jackycowper's posterous

 

Sunshine....
I'm sitting here in the office and looking at the screen of the computer. At least I would if it weren't blanked out by the brilliant sunshine coming in through the window. Yet I am reluctant to bring down the blind. It's the depths of winter, and though this one has been mild (so far) it's still dark when I get up and get home from work. So the couple of hours bright sunshine in the middle of the day is incredibly welcome, and I am reluctant to pull down the blind until I absolutely have to. I'll move the computer round and keep going until I just can't any more. It'll be gone again too soon.
 

The Trouble With Racism
I remember my racial awakening very well.
It happened many years ago. I was a young reporter, working with a colleague. He was black. In every way possible, he was the same as me. We were both Scots; both brought up in middle class households; both enjoyed the same films and hobbies and we were friends. No, just friends!
We went out to do a story and interview some people about a racial killing in Edinburgh. A (thankfully) rare occurrence. The policeman told us that the victim had been attacked simply because he was black.
I couldn't get my head round it. In the car, on the way back to the office, my colleague suddenly said, "It could have been me."
The killers would not have seen the person he was - in every respect, just the same as me. They would simply have seen his skin colour.
That simple statement shook me, and opened my eyes to the real world of racism. Racists don't see in black and white. They don't see people, or shades of grey. They simply see colour.
 

In Praise of Hairy Men

Please Stop Emasculating Men

By Jacky Cowper

 

Now let’s not exaggerate things. I’m not into cavemen. I don’t necessarily like ‘em big, tough and rough.

I like to be treated with a bit of finesse – and I’m secure enough in my feminism not to worry that if a guy opens a door for me it means he thinks I’m fit only for being pregnant and chained to the kitchen sink. Instead I think that it’s just a way to try to impress on me that he’s trying to show he was brought up genteel and would be a bit of a catch. He’s putting on a show – as do I every time I flutter my eyelashes and look coy at a guy I fancy.

So, even stevens on that front.

No, what I’m really complaining about is Hollywood’s attempt to make men look like women.

I have said I’m not into cavemen. And that’s true – I’m not. But I do like to be able to look at a guy and see some evidence of masculinity…

….and the masculinity in question is a little body hair.

I’m not meaning a guy so covered from head to toe that he needs to shave bits to distinguish between his head and his torso. In my not unlimited (I’ve been a student nurse in my time, so I’ve seen probably more naked men than I would care to admit) experience, when men hit physical maturity, they grow a bit of hair on their chest, some on their forearms and some on their stomachs. There’s hair usually elsewhere as well, but I’m not really delving that deep at the moment.

In today’s sanitized Hollywood, these chests are as bare as – well, a baby’s butt.

And baby’s butts just don’t really do it for me – and I’m betting a whole lot of other women (plus maybe some guys as well,) would agree with me.

A bit of well-placed male chest hair only serves to enhance the masculinity of a man. It’s a pure turn on. It accents the male. Especially if it has a little trail leading down over the stomach and into the ……..forget it, I digress.

It shows maturity and (literally) differentiates the men from the boys.

But Hollywood, in all its wisdom, has decreed that male chest hair is not desirable. Oh no. Instead, through the ages we’ve had a succession of male leads shaved or waxed to within a whisker of their natural selves. The back, sack and crack (as I believe it is called) waxing is something even the Spanish Inquisition would have been proud of as a novel torture they’d just invented.

I realise some guys are just plain furrballs.

Take for example, one Mr Scott Bakula, star on the large and small screen and notable for being a hairy Starfleet captain.

Being a bit of a trekkie I notice these things. I noticed that in the first episode of ‘Star Trek; Enterprise’ that while clothing was being strewn about the ship in a way that had taken previous series many seasons to work up to, Mr Bakula exposed a rather attractive hairy chest. I admired the way he’d kept some body hair and not given in to the normal waxed look. I noticed that the other men on the starship might have started off suspiciously hairless – but gradually furred up as the series progressed, taking a lead from their Captain perhaps. And all the better for it they were too!

Whether Scott took this stance because he was so hairy the itching as his body fuzz grew back would have landed him in a straight jacket, well I don’t know. I know he got the thumbs up from me for his bravery. It is not easy to go against the machine.

I have not always thought this way. When I was a teenager and even as a young woman, I liked the clean-shaven look. I realise now that this was fundamentally because I was young – and not ready for an adult relationship with a grown-up man. It was nature’s way, if you like, of keeping me away from guys I was not ready to date. Basically, I was scared of the maturity body-hair suggested.

Now I’m much older, bolder and have been round the block a few times. I notice men’s chest hair. I like men’s chest hair. I like that little line of hair that works its way down across the tummy. I like the way the chest hair turns and twists in my fingers when I run them through it.

I don’t mind that they have hairy legs – and I positively adore hair on the arms. My peeve for the moment is the delectable Alcide, a werewolf, played by Joe Manganiello in ‘True Blood’.

With the beard and the body, I just KNOW that man has a hairy chest. Whether to show ‘definition’ or just to fit in with the current fashion trends, he is currently naked as the day he was born.

Much as he has a chest that most women would happily lick ice-cream off, (not something you can do easily if the chest hair is present as it tends to get caught in your teeth!) it is still a bit of a let-down to those hairophiles, like me.

Bring back hair. Let men be men. Us more mature women like it.

 

Inception - dull, dull, dull
I wanted to like Inception, I really did. I'd tried to get in last weekend, but it was sold out all over the shop. I waited until last night and finally got in, with only 30 seats left in the cinema. What a disappointment. I nearly cried I was so bored. I know I certainly yawned quite a few times. Inception was, for me, the disappointment of the year so far. An idea so convoluted that anyone with half an imagination or whose brain works in lateral ways (like mine) had worked out the end after about five minutes (and I mean worked it out right down to the fine detail of the final scene - and frankly I would have filmed it slightly differently) and I sat through the admittedly great special effects just waiting for the end to come (I thought I might die of old age before we got there) so that I could go home. The audience seemed to like it, and gasped appreciatively in all the right places, but dear heaven, it was predictable and boring. I'm not going to give anything away. But if you find yourself in a big queue at the cinema, and Inception is nearly sold out - do yourself a favour and go and see something else instead.
 

Some pictures I took today.
(download)

You can tell I just figured out how to use my macro digital option, can't you....

 

Predators - remix

This is beginning to annoy me. First it was Star Trek. Now Predator. And I'm quite sure there will be lots of others that I didn't even go to see. Some of our cherished films are being remixed - not just remade but completely rewritten. Basic and well-loved storylines and characters are being 're-imagined' - that means a completely new character has been parachuted in in their place, with new backstory, new shape, new face, new age, new friends and - gosh - lots of new adventures with new CGI. And talking about parachuting in, I bring you - Predators.
As a standalone film, it was fine. As a remake of the original, it was not.
I liked that all the characters were not enormous strapping bodybuilders with huge guns. And I actually mean their weaponry. These new guys waken up in freefall, parachuted in to a strange planet with the biggest freaking planet hanging over them in the sky. Personally I thought that it was so enormous that it would be affecting the gravitational pull and the weather patterns of the planet they were on, and yet they managed to stride around in the jungle and across a rocky plain for a fair part of the film before they actually noticed it.... In my opinion, it would have been omnipresent, at all times, and not something you had to walk to the edge of a forest to notice.....at that point they realise they are not in Kansas anymore.
The bigger the gun, the smaller the brain I guess.
Adrian Brody does a fair impression of Christian Bale with his husky Batman voice and has plainly been working out quite a bit and is reasonable eye candy, and he is ably supported by a strong cast that includes Topher Grace in arguably his first mainstream lead role (and he's very good) and Walton Goggins, everyone's favourite villain du jour. But of course they're not the villains - they're the prey. And here we introduce my second bugbear - the predators. Now the original Predator was a big strapping creature and sufficiently ugly that they couldn't do much with him. So they've created a new, SUPER-PREDATOR. He's got a bigger jaw and he's stronger, faster, meaner yadda yadda. These two types of predator have apparently got a blood feud going. Yeah, right. My beef is this. You can't just do this in a film. Star Trek did it when they destroyed an entire time line and have set about creating a whole new universe. Predators has decided to rewrite the whole Predator myth. They get round it by setting this in the future slightly and one of the party knowledgeably fills in the backstory for us, but we can all see where this is going. Bye bye old Predator and hello new, bigger, nastier one.
Maybe I'm old fashioned. Maybe I just like trying to maintain some semblance of order in these wacked out universes. (universii?) But I do wish they'd stop doing this.

 

Reclaiming the Bitch....

When did bitch become a bad word?
When I was a kid, it was a very mildly abusive term – more a comment on your behaviour than anything else. And not one where any great offence was taken either. Sometimes it was even a term of endearment used between friends. But sometime between then and now, it has become a VERY BAD word indeed. It isn’t even written in stories – it has attained the grand heights of being given asterisks instead of letters! Whooo! Welcome to the big league of world swearies! It’s even a term of derision, used when someone is belittled by a more dominant person.
And yet it is just a simple, inoffensive word that is the feminine of dog.
Now, if you call a guy a dog, does he take enormous offence? No. ‘Course not. Sometimes being called a bit of a dog can be a badge of honour or at the very least, achievement.
But bitch is a different beast.
Yes. Bitches are some of the sweetest, most loyal, faithful, biddable and intelligent beasts in the animal kingdom. I have one of my own, and I wouldn’t swap her for anything. We could all do a lot worse than have a bitch of our own.
 Bitch shouldn’t be a term of abuse – it should be a term for someone loving and loyal, someone you can depend on, someone who is there to comfort you when you’re feeling low and bolster you when you’re feeling dumped on.
I like bitches. Most dog owners do. It’s about time we took bitch back from the yanks (as it is, I fear, they who have corrupted it to its present form) and gave it the respect it deserves. Bitches are nice. Bitches are a mans best friend. And a woman’s.


 

Date Night

 Gosh. Date Night, the new Steve Carell and Tina Fey comedy hit my local cinema this week, so off I went to have a look-see. Firstly, I like Steve Carell, so I was a bit biased. I've not really seen Tina in anything, no, not even the famous impersonations of Sarah Palin, so I was willing to like her too. The trouble was, this was a comedy that cut far too close to the bone to be really funny. The basic plot is a bit silly, but we all need amusement in our lives, so no complaints there. But there were some dialogue scenes where someone, presumably the author, was obviously working through some personal feelings about marriage, families and what the combination does to relationships. There were some great unspoken secrets let out during Date Night. That kids take up so much of your time that life becomes perfunctory. That we are so busy being a family that we forget who we were and why we got together in the first place. That marriage can be boring, hard work, and often without much apparent reward. That people who don't go down that route can often have a happier life. It's all true - but it's not the whole story. Date Night nearly succeeded in showing both sides of the story, and the combination of Carell (who has put a bit of weight on since he became famous, and I notice no one has shown his excess in the magazines as they would have done to a woman) and Fey was good. They seem to like each other, and have some genuine chemistry. Apparently some scenes were ad-libbed and under-rehearsed. It showed. The pole dancing scene was not as funny as they seemed to think it was and that was a shame. An amusing film rather than a laugh out loud one. 6/10
 

The Ghost

 The Ghost. Good cast. Good acting. But sadly a tad predictable. Sometimes I think it's possible I've maybe seen too many films - but I'm seldom wowed anymore. The Ghost didn't wow me. The setting was dreary (rain, rain and more rain) and the storyline was fairly easy to work out once you got to about the 2/3 stage. One or two red herrings, but all in all, I preferred Ewan McGregor's last outing, as Jim Carrey's gay lover in 'I Love You, Philip Morris'.
The ending of The Ghost was complete bollocks. Far too fast, way too 'neat'. I felt it was a rushed ending - as if it hadn't been the original, but tacked on later for the sake of completion. So, The Ghost gets a 6 out of 10.
 

Playing Hard To Get - Not Half!

 Over the course of the winter/spring, one of the things that has kept me amused has been a pair of magpies building a nest outside the living room window. I know they're pretty universally hated, but I think they're stunningly beautiful (my very fave are starlings though - I'd love one as a pet!) and these two have kept me entertained as they have worked. The nest took ages - and the twigs were two layers thick in the garden of my neighbour, in who's garden the tree actually is. Finally they figured out what to do and the nest is clearly visible high in the branches of a silver birch. Now the serious courting has begun. He's being very attentive, hopping around her, bobbing his head and keening all the time. He's laying on the patter with a trowel. I have a funny feeling they might be newcomers to the mating game - they certainly took their time figuring out the nest-building and now she's playing REALLY hard to get! He's very anxious, hence his peeping noises. They're plaintive and a bit sad, but maybe hopeful as well. So like a teenager. She's interested but trying to look cool. Heck, she's already spent three months building a nest with him - that's a lot of time and energy wasted if she knocks him back now. So now I await the better weather for them to get it on all over the chimney pots, and though I probably will lose sight of the nest as the leaves grow and obscure my view, I will try to keep an eye open for little magpies. I quite fancy one of them as a pet too...
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