Round like the world?

Well that's a new one! I've included her photo from the Miss World site.

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Twenty-year-old Miss England, Georgia Horsley, has a figure many women envy.

But the size-eight model, originally from North Yorks, England, has been told to “fatten up” if she wants a shot at winning the Miss World pageant, the Daily Mail reported Tuesday.

The organizers of the pageant, to be held Dec. 1 in Sanya, China, reportedly are looking for contestants with more voluptuous body types — ones representative of the average woman.

"Miss World judges like naturally curvy girls and don't like the stick-thin women you see on the catwalks,” Horsley told the Daily Mail.

"They promote healthy eating and I want to help them get that message across, so I'm giving it my all."

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Clearly she's much scawnier than the nicely rounded Miss Canada. (!!)

ahhh the importance of clothes

BBC STORY: Elephants sense 'danger' clothes

Elephants associated the colour red with the Maasai

Elephants can tell whether a human is a friend or foe by their scent and colour of clothing, according to Fife experts.

St Andrews University researchers found that elephants could recognise the degree of danger posed by different groups of individuals.

The study found African elephants reacted with fear when they detected the scent of garments previously worn by men of the Maasai tribe.

Maasai men are known to demonstrate their virility by spearing elephants.

Level of risk

The elephants also responded aggressively to red clothing, which is characteristic of traditional Maasai dress.

However, the elephants showed much milder reaction to clothing previously worn by the Kamba people, agriculturalists who pose little threat.

The psychologists said they had expected to find elephants might be able to distinguish among different human groups according to the level of risk they posed.

They said: "We were not disappointed. In fact, we think that this is the first time that it has been experimentally shown that any animal can categorise a single species of potential predator into subclasses based on such subtle cues."

Dress for Outrage

There's a fun show, I think British, which I only caught the tail end of. It's something like A Week of Dressing Dangerously. A woman is challenged to wear these mildly outrageous outfits all week, and see the effect on her. Will she feel less inhibited, more confident, more sexy etc. after. I'll have to catch it again, because not only was it fun, but I think they're tapping into something that What Not to Wear is missing out on. Or maybe it's taking an idea in WNTW and expanding it.

I know several people (possibly all men) who believe you shouldn't care about what you wear, because it's Only for Other People, and anything that's about Other People is automatically bad. And I presume they actually think that they don't care about what they wear.

But I think appearance is part of the way you communicate with the world around you, just like talking, or writing, or blogging etc. And how you present yourself to the world, does feed back in to how you feel about yourself... even if you're just wearing sluffy jeans and t-shirts. You're still carefully choosing that I Don't Care What People Think look.

Which brings me to the topic of Caring What People Think. Anyone who's known me since, say, high school will know that this has been a Creed of mine for most of my life. But there are limits--sensible limits. A friend of mine once said "only crazy people don't care what others think of them"... and if you think about a really mentally ill person riding the bus, you know what she means. (Maybe Drunk People could be added to the list, but you get the point.)

And there's nothing inherently wrong with caring what others think, it's very biologically sensible. We live in societies, we are constantly engaging in non-verbal communication, and how we read each others signals probably made the difference at one point in time between getting skewered and surviving. Or being outcast and left to starve, and surviving. We probably have very strong drives making us want to *belong.*

So while I'm all for the "do what you want, to hell with Them!" attitude, and try to live a lot of my life this way... ease with the binary opposites. Taking this idea to the extreme is just as silly as always caring what other people think... and I would argue, it's rarely even done, because that's how illogical it really is.

Faking Your Way to Success!

A friend recently joined Facebookcrackland and posted some photos of other friends. Everyone immediately wrote in to tell her which photos of themselves they didn't like and to please remove!

Well as usual I have a problem with this sort of thing. Look, I'm not saying that you can't delete a photo of yourself in the privacy of your own home. But if you don't like a photo of yourself that someone else is waving around, I believe you should keep your mouth shut.

Why?

Pride! Come on people! When someone looks at a public photo of themselves and comments negatively on it, it feels to me like they're thinking: I have to point out to everyone that I know I look bad in this photo. I KNOW they're thinking "woah, he's so fat!" or "She looks like a moron" and I want them to know that I know!

The reality is... we all know what you look like! Friends and family see each other all the time, in many circumstances. There's nothing shocking about your pictures to anyone else, only to yourself. If you don't like to look at yourself, then fine, don't. But there's no point trying to stop others from looking at you, because we all have to do it all the time. If we found your looks to offensive, we wouldn't be friends with you.

Don't give in to this photo delete-ahj! I firmly believe that one of the best ways to change your mental reality is to start by faking it. You will feel better about your looks if you first stop vocalizing your self-criticisms. At the very least ACT like you love the way you look. It's attractive.