sundries

[rm]

Despite Patty's hatred of Costco, I've lured her into going with me today. YAY. This mitigates, slightly, the pouring rain factor.

Last night I said to myself, "don't forget to post about ANZAC Day tomorrow," and then, of course, forgot. wcg reminds us all.

Don't be fooled by this article. While plastic surgery may be out for actors, impossible beauty standards still reign. So if you didn't win the genetic lottery, you can forget about going into the business, at least on screen, in the United States. Also? the ratio of period films for which natural breasts are a must have to everything else? Yeah, not so much.

I told you the UK was a very drinky country. Because, holy crap, Cardiff! I can't believe this is where Patty's going to be for 10 - 12 weeks.

Last night on Buffy we watched "Shadow" and "Listening to Fear".

- OMG, Riley, REALLY? You're patronizing vampire hookers so you can be dark enough for your girlfriend? This is the most fucked up plot ever, and, quite frankly, sort of a stupid one. But I've always thought Riley was such a dumb lug, that I'm not riveted by this complete absurdity Wheedon has visited upon us.

- Aliens! There are canonical aliens! Man, that thing, that whole ep, was TERRIFYING. Except, you know, the part where Riley was being distracted because he wanted to go visit some more whores.

- Willow was AMAZING in "Listening to Fear"

- This whole arc in which Joyce eventually bites it (yes, I have that spoiler and the Tara spoiler) is going to be really hard for me to watch. I have an acute medical phobia that manifests in weird ways -- it's not about the gore, it's about the lack of control, medicine as punishment and my own probably not so awesome genetic odds. And this is punching those buttons hard.

- I really don't like Glory. She's just not a bad guy I find interesting and I think I really dislike the actresses performance, although it's clear she's just following directions. I am, however, really curious about Ben and the whole cosmology around her now.

- And I forgot to mention about "Fool for Love" the other day that hey RTD, you really liked SPike's little "you're connected to people and that keeps you alive" speech, didn't you? Well, good to know that Torchwood isn't _just_ about the Angel/Wesley Jack/Ianto loving. Wow, now if only Torchwood fandom could remember that. *snerk*

Royalty in New York. Really.

Sainsbury's gluten-free cherry bakewell tarts? AWESOME.

We think Cricket's squeakiness may be cat sonar.

Comments

[smirnoffmule.livejournal.com]

It's not really a new fad, we've always been a nation with a big drink-to-get-drunk culture, though some of the related issues are more recent (as in, last couple of decades, not super-recent) developments, probably due to alcohol being cheaper and more widely available. And regulations being very poorly enforced - I remember being surprised, when I visited Canada when I was 23, that I got ID'd in pretty much every bar I went in, but at home I'd been buying alcohol without much challenge pretty much consistently since the age of 15. And there's also an element of reportage creating the truth - what the doom-mongering papers have suddenly got their teeth into as a symptom of our broken society is actually something that's been around for ages which just hadn't previously considered newsworthy. The term "binge drinking" is a relatively new one, but the practise isn't.

I only know what an intervention is via Buffy but I know lots of families affected by alcoholism.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I'm 37 and I still get ID'd at pretty much every bar I go into here, sometimes to even go into the bar! Now, I look young for my age, but under 21? No way.

I think it much be a product, in part, of different liability laws here vs. elsewhere, and also this sense of "if you have sex or drink before the age we say you can, soon you'll be a drunk-driving heroin addict fucking animals in front of the elementary school." We're very high strung here.

I only know what an intervention is via Buffy but I know lots of families affected by alcoholism.

This is the most stunning thing I have ever heard. I assume part of it must be that American culture has a self-help book of the week streak and an airing of dirty laundry in public streak that make interventions right up our ally, but I'm still stunned by this.

I'm also interested in your casually uttered "broken society" -- I heard that phrase constantly in the rhetoric when I was in the UK and it's not one we use here. It was hard to hear it as an American and understand that it wasn't code for "women in pants not going to church enough and homosexuals roasting our babies" which is what it would be code for here.

[smirnoffmule.livejournal.com]

How does this intervention thing work, then? I got the basic definition from context in Buffy, but I didn't realise it was like an institutional thing? Or is it?

And yeah, broken Britain - I did use that self-consciously. As you say, it's a big buzzword in the press at the moment, mostly, if you'll forgive me being cynical, designed to convince us we're about to slide into anarchy if we don't all vote Tory, and/or get out of Europe, lock up all teenagers, treat people on benefits with the mistrust they deserve, stop immigration, and hang paedophiles. Perhaps not really that different from how an American might understand it, except we have different focuses for our national paranoia :)

Re IDing, our laws are, to be fair, much stricter now than when I was a teenager - I get checked a lot more at nearly 30 than I ever did when I was underage. But yeah, I think there is more of an attitude here that it's normal and healthy to push those age boundaries a bit, plus a layer of laddish pressure that you ought to want to, or at least that's the case within my typical peer group - I've worked in pubs for years, so I've had a lot of exposure to booze-centred culture (and seen some lovely people dead from liver disease, and my ex's dad drank himself to death, and my mother married an alcoholic, so I can see both sides here).

[rm.livejournal.com]

Dude, we even have reality TV about it: http://www.aetv.com/intervention/index.jsp

But the idea of "staging an intervention" for any type of addiction or related self-destructive behavior (i.e., an eating disorder) is ubiquitous in the culture here. I wouldn't say everyone I know has been to one, but I don't know if you could find anyone in the US who didn't know what one was, or at least have a friend of a friend story about it.

[redstapler.livejournal.com]

Some friends and I have been considering staging an intervention over the depressive and irresponsible behaviors that a friend of ours has been exhibiting with no sign of addressing.

So it's gone beyond even addiction or specific self-destructive behavior and into "There's something broken with you and you don't want to address it, but we're going to."

[rm.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and see, we all have these conversations, whether we engage in these things or not. Like I'm sure I've said "so-and-so totally needs an intervention" about any number of weird things, including people who can't tell that leggings and pants aren't the same thing.

Another UK take on it

[penguineggs.livejournal.com]

I'm with smirnoffmule about only knowing vaguely what an "intervention" was from US media and LJ and an article in the Observer from Robbie Williams about how badly he hated Elton John and David Furnish for staging one on him when he was in the process of working fairly carefully with his own psychiatrist around the "coming to terms with having a problem and where that problem lay" and suddenly found himself (effectively) kidnapped by them and told by them what his problem was and denied any validity to his statements of, "No; actually I've considered that in great detail and your assumptions there are just plain wrong; I know I've got problems but they aren't the problems you say they are."

It strikes me that if you staged an intervention in the way it sounds in US media in a UK setting that you'd be cutting across so many and such deep-rooted social taboos that if the interventionee turned round and killed you they'd have a sporting chance of getting away with "manslaughter on the grounds of extreme provocation".

[heron61.livejournal.com]

This is the most stunning thing I have ever heard. I assume part of it must be that American culture has a self-help book of the week streak and an airing of dirty laundry in public streak that make interventions right up our ally, but I'm still stunned by this.

I hadn't know that the idea of interventions was US-only, but it really doesn't surprise me in the least. It very much seems part of the US mixture of puritanism and the sort of nosiness which isn't always a bad thing.

I'm also interested in your casually uttered "broken society" -- I heard that phrase constantly in the rhetoric when I was in the UK and it's not one we use here. It was hard to hear it as an American and understand that it wasn't code for "women in pants not going to church enough and homosexuals roasting our babies" which is what it would be code for here.

*nods* that was also my reaction to this phrase.

[redstapler.livejournal.com]

I sincerely believe that much of alcoholism in the US is caused by the availability factor that rm describes above.

While I would never describe myself as the most overwhelmingly responsible of drinkers, there was also never a mystery around alcohol for me. I was allowed to have wine with my family as young as 13 or 14, and starting as young as 17, I knew of bars I could go to on my own and be served.

But yeah: America has a terrible alcohol mystique, and it causes no end of problems when people get to college and suddenly, perhaps for the first time, have access to it.

[smirnoffmule.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I agree entirely about the mystique factor, and I've never felt high age-limits were a solution - I think at the end of the day you can't prevent people from doing what they're going to do, you can only try and equip them with the tools to be sensible about it. In say France, there's much more of culture of drinking for pleasure, and it's perfectly normal for children to be given a glass of wine with dinner, and they don't have anything like the problems we have. I think in the UK our problem is overwhelmingly one of a cultural attitude which doesn't encourage anything sensible, but measures worth in excess.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I'm interested in how that happens in the UK, because young people do have access to alcohol, so you don't get the university freakouts like you do here. Is it that parents abusing alcohol are teaching their kids to abuse alcohol on a scale much broader than "yeah, alcoholism runs in families?"

[smirnoffmule.livejournal.com]

I think it's that there are huge cultural pressures from all sorts of directions, on all sorts of levels that reinforce the all-pervading idea that this is what sociability is, that this is what having a good time is, this is what a good night out feels like, that this is where all the good stories are, that you're worth more as a person if you can drink more (no insult more cutting than calling someone a light-weight), and the prestige which comes with the morning after if you really did drink yourself half dead.

I mean, I won't pretend I'm a saint, but I don't much like getting drunk, so I'll often switch to soft drinks, and in a pub where everybody knows me, I have to keep on accounting for myself, explaining myself, laugh off all the teasing, refuse offers to buy me a "proper" drink (very tactfully, because this can be read as rude) over and over again. So many times I've ended up drunker than I've meant to in those situations, and I don't even much like it. And though this is quite a particular, and working class, environment, I think the same ideas ingrained at a lot of levels in our culture, much as it's sometimes characterised as being a lower class problem. I've often seen City types - stock market workers, rich people, in nice suits - on their hands and knees in the gutter at 2am in the City of London.

I probably sound like I should write for the Daily Mail now, and there is certainly a side to it that is sociable and fun and a bit of cutting loose does no long term harm, but if you're a person who's predisposed to have a problem, then you're in the worst possible environment, and you'll grow up to be my ex's dad, with nothing else to fall back on.

[rm.livejournal.com]

We saw lots of definitely not working class people drinking like idiots in London. Granted, we were staying in Brick Lane, but guys in suits wandering the streets swigging out of open bottles of wine, carrying classes nicked from pubs, etc etc.

[smirnoffmule.livejournal.com]

Yeah, if I had to stereotype - while acknowledging all the problems inherent with stereotyping etc - the most obnoxious kind of drinker, that would be the kind I'd think of. Money to burn, no ties, no breaks, and a nice fat sense of entitlement.

I should apologise for getting slightly impassioned above - I'm not really evangenical about this stuff; generally, I do think it's true that the media whips things out of proportion, and I certainly participate too much in that kind of culture to really be on my high horse about it - but I'm also quite finely attuned to the point where it gets beyond a joke, for the reasons mentioned above.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I mean, while there are some cultures here in the states where it's hard to refuse a bought drink or whatever and the drinking contest thing is still very there, it's pretty easy here to go to bars and be out and not get excessively pressured to drink. One or two statements about not wanting to drink or drink more and people stop, very quickly. This is probably better in NYC than other places. The aggression that you describe in these interactions both is and isn't surprising to me, and unsettling, but I think some of that is female socialization -- it pushes the "just how fucking loudly do I have to say no?" buttons.

[penguineggs.livejournal.com]

Yes, though actually it's an environment where it's generally easier for a woman to say no (though if a young woman going out for a drink with a group starts the evening by asking for a soft drink she will invariably have to fend of an, "Are you in the club?" type comment) and it's the guys who come in for the most pressure.

[smirnoffmule.livejournal.com]

I think it's quite telling how gendered the pressure is, with all the implications that comes with - the idea that abstaining is somehow girly puts huge social pressure on young lads (and from there, to a certain extent, on girls who want to be taken seriously by the lads as real people rather than just bacardi breezer-supping arm furniture). And I'm sure there's pressures within social groups of girls too, though I'm less personally familiar with those - I used to do fake vodka lemonades for this one girl (lemonade in a short glass, basically) who didn't want her mates to know she'd wasn't drinking.