Party. In contrast to my formative years – I use the word "formative" here not in the sense that they formed anything lasting, but that they were expected to before things went all "tits-up" as the idiom of my original culture would say – I am not a party animal.

Or, if I am a party animal, I am something nocturnal, shy and foraging, like some minor rodent.

Don't get me wrong. Halloween 2009 will be very positively memorable for many reasons; mainly that it was the debut of "Damini" in my little town -

- and the company I was with, a small selection of people I've come to know and love in this town, was as ever excellent;

- yet somehow I still feel disconnected from the type of evening where Whigfield and Ay, Macarena are symbolic of the evening's aural entertainment; things were so bad that I almost whooped at Steve Vai's oasis-in-a-mediocre-desert ten-second guitar break in Beat It providing the only musical highlight of the proceedings.

I mean, it's a Halloween bash, can't I even do The Time Warp?

In the end, I hung around the kitchen, where things were at least quieter and less affected by line dancing.

In all this, I haven't changed much in the past twenty-five years, when the horrors of the mid-to-late-80s youth club disco and it's "Stock Aitken and Twatmeister"-produced soundtrack were at least punctuated by one song per evening to headbang to, even if it was something wanky like The Final Countdown or Crazy Crazy Nights.

The illicit alcohol I often smuggled into such proceedings also helped smooth things over, of course. Which was another reason I feel slightly "disconnected" in parties and discos nowadays.

So I'd still much prefer to talk to these lovely people over a large curry or pots of coffee.

…But can I still wear the frock anyway?

[Written about 1:30pm.]

link

"Traditional Polish Gypsy group 'La Roma' established in 1995 and based in Southend-on-Sea is made up of 23 young Roma dancers who perform a cornucopia of classical Romanian, Polish, Hungarian, Russian and Pakistani dances, accompanied by four musicians and 2 singers."

link

[Thanks, Gosia et al. Thanks, Paula et al.]

Gosia [in red] and the Pancake [Nalesniki] Team

Envy:

It is said, in an old Russian proverb, that "jealousy and love are sisters", which may explain some of the following green-eyed feelings that I'm having today;

- for Max who will spend the evening in the Goddess Tori's company [along with 3,600 other ravingly-insane devotees];

- for Zo's plane-hopping and Madrid-hanging;

- for Paula's birthday yesterday – she arranged a lovely picnic in Rendlesham Forest…

…and I took the opportunity, on the deserted kids'-play-area, to indulge in a spot of pole-dancing…

…but it was her use of the birthday present I got her, later on with Rik, which I'm envious of [no, I'm not telling you what it was, let's just say I got a message this morning from her saying "OUCH"];

- for Milly's trip to Office;

- for England for always getting a much easier qualifying group than we do;

- and for anyone who actually manages to do housework without having a partial nervous breakdown about it whilst they contemplate and fear the amount of energy and effort that will have to be put therein. [Yes, I know, I probably spend more energy thinking about it than I do actually getting on with it, but since nobody provides "housework counselling/therapy" I'm stuck with it.]

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Thing that is helping right now:

- Composer of the Week is Bernard Herrmann, best known for his film scores, and especially those for Alfred Hitchcock. Listening to them is a wonderful journey down memory lane for an amateur movie buff like myself.

Already this week, alongside the classic Vertigo and Psycho scores, there's been unexpected delights – for instance, I didn't know Herrmann was also the composer for things like The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad; images from that film, such as the snake woman…

…and the skeleton warrior…

[images from http://theseventhvoyage.com/theseventhvoyagefilm.htm]

…were burned into my consciousness at an early age; the effects are clunky by modern CGI standards, but have a charm and an aura utterly absent from the vast majority of computerized animation.

I'm not a technophobe or Luddite – I recognize the benefits of modern technology, especially in computing [how else would I know all you bonzer people?], and in this case it's probably not technology's fault in itself, so much as the technology allowing the accountants to demand short-cuts.

[The best example I can think of for this is Fantasia vs Fantasia 2000. In the first, each of the leaves blowing off the tree accompanied by the Nutcracker Suite are individually drawn, and each has its own random but beautiful trajectory. In the latter, during Beethoven's 5th the shapes move in a mathematically precise set of radii, and it looks sodding cheap and horrible.]

Ray Harryhausen, gawd bless him, was immune to such things; there's no way he could work any faster than the eleven months the "dynamation" for this film took. Somewhere along the line the artists and the creative people lost control…

Not a shitload happening continues to be the order of the day here – and a bloody good thing it is too, I may add [and indeed have just done so].

These are a few things that have passed through my consciousness over the past few days;

- C & N's wedding reception on Saturday evening. This was held in a pub right next to Sutton Hoo, and the three hours I was there now holds the record for the longest time I've spent in licensed premises without touching alcohol. The night went well apart from the very end, when I was cornered by a drunk woman who kept telling me about my "guardian angel" [apparently "a man who stands right behind me at all times, but not a relative". Who, then? Nicholas Parsons?]

The couple are wonderful, but their music choices differ somewhat, and that was reflected in that which was played over the course of the evening. Put it like this; seguing Enter Sandman with Barbie Girl is a nice trick if you can do it…

The photos have been all over FaceArse; I won't reproduce them here, but you can have this one of Paula and myself:

…and, cropped as so not to identify the person [because she's not of age and I've no permission to show her on a public bit of El Interwebz], this one to show why I was so jealous of the bridesmaids…

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- The DVD of Doctor Who – Battlefield which had disappeared under a pile for the past three months.

McCoy's Seventh Doctor is not well-regarded amongst some fans, but a careful watch shows a lot more depth than it was given credit for at the time. This story was particularly panned, and still holds the record for the lowest [first showing] audience ever for a Who episode; but it contains much that is worth it – the new Brigadier, the Who take on Arthurian legend, and Jean Marsh's much-more-subtle-than-it-looks Morgaine.

Particularly interesting is the heavily implied lesbian overtones between Ace and her new friend Shou Yuing [who should have been a co-companion] -

- although I may well just be imagining this…

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The Fish World app on FaceArse. Which is, I know, utterly useless, but in the absence of a proper fishtank here in Czech Cottage, it does a simulation pretty well.

Normally I avoid FB apps, especially those useless gift ones, but this one scores, if nothing else, for the soundtrack of bubbles and gulps, which, I've found, creates a nice background to the day's emailing, typing, blogging and CM01-02-cheating on this laptop.

Talking of background sound; ages ago I came across this site – which simulates the effect of walking into one of those seaside video game arcades, circa 1981, 1983, 1986 or 1992. The 1986 one particularly took me back to a misspent youth in Southend pushing 10p pieces into electronic money-sucking machines…

…I must dig out MAME. [Legal Note: Fish does not have any ROMS  for this application for games still protected by copyright.]

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World Champion Undergoes Gender Testing.

I have never really followed athletics at all, apart from a fleeting early-teenage fancy of Fatima Whitbread; but this story is interesting not just because of its politics, but because of the science.

As hurtful and invasive as the process has been to Caster Semenya, one of its effects is that it has highlighted the innate problems with determining gender in a small number of people.

Decades ago, they used to do a humiliating "physical examination" on athletes suspected of hiding gender reassignment; now, the process is complicated, and the IAAF's own criteria for determining gender go through a swathe of medical and psychological specialists in order to come up with a decision on whether a person is enjoying the metabolic "advantages" that come with male testosterone production, whatever their chromosomes say or whether they've got inny or outy joy-parts.

Several people I've been talked to have been genuinely surprised by this process, as they've only ever thought of gender in binary terms. Certainly it gives the lie to those who insist that God makes only Man and Woman unambiguously, fearful of what a proper rounded view of gender would do to their world views and to their control of people via their sexual identities.

To borrow the utterly wonderful Ben Goldacre's phrase; "it's a bit more complicated than that…"

I hope that Semenya's case is instrumental in helping awaken people to the complications of gender identity; certainly her heroine's welcome in South Africa will have very much heightened awareness in her own country. Reports have been that she has been reluctant to take the spotlight since the story broke, which I understand perfectly; but [however unwittingly] she could, if everything went well, be the face of a new understanding…

That nice little restaurant in Walthamstow is getting rather used to my bringing along gorgeous people.

Yep, yesterday it was Tallulah and partner's turn to make the jump from cyberspace to meatspace;

[clickyforbiggy]

…with several delightful flights of fancy along the way, involving yaks, lobsters, Patrick Stewart's head, and most gratifyingly, a round-table increasingly-Aristocrats exchange which if recorded would have resulted in the sentence  "wouldn't it be nasty to come home from holiday and find a dead fox; especially if it was covered in a shitload of cockroaches; all of which were doing semaphore; trying to communicate the message 'warning: it wanked in your toothpaste'?"

Yep, that sort of conversation.

Thank you, Pet.

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I also got invited to one of the performances of The Taming of the Shrew last night, played by all the women of the company who were going to do Henry Vee.

I know of the play generally through Kiss Me Kate, but I also remembered that as a small child I'd been dragged along to a performance in a park in Romford because one of the teachers at my primary school was in it. Not that I understood any of it at the time. The Bard's propensity for having characters switch roles and dress up as each other and pretend to be someone else confused the heck out of me.

But last night a little familiarity with the plot and main characters proved useful as J., playing lead male role Petruchio, had lost her voice that afternoon. She went on anyway: doing the performance – [omifroggingawd, I'm missing Torchwood for this?] – in mime.

Actually, once I got used to it, it was just as easy to interpret Petruchio through J.'s actions as it is to understand the character through the density of Shakespeare's language.

It was also slightly weird to see women dragging up for the male parts and cavorting with the female characters without once using or implying "the L word". It places a new twist on the tired-controversial gender politics of Shrew, and I'd've wanted to extend this further by placing butch/bitch for male/female. Whether that would've been suitable for the nice middle-class audience…

But if you're doing Shrew, there's only one part to get, and that's Katherina; screaming, shouting and generally behaving badly, you're fairly sure to steal the show.

Especially if you wear a little toy shrew on your head.

Katherina and Petruchio [pic courtesy of Des - thank you.].

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And most importantly today: Happy Birthday Zo!

May rose petals strew your every path, may your guffs smell of perfume, and may your giraffe always be clean and hygenic;

[stolen from here]

Warning: Mildly Saucy Content

Over on another site I occasionally frequent, it's become rather a ritual on the occasion of someone-on-there's birthday to post a picture of onesself showing off one's hottest attributes / attire.

And so it was this morning, when I celebrated my friend AOD's 30th with a picture. I decided it wasn't fair to allow the people over there to see this without sharing it with all you lot too [especially Cathy whose kind gift is shown below]:

And since it's my good friend Sheryl's birthday in a couple of days…

[there's a whole zip of pics to go with this, but they're totally unpostable here. Beg / bribe / swap if you want to see them ]

I'd like to see this "ritual" go to other sites and individual blogs too.

…My birthday is May 23rd. Just sayin'.