Friday, 26th August, 2005

Complete Fabrication

Back to normal. Thank God that's over. Pulling little blog-stunts can be fun, it can also seriously damage your reputation as a rant-fuelled transvestite hell-bent on changing the world. It's also a source of embarassment — the one day out of (quick guess) 1,200 that I've been doing this that I land myself in the hallowed halls of Jon Hicks's sidebar links, and it's the one day when I look like shit.

Ack well

...

So right, earlier this morning, I got an email:

Dear Siobhan,

My name is * and I'm the Creative Director for the advertising agency who is responsible for the "118 118" series of sponsorship bumpers currently running on Channel Five films.

I just wanted you to know that I'm a long-time fan of your website, and as a little joke, I snuck in a small reference to you in one of the clips.

Hope you don't mind.

xxx

What?! It could happen...

The Problem With Weblogs

...is that when you write something really cool, the very ext day it drops into the bottomless chasm labelled "archves" never to be seen again.

(OK, so that's only mine, with my weird one-day-a-page format. But a good post only has, what, about a week's shelf-life usually?)

I thought then, I might try and pull the wheat from the chav chaff and try and compile some sort of "best of" list — fully aware of the ironic futility of the excercise, seeing as tomorrow this list will go the same way, and I'll have to someday write a "best of best of" list. Then a "best of best of best of" list (ad nauseum)

• I write a pseudo-weblogging-script

• I'm not always Little Miss Hugs

• An ode to Bleach

• Weekend Socks

• A complete run-through of 2002

• 1221 feet

• Siobhan's Recipie for Fish and Chips:

• Ex-girlfriend-based-ranting

• Shortest. Entry. Ever.

• Things I have learnt through knocking through my fireplace

• Biggest reformatting-based fuck up

• A born-rich anus

• soapbox
  Up until this point, I'd written very little about transvestism. I think this was my first rant.

• Noted not based on the quality of writing, but for the fact that it was the first time Kathie and I spent time together. I thought I was being flirty — apparently, I came across as "grumpy"

• My First Exhibition

• Advice falls on deaf ears

• Siobhan's Trip to The South

• My Geek Code — 'scuse the formatting please

• First Ever Visit To Pauline

• Siobhan admits to being bisexual

• What happened at SCC 2003
  With running train commentary

• Limericks, and the day I broke my server

• I get Panther

• Going out clubbing in Lancaster for the first time

• Things Siobhan will do for money

• I join the UK Angels

• After a month of absense, the page I use to test comments out on

• Siobhan's Photoshop Tutorial #1
  Minus pictures since the Big Crash of May™

• First bit of comment-spam?

• First overt mention of Kathie
  (I'd been hinting for weeks)

• Nose Hair

• How to un-fuck-up your server

• Sometimes, <table>s have their uses

• A story about my first car

• Have you noticed how my biggest diary entries either happen on a day when I'm really really bored, or when I'm on a train?

• Kath goes to Australia

• Motorway ranting, and the day I write the comment-script

• Kathie comes back from Australia

• Multi-storey car parks and why I hate them

• The abandoned house
  (Which would be more intersting if I still had the pictures)

• Paintball!

• "I met" becomes a synonym for "was snubbed by"

• "u stole my name arsehole"
  First troll! w00t!

• The passing rant

• The story of my exhaust-bodging brilliance

• I write the Tranisaurus

• The Little Man

• What I Did At The Bank Holiday
  (Which sucks without the pictures)

• Treasure Hunt!

• I have new tits!

• Why Fox Hunters are assholes

• New Kitchen
  (I will fix the pictures one day...)

• The Great Ebay Negative Feedback Trail

• The John Peel Story

• An Anti-anti-smoking rant

• Where my arthritis comes from

• What should I call my weblog?

• On coming out

• The first example of a trannie-check-list

• What happened when I was born

• The Eddie Izzard Story

• What's wrong with CGI

• Finding out someone was a trannie who I didn't expect

• I get nominated for a Bloggie, and it goes to my head...

• Anonymity #1

• Major Rantage

• Troll-feeding

• Conversations of an Email Variety
  Several things to note about this page. (1) I hate the title. I wish I'd thought of something a lot better for it, considering it seems to have become a fixed feature in !Mike's sidebar. (2) It was fun. Really fun. And I want to collaborate with other people. In a better way.

• Sparkle!

• Emily Howard

• The Grayson Perry Documentary
  Some people seem to have got the impression that the documentary pissed me off. It didn't, honestly. I don't know why anyone came to that conclusion. By the way, sod blogrolls and links — that was the day I made it into The Guardian .

• Dear Sweet Mother of God, Tom Coates Leaves a Comment
  *swoon*

• A Very Big Post

• The Day I had a Panic Attack

• New Work

• Meeting Chris Bonnigton

• What my weblog is all about

• Siobhan doesn't win a Bloggie — but beats Mike

• An actual proper "Best of" — several memories of being a transvestite

• My "transformation" experience, and a night out with Becky

• Why transvestism sucks

• On "I'm a lesbian trapped in a man's body"

• The Tooth Abcess Story

• Fuckity fuck fucking fuck. Fuckity fucking fuck fuck fucking fuck fuck. Fuck fuckity fucking fucity fuck fucking fuck. Arse fucking fucking fuckity fuck. Fucking great fucking arse fucking fucking fuck fuckity fucking bollocks

• Siobhan goes to Liverpool

• George Dies

• Why Tories are stoopid

• More Troll-feeding

• The Big Crash™

• Scary Slitheen

• Photoshop Fighting with Becky

• My Husband Betty

• Buy My Shit!

• pngs!

• Doctor Who rollcall

• Getting Made Up

• Sparkle!

• Siobhan's Photoshop Tutorial #2

• A Collection of Memories

• Siobhan decides to take a break

• "my cook get angry"

• A Weblog Anatomy

• Xtreme Crossdressing

• The Tranniesphere

• The Dressing Up Box

• Anonymity

• The Gluepot

At some point, I'm going to write a review of everything — but not today OK?

Probing Questions

OK, that was weird. I'm not a great fan of using a credit card to buy things in shops. It all goes back to my days as a student when I had more than my fair share of embarassment at having your card cut up in front of you with a whole queue of people sniggering behind you.

So anyway right, I went out this morning to buy a new compact flash card for my camera. This may seem like a bit of a frivilous luxury seeing as how I've got two 256MB ones and a handful of littler ones — but I do keep running out of space when I'm out and about.

I got myself a nice big fat speedy 1GB card, and gave the guy behind the till my card...

...five minutes later he was on the phone, and I was doing that "la la la, I'll just look at the things on the wall" in an attempt to seem unflustered by the complicated financial transaction going on.

Part of me was thinking "shit shit shit shit", and the other part was thinking "WTF is going on? I just checked my balance, I'm loaded"

The guy moves the phone away from his ear for a second, looks at me sheepishly, and asks "what supermarket do you usually use?"

Now that threw me. I wasn't execting that. I thought maybe that because my card hadn't been used in a while that they'd put some kind of stop on it or something.

Turns out that's pretty much what had happened. Because I've not used it over the counter for ages (a couple of months?) it had been passed on to the bank's fraud security type checking thing and they needed to make sure it was me.

He gave me a number to call, and after having answered every single security question under the sun, they took the block off my card. They were quite sweet actually — "We were worried that you'd dropped it" they said.

Aw, bless

...

That's only ever happened to me once before — about two years ago when I bought my fireplace. But that time it was for a considerably larger amount of money, and I was the only person in the shop.

Imagine what would have happened if I'd been in a big queue at Sainsburys, with disgruntled people with big trolleys behind me Actually, thinking about it, would they have asked me which supermarket I normally shop in if I was in Sainsburys?

Or would they just quickly check what I'd bought?

"Two bottles of wine, some cheese, some coffee and a bottle of raspberry Yop. Yep, that's Siobhan. Let her have the stuff"

Aye

Hair

I think it's been a good six months or so since I got my hair coloured. It's still got orange streaks in it, but they used to be red and now they have a good two inches of dark brown roots.

Thing is though, the other day, when I was at the printers, one of my colleagues was asking me to show her it down to see how long it had got, and we ended up having a conversation about how long one's hair can actually go.

I remember seeing Norris McWhirter comparing two women's hair once — one had never cut it in her life, and the other got it cut once a year. The odd thing was though that the first woman only had about a foot of hair, while the other's went down to her bum. Apparently, so Roy Castle explained, hair has a 'natural length' and it doesn't get any longer than that.

Personally, the longest my hair has ever been was down to just below my chin. This was back at Uni, just before I cut it all with a pair of scissors for some unknown reason. Now, it's about that length again at the moment, and I'm curious to see if it can go any longer...

...but I was thinking, just there now whilst making a cup of coffee and marvelling at the way the stuff in my yard grows, OK, so maybe my hair has a natural length that it doesn't grow past...

...but how the fuck does my hair know what length it is?!

How does that work? Hair is all dead isn't it? I thought that anything past the follicle was just dead cells — so how the hell does my hair know when to stop growing?

I blame the pixies. They come in the night with scissors and a tape measure

OK, I asked Google ... and Google says:

Hair grows when new cells form inside a hair follicle and push out the old cells, which become visible hair.

Follicles only produce new cells during growth phases. The hair on your arms or your eyebrows has a growth phase of only a few months, whereas the hair on your head can keep growing for years before it falls out.

(Actually, Google didn't say that — http://www.ontariosciencecentre.ca/scizone/question/default.asp?teaserIdEN=188 said that, but Google took me to them )

I'm hoping that mine's going to get at least twice as long as it is, but I'm not confident.