BBC News – Are you wearing a handmade poppy?

Since it was founded 90 years ago, the Poppy Factory has produced millions of buttonhole poppies to mark Remembrance Day each November. This year the 35-strong workforce at Richmond upon Thames in west London have made, by hand, 500,000 of the classic stylised flowers – a small but significant proportion of the 45 million produced in total.

Another 11.5 million have been created by homeworkers, and the rest on an automated production line at Aylesford in Kent. As Remembrance Sunday approaches, take a tour of the Poppy Factory – and see how the instantly recognisable buttonholes are put together on a simple wooden block.

via BBC News – Are you wearing a handmade poppy?.

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Brighton round up

So this year it poured down in Brighton for the annual London-on-Sea Pride. It didn’t dampen our spirits though and we struggled through for a few hours before dragging ourselves back for hot food and some more drinks 🙂

In the evening there were fireworks over the pier too which was great fun.

Oh and a trip to the pier on the Sunday morning is always fun.

Plan to test mobile phones on the Underground

Transport for London (TfL) had appealed for telecommunications companies to come forward for a trial on the Waterloo & City line but have drawn a blank.

The aim of the test – originally scheduled for 2008 – was to find how out technically and commercially viable a scheme would be.

All I can say is thanks god – it’s one of the few places where you get peace and quiet from people on mobiles. I commute using the trains and so sadly don’t get the luxury of not being in contact on my way to and from the office.

Still we know it’s possible as mobile operator O2 already offers mobile phone access on the Glasgow Underground. So really it is inevitable that eventually there will be a London trial on the tube.

Severe Weather Warning

So London has closed down due to snow. It’s the most snow we have had in 18 years apparently and more to come today. All very exciting but means I can’t make it into the office and neither can most other people unless they can walk. Another ten centimetres forecast for today which means most people even if they could get in might not make it back out again!

The Airports are now closing too which means it is bad, trains are suspended in the south west and the south east, all except one tube line is part suspended – the Victoria line is the only one which is completely underground so the weather rarely affects it.

So snowball fight anyone? Oh and don’t eat yellow snow…

Genius Advertising

As anyone who knows me knows I hate advertising. Well okay that’s not entirely true. I hate when advertising ruins the experience or when advertising becomes more imprtant than the content.
Anyway advertising rant over – more to come when I don’t work where I work now.
Anyway AOL Pictures and presumably the rest of the internet are showing the following advert for a new ITV show. It starts with Mike and inviting you to see what else he is wearing…
mike
Then we get to see what he is wearing…
mike 2
And then the prompt for the show…
trinny and susannah
The bit thatmakes me laugh though is that when you see Mike in his pants they look very similar to the ones that American Apparel make and that most of the gay stores in London sell as fashion.

flickr and maps

Those lovely people over at flickr have integrated geotagging and yahoo maps into the organiser function. Very nice integration. Well if you live in the US it is. If you live in say London…

You might have more of a problem. Yahoo maps just simply doesn’t cut the mustard for this kind of application. Well any application actually. Let’s compare Google and Yahoo maps for my neighbourhood.

You can see if you look closely towards the centre a big square block called Du Cane Court. Well you can on the map on the left (google) on the right you just see a blur of housing.

The problem with gay men…

I was channel surfing last night when I stumbled upon Simon Fanshare’s documentary looking at the problems with gay men shown on BBC3 entitled The Trouble With… Gay Men. If you missed it then it’s repeated on Saturday 29th April at 2:50am (that’s Friday night essentially) – you might want to set the recorder for that!

The synopsis promised a look at the upsides and downsides to being a gay man in the UK in 2006. It was hardly the UK view though with the programme being based in London. Although there was a brief trip out to London-by-Sea (Brighton) and an even briefer trip out to Peterborough to meet parents of two gay men getting ‘married’.

Fanshare and the programme focussed on problems that are endemic to youth culture regardless of sexuality, such as drug taking, promiscuity and worshipping the young & beautiful. I must admit to some worshipping of the young and beautiful – who doesn’t?

He seemed to be upset that the youth of today felt it owed no obligation to their elders – again something I think is not confined to the gay community. In fact this seemed more a rant about people with different morals, lifestyles and ideas to his own, for instance he condemned entrants to Mr Gay UK, labelling them as vain and naïve. Whilst I agree I also feel that if you have looks and want to parade in front of the general public in nothing more than your designer underpants then who am I to judge? It reminds me of the outcry about Miss World competitions and beauty pageants the world over, again nothing really new here and nothing specific to being gay in the UK.

Then there was the interview (in a sauna) about promiscuity. An extreme example shown of one man claiming that gay men can never be monogamous. Sure some can’t, but then neither can some straight men. How many marriages end because of infidelity by both men and women? Plus if you have the interview in a venue people go to have promiscuous sex you are hardly going to get an unbiased view. I believe wholeheartedly in monogamy.

My favourite part however was when he interviewed a group of young gay men in Brighton. Complaining they had no role models on television because they felt people like Graham Norton were too camp. Did anyone mention that television is for entertainment? They did all manage to agree though that the cute presenter Kristian Digby from daytime TV shows (and previously That Gay Show) was a good role model. Now I have to say I think this was simply worshipping the young and beautiful and this would have been a nice segue between the two subjects. I personally would have said that John Barrowman would have been a better role model and he is 39.

On a brighter note, and outside the normally closeted world of media, the interview with the Met’s Deputy Assistant Commissioner, Brian Paddick was brilliant, showing that gay men can lead regular lives, even in a ‘dangerous’ environment. I already knew that though – my flatmate dates a copper. I also know many gay men who are builders, firefighters, nurses and office workers. So what does that prove? Oh yeah that being gay is about who you sleep with not what you do for a living.

While I found the programme interesting, I also thought that it served to reinforce the stereotypes that many people have about gay men and women. Proving ultimately that you don’t need to be straight to have gay stereotypes. I disagree with many points that he made, in particular the divisions that have occurred within the ‘community’. I have to say though the ‘community’ is little more than a sham. A few bars and shops on the whole owned by large corporations eager to make money from the ‘pink pound’.

I also thought that some of the statistics were questionable too, in particular, the ‘1 in 5 gay men have tried crystal meth’ statement was misleading – were they asking clubbers in Vauxhall at 4am on a Sunday? I know a lot of gay men in many countries and know no-one who has taken it. Some of them take ‘recreational’ drugs every weekend so I would have thought if it was so prevelant one of them would have tried it.

So I think ‘the problem with gay men’ is they are becoming normal. Being gay is no longer about fighting for rights or any of the other causes that were necessary before we got pretty much equal rights. Many gay men just lead hum drum everyday lives. Many do not cruise for sex on gaydar, are not promiscuous and have never taken crystal meth or other drugs. In fact I don’t think there is a problem with gay men other than an overwhelming need to feel accepted yet different, never a combination that will work well.

Anyway it’s been a while since I’ve had a rant. I’ll step off the soap box now!