Girlie bits

I've been logging my period for quite some time - a number of years - and while the site I was using was adequate, I was on the lookout for something a bit more funky. I found monthlyinfo.com, which, while it's a bit bare-bones, has a nice interface that isn't too relentlessly pink, and has a really nice yet simple stats page. You need to register with an email address, and while you could always crank out a mailinator.com jobbie, I used my usual one, and have not received any messages at all, except the one confirming registration.

An example of the stats is shown below, complete with the data I re-entered from the other site I've been logging at. I could wish for a tool-tip showing the applicable date for each of the graph points (you can see the actual dates on the History page), but I do like the the at-a-glance rendering of the variations in my cycle, what the average is, and also the standard deviation. Now, while it's looking a little random at the moment, those peaks and troughs really just represent a day or so difference in the onset of my period.

A killer app is being able to export the data in XML, CSV or even JSON formats. Very geekily groovy.

While I'm on the topic of bodily things, thank god for osteopaths. I managed to put my jaw out a couple of days ago, doing absolutely nothing at all (and certainly not anything like that, you filthy-minded individuals). I couldn't bite down with my molars at all, and it was most disconcerting. The next day, and half an hour of back pounding and jaw-massaging later, the thing was behaving itself, and I could actually eat lunch like a normal person. Thank god. I hope it doesn't become a trend, though. I'd rather just stick to having a cranky dorsal and cervical region, thanks.

On a more serious topic

If you didn't already think that Dubai wasn't emblematic of obscenity and excess, The Independent has published an article outlining very nicely the number of ways it is so obscene.

Yes, there are scenes of obscenity and excess in many other places of the world. Yes, there is a horrendous amount of worker abuse and exploitation around the world. Yes, there are plenty of places where a fat overclass live a life of conspicuous consumption and entitlement that makes the rest of us ill to contemplate it. Yes, there is blatant disregard for the environment and policies of raping the land for whatever you can get out of it in many many places. Yes, we all know about the financial houses of cards around the world that many of the glossy buildings and trappings of luxury are tottering on. And yes, compared to many, my life is obscene and excessive in some ways.

However, Dubai, complete with its class of self-satisfied "expat" tax-dodging responsibility-shirking slavemasters (I'm sorry, I can't come up with a kinder concept), just epitomises so many of those repellent things all at once, and in such a concentrated area. Singapore is another place I feel violent distaste for, but at least they don't also suffer from religious hypocrisy and such conspicuous consumption.

Reading the comments in the article is interesting as well. A few people (surprise, surprise, of the expat class) have stuck their heads over the parapet, only to get howled down by others. One even claimed the journalist had made the whole thing up out of whole cloth, because there isn't a "gay club" in Dubai. Hell, if I, a dyke who lives on the other side of the world, know that Dubai is a magnet for gay men in the region who go there because there are places they can hang out, clubs that gay men attend can't be that non-existent. As for the others who go, "Oh, most of the Middle East is worse", I am beyond words. So that makes it acceptable, eh?