A fascination with the hind-quarters of celebrities is fueling a booming market for underwear that amplify the tush. Booty Pops or Wonderbutts – see the video – are the latest women’s fashion accessory that have egg shaped foam pads to create a fuller backside.

Forget hours of agonising training and gym work to develop a fuller derrière – slip on a pair of the padded panties and you are transformed becoming “Bootylicious”

High street shops in the UK such as Marks & Spencer are stocking shapewear within their ladies underwear departments but this tends to be more about overall size reduction and slimming with ranges such as magic pants so it would appear that these butt boosters are primarily for the US market

An American commented:

We have an obesity problem in the country and this is all we need… to make our fat back sides look even bigger.

I’m thinking this won’t be that big a seller since most adults could stand to lose a few in the posterior rather than gain.

I’m told that padded bottom underwear was fasionable in Paris in the 1950′s.

See how those fellows look at me, I have a well fixed behind (estoy bien dispachada atras)

There’s nothing wrong with a woman who feels sexy and confident about herself. Make-up, bras, heels, bum boosters are all tools of the trade just like a nice suit and tie, cufflinks, a good shave and polished shoes are for men.

I do hope the women wearing these butt pads have a sense of humor about it and readily admit to wearing them if questioned.

Egg-Shaped Foam Padded Panties?

Wouldn’t they get a little warm and sweaty and retain body odors?

FAKE

No matter how you cut this thing, it still comes down to false advertising. Fake booty, fake resumes, fake military medals, fake or altered biographies, fake this, fake that, fake everything.

Booty Pop projects it will sell close to 1 million pairs of padded ladies underwear this year

Since then I’ve managed to drink many wines, mostly with better flavors than the first. But after all of these years and wines, I have still feel a bit uncomfortable expressing how I felt about a particular bottle, especially after hearing people describe the same wine as “flowing with chocolate and cinnamon, intermixed with blah, blah, blah”.

Perhaps my palate died on the lawn. In any case, I’ll leave the lengthy descriptions to those with better imaginations than me and stick with more elegant descriptions like “it’s nice” or “not bad”

BTW Beer is better!

By attaching its name to the ultimate in overdoing it, Pepto, which is owned by Procter & Gamble, may have found a receptive audience. “[Competitive] eaters have been using it for years,” said George Shea, chairman of Major League Eating, the event organizer…. Sauce

It is a sad commentary on our society. That they have a “major league eating” that can actually exist as an organization is even a sadder commentary .

However I believe in a free market, and defend the right of people to engage in any commerce they desire. The most important market is that of ideas. To be “frank” , hot dog eating contests are among the “wurst” entertainments in the culture, though they seem to be “on a roll.” I do not “relish” such events, have never “mustard” any interest, and hope the participants “ketchup” with better alternatives.

A funny NY Post headline from many years ago: “blokey (can’t remember the name) wins by a nose.” The winner stuffed his mouth so much that bits of hot dog were coming out through his nostrils!

Summer brings expecations of balmy evenings sitting outdoors in the garden sipping refreshing drinks wearing loose clothing and enjoying the peace – all very well for most but consider those with less regular working patterns – seasonal workers may be required to stay on to satisfy customer demands at tourist attractions, IT technicians who work long into the night running system updates sweltering in server rooms installing financial software so essential treasury management system will be effective next day.

Folks who return home after dark should plant white flowers (or salmon pink, which also shows up well in the dark) around their walkway and front steps. Planters or beds near a deck or porch where folk sit after dark can be planted with salmon pink, white, or silvery foliage plants. All this can be done on a small scale, to add great pleasure to evenings at home, without planting a full garden for evenings.

Don’t forget Evening Primrose (Oenothera).

The common Evening primrose (yellow) makes a delightful evening flower display. It is a tall biennial and looks like a weed (in some places it IS a weed), but a whirl of new bright yellow blossoms opens on every plant every evening just after sunset – you can watch them POP open in a few seconds.

The blooms have a rich dark scent of musk and fresh ground black pepper, a strong draw to their pollinator of choice, ghost-like hawk moths the size of hummingbirds.

Come morning the flowers will shrivel, unless the day is cool and overcast…

But evening will bring a fresh new round, and will do so for two months or more.

Flying in economy can be so unpleasant and leather seats won’t help.

I’m tall – leather seats don’t make you “more comfortable” when you’re completely crammed for hours. I don’t need a meal or a smiling flight attendant as long as I have room. So it seems to me that the airlines have their priorities wrong.

Leather seats are hot and make people sweat … won’t that be sweet? It will also be more difficult to muffle escaping gas. Imagine the inflight entertainment on a return flight from Mumbai – up, up and away!

Are they planning to fix my pet peeve? I don’t think seats in economy should recline. It’s like asking someone if they want to steal space from the person behind them at no cost to them. They should just put in those bendable head rests, pick an average seat recline angle and leave it.

Forget the wi-fi – forget the drinks – forget the toys – MORE space is priority #1. When a person is physically uncomfortable, nothing else matters.

While reading listen to the wonderfully hypnotic sound track from the eeppy peeps that accompanies their classic diet fizzy brand drink and mentos experiments.

Hi – my nana always loved telling me about her home brew exploits and getting aunt ada sloshed on a weeknight….she used to love eldferflower champagne and I have been meaning to do some for many years.

For the last couple of years I have missed the flowers so made great use of the berries later in the year to make some luscious elderberry vino.

I had a couple of scary moments with my homebrew exploding – I had taken advice previously and filled lots of tiny glass wine bottles, and many 2 litre plastic screw tops…..

….not long after bottling – fermentation must have started again….the 2litre plastic bottles felt like rocks – I held it in the fermentation bucket in case it exploded – BOOM! in a milisecond my hands were empty – the bucket was no where to be seen, my friend was stood on one leg with one eye closed dripping all down one side with sticky purple – I looked down at myself – i was covered from head to foot in purple and stood in a lake of it – we were both frozen to the spot with our mouths hanging open in absolute disbelief of what we were seeing – i looked around the previously cream kitchen…..purple was dripping off the ceiling, off the cupboards, downs the walls, looked like a massacre!

After stripping off where I stood and leaving my friend to start mopping up the insane mess using all of my best bath towels – I took the other bottles outside into the yard at arms length like unexploded bombs….took a towel and opened them all under the towel back into the bucket….half exploded in my hands again, covering me top to toe in streaks of blood coloured elderberry wine..the doorbell went, aargh! and the poor gas man nearly fell over where he stood – he took one look at me, went white as a sheet ‘holy moses are you alright pet?’ thinking I had suffered some terrible injury with elderberries dripping down my face/arms/legs.

Once the colour had returned to his face he recounted tales of his own homebrew exploding under the stairs.

anyway – it took a week to clean the kitchen – i then had to re-paint it, and we were still finding purple oozing out from skirting boards and light fittings in the kitchen for two years afterwards.

(the rebottled result of this debaucle is lush though!)

So – I am about to embark on elderflower champagne. I bought those ikea bottles someone earlier was talking about thinking, well – glass screw tops didnt work, plastic bottles nearly blinded my friend, maybe those glass swing tops might work.

Now I am seriously worried! I would rather have a VERY VERY slightly sparkling (rather than fizzy) champagne than have any more dramatic explosions.

So – can I ask you lovely people if you think that:

1 – I leave it to ferment in the bucket for a week or so, will it be less fizzy?

2 – If I put it in these glass swing tops and store them in the cellar (cool and dark) will it be less fizzy when I come to open them?

3 – If I open them when the bottles are really cold will that help prevent the bottle exploding in my hands!?? I am assuming that gases expand with heat, so if I keep them chilled the gases should be smaller by volume?

4 – I will make sure the bottles are all covered in something so if they do explode they wont be flying through the floor of my living room!

5 – OR – is there something else I can make out of this bucket of elderflowers/sugar/water/lemons…..(smells really nice!)

I am an absolute chicken.

6 – what if, after having bottled the volatile liquid into the swing tops – if I left the swing tops off and put a balloon over the necks of them? I have heard people do this with demi johns if they dont have an air lock – maybe with a pin hole in it (but then the gas would escape wouldnt it?)

hmm, i am worried about my 20 litres currently steeping in my (recently painted) kitchen!

By the way – the berries this year will be made into marmalade. I am not brewing anything with a colour ever again.

It sort of epitomises so much that has gone wrong in Britain over the past two or three decades. British people have allowed themselves to be so very easily manipulated, exploited and ripped-off.

They have embraced rip-off Britain instead of challenging it. House prices are a good example whereby people still bought despite extortionate prices compared to other parts of Europe and then struggling with huge mortgage repayments, when they should have, like Zammo from Grange Hill, just said no.

It shows that we’re a nation of spineless creeps always trying to suck up to the boss and never willing to challenge and stand up for our rights. I’m sure many forego their entitled lunch-hour becuase they’re too spineless to claim it, and it seems the same goes for holidays. What people don’t realise is that by taking this line, they’re making it worse for everyone in the long-term, because management will realise they can manipulate and bully their staff into conceding many of their rights. The culture then becomes exploitative by default because employees have allowed it to become that way.

The opt-out of the 48 hour rule is another aspect of this. Far too many people sign the opt-out when they should just be saying no, I do not want to work more than 48 hours in one week you can pay me a proper wage so that I won’t have to work excessive hours.

A lot of it goes back to the Thatcher era and the erosion of the unions and then workers rights but also the weakness and passiveness of us Brits to challenge anything.

What people don’t realise is that by taking this line, they’re making it worse for everyone in the long-term

Quite. This behaviour has a cumulative toxicity in the workplace, a little like people being prepared to pay over the odds for housing or any other product/service.

When we make concessions to companies, employers, banks or whoever, such as buying a video game with restrictive DRM, or agreeing to work additional unpaid hours, or being willing to pay £200k for a shoddy damp bedsit, we’re not only tacitly approving of that behaviour, we’re actively rewarding it.

It’s like rewarding a dog for peeing on the carpet, or rewarding a child for swearing. Utterly irresponsible.

Should air travelers meekly accept whatever debasement is inflicted on them?

Is it  rude to want to be treated with dignity and respect?

Several comments on the Wall Street journal have implied that there is little travelers can do about this.

Forget flying – take the car

One bright spark found a solution. One year ago, he decided that he would no longer allow himself to be treated like an animal, and he resolved to never fly again. He only goes where he can drive or take a train and grab car hire easily on arrival and it has been wonderful. The longer he goes without flying the less he wants to fly.

I suspect many others have made the same decision.

The result of all these tight airport security measures is that even flights that are 60-90 minutes in the air can quickly become all-day adventures (or longer if you hit a cancellation).

Drive more – fly less

So I too drive more. I can drive through thunderstorms; planes get cancelled. I can estimate the time it will take me to drive from one place to another, and almost always be right within 1/2 hour or so. Flying is a guessing game. In my car, I have whatever I need — 8 oz bottles of shampoo, as many “carry-ons” as I’d like, the food and drink of my choice to munch on, etc.

What is that HONK??

Hideous Vuvuzelas – Is that the droning noise I have to listen to watching the World Cup football games on tv??

This blasted horn should be banned if they want people to continue to watch the World Cup matches on television.

Ban Vuvuzelas!

I watched USA vs England, and between the drone of the commentator and the drone of these stupid trumpets, I think I’ll mute the next one.

I can barely take it and I am only on game two I have been able to speed up play and watch in silence, but is not near as much fun.

The vuvuzelas is just stupid. I am a world cup fan and love to here the chants. That horn sounds like an overcharged vibratory device.

But somehow if you say anything against the however-you-say-it… craphorns… you’re some kind of cultural imperialist. But I bet the stupid things are made in China.

I think there’s nothing wrong with some benign enthusiasm, no different from thundersticks, cowbells, or whatever else we’re used to in our spectator sports but I think that if  Vuvuzelas are allowed to remain in the crowds – it would be fantastic to honk them only to celebrate goals and they must be silent during the national anthems.

Way back in 2000 I think it was I was puzzled by the announcement that an artificial reef was to be constructed at Bournemouth with the intention of transforming the area into a surfers paradise.

Now we learn that the artificial reef has failed to create waves in the English Channel – one of the least wavey places in the UK

No Waves at Bournemouth

Bournemouth does not get good, consistent swell. No swell = no surf no matter how many sandbags you dump on the sea bed.

Bournemouth is on the Southern coast of the UK. Exposed to what is ultimately a fetch limited shallow water undeveloped sea state that is the North Sea/Channel. To make it worse, the localised currents from the Channel disrupt and interfere with any wave that attempts to ‘develop’.

End result? No regular waves with which to surf on. Regardless of how much diamond coated sand is laid out. This is why only short sharp and random waves are noted instead of long crested regular waves.

The failed project was 1.3 million over budget and delayed by 12 months.

How was an initial budget of 1.7 million approved for filling 55 sacks with sand and dumping them on the sea bed?

And how could this possibly have taken 12 months longer than expected?

Anyway here is a glorious photo of Bournemouth going off big time: