…but today, while having lunch I did a bit of Googling and to my dismay discovered that not only is this unimaginable tale NOT a hoax, this deranged woman isn’t the only poor-excuse-of-a-mother out there injecting her young child with botox.
Several blogs have picked up this story but Mama Mia’s closing editorial remark struck me as the most relevant:
”It’s really really difficult to find the right words here. You might be more successful than me. But what troubles me most (on a long list of deeply troubling things about this story) is that this societal obsession we have with youth and perfection and erasing wrinkles and hair and all signs that we’re not human Barbie dolls, is trickling down to kids and parents. This case is extreme but is it symptomatic of a bigger problem?”
And of course from a different perspective one might argue that all the botox and body waxes and tattooed eyebrows and lips in the world won’t turn this little girl into a superstar unless she has that annoying little quality known as… talent.
“A mother who controversially injected her teenage daughter with Botox is now teaching her seven-year-old daughter to poledance. Sarah Burge, 50, known as the ‘Human Barbie’ after spending half-a-million pounds on cosmetic surgery, claims that the poledancing lessons help daughter Poppy seven, to keep fit.”
So the only thing more compelling than seeing a mother injecting her daughter with botox is seeing a mother injecting two daughters with botox and then teaching them how to poledance at the age of seven….
I am with a lot of commenters who simply do not understand how this is not considered a punishable-by-law form of child abuse.
Some things are just meant to go together. Peanut butter and jelly. Milk and cookies. Babies and hunting.
That appears to be the logic behind Senate Bill 207 sponsored by Sen. Joe Hune (R-Hamburg), which is being debated in the Senate right now. The legislation would scrap the minimum age for hunting licenses in Michigan in an effort to halt the declining numbers participating in the sport
[Click link above for full story]
Have all the elected Republicans gone completely insane? We’ve got serious relief responsibilities to deal with in Haiti and Japan requiring money and manpower. Unemployment is still down. Housing is still knackered. The economy is struggling to recover. We’ve got troops in Afghanistan, Iraq and a dozen other countries globally. We’re aiding a military movement to stop a truly evil dictator from killing off all his citizens…
…and Republicans want the Federal and State Governments to focus on things like redefining the word rape so fewer women are eligible for legal abortions and abolishing the age limit of hunters in Michigan because the people who sell guns to hunters aren’t having a good year?
Yuh because what I want for my 4 year old in the middle of throwing a temper tantrum is for him to not only know where daddy keeps the guns, but how to load and aim them!
And did you notice? The Republican who came up with this hair-brained scheme is named Joe.
Editor’s note: heh – I meant to say unemployment is still up, not down. Thanks FEDUP for catching this 🙂
Never realized before how much face makeup she wears…
I know, I know I am so going to Hell for this… but before Satan comes to drag my sorry ass away let me just sincerely apologize to Getty Images, the model who didn’t deserve to be defaced and the wonderful people who make Babybel Mini Cheese… Ok – ready for the fire and brimstone now…
Second Thoughts: My smarmy spouse read this and chuckled. Then, grinning like the Cheshire Cat tapped me on the shoulder and said “you need to add a slogan – Life is Gouda when you Let Cheeses into your Heart!”
Well, at least I won’t be going to Hell by myself – on the other hand, I may be in for a whole evening of bad cheese jokes and I’m not sure which is worse – hahaha!
Third Thoughts: Then, of course, there’s the whole issue of hymns and carols and anthems and guessing Palin’s favourite might be –
A Whey in a Manger…
Fourth Thoughts: Ok now it’s just embarrassing… There’s a (spoof) Pizza Hut in the U.S. that purportedly sells statues made of cheese called Cheese Jesus standing on a platter of crackers AND here’s the link…there’s an entire (spoof) history of Cheese Jesus along with Mozzarella Moses…
There’s a video of a cheesemaker in Europe who actually makes a nativity scene out of cheese and takes it to his local church…
There’s a video of an english family performing a cheese play at the Christmas dinner table using hand-carved cheese figures…
And then there’s this…
I howled! I had no idea Cheese + religion was such a big deal on the internet!
…apparently the reseachers aren’t the brightest crayons in the box either:
Full Story Here. By the way, a commenter on this story noted that Fox placed the city of Sendai on the southern end of Japan. It’s actually north of Fukushima – well of course it is, the entire city of Sendai was washed away in the tsunami because it was so close to the earthquake epicentre it was ONE OF THE CITIES HARDEST HIT! Which could NOT have happend if it was located on the southern tip of Japan! Does ANYONE at FNC know geography???
Bleh…
So it wouldn’t surprise me at all to hear the following was a real quote and not just a bit of holiday humour 🙂
And on a final note, just in a late observation, I was listening to a very funny bit on Palin by Kathy Griffin and she mentioned something that struck a nerve. It does my head in when people still refer to Palin as ‘Gov. Palin’ because – she quit! Ms. Griffin brought up the point that when a king abdicates his throne HE DOESN’T GET TO KEEP HIS TITLE!
So really, if anyone in Alaska wants to start a petition… I’m in!
Reminiscing about Elizabeth Taylor, her gracious life and the wonderful roles she was given through the years gave me pause to think… what roles would a studio offer Sarah were she as big a movie star as Ms. Taylor?
Well it didn’t take much imagination to come up with this role for Queen Esther… she truly is an inspiratiuon!
After all, her voice is a natural for this part. The studio would save a fortune on sound fx.
Elizabeth Taylor became my Hollywood heroine in the 1960’s when her film production of Cleopatra hit my city. Tickets were purchased in advance, just as if it were a live performance. It was four hours long. Once you were seated there was no getting up again. A 30 minute intermission at the 2-hour mark allowed the audience to buy a cool drink, catch a breath of fresh air and then it was back to the seats for another two hours. I remember the line to the ladies room was so long I didn’t even bother.
I enjoyed the movie but Ms. Taylor captured my heart, mind and soul during the scene where she defiantly arrives in Rome to deliver Caesar his son. Behind a parade of dark, dancing Nubians in white ostrich feathers and fair-skinned concubines swathed in glittery veils, she stands in front of a golden pyramid at the top of stairs which stretch out onto a long platform. Hundreds of slaves carry this monstrous parade float on their shoulders in the hot sun. She stands by her child, she draped from head to toe in a costume made of bejewelled, golden feathers (meant, I believe, to resemble the Goddess Isis) him in golden robes and nestled under the keen protection of his mother’s arm.
It was the most powerful movie scene I’d ever watched. It was like seeing an old adage turn upside down and come to life – Yes Virginia, the mountain can come to Mohammad.
I do realize that the epic production of Cleopatra was created by authors, costumers, cameramen, directors, etc. But one cannot pretend the genuine gutsy demeanor brought into the scene by Ms. Taylor wasn’t the thing that pulled everything else together and made it work. I doubt there are many if any in Hollywood today who possess the ability to pair gutsy with ladylike quite like Elizabeth Taylor. Even in her drunken scenes in Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf she is never for a moment – not poised.
The sense of true bravery didn’t end with the director saying cut, either. On camera or off, Elizabeth Taylor was a brave lady in every sense of the word. She became my real-life heroine in the 1980’s when she sat on a hospital bed and cradled a young girl who was suffering from AIDS. She deplored people who were unforgiving and who acted from ignorance and fought many social injustices many times over.
She was a great actress, a generous philanthropist, a loving and lovely lady. She will be missed.
There’s a reason the most carefully planned fallout shelters of the fifties and sixties were built several feet underground with elaborate double and triple door entrances. And apparently, the current Japanese authorities reporting on the conditions at Fukushima #1 Nuclear Plant are hoping no one remembers.
Well I remember. My early school years were dotted with duck and cover drills, Tuesday city-wide air raid siren tests, and listening to my father, uncles and their friends periodically arguing about exactly how far underground a fallout shelter would need to be buried to avoid radiation seepage from the soil into the concrete walls; how thick those walls would need to be and then how long people would need to remain underground without ever opening the inner or outer doors in order to completely avert radioactive contamination. They were grisly topics of conversation, the kind you really didn’t want to overhear but couldn’t stop yourself from sitting on the upstairs landing, out of sight, soaking it all in.
I grew up listening to educated men and women discussing the horrors of Hiroshima, how both governments, theirs and ours, could have behaved better and in the end how the after-effects of that bomb, as devastating as they were, compared to a nuclear meltdown of the proposed power plants in the U.S. would become monumentally insignificant.
I am not an expert on or well-versed in the topic of radiation poisoning or exposure. I don’t know a rad from an ohm. What I do know is that in 1979 a nuclear explosion that occurred in a NY plant caused radiation to seep into the Long Island Sound and within 15 years Long Island health statistics reported the populated areas surrounding the sound had the largest percentage and most incidents of male breast cancer in the world. Prior to these stats becoming public, few people were even aware that male breast cancer existed.
It has been suggested that when the waters in the sound became radiated, unlike other waterways affected, the geography of the sound itself encapsulated the radiated water, making it slower to disburse the contamination, as opposed to the surrounding rivers which flowed always in one direction, out to sea. It was suggested that when authorities tested these waters and found the levels of radiation outside the known safe levels, they simply raised the safe levels to agree with the results of their tests because – it would have been impossible to move that many people out of harm’s way.
And whether that theory is true or not, that’s the mindset I find myself thinking about this week, each time I hear the announcement “those living within a 20 km radius of the plant have been evacuated – those who either could not be moved or choose to remain behind and those living just outside the 20km radius were instructed to stay indoors and keep your house air tight.”
“Stay indoors – keep everything air tight.” Really? Because all these homes and buildings were hermetically sealed? Because wooden walls, terra cotta roofs and glass windows will protect people from radiation? And how long before the air inside these sealed homes becomes too stale to breathe? We’re taking these people supplies of oxygen, right? Along with food and medical supplies, transistor radios and power generators?
I’m not certain, but I think this is where we’re all supposed to just be quiet and look the other way.
============ UPDATE============
This link will take you to an Alaska website called Frozen Justice. The blogger is in touch with a person in Japan who is translating the Japanese news reports and feeding it to Frozen Justice. It’s the closest we’re going to get at the moment to an unfiltered, live report. The blog repeats itself in the middle – I’m guesing the writer is really tired…
The little mud-covered, downed trees photos of Colleges Crossing that were planned for posting here this weekend, pale in comparison to the images coming from Japan. It would almost be embarrassing to post them now. Pointless.
My television has been on for 48 hours, tuned to Sky News and I can’t make myself turn it off. I watched the video of the waves washing away the entire village of Rikuzentakata at least a dozen times and wept.
So I decided to light a candle and hope some of you will join me.
I’ve just come from the Post where I’ve sent my 90+ year old mother in California a lovely pressie for her upcoming birthday. I deliberately kept the package as lightweight as possible so the postage wouldn’t kill me. I like to send everything airmail because the alternative takes 8 weeks.
The nice lady who usually processes my overseas parcels (with kids, grandkids and other assorted rellies I send a lot of parcels to the U.S.) weighed my package, told me how much it was going to cost then added “And there will be an additional charge of $9.00 as per instructions from U.S. Customs.”
My $24 airmail package just jumped up to $33.
U.S. Customs has instructed all foreign postal offices to collect an across-the-board $9.00 USD fee PER PARCEL to offset the cost of handling by U.S. Homeland Security to keep the U.S. secure.
$9.00 – whether it’s a DVD or a moosehead.
Guess who’s NOT going to be sending monthly packages any more…
That row of muddy looking kindling [above header] used to be quite tall trees lining the river at Colleges Crossing. They fed flocks of wild parrots, nurtured Koalas and provided shade for some of Australia’s smaller flora and fauna. A couple of weeks ago, spouse and I had occasion to cross the bridge at Colleges Crossing and took some shots from the car window, on the fly. A week later, we got the news that the Department of Water decided to open the floodgates in one of the upper dams and this road would be closed for ten days as it would be under water. The decision was based upon weather forecasts of more rain to come in March so the rush to make room in the dams was on.
As soon as the bridge reopened, we went back with the camera and – in the rain – took more shots of Colleges Crossing and the Weir above. I have a few scaled but it will be the weekend before the lot is done and fit for posting.
As hard as it might be to imagine, there are still homes just sitting, waiting for insurance companies to make their assessments before any clean up can begin – from last January’s flooding. I saved a couple of shots from the papers of people standing in ankle-deep muddy water in rooms without roofs and beside soggy furniture. They are not allowed to try and rescue anything or clean anything until after the insurance agents have documented their claims and taken photos. A task that is taking what seems like forever.
Needless to say, there are items which might have been salvaged which are now almost assuredly, just rubbish, and foundations which might have dried out, given half a chance, but now need to be replaced completely. The losses just don’t seem to stop for some of our flood victims.
There is a list of links on the right specifically for gathering donations for the families caught in the recent Queensland floods. Please give if you can.
I was reminded (via the FB thread where this little gem emerged) that a quite prominent US citizen is absent from the above list. In the spirit of fairplay then herrrrrre’s Charlie!
Charlie Sheen – divorced x3, children x4, currently unemployed and umemployable due to drinking and drug problems and openly living with not one but two half-his-age porn starlets 🙂
I’m thinking we could do this up right and add a few senators, governors, governors wives erm I meant husbands…
Oz Mudflats 
