballs, mintballs (chuffed to them) and Terry's orange slices. Pukka.

In 24 hours I'll be on my way to the airport.