Hmm… a perfect place for a punch up. Image via facebook.
Ueli Steck’s climbing career is littered with ‘firsts’ but it’s highly unlikely that, come retirement, he’ll consider his involvement in the first fist fight to occur at 25,000 feet among his favourites.
Via tumblr. H/T JC.
I used to be in a band. Thanks to the people around me at that time – my band mates, venue staff, promoters, the selfless souls who would hump equipment up and down flights of stairs, the fans who followed us everywhere to ensure we never had to play without at least twenty people throwing crazy shapes in front of the stage – it was one of the most exciting, petrifying, weird, maddening, exhausting and ultimately thrilling experiences of my life.
Regular readers will know that I’m perpetually primed to be pissed off when I read about incidents of misogyny, but a Tumblr post from Canadian musician Grimes that popped up on my FB feed yesterday touched an especially tender nerve of the festering feminist within.
Do you use Timotei? Image: Marianna Massey/Getty Images.
Writing is a difficult business, fraught with self-indulgence, petulance and the kind of narcissistic navel gazing that should be punished with a hefty slap in a world where people are really suffering.
Thankfully, I’m over it, my hairdresser has sorted through the carnage my burnout breakdown inflicted on my bouff and I’m ready to tell you what I think about the telly.
It’s Broadchurch, baby!
Continue reading “Bitching, Bad Hair Days And A Bit Of Broadchurch”
You know, I think we’re a bit beyond a spray on de-icer here.
Once upon a time, a truck load of snow dumped over my house would have sent a shiver of excitement up my spine.
It wasn’t just the school closure that inevitably followed such an event that thrilled me. School was closed at other times of the year too, but only snow, lots and lots of snow, saw me actively encouraged by the responsible adults around me to engage in all manner of dangerous and anti-social behaviours that were strictly prohibited in other seasons – building effigies in the garden and festooning them with produce purloined from my mother’s vegetable basket, throwing dangerous missiles at other people and piloting my own craft (constructed entirely from binbags, wood and bits of plastic) over steeply graded terrain at extreme speeds with no brakes.
But when you’re a grown up, the sense of immortality that encourages you to engage in the kind of activities that end in thrilling injury and worrying bloodloss has passed, hasn’t it? A snow covered garden should be met with a gentle sigh or raised eyebrow of indifference, shouldn’t it?
Yes. If you’re a proper grown-up. If you’re like me, it’ll go a little more like this.
Continue reading “Garden Grrl: In Winter, A Young(ish) Grrl’s Thoughts Turn To Hospital Treatment”
Images via facebook.
Wilfred de Bruijn was walking home through Paris with his male partner after a dinner date on Sunday night. He woke up in an ambulance after being savagely beaten in a homophobic attack and posted this photo to his Facebook account shortly afterwards. The story went viral and activists responded by staging an anti-homophobia demonstration on Rue Des Archives in Paris on Tuesday evening.
Would you have done it? Imagine that for a second. If you were beaten in the street for being different, would you post an image of your broken face on your timeline? Would it make you feel a little better about what happened to you if that image had inspired hundreds of people to protest in your name and express their support for you?
Maybe. Maybe not. But just think how lucky you are to have that choice.
Continue reading “Wilfred de Bruijn: The Comfort Of Strangers”
Shit. You got us.
Er… Steve? Image via discovery.
Before yesterday evening I would have sworn, in a document written using my own blood if necessary, that I had sat through every conceivable televisual extrapolation of man’s fascination with Great White Sharks.
I’ve watched Robin Reliant sized members of this extensively toothed species launch themselves out of the water in pursuit of Styrofoam seals, force their way into pitifully inadequate dive cages and literally hundreds of hours of footage of them swimming in the vicinity of divers armed with cameras and inadequate poky sticks, the expressions on their pointy faces suggesting they’re as bored and pissed off with the whole charade as I am.
But that was the old days, before Steve Backshall.
Continue reading “TV Review: Swimming With (Empathetic) Monsters”
“…when female nudity is placed outside a sexual context, both men and women recoil from it.”
A big thank you to Angela Merkel, Vladimir Putin and assorted other dignitaries, who this morning took it upon themselves to prove my theory about the efficacy of FEMEN’s topless activism, whilst attending a Hannover trade fair.
The amount of criticism they’ve been receiving lately from women I respect was making me doubt myself.
Image: Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images.
Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman.
Unless you’re Andrej Pejic. For him, it’s a piece of piss.
Kelly Welles 
