Scorpio

Gnah. Am ailing. My recurrent chest infection has popped up again, for the first time in a year or so, and I am feeling a bit below par.

Which is a shame, as life is rather full right now.

The last couple of weeks have seen a visit to the Moot With No Name (for the first time in years) for a talk by Robert Rankin, which was, as usual, highly entertaining. Wish I hadn't missed his & his missus' party now. The evening was capped off nicely by getting the phone number of a really very nice young lady doctor.

The following weekend, I sampled the new Intrepid Fox with alyxandrauk and my mate Howie WINOLJ. He made his usual wonderful impression. The evening ended in the St Moritz club for Decadence. It was almost as if it was 1992 again!

This weekend just gone has been busier still. On Friday night, I was out for dinner and a few - OK, really rather a lot - of drinks with the utterly beguiling androctonus, who is said young doctor, A.K.A. Dr Kat. Home at 4:15. Up again at 9:15 to shower & get ready to be collected by nolley (and reverendjim and pingopark) to head off to Abingdon for the STC's annual Pratchett Play: Feet of Clay, as adapted by Stephen Briggs. It was splendid - about the fourth Pratchett play I've seen staged and far and away the funniest. The STC's Nobby Nobbs is definitive.

This was both preceded and followed by meals at the Broad Face, a splendid nearby gastropub. My lunch order they managed to forget, so I had to cram it frantically down in great haste as everyone else went off to get decent seats for the play. I washed it down with a Batemans' XXXB, for, you understand, purely medicinal reasons. For dinner, we had to wait an hour or two for the rush to subside before ordering, and it is perhaps due to their haste that I received penne picante instead of penne sorrento - meaning that the little rubbery lumps weren't buffalo mozarrella and sweet pepper, they were chicken and chorizo.

This made me feel rather unwell. First time I've knowingly eaten animal flesh in nearly a decade. Ick. And because it was so dark, and I really don't remember what meat tastes like now, I put away a fair proportion of it - we waited ages, I was hungry! - before my suspicions overwhelmed me.

Well, now I know what chicken tastes like. (Again.) It's more or less identical to Quorn.

The pub quickly replaced it with a vegetarian equivalent, freshly made, didn't charge me for it and gave me a free scoop of ice cream with my sticky toffee pudding, but frankly, excellent though I am sure it was, the savour and pleasure had entirely gone out of it for me.

Sunday was the usual pub drinkie followed by a 5min memory upgrade for Nolly's computer. Yeah, right. It won't boot Windows 2000 with DDR RAM installed, only when it's SDRAM - but otherwise it works fine and Windows 98 works. Inasmuch as it ever did, which is to say, not a lot.

So I have an evening at the Collyery looming ASAP, backing up, wiping & reinstalling the machine with XP. Joy. I might have to nip over to chez coth to retrieve my working reassembled XP CD image from her PC.

Looming this week is Skeptics in the Pub on Thursday, the same day as the Ton, for which I hope Kat will be joining me. I think I want some drugs, please...

Wallis Simpson was wrong

Who she? The one-time Duchess of Windsor. She once famously said, "you can never be too rich or too thin".

Now some people, of course, will cheerfully and at length expound on the principle that there is much to be said for the larger female figure. I believe it's termed "BBW". (Personally, I'm all for acceptance of natural body shapes and so on, but I do think that the "FA" lobby sometimes err as far into encouraging unhealthy lifestyles as the pro-ana mob and arguably the fashion industry. Being obese is bad for you; it is not OK to be obese, any more than it is OK to starve, voluntarily or not. That doesn't mean that anyone obese is evil or must hate themselves, but face it, it ain't a lifestyle choice, it's a health problem.)

Anyhow, I have a well-documented fondness for the more slender or gamine physique. Indeed, a certain friend of mine, not unadjacent to the first hyperlink in the first line of this paragraph, used to regularly reduce an ex of mine to tears by telling her that "You're too thin!".

It need hardly be said that I disagree.

But recently, I thought that maybe I had experienced something of an epiphany. Idle curiosity led me to investigate one Ms Heather Sweet, better known to the world as Dita von Teese. (That website is a rather impressive fifteen years old and is probably not remotely safe for work.) I think alexmc brought it to my attention that she was once again available* as she had dumped her husband Brian Warner, or rather, to name his band, Marilyn Manson.

(Her stage name was chosen in honour of Dita Parlo, a German film actress of the 1930s. pingopark tells me that "Dita" is more normally a male name. The "von Teese" bit came from her being Playboy cover girl in 2002. The magazine insisted that she have a surname; Ms Sweet chose "von Treese" at random from the phonebook, Playboy misspelled it and she liked the result so much that she kept it. Fascinating woman. No, honestly.)

But anyway, my interest in Ms Sweet has at least provided my Mac with some interesting new wallpaper. No, it's NSFW either.

In fact, it emerges than Ms Sweet is in fact a svelte 32-22-33, 5'6" and 7½ st. Noel would probably think she's too thin as well. I invite you to go look at some of her pictures - in the privacy of your own home - after which I am sure that you will agree with me that, in this case, the bloke's a nutter, as Harry Enfield might put it.

One thing I found interesting is that the comment boards of many of the American websites featuring images of Dita contain predominantly two types of comment: variations on "phwoar", broadly, and on the other hand, "that girl is too pale, it's not natural and she looks horrid". This just happened to jar with something that I discovered while perusing the silly-news-stories section of Metro after reading Nemi: the name of a really quite staggeringly lovely new British supermodel, one Lily Cole. (Reasonably safe, that one.) Those eyes! [*Chews desk*]

This I actually find rather reassuring. My tastes have not, in fact, changed very much after all. But it makes me wonder what the sort of women I find attractive actually look like in the eyes of Noel or even Doug (who once said to me, with remarkable self-knowledge, that he likes the way thin girls look but he prefers the way fat girls feel, or words to that effect).

Then a post from Douglas informed me, laterally, as it were, that the very splendid dashing has started updating once again. He is Russian, I can't read a word of the posts, but I don't need to: it's a photo blog of images he finds pleasing. He doesn't take them - sometimes, I can identify the source - they just seem to be Stuff He Likes. There are strong recurrent themes of cute kittens and seminaked or nude girls, the latter of which is fine with me and the former over which I can just skip, but there are some great images in there.

Which leads me, finally, to the original point of this post, which is "What 'size zero' women look like to Noel". Which is, I suspect, something like this.

See? There really is such a thing as too thin, even for me.

Sheesh. At least she looks cheerful, but... Aieeesh.

Oh, yes, and the other thing I discover when innocently - well, fairly innocently - looking for photos of Miss Cole? That Marilyn sodding Manson is a big fan and is casting her as Alice in his forthcoming movie. Which proves two things: one, he has excellent taste, and two, manifestly, he must DIE!

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* In a certain, very specialised and rather theoretical sense, anyway.