This one's been doing the rounds at work - mainly because one of my colleagues does a spot of cake decorating herself. But you may be more interested in the second extract.

No doubt pressured by the likes of the Daily Mail, six months ago the UK government launched a review into the "Commercialisation and Sexualisation of Childhood". Oh yes. It was led by a chap called Reg Bailey, who's the Chief Executive of Mothers' Union. The organisation then criticised the report for "not going far enough" in its recommendations. Ho hum.
The recommendations include:

While trawling YouTube the other day (as you do), I found a one hour documentary (split into four parts) about a 17/18 year old trans girl called Lucy. As well as narration, it features contributions from her mum, grandparents, therapist, breast augmentation surgeon, best friend and Lucy herself (through video diaries). Needless to say, as well as the usual tensions, there's also friction between Lucy's typical teenage "I want it all and I want it now" attitude and reality.

Courtesy of a link on Warwickshire's corporate intranet homepage, I've discovered that apparently today has been "IDAHoT 2011" - International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia.

http://www.dayagainsthomophobia.org/-IDAHO-english,41-

Apparently May 17th was chosen because the date is the anniversary of the World Health Organization’s May 1990 decision to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders.

Via Twitter, I came across an interview in "Time" with Chaz Bono, the F2M son of Sonny and Cher.

It's fairly brief, so if you're interested, take a peek over there.

I don't normally post two blog articles in succession, but BBC News is carrying the story of a rather unusual orchiectomy...

A mother of four accused of biting off her boyfriend's testicles has denied grievous bodily harm. Maria Topp, 43, allegedly attacked Martin Douglas at his Newcastle flat at 0400 GMT on 18 February. He required emergency hospital treatment for his injuries.

You may have noticed that neither I nor PS have been updating the Bike summary spreadsheet recently. Unfortunately, we've both been quite busy recently, and as I often now read it first thing in the morning before heading to work, I don't have time to update it until the evening, when I tend to forget to re-read the last episode and update it.

It may seem a slightly odd question, but a new charity launched yesterday, called "Action for Happiness" (I kid you not - here's proof!).

Apparently, they've worked out that although average incomes have consistently risen over the past five decades, happiness hasn't.

To attempt to make us happier, they've published a list of fifty actions, most of which appear to be backed up by videos, text explaining why you should do it, and a bunch of resources.

The other day I was sufficiently bored to browse my way through a lively comment war on one of Stefani Germanotta's videos (no prizes for guessing either the song or the entrenched sides), and came across this interesting theory, which I've quoted verbatim (so spelling / grammatical errors in the quote are the commenters, not mine!):

A slightly odd story idea that came to me in a dream...

A group of teenagers arrive at a disused holiday camp (in the dream it appeared as a pair of linked islands, the North containing a mini-mansion designed for group leaders, the South containing deteriorating simple log platforms and structures designed for use for camper accommodation) determined to 'do it up' as they enjoyed their times there and didn't want it sold off to a developer.

Here's something for fans of a certain pedal-powered form of locomotion - a series of ten radio programmes about the social and cultural history of the bicycle. It started on Monday, so there are currently two programmes available to listen to, but as they're only being made available for a week after broadcast...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00yfq82

It also features some notable riders, including (this selection from the first five minutes of Episode 1 alone):

Here's one for Sci-Fi fans: the 10th Doctor is to marry the 5th Doctor's daughter. Who once played the 10th Doctor's daughter/clone.

Well, he is on record as talking about the "wibbly wobbly timey wimey" nature of his travels, so I guess anything's possible...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/05/who_marriage/

Just a quickie to let you know I'll be offline for a few days - so you'll have to cope without your daily dose of random weirdness in the comments section of your stories :) No doubt you'll also spot plenty of catching up comments when I return mid-week :)

Anyway, on with the main point of this post: wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Or, for the benefit of some readers, Nadolig Llawen a Blwyddyn Newydd Dda.

I remembered a few minutes ago that it had been a while since we had a new chapter for Goddess' Tears, so sauntered over to Persephone's author page to find out more...

...only to find that only the title pages for her stories (Frozen Balance, Goddess' Tears, Healing Dagger) remain, and all the story content appears to have been pulled. I don't recall reading any blog entries announcing her departure, so does anyone know what happened?

There hasn't been much around my way, but I couldn't resist pointing out some of the dafter stories to emerge from the UK's recent snow.

-oOo-

In case it hasn't been reported in your neck of the woods yet: A woman dialled 999 (UK Emergency Services number) to report a theft.

So what?

The item in question was a snowman, with pound coins for eyes.

Understandably, the force has branded her "Completely irresponsible".

Source: BBC News

-oOo-