When you make the same journey a lot, you tend to start picking out details. Silly things that weren't there the day before. The people. Notices in shop windows. And, oh my God, the ever changing advertisements on the hoardings. I think this is why advertisers bother with roadside billboards... because they know that after a few weeks people stop noticing the things that are the same, and start looking out for the things that are different.

Advertising. Yeah. Lovely.

We're currently in the run-up to a General Election here in Merry England. The date hasn't been called yet - I wish they'd hurry up and do it so at least we'd know when all this irritating electioneering would be over - but we've got election posters coming out our ears at the moment. The most aggravating of these are the Conservative party's desperate attempts to appear 'in touch' by using posters which are covered in bad handwriting with populist sentiments like "Just how hard is it to keep a hospital clean" and "It's not racist to impose limits on immigration". Very nice.

Only thing is, if I remember rightly it was the Conservatives who introduced the idea of contracting out hospital services like portering, meals and yes, cleaning to private companies - the lowest bidder, in other words. Hospital cleaners are overworked, underresourced and underfunded - is it any wonder we've got problems with hospital hygiene these days? When catering, cleaning, portering and the like were run by in-house services, things weren't this bad. Now they're all run by private companies, with predictable results. Thank you, Tory party. And while it's not racist in theory to impose limits on immigration if you do it across the board, I highly doubt Michael Howard would stop immigrants from first-world countries getting jobs here if they wanted to. I bet poor Eastern Europeans, Africans and Asians couldn't say the same, though. So yes, that is racist.

The one that really got my goat was this one, though:
"How would you like it if some bloke on early release attacked your daughter."

Ouch. The latent paternalism in that one really is painful. It's as if the Tories are suggesting that the hypothetical daughter's feelings in this scenario don't matter in quite the same way as her incensed father's do. As if the woman is somehow little more than an extension of whichever man has custody of her. The subtext seems, to me, to suggest that women belong to their fathers or their husbands, not to themselves. Obviously that one wasn't aimed at women. Amazing, isn't it? Even when they're going for the populist vote the Tories shoot themselves in the foot by revealing themselves as unreconstructedly sexist. It'd be almost funny if it wasn't so sad.

This has been a Party Political broadcast from the Fangirl Party.

The other poster that's been catching my eye lately is the one for 'Miss Congeniality 2', which strikes me as one of the more useless sequels of recent years. I can't remember the first one being that popular - what about this movie was crying out for a sequel? Or is it just because Sandra Bullock (oh, Sandy... and you seemed so full of promise, too. What went wrong?) is so desperate for a paycheck she'll do anything? The poster, if memory serves, is virtually identical to the first one. Needless to say, this really doesn't bode well for the film.

If you're wondering where this update's title came from, by the way, I do actually pass a barber's shop on my way to college which also sells hats. Does anyone else think the juxtaposition is, for wont of any other word, unfortunate? I know I wouldn't go in there for a haircut if my life depended on it.

... and now I need to go eat.

--oh, and yes, I have managed to upgrade my livejournal account but I've got to say, the changes only really take in the small matter of presentation. The content, for instance, is still exactly the same unreconstructed fangirl chaos that it always has been (random stuff about the frustratrions of writing fanfiction, manga and anime and the associated shounen-ai/yaoi fixation I've had for the past... ooh... seven years, my verging-on-the-scarily-obsessive thoughts on the subject of Ken Hidaka - all that kind of thing) interspersed with occasional rants about life in post-millennial Britain and proof positive that student nurses are amongst the Strangest People on the Planet.

But, looking on the positive side of this (not particularly) expensive upgrade, I have managed to got a nice new layout up as well as upload and use my All-New Obsessed Fangirl User Icons, so that's all good. No, it doesn't take much to make me happy, does it?

Too bad everyone and their dog uses the 'Component' layout, really.

Also, it has recently been brought to my attention that I really am a hopeless fangirl of the Ken Hidaka variety. There are three things I could do to cure this. Shoot myself in the head, get serious and expensive psychiatric help, or find some kind of an outlet for all this complete and hopeless fangirlishness so that I'm not boring my non-fangirl friends to tears or irritating them to the point that they'd contemplate strangling me for the sake of a bit of peace and quiet if it wasn't for the inconvenient ocean seperating me and them (I'm not quite this bad in real life - the name for that irritating state of affairs that occurs when I'm not online, writing fanfic or daydreaming - honest!). I didn't think I was a complete obsessive but obviously I am. Yes, I know, it's sad. Since I don't really want to shoot myself and I like being a fangirl loon, not to mention I don't have anywhere near the kind of money I'd need to take myself and my Ken obsession into analysis, that means I probably need to try and find some kind of an outlet for this. Maybe a peer group would help?

Okay, that completely blew my 'I'm a mature, sane, sensible, adult, functioning human being type person' cover, but what can I say? I never was any of those things, all this time I was just pretending. Now the truth is out: I'm a hopeless fangirl. I think I need to find some other obsessive fangirl lunatics like myself. The question is, where can I find one? An anime convention? The Forbidden Planet bookstore? The Maudsley psychiatric hospital?

Ah... I know. The Internet!