So where do we go with triplets? How do we determine which is the evil triplet? Does one of them get voted off the placenta?

With that disturbing (hopefully) image I'll leave you with some images I've sumbled across that indicate that both Angelina Jolie and Catherine Zeta-Jones have evil twins.

Actually I've always loved Catherine's twins... never underestimate the power of a dark clown!

My last couple of posts have been kind of wordy, so I think we all deserve a little break. 

The following visual feast is an assortment of crap that kicks around my flat making me *sigh*smile*laughobnoxiously*

Enjoy.

 My Oscar - a gift from my high school boyfriend. I suspect it was his subtle way of telling me I was a drama queen. Whatever.

Your eyes do not deceive you.  This little gem was discovered while rummaging around a junk store - it may in fact be the only one of its kind.  It was a find of a lifetime, celebrated with much hooting and hollering.  It may even possess magical properties.

Yes, it's the Book On Tape of the brilliant bestselling book on astrophysics written by The One and Only Stephen W. Hawking (my personal hero) as read aloud by...Michael Jackson.  Yes, indeedy.  Michael Jackson.  (Because Dr. Hawking is so awesome, I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that this was approved by him at a time when MJ was still cool.  And, you know...black.  And, you know, ...possessed a nose.)

To tell the truth, I haven't actually had the nerve to listen to it yet.  I'm not sure there is enough alcohol on the planet to make that possible.  Well, and I'm sort of afraid the gates of hell may open if I ever do.  So I may just put it in a nice shadowbox.

My leopard-skin pillbox hat.  (Chill out, it's faux leopard-skin.  I'm vegan, for cripes' sake.)

But, yeah.  Bob Dylan actually wrote the song about me, you know, not Edie Sedgewick.  Always stealing my thunder, that stupid wench.

(Oh, and the mask and Satanic-looking tiara in the background are not just props left over from a debaucherous night on the town.  I actually wear them both on a very regular basis.  I like to look pretty.)

BIG.  ASS.  SHELLS.  Found here on the bee-yoo-tee-full South Shore.

 Lava lamp night light.  Every home should have one.

Understand Your Mother breath spray.  Priceless.  A gift from (who else) my mother. 

It doesn't work for shit, by the way.

Gum, a gift from my, well, I was gonna say 'BFF' but Paris Hilton has ruined that term for me.  But you get the idea. 

"Don't Have Ugly Children Beauty Gum" and "Be Gone Evil Twin Gum." 

My friend was really hoping that second one would work.  It, like the "Understand Your Mother" breath spray, was disappointingly ineffective.

My books.  This is only a very small portion of my current library.  A very, very small portion.  I'm not posting pics of the rest because I don't want to overwhelm you.  Or scare you.

I'm seeking a support group.  (But I don't expect it will work, either.)

My flavoured toothpaste collection.  Because you just never know if it's gonna be a 'watermelon' kind of day or a 'citrus blast' kind of day...or maybe a snuggle-into-bed-tasting-like-'vanilla' kind of night.

Go ahead and laugh.  You're just jealous.

And finally, something that is one of my favourite things (today it is, anyway - sometimes it is future cat stew) :

The Glorious, the Dignified, the Incomparable...*

PYEWACKETT THE MAGNIFICENT  (Or...'RETARDED.'  I get those words mixed up sometimes.)

*This is supposed to be a cat play tunnel, by the way.  Wacky is such a fat-ass (it's hard to tell from the pic, but the tunnel is HUGE) that it's sort of more like his very own leopard-skin pillbox hat.  Kinda stylin', really.

Have a nice day.

Been grumpy and irritable all week, actually that is putting it mildly.  I've been downright Bitchy with a capitol B all week.  Probably hormonal, or something wacky with my lunar cycle, nonetheless trying to make excuses for my uncontrollable mood does not make it go away.  As a result of the sucky mood it seems like everything is difficult, is awful, and a royal pain in the ass.  It is a balance between ripping someone's head off and crying uncontrollably.  Maybe twice a year, I swing like this - I call this version of me- my evil twin, since I am a Gemini.  She, the evil twin, does not come out very often, but when she does she is feral, bitter, and does not like to play nice.    Even my friend/Yoga teacher Sue (bless her heart) tried to ease me out of my emotional discomfort with some great grounding exercises (crocodile) and reiki, but alas her efforts only achieved temporary relief of what I am unaffectionately calling my "ick".

I plan to drown my mood in Mexican cheesy goodness.  On this rainy Friday night I have prepared a lazy dinner - You can call it lazy person's quesadillas or Mexican Lasagna (Layers of tortillas, cheese, re-fried beans, roasted peppers, taco seasoning, Enchilada sauce out of a can, and my fave chipolte Tabasco- piled high in a deep casserole dish and baked in the oven); and one must have homemade guacamole (there is no other such thing) but for me that takes little effort to throw together.  I would normally post a picture for your viewing pleasure, but that would require too much effort at the moment, and would probably go wrong in some way irritating me to the point of deleting the post.  We don't want that.    

After dinner there is a steaming hot oily bath to be followed by catching up with the season premiere of "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" and a hot fudge sundae.  

I hope the combination of all those factors (not to mention the alcohol & snuggle time with H) will soothe me into a peaceful ----l---o---n---g---- sleep and I will wake up in the morning with a whole new attitude.  I do not want to waste my valuable Saturday in a horrible mood.

But first - a rough overview of the trip:

Thursday - 4:50 am - bus departs for Vancouver via Seattle

Thursday - 11:15/11:30am - arrive in Vancouver

Pick up Mom's car from Airport

Go home and nap.

Wake up - shower - not sure from there.  Depends on energy and what not.

Thursday - Evening - a trip to Kell's (Irish pub) with my PSS, our dear brother, and my evil twin!

Thursday - Night - Crash at my evil twin's place so its easier for her to drive me to the airport in the morning.

Friday morning - Fly out to LA, arrive in LA, Head for my Grandparents house.

Friday Day - This is a mystery to me!  I don't know what anyone has planned and I plan to just go with the flow.  I do know its my brothers b-day and I'm hoping that we get to spend some one on one time in there somewhere.  Maybe borrow a car and ditch the family for an hour or two?  Who knows.

Saturday - Grandparents 50th Wedding Anniversary - sadly I have no clue what time it's at (bad Ruthie!) but that's the plans for Saturday!  I know we're going to fancy restaurant and I'm really looking forward to seeing the family!

Sunday - Fly to Seattle, take the city bus to Greyhound - take the Greyhound to Ellensburg.

Sunday night - CRASH

Monday - Start finals week >_>

See why I'm calling this an adventure?  It's going to be a jam-packed couple of days!

So here's my plan.  I'm bringing my camera along with me and I plan on taking as many pictures as I possibly can!  I'm also going to take a notebook and do a "pre-blog" in there.  Making random notes of the sequence of events - interesting things - and comments about photos I'm taking.  Depending on whether I end up with any down time I MIGHT get one of the trip blogs up while I'm actually on the trip - but don't count on it.  It'll be finals week when I come back - so it might take a wee bit to get caught up blogging wise - but I do plan to blog about my trip and include lots of pretty photos!  Keep in touch while I'm gone :)  Whether I blog or not likelihood is I'll get on to check e-mail and messages.

Love you all! <3

Yesterday I saw my paladin's evil twin. All quasi-translucent and red. Like a Shadow Priest, but full of red rage.

... as the story goes, from my past 2 posts, I've been feeling rather moody and not myself... though I'm not sure how 'myself' actually feels like when I'm normal. Maybe I am the moody-anti-social-stuck-up-dick-head and all that goodie-happy-go-lucky-friendly-and-caring attitude is a show I put on to make myself fit into society.

I think that we shouldn't be happy all the time, shouldn't have things going our way all the time, shouldn't be rich all the time, etc... because like a lot of "great" philosophers have said, you can only know happiness if you've experienced sadness, and so on and so forth, yeah right! What we didn't know is, it's not necessary for you to enjoy something good after something bad has happened. It is actually easier to make something turn bad after something good happened.

Am I insane? Why would I want to jeopardize the wonderful feeling I'm experiencing to feel like a complete trash?

Because it's less stressful that way. If you don't care about anything, don't try to maintain anything, don't love anything, you would be able to see another part of you that you might have never seen before, the part that you're reluctant to let out of the dark, the part that you think everyone despise and hate, the part that might cause your relationships with people around you to turn sour or even break apart. Scary isn't it?

For years and years, authors after authors, self help/management books/articles have been published teaching people how to be good to one another, love each other, blah blah blah. How about the darker side of ourselves? Don't we need to help that part as well? If we can't control our darker half, then we haven't really truly understand ourselves entirely. Maybe that's the missing part that we've been trying to find an answer to to bring ourselves closer to what we truly want in life. So have you met your darker side yet?

HATE & ANGER

I figure it's going to happen today or tomorrow and I just wanted to take a moment to thank you all for stopping by, making this possible, and for pretending to like my stuff. :P Approximately 10,000 hits and growing, so I must be doing something right, or at least that's what I keep telling myself. ;) To commemorate this moment I have collected a bunch of pointless pictures with the common theme being 10,000. That and a suspiciously gay looking Spider-Man getting his grove on. :mrgreen: Ok Spidey, get down with your bad self.

Thanks again everyone. :)

I ain’t know ol’ girl from Eve—but she was ready to cuss me the hell out.

Turns out she hung out with my evil doppleganger the previous weekend at a club.
She was shocked when I revealed that she had the wrong dude. 

A few minutes earlier I talked to a different young lady who thought that we hung out at a tequila bar not too long ago.

I need to get to the bottom of this.

When considering potentially solutions to the issue, one of the first things to come to mind was an identity verification service.  This service is more geared towards the problem of allowing the average person to be sure of a web identity, than stopping the "Evil Twin" websites being created. Most people have numerous entities online, whether that be email accounts, social websites,  or even auction logins. Therefore, if there was a way to automatically verify a social website as being owned by the same person with an identity you already know, you could have greater confidence in the source of the webpage.

So how might this work. Ideally, a common set of protocols would be agreed so that you could log into your various web identities and submit a linkage back to an identity verification service. This would remove the need for the identity verification service from having to gain access to your various logins to test the validity of your identity. Having web sites sign up to such a protocol would always be a problem without a benefit (unless they get alot of public demand for it). The value for social websites would be if there was a common way that the average person knowns if a site is an evil twin or not (through some sort of common visual key that lists the web sites owners other known web identities), then the high profile sites hosted on a particular social site becomes more valulable from a marketing point of view (i.e. we host the official website for Celebritory X).

The next problem is how do we get people to use the service and do the work required to link their web identities back to the verification service. The build it and they will come, will only succeed with the population who are aware of the problem and look for ways to mitigate the risk to themselves. Unfortunately, it wont hit critical mass this way because those who don't know better, wont want to do the work to link their identities. One possible solution is to try link the verification service  to some other cross website service like federated authentication (e.g. OpenID). So now we have potentially two beneficial services, strong authentication and strong web identity verification, in one place.

There are quite a few issues with the suggestions above (e.g. how to protect from identity theft if you are presenting all the idendities of an individual to verify the owner of a website). But in the interest of not turning this into some sort of novel, I will leave it to the community to suggest improvements,  pull the idea apart, and finally shoot it down in flames in the hope it may get others thinking about alternative solutions to the problem.

Pois é: o PVC é considerado por muitos como uma das substância mais tóxicas que existem. Seja na hora de produzir, consumir ou descartar.

Entre os males ligados a ele estão câncer e problemas no aparelho reprodutivo. Tudo porque o PoliCloreto de Vinila é inútil sem a adição de substâncias altamente tóxicas, como os ftalatos, que servem para amaciá-lo e torná-lo maleável (pense numa jaqueta de vinil), e os organoestânicos, que estabilizam o plástico, e são usados como tratamento contra mofo e poeira (ácaros) em alguns carpetes e pisos, e atacam o sistema imunológico.

Por outro lado, alguns advogam, o PVC é o único plástico que não vem unicamente do petróleo: 57% dele é composto por cloro, que é derivado do cloreto de sódio (sal), recurso renovável. Outros 43% são de eteno, que vem do processo de refinamento do petróleo.

Na Europa, produtos que contem ftalatos estão sendo sistematicamente proibidos e restringidos e já não podem ser utilizados na confecção de brinquedos infantis. Além disso, o PVC é de reciclagem complicada devido aos seus aditivos tóxicos, e uma garrafa feita do material pode arruinar a reciclagem de 100.000 garrafas PET se misturada acidentalmente→. Para saber quando você está usando algo de PVC, basta olhar o triângulo da reciclagem e procurar o número 3, no centro, ou a letra V, sob as flechas. Esse símbolo indica que o plástico utilizado é o Vinil. (Confira aqui o que cada símbolo significa).

O Greenpeace indica, como alternativa ao nosso evil twin, o polipropileno (além de alguns outros, você pode ler aqui). E qual não foi minha surpresa em descobrir que o Instituto do PVC não estava dizendo a verdade (oh! Uma associação de classe que defende o interesse dos seus sócios em detrimento da realidade!) e que, na verdade, existem outros plásticos que, além de serem menos nocivos ao meio ambiente, também utilizam materia prima não proveniente do petróleo. É o caso de um tipo especial de Polipropileno (PP, ou 5 na hora de reciclar) produzido pela Coza, uma marca de utensílios domésticos que mistura esse plástico com lignina, uma substância orgânica que vem das fibras de celulose, além de fibra de cânhamo, sisal e linho. Outra empresa, a Orikasso, usa o PP para produzir copos, pratos e afins, com o intuito de substituir utensílios descartáveis. O legal é que eles vêm desmontados, e você dobra na hora de usar, o que facilita o transporte para lugares mais remotos. Ou seja, são canecas, pratos e copos instântaneos. E, como esse tipo de plástico é muito resistente ao dobra-desdobra, a garantia do fabricante é longa: 10 anos de uso. Pena que não tem por aqui.

Para dizer a verdade, plástico não precisa ser proveniente do petróleo. Existem alguns compostos feitos a partir de amido (pode ser milho, mandioca, etc) que são biodegradáveis e, portanto, podem ser descartados no lixo comum. Mas, por enquanto, eles ainda não passaram de protótipos e talvez demore algum tempo até que possamos encontrá-los em qualquer esquina. Por isso, sempre que falarmos de plástico, lembre da hierarquia dos Rs: Reduzir, reutilizar e reciclar. E quando for absolutamente necessário, procure um plástico menos nocivo à natureza.

Mais sobre PVC: Greenpeace, Suzano Petroquímica, Be Safe

:::

Foto cortesia de found_drama via Flickr.

The fun times have begun.  Or will shortly.

THE EVIL TWINS' CO-BLOG.

Oh yeah.  It's going to get real interesting.  :D

Danny Noriega, on the other hand, plays perfectly as a dark horse, perhaps not to go all the way to the end, but to last much longer than people expect him to. VoteForTheWorst.com has already started encouraging votes for Danny, labeling him as this season's Sanjaya Malakar. We all know how well Sanjaya did after bombing performances week after week.

However, I think that Danny has the upper hand against Sanjaya. Though "Jailhouse Rock" didn't show off his vocal skills, his previous auditions proved he has a voice with way more potential than Sanjaya ever had. He also has the bonus of being memorable for reasons other than just his hair. His remarks to the judges felt much more like amused banter than the result of spitfire attitude that some have labeled to him. In that way he's oddly likable, albeit in a completely different way than David.

Personalities aside, David and Danny are alarmingly similar. Their names have similar rings to them and the same distributions of syllables: David Archuleta, Danny Noriega. They both auditioned in San Diego. They both have green eyes, dark brown hair, thin body frames, and somewhat childish faces. They are only a year apart in age.

It should be fairly obvious by now what I'm driving at. They are clearly the same person, separated into two halves: the light and the dark. David Archuleta has the smooth voice, the ever-smiling face, the innocent reactions to praise, and the vote of probably every pre-teen girl across the country. Danny, the "evil" twin, has the solid voice, the witty remarks, the audacity to retort to Simon, and probably the most femininity of the ten guys left.

I suppose this all makes David the "light horse" to win the competition, and perhaps rightfully so. It's interesting to wonder what would have happened had someone with the un-separated personalities of Danny and David auditioned for American Idol, some Davy Archiega. It's possible he would have been rejected for being far too normal. Year after year, we've seen the judges go for the polar opposites, the ones who stand out among the rest, not just with their voices, but with their personalities as well. Against all the odds, we managed to get two polar opposites of the same person in the same season, and both of them will go far.

What is evil twin?

It has taken me all day to write, but the only casualty is my waistline where I accidentally ate nearly half a box of Thorntons new 'single source' chocolates to keep me going.  Apparently these boxes of Thorntons have cocoa that is sourced from individual countries so that you can appreciate the naked chocolate hit or something.  Normally they blend the cocoa together in a big tub, but this is 'new', this is 'exciting', this is a purist chocolate experience (this is marketing, but it's chocolate so I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt).  This box had three different types of chocolate from three African countries.  I would tell you what they are, but I can't be bothered to go back down to the kitchen and have a look.  For the sake of argument I'll say Doncaster, Basingstoke and Swindon.  Each one is lovingly hand crafted, and looks very beautiful indeed.  One even has a teeny, weeny bit of gold leaf fluttering atop it (note the poetic language here.  We are what is known as 'waxing lyrical').

I tested each one.  Then I tested them again.  I had a little rest.  I cleaned my keyboard of the residue of chocolate powder, and then I had another little testette.  Luckily there were no cries of outrage from the family, as these are all dark chocolate, and I'm the only one who likes dark chocolate.  I like my chocolate as dark as possible.  I am a great fan of Green & Black's chocolate because even the milk chocolate is so bitter it makes your mouth pucker like a cat's bum when you eat it.  One of the chocolates I ate today was 92% cocoa solid.  I don't think I've ever tasted chocolate that dark before.  It was squinchingly good.  It had that sour edge to it that I really love.  It's the same kind of taste you get from a really good cup of black coffee. Yum!

The trusty chocolate got me through the long, dark teatime of the soul, which is just as it should be.  I would be feeling liberated from the bonds of oppression about now, but I am mostly just tired out and a bit over chocolated.  I have also cooked a proper dinner this evening, which I think is what has tipped me over the edge.  I have actually cooked every day, but the other days were just old faithful, no brainer type days where it was easy.  This evening I went a bit creative.  I don't know what came over me.  It was probably the fact that the Ocado man had just been and we had more than a dried up piece of parmesan and some salted anchovies in the cupboard to be honest.  I did chicken breasts steamed in foil with a thai marinade, stir fried savoy cabbage with garlic, chilli and sesame seeds and rice.  It was very nice. 

The kids had cheese sandwiches and a good moan for pudding.  I do try.  I really do.  They are philistines.  I would have made them try it, but I couldn't stand the thought of dining with midgets who look like they're about to face the firing squad.  It takes all the joy out of life.  Tilly made such a fuss when I cooked the cabbage that she went and sat in the lounge with a jumper wrapped round her head.  Apparently: 'It's the smell.'  I bet Gordon Ramsay doesn't have to put up with this kind of crap.  That's because he beats his children and keeps them in a cupboard under the stairs if they don't eat foie gras basted on  organic turkey's eyebrows with pureed swede and like it.  I may have to adopt that scheme myself.

On top of all this, I think I might be turning into Jeremy Clarkson.  Jason will be deliriously happy when I tell him.  It's probably his bestest dream come true.  After all this time it turns out that he's married to Jeremy Clarkson in a dress.  Who knew?  Now maybe I will be allowed to experience the rite of passage that allows me into the hallowed portals of the garage which is 'just for men'!

Now I know you might find this hard to believe, as the one fatal flaw in my theory, as we all know, is that I can't actually drive a car.  There are two possible explanations here.  One is that I have repressed memory syndrome, and if I visit a reliable hypnotist I will make a breakthrough and suddenly be able to drive Formula One racing cars  like a veritable demon (although, as we know, all demons actually drive Ford Fiestas).  The other explanation is that I am Jeremy Clarkson's evil twin, and we were separated at birth for the good of the nation (probably by the Queen, or by The Archbishop of Canterbury at the very least).  I am going down the evil twin route at the moment, as it seems most plausible, and I don't have the time or the inclination to place myself in the hands of a reliable hypnotist.  I am afraid I will wake up having somehow turned into Paul McKenna.  Now that would be horrible. 'That's Right!' as our Paul would say.

The revelation of my Clarksonian metamorphosis came late last night.  You might say that I had an epiphany.  This is very neat, as we are nearly at Epiphany anyway, so it's probably grounds for a party and the invention by me of the first, but not the last, Epiphany cake.  As an aside, I have decided that all appropriate feast days which don't have cakes associated with them, will now have cakes invented by me.  Then I can write a book about them and get fat and famous.  Hoorah!

Anyway, back to Clarkson.  I had a pretty terrible time of it yesterday evening.  I finished reading a very, very miserable book for my Amazon Vine review (in fact I have only liked one thing I have reviewed so far, so I think this reviewing lark is a punishment sent on high to punish me for too much mucking about).  It was, and I tell you this so that you can avoid it like the very plague, called: 'Cathedral of the Sea' by Ildefonso Falcones.  It purported to be a rollicking historical epic set in Medieval Barcelona about one man and his very exciting life.

The word epic here just means long.  And if you think my blogging is long my words are as ants to the colossus that is the towering prose mountain of Ildefonso.  It turned out to be 650 pages of sheer misery where all the bad things that can happen to a person happened, and then happened again.  It was like watching the omnibus edition of Eastenders when you're coming down from crack and you've just had a phonecall to say that your favourite aunt has died in a freak kayaking accident.  The word, 'Why?' kept springing to mind.  We had rape, murder, pillage, heresy, racism, sexism, plague, famine, desecration and The Spanish Inquisition (and not the fun and cuddly Monty Python type either).  It was terrible.  I was depressed.  My feathers fell out.

I decided to watch some television in order to cheer myself up.  My ex-husband had told me that the film Napoleon Dynamite was quite funny.  I had it on Sky Plus.  I decided to watch it as my film record has turned out to be quite good this week.  As with the respite from illness, the worm has truly turned.  The word, 'Why?' kept springing to mind.  Apart from the fact that the acting was as wooden as a scale model of Notre Dame made from matchsticks (even though they can act because I've seen them in other things, so this means it was intentional.  Again, 'why?'), the storyline was non-existent and it didn't end properly, in fact it ended twice, both times in a failed, non-ending type way.  I was not very impressed.

At this point I decided to give up and go to bed.  I tripped over a copy of a Jeremy Clarkson book Jason had left in the bathroom and decided that as it wasn't about Burma, or the scourge of Christendom or a f***wit from Idaho, I'd give it a whirl.  As it was a collection of his newspaper articles it also meant the chapters were very short, and so I could speed through it, and I'd know pretty soon whether it was going to push me over the brink or not.  Turns out not.

I think it was called something like: 'And Another Thing,' or 'More Shouty Ranting From That Curly Headed Git Off The Telly,' or something.  I expected it to be mildly diverting and found myself both amused, and frighteningly, in agreement with him over more things than I'd really care to think about.  It was a bit troubling, as apart from getting aggravated by about a million small and entirely inconsquential things, I consider myself to be quite liberal minded and erring on the side of lefty lesbianism in general.  To find myself agreeing with a right wing speed demon with hair like a microphone boom thingy was rather unnerving to say the least.  Perhaps as I get older I am becoming more in touch with my fascist tendencies.  What a terrible thought!  I may have to go on a training course and have it all slapped out of me.  I really don't want to go too far down the path of Clarkson.  I fear there may be no return.

Still, whatever gets you through the day I suppose.  Tilly's glands are up and she looks like a hamster stock piling marbles.  She's soldiering on because school is more fun than staying at home with me.  I agree wholeheartedly.  She also wants to go to her second best friend's (!) birthday party on Sunday and knows she won't be allowed if she is ill.  She won't miss a party even if she's bleeding out of her eyeballs.  After all, she is my daughter, and I believe there is going to be cake.

Tallulah has got a sore top lip where she played out in the cold with a snotty face.  She asked me to put some cream on it when she got home from school.  As she was just about to have a drink and some tea I said I would put some on later when she wasn't just going to wash/wipe it all off again.  This did not go down well.  She stomped upstairs muttering dire imprecations about humankind in general and me in particular.  When she got back I noticed there was something different about her.  As I was sorting out tea I didn't really give her my full attention.  It was more like looking at someone and knowing something is wrong or different, but not noticing they've shaved their eyebrows off until a few moments later when it suddenly dawns on you that they don't usually look that surprised.

When I turned to look at her properly I realised that she had stuck a plaster in the shape of a tiger across her top lip.  She was sitting at the kitchen table scowling at me defiantly.  I made matters much worse by hooting with laughter and demanding that she take it off immediately before she ended up with a big tiger shaped scab on her lip.  She was not best pleased.  It did cheer me up immensely though.  Children do have their uses.

It reminded me of the time my gran was watching my aunty Liz wax her legs.  My gran suddenly decided that she was going to give this waxing lark a go.  She had identified a few lady moustache hairs on her top lip, so she begged a bit of wax from Lizzy so that she could remove them.  Liz advised her to place the warm wax on her lip, leave it for a few moments, press down on one end and pull sharply away from the direction of the hairs' growth.  All very simple.

My gran shaped the wax into the form of a giant handle bar moustache and stuck it on her top lip.  She then proceeded to prance about showing everyone her new look.  We all laughed heartily.  A few minutes later she did the whole ripping the wax off thing.  Sadly she hadn't paid full attention to what Liz was saying and ripped in the other direction.  All that happened was the hairs stayed in place, and all the skin on her top lip came off in the shape of a beautifully neat handlebar moustache.  We laughed heartily.

We were still laughing heartily a few days later when she had a scab in the shape of a handle bar moustache, and had to drink her tea through a straw because every time she moved her lips more than a millimetre apart she made her moustache bleed.  Bless her!

Now I rarely venture down the path of waxing, because it is, despite what people tell you, quite painful.  It's the same kind of thing as people telling you that a tattoo doesn't hurt much.  You know it's utter bollocks.  It only doesn't hurt much if you've got skin made of teflon or you've had fourteen bottles of Diamond White beforehand.  Otherwise it hurts like stink.

Waxing is quite useful for bikini lines and other such nether region topiary however, as it never does to venture that far north with a naked blade, unless you get a thrill from that kind of savagery.  If I am going to rip large lumps of my flesh out with wax I like to do it in the privacy of my own home, as I am a coward and a loud coward at that.  This means I can scream my lungs out in the peace and privacy of my own home without anyone having to give me a rolled up hand towel to bite down on.

When I was pregnant with Oscar however, this was a bit of a problem.  I was enormous.  I was like a bus in a skirt after about five months, and I could not see my feet, let alone my nether regions.  This posed a bit of a problem.  I knew I was likely to be spending a fair amount of time in hospital and I do like things to be neat and tidy.  I get hysterical when I can't shave my legs let alone make sure I'm not straggling about in the undergrowth.

When I had emergency surgery before I had children I was unable to bend for a while due to some interesting scarring.  All the time I was in hospital and when I got home I was conscious that my leg hair was swirling around, growing more Rapunzel like every day.  I was somewhat obsessed.  It didn't matter that I couldn't climb the stairs or sit down, and that after a week in our house/squat my mum had to take me home to her house where she had proper furniture etc.  What mattered was that as soon as I got to mum's, I made her stick me in the shower on a stool and shave my legs so that I could die happy.  It's the little things.

Anyway, with Oscar I decided I could not possible enter the hallowed portals of the hospital until someone had seen to my bikini line for me.  Jason refused on the grounds that I was wildly hormonal and that if he did it wrong I would squash him flat in my elephantine rage.  He said he didn't want his son growing up without a male role model and that was that.  In the end, a friend of mine recommended a lady who she swore blind wouldn't make me scream with pain.  I booked an appointment and set off.

She was lovely.  She was an ex-body builder who had decided that her days of pumping iron were over, and now she was going to use her mighty strength ripping yards of hair off of hirsute ladies.  Fair play to her.  I don't suppose it was Geoff Capes' first thought upon retirement, but she was absolutely brilliant at it, and it really, and I mean really, didn't hurt.  She did make me laugh though because when I waddled through the door she had her back to me, mixing her unguents, and her first words to me were: 'Pop your clothes off, hop up on the couch and just bend your knees up to your ears and we'll get cracking!'

She turned round to see why I wasn't complying, and her face was a picture.  It was just never going to happen.  It was like asking Jabba the Hut to give pole dancing a go.  Still, we managed in the end.  It's amazing what some fortitude, a bit of elastic and the leverage of a sturdy windowsill can do.  If I weren't so utterly embarrassed by the memory I'd definitely go again.  As it is, I shall just have to make do with quarterly screaming sessions in the privacy of my own bathroom.

Patsy Walker(s) by Stuart Immonen.

The short Hellcat stories in Marvel Comics Presents by Stuart and Kathryn Immonen manage each month to combine Patsy's Archie-esque past with her Bronze Age super-hero career and '90s horror stint.

In other words, the strip is #$%^# awesome.

Along with World War Hulk and The Order, Hellcat is one of the best Marvel series this year.

More, please ...