Ladies and gentlemen we have an epidemic - run, save yourselves!

I’m sitting here watching the BBC 10 o’clock news and one of the reporters on it is describing, not for the first time, the 'epidemic levels of obesity in England and Wales'.

Obesity epidemic; you have to love that phrase, a journalist (probably American) somewhere has spent many years in university before coining such a phrase and many journalists since then have seized on it and used it for themselves. But come on, can we really call obesity an epidemic? To me the black death was a proper epidemic. Poor sanitation and hygiene with rats rapidly spreading disease killing 240 million people in Europe, a third of the entire medieval population, now that is a serious epidemic. To describe obesity with the same language has got to be a joke.

Imagine 50 years from now some kid asking his grandparents about the obesity epidemic of 2006 for a school project,

‘Grandad how did you survive?’

‘Oh son it was terrible, there were Burger King joints at just about every corner. We couldn’t walk to get the paper in the morning because we had the car. At work we sat at computer desks for 8 hours a day, then came home and sat at the computer some more to write on something called blogs. We had far too much salt and sugar in our diets but with super size meals just 50 pence extra it was so hard to resist. Really son, it’s amazing you are even here, your grandmother found it very hard to have kids due to my diabetes, if it wasn’t for viagra we doubt that your father would ever have been conceived.’

I know obesity is a serious issue and I shouldn’t make light of it but the language is over the top. Obesity is a problem of our time because of the lifestyle many of us in the western world lead. We’ve become lazy when it comes to meal times, we don’t cook home made meals like people used to, some of us can’t even cook. In the past people used to walk locally to work everyday, now many of us have to drive to work. Work itself used to be physically exhausting it involved manual labour; now most work is office based moving nothing but our fingers and our mouths.

Obesity is not an epidemic. It is a killer but so is cancer. It’s a long term slow process killer, it doesn’t come along and sweep through the population wiping a third of it out in the space of a few decades. It’s a result of our spoilt lifestyle with food being in easy reach of us all and few of us exercising enough. It’s only an epidemic if you consider McDonalds & Burger King the rats of the 21^st century sweeping through America and Europe. Even then you have to wonder why the world’s population is still growing if we are in the middle of an epidemic.

I love language, the English language is a great tool but I hate to see it abused by people who should know better. Describing obesity as an epidemic at best shows a lack of knowledge of the causes of obesity, at worst it is a deliberate attempt to use scary language to frighten fat people into dieting. If I were obese I’d tell the journalist who coined the phrase ‘obesity epidemic’ to stick two fingers up his judgemental ass.

Can You See The Join?

Normally as a photographer I don't believe in editing. Truth be told I'm too lazy to touch up my photographs. I point, I shoot, if I think its good I keep it, if its bad I delete. Simple. But I've seen other people making great panorama shots by stitching two or thre photographs together and saw this scene and thought it was the perfect opportunity mto try that myself. Well stupid me didn't really know what the hell he was doing. As a result you can see this great big diagonal line where the join is so if anyone wants to tell me what I did wrong or tell me what I need to do to fix it I would appreciate the help.

Has Equality Gone Too Far?

I’m all for equality between men and women, I think it was long overdue. Women deserve equal pay to their male counterparts, no question about it. I am attracted to strong independent women and I’m really not attracted to women who take on a subservient role in a relationship. I have nothing against women wanting to be housewives or who want to look after the children but if they would rather work then I’m fine with that. I’m not attracted to women who allow the guy in the relationship to make all the decisions without having any input of her own.

Women have fought hard to get equality from men and you could say that they haven’t yet quite got equal pay and opportunities but they have definitely got better prospects than to lead an independent lifestyle than women have ever had in the past. However as a guy I’m starting to think the balance is maybe going too far. Maybe I’m alone in this and maybe I’m going to look like a male chauvinist pig and am going to be doomed to leading a eternal single lifestyle after I am finished writing this post but I’m going to say it anyway – I think in many aspects women are more equal than men.

Women have the right to go to work AND they can be looked after in a relationship. In truth I have no problem with that. As a man I am somewhat old fashioned in that I think it when I am in a relationship it is my duty provide my girlfriend or wife with a stable environment in which we can live. If she wants to contribute to that lifestyle by working herself, fantastic - that makes my responsibility somewhat easier. Where I draw the line is if that relationship were to end I don’t see why I should continue to support her unless there are kids involved. If we had kids together or if I was a father to her kids for any length of time even if they weren’t biologically mine I would feel I should contribute in someway to their upbringing by being a father figure and by providing some sort of income so that they may live the life that having two parents can provide.

However in some cases you see women divorcing from their husbands and demanding money as part of the divorce. They have no kids together and they still demand that their ex husband provide them with an income. Personally I am all for the house being sold and the proceeds split equally 50/50 that way the both parties in a relationship have what it takes to get on with their lives separately. Today we all have what it takes to go to work and live independently, providing for ourselves without the need to have a significant other to provide for us.

Well that’s not quite true, with house prices as they are I can’t buy a house on my own as house prices have in the past few years exploded when compared with my annual wage increase. However that has less to do with not being able to live an independent lifestyle than it has to do with house price inflation. It seems today that you need two incomes to buy, but instead of buying I can rent.

Ignore that for a second, I went off on a tangent there. What I’m trying to say is as a guy I feel I have fewer options than a woman. As a guy I don’t get the chance to be looked after. I have to work. I have no choice in the matter. I suppose I could perhaps marry Demi Moore or Michelle Pfeiffer and be set for life, well as long as I am living with them anyway, but being realistic that’s probably not got much chance of happening. Truth is I wouldn’t want to be looked after; I’m too independent to rely on someone else providing for me. I like my independence, I value it.

However I pick up the papers and see Paul McCartney getting divorced from his wife. I don’t know how long they were a couple for. I don’t really pay a lot of attention to celebrities but it doesn’t seem that long ago when his 2^nd wife died of cancer, so say they were together for somewhere in the region of 2, 3 or 4 years. He’s apparently worth £1billion. Personally I think that’s way too much money for any man. His wife seems to agree with me and is supposedly demanding a fifth of his wealth. As much as I think he has more money than any man needs I really don’t see how she deserves any of his income. They have no kids together. I don’t know what age he is but he must be close to 60, as an ex-Beatle he amassed his vast fortune throughout his life probably most of it before she even became a part of it. It’s not like she contributed to his wealth by playing the supportive wife role while he went off to work each day. Maybe he insisted that she gave up working while they were together, there could be a case of loss of earnings money. I agree that he has a duty to provide her some means in which she can put a roof over her head. However as a woman today she has more opportunities for providing herself an income than probably her mother did, certainly more opportunities than her grandmother did, does she not have some sort of responsibility to provide for her own lifestyle after the divorce?

Now she may want 200 million but the reality is it’s unlikely she will get as much as that, she might get 40, 50 or 100 million which she will be happy with. Paul has so much money I don’t really care how much he loses out of this but I think the message is wrong. What this divorce says to me is that ordinary man and woman can fall in love, get married, buy house together, fall out of love, get divorced and the woman can demand an income for being in the relationship despite the fact that no kids were ever involved. Beyond splitting the house sale 50/50 I don’t see why there needs to be any extra money exchanged hands between the couple when a relationship ends. If he insisted that while they were together that he did all the providing and as a result she lost her job skills or pension rights then I can see a case for providing extra. However in a world where both sexes have equal right to work and near equal opportunity and wage prospects there must surely come a responsibility with that to play fair. Guys cannot continue to provide just for being in a past relationship.

So am I alone in this. Are women getting to be more equal than men or am I just seeing it all wrong?

Understanding The Thinking Of The Male Species

Do Men Think About Sex Every Waking Hour?

How do I answer this?

Do the plants and animals that live in the world’s driest desert miss the rain? Am I easily bought with a free meal? Does George W. Bush have the mannerisms of a chimpanzee? By now you should have your answer. However if you were struggling to answer those questions let me spell it out for you…Yes men do think about sex all the time, whether awake or not. However the reason why that should be is not as simple as the entire male species being dirty horny little bastards with a desperate desire to spend 24 hours of every day servicing a super hot female that looks suspiciously like a young Michelle Pfeiffer. That might only be me, but nevermind that the reason men think like this goes back to the day when woolly mammoths ruled the world and small nomadic groups of humans had to hunt the woolly mammoths for meat and clothing. Back then it was no point in having 2.4 children, to survive you needed big family groups to hunt down one woolly mammoth. It was the only way to survive. Darwin said it best when he coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’. As a result thinking constantly about sex was inbred in males.

Nowadays men have been left with this urge to put their penis in any orifice a woman will allow. (I come up with the nicest of lines, don’t I?) Of course only the fittest ie the good looking, the richest or the strongest get to do so on a regular basis the rest just have to think about it, go to the pub, drink more alcohol than they really should and show signs of desperation with phrases like ‘Get your coat, you’ve pulled’ or if they are really, really drunk and caveman has come to the fore ‘You, Me, have sex in alley round back’.

The flow of this desperation comes in cycles, some days you will be spared witnessing any such behaviour then there will be days like today where the sun is shining and the summer seems to be here forever and all hell breaks lose. It was maybe a day like today that Axl Rose first sang the immortal line ‘Take me down to the paradise city where the grass is green and the girls are pretty’. The reason that that song is so popular is because every man has experienced that moment. It doesn’t matter the name of the town or city the entire (heterosexual) male species has lived that moment. The moment that summer has arrived when just about every women in the vicinity of man seems to be wearing short skirts and tight t-shirts with push-up bras. That moment on Saturday when you are in the city and waiting for the underground train when a super hot female that looks suspiciously like a young Michelle Pfeiffer wearing a short skirt, tight t-shirt and push up bra runs down the steps to catch the train. That moment when she is all breathless, cleavage moving up and down with each breath, a little trickle of sweat running down her face, and her lips plush red from the blood in her head, yes those moments we are thinking about sex. We might be respectful about it, we might not stare, we might not make her feel violated but at the same time you can be sure we will be happy when she sits next to us. Yes we might let a little smile form on our lips at that moment, we may let thoughts drift off to somewhere that isn’t politically correct in this day and age but you have to realise its not entirely his fault, it goes back to the time when woolly mammoths roamed the earth and that was a long time ago.

Is it any wonder that I am single, some people just won't see the intended humour in this post. Ah well.

I Need A Brain Transplant

I'm having one of those days when despite having what I thought was a good idea for a blogging moment, back when I was lying in my bed, I just can not get my brain to translate my thoughts into something that is comprehendible to outsiders. Sometimes I don't like my brain. My brain and I have this war on a daily basis.

I see people in the outside world who are intelligent, who seem to be able to concentrate on one thought at a time, from the beginning all the way to the end before moving onto the next thought. It looks so simple. So easy. I want to be like that!

Instead I have a brain that has mistaken itself for a machine gun. It fires out 1001 thoughts at once, firing off bullet thoughts in all directions. It does this throughout the day on a daily basis. Never finishing one thought before moving onto the next. I'm fed up with it being complicated.

My brain never shuts up. Never! It’s always bloody thinking. It does its best thinking at night time. That’s when it focuses on maybe 10 or 12 thoughts at a time instead of 1001. This feels great, except for the fact that I should be sleeping and not thinking at all. In the morning when I want to focus on those great thoughts I had during the night its back to the machine gun mode. Argh!

You know that picture by Edvard Munch called The Scream where the man is pushing his face in with his hands? I could do a self portrait something similar to that, instead I would paint a scene where I would be demonstrating trying to pull the thoughts out of my head with clenched fists.

I want a new brain. One that works. One that is intelligent, allows me to be articulate and doesn't fight me every fucking inch of the way. Sometimes I feel I am intelligent, other times I am just reminded how stupid I am and I'm sick of it!

Meanwhile I have forgotten what the great blogging moment was. Bugger!

Another Day, Another Year Older

And yet I don't feel any different. I was born in the year of the snake, the day the papers announced to the world that the King was dead. Now 29 years later I can't say I feel any older. I'm a weird person, I've always felt quite mature in my head but outwardly I look young for my age. So for some reason that leaves me in some sort of odd limbo, I don't feel like I'm getting older. It's just another day to me.
I've never been one of those people who are anti-birthdays, I'd much rather have another day than not. This whole idea 'oooh i'm getting older and I don't like it' doesn't make sense to me. If you are not older its hard luck for you, you are dead. Frankly I want many more days to experience as many things as I can. I've got a life to live and worrying about when it might end just isn't part of that.
I'm not much for celebrating birthdays either. I don't see what makes the day so special. More special than any other I mean. Every day we are here is a chance for new experiences, its a chance to live. We don't get many chances at it.