Sunday.

Not cold, not snowing, not anything - really.

I watched Telstar last night - really enjoyed it - very stagy, which is what it was in the first place - but really enjoyable. Ignore James Corden - if you can.

I mentioned the death of Aaron Shwartz below - and called it sad - but it's much worse than that it's tragic and terrible. I know that he had publicly talked about his battle with depression over the years ( I mean, he was only 26 FFS ) but even the gushing obits have failed to really grasp how important he was - and how appallingly badly he was treated by the US Judiciary. If you saw the film 'The Social Network' - you would have seen a small section where a simple algorithm was drawn on a window pane with a marker pen - it didn't really make enough of an impression in the film - but that simple 'elegant' solution is the foundation of the system that makes facebook work. Aaron did a similar thing ( at the age of about 14 ) that allows you to read this blog, get email, use a smart phone and basically do anything online that means anything to anyone in the modern world. Most tech people are skilled but not sophisticated - the vast majority of the Internet is in the creative dark ages - but some people can transcend that and create 'elegant' and simple solutions that create shift changes in the way the world works - it's like inventing fire or figuring out how to calculate volume of a solid. A very, very sad thing.

The Suzanne Moore Twitter thing has rumbled on even further - I linked to the very good Stella Duffy blog below - and sadly - even her comments page has become a battle ground for people who seem filled with rage, indignation and pedantry about something they don't really understand - but feel they have a right to take ownership of. Now - to make it worse, much much worse - Julie Burchil  ( who I have described before as being part curiosity, part cultural icon, part idiotic sociopath self loving tyrant bully, and part genius self promoter ) has written a piece in today's Observer ( I won't bother linking )  that is part a defence of her friend, and part a quite deliberate attempt to incite, anger, offend and shock... but then, it is Julie after all - that's what she does, and always has - she is just a big ball of anger, self loathing and self importance. A very well paid ball of spite - she likes the attention, enjoys the screaming matches and it generates income for her employers, as well as providing her with huge re numeration ( about 15 years ago Deborah Ore admitted that Julie was first attracted to her Guardian column by a salary of 'very much in excess of £100k, although that's small change - Boris Johnson used to get 400K for his Telegraph column - when told it would be reduced when he became London Mayor - his angry response was "I've been raped" )

It's a curious little episode that has spiralled out of all proportion for no real reason. People love to have 'issues' - I know so many people who define themselves by their anger and indignation, quite often over things they don't really understand, have no connection with, and have not really done the research - but the Internet gives them a platform to be legends in their own face-time. It's frightening how many people have transferred the original cause of offense ( the throwaway line about Brazilian transsexuals - which was more about the shame that so many girls strive to look like Jordan rather than get an education ) into something else - either because they have their own axe to grind - or, frankly - it's a nice band waggon to be on.

I wouldn't dream to imagine how it feels to have issues with your gender, and I wouldn't be so conceited as to talk on their behalf. I know two transsexuals ( I'm not even sure if that's the correct term anymore - I'm sure someone will educate me with the full force of their fury ). One is a local girl - who I get on very well with and like very much - her change of gender is by far the least interesting thing about her - she has the most unusual Job imaginable - designing trigger mechanisms for machine guns, although - to be fair, I've only know her while she has identified as a woman, both before and after her reassignment - so she's always been the same to me. The other is more complex. Growing up, I had an aunt who was almost the same age as my mother - and who resembled her so closely that they were often mistaken for each other. As you can imagine, this meant they never really got on. They had two children - a boy and a girl - roughly the same age as me. You'd think we would get on, but we didn't. They had more money, a better quality of life, were ( in my young eyes ) aloof and a bit smug - and didn't engage with us at all. My cousin - the elder, was about a year older than me and I never really encountered  him at all. His parents marriage broke up unexpectedly and quite dramatically when he was in his late teens, as he grew older he had problems of his own, issues with drugs etc - but sorted himself out - worked and eventually married. Some years ago he was in a parked car that was shunted from behind and left him a virtual quadriplegic. A couple of years ago - my brother called to tell me that my cousin's marriage had broken down and his wife had left him, and although the assumption was it was due to the burden of caring for a very disabled partner - the truth was that he had announced his decision to undergo a full gender reassignment. My brother saw him recently and confessed that he could hardly recognise him, everything about him had changed, his features, voice, mannerisms etc - he'd made himself into something else - seemingly by sheer force of his own will. It reminded me of a documentary about April Ashley from 20 years ago where she said 'I am my own Galatea - I made myself into what I am".

When I'd thought about it a bit - I came to my own conclusion that - when she found made herself powerless by disability - it gave her the opportunity to look at her life and assess what was in her power to change, improve, and take control over - and that was the choice she made, although I can never really know unless she tells me.

To put this into a bit of context - she still lives in the same little town, where you get stoned by feral kids if you wear the wrong trainers or change the way you part your hair, so a staggering amount of bravery must have been involved on many levels.

The point is - I'd never presume to know what they are thinking, have no way of really empathising with them, and cannot begin to understand what their lives are like. I can understand, accept and support them - but I'm not doing them any favours if I presume to be their moral guardian when my own experience is so lacking. Transphobia is being bandied about as a term and bundled in with Homophobia - it's a totally different thing and they both deserve to be treated with equal importance, but not turned into soundbites, buzzwords and mascots.

The writer Deborah Ore just made the comment on twitter "I hope that things never get so bad for me in my life that Julie Burchil needs to jump to my defence" - actually quite funny, but another throwaway line that someone, somewhere will take issue with and is probably already ranting over.

Actually - If you pop over to twitter right now, it's a firestorm of some of the most offensive bile I've ever seen. You know when you pass a pub late at night and there is a gang of angry, drunk, screaming girls fighting, spitting and tearing at each others clothes and you tell yourself to walk away before they turn on you?? Well - it's like that right now.

I'm not completely sure what all this is really about, if it means that people stop and think before they speak sometimes - that's a good thing. Many, many faults on both sides. It's also reminded me that journalists are just people, and often - very stupid people. At one time - living at home in a God forsaken cultural vacuum in North Wales, I used to idolise writers and journalists, as an early reader of ID and The Face, people like Katherine Flett and Julie Burchil were fantastic, glamorous, intelligent and brave, my heroes. I envied them. Years ago Julie Burchil lived round the corner from me in Brighton, she turned out to be an idiot. Carping on for years about how she 'discovered' Hove and loved the community spirit and wanted to protect it - and then selling her house to a developer for a huge amount of money so they could build a block of flats - and now, Katherine Flett lives in my town, has the same air of 'I discovered this place and made it a media bolt hole' but spent last night in the St Leonard pub with a roll call of faded '90s media casualties, tweeting furiously like a 14 year old at a Take That concert about what a wonderful time she was having, and name checking everyone ('drinking with Sally BramptonXX' etc ) so that the whole world could see how FABULOUS she was... her final tweet of the night to the people she left behind as she stumbled into her cab?.. 'Mwah Mwah"... really, you couldn't make it up...