A great favourite of mine!

Here she is doing a big show

And here she is, all alone and taking her clothes off slowly one by one in true French style

And here she is as a mermaid! How could I resist that?

For Charly is something of a superhero. Indestructible, as I say. And able to hold her breath for five minutes underwater (which reminds me of my previous post!) tied to a wheel in ice-cold temperatures – and after three immersions come up and kill the man who is doing this to her.

I remembered it from years ago. When I watched the DVD last night, I was particularly struck by one minor but it its own way stunning example of the contrast between Samantha and Charly, a modern and ultra-feminine Jekyll and Hyde.

It is the scene with the neighbourhood fat boy who is in the class she teaches at school.Early in the film she catches him smoking, speaks to him kindly, tells him smoking is harmful to his health. Later, sneaking into the town gun in hand to pick up something she needs, she catches him smoking, says, “What did I tell you about the dangers of smoking? Give me that,” takes two deep drags, passes it back to him, says “If you tell anybody you saw me here I’ll blow your head off,” and strides away. We watch the terrified kid piss himself.

Charly

Such details are the mark of a great screenplay (by Shane Black) as is the climax – one of the most dramatic climaxes I have ever seen in the cinema (don’t watch it if you have a dodgy heart) and the way that in the end she manages to integrate the two sides of her personality. Result: the perfect woman – as you see her on the farm at the end in this video clip.

Gilbride throws a little light on Dark Age Britain.

• Was Cinderella really a boy? NO! I am happy to say that that was just a malicious rumour put about by Morgan le Fay and backed up by a rather nasty spell.
• Was Queen Guenevere “the fairest in the land”? YES!
• Was Queen Guenevere a slut? Well, YES and NO. We do not like the word “slut” and will not countenance its use, but this was not simply a malicious rumour put about by Morgan le Fay. Guenevere was no more capable of being faithful to one man – or two – or ten – than she was of pulling the great sword Excalibur out of the rock in which it had been embedded by the wizard Merlin.
• Was King Arthur the rightful owner of Camelot, the castle and the alnds surrounding it? NO! That would be Sir Hugue Cumalot, whose own father had been dispossessed of Cumalot by King Arthur’s father for no better reason than that he fancied the place.
• Did Sir Hugue Cumalot have a son to inherit his title, the Cumalot? NO! His only child was a daughter until Morgan le Fay – but see the first item in this list.
• Did King Arthur have a son to inherit his title? NO! He had a nephew called Modred, whose mother, Morgan le Fay – yes, her again – claimed that the boy had been got on her by her half-brother, King Arthur. So perhaps that should be YES! Perhaps not, though. Why would anyone ever believe Morgan le Fay?
• Was there really a revirgination machine at the Castle of Maidens? Well, it was actually a fountain, the Fountain of Revirgination, but – YES! – it worked, as long as the girl had fasted for 48 hours and been thoroughly cleansed inside and out prior to being immersed.
• Is it true that Old Mother Goose was really a man, that it is not simply a pantomime convention? YES! Or at least that he had been a man until the witch Melisande learned that he had referred to her as Smelly Mellie and turned him into an old crone with an even more penetrating and repellent odour than she herself sported.
• Were there really ever such things as water-nymphs in the rivers and lakes of Britain? YES! And mermaids all around the coasts and witches in the villages and wizards in the forests and brave knights who rode out in quest of damsels in distress. (Not to mention shape-shifters and lamiae and succubi and incubi, and nuns and priests, some prurient, some puritanical, and other fanatical followers of the new religion.) BUT READ ALL ABOUT IT IN -

Let me introduce you to Mermaid Melissa.

She apparently holds her breath under water for five minutes or so, no problem. And she wasn’t brought up as a mer like Millie was.

You can find out all about the adorable Mermaid Melissa on YouTube. Start with this one:

Or find her at HireAMermaid.com

And while I’m at it, can I recommend Amanda Hawkins’ short stories – you can find them on Yahoo Groups at Amanda’s Reading Room. I mention it here because two of her latest, and very funny, stories  take TG captions as their theme.

If you like TG fantasy with a taste of 

You can find it here, at Short-Fiction.co.uk

Deep Blue is set in a seaside resort in the south-west of England. It is summer. The weather is fine and the town is full of visitors, there simply for the sun and the sea. But the hill overlooking the town is an archaeological site, a barrow reputed to be the temple of an ancient octopus god, the Celtic “Sigodin-Yth”, pre-Celtic “Txcalin”. This of course attracts a quite different type of visitor, such as the group of academics, professional archaeologists, there to reopen the barrow for the first time in more than a hundred years, and the “new-age weirdos” intoxicated by the octopus god mythology (among other things) who plan to have a great party on the hill.

Nothing special there, just a nice setting.

However, the dramatis personae are something special, and include, roughly in order of appearance, a peeping-tom named Joe, with whom the book opens and – as it happens – closes; a shop-keeper called Mr Hobbers, who dreams of spanking girls’ bottoms; a strange girl with bright green eyes called Tammy, oddly old-fashioned in her way of speaking and in some of her attitudes, not at all old-fashioned in the way she dresses and behaves; two sadistic uniformed bullies, one of them, Ed, a customs officer, the other a policeman; Lily, a young archaeologist with a submissive soul and masochistic body; Nich, the charismatic leader of a group of pagans; Violet and Yasmin, tattooed, pierced and gorgeous new-agers who are, predictably, devotees of Nich, both in and out of bed; and two other green-eyed beauties like old-fashioned Tammy: playful – and spiteful – little Elune, and stately Juliana.

In this book everyone’s dreams come true, be they fantasies or nightmares, for beneath its veneer of respectability the town is a seething riot of sex . Perhaps that is the norm in a quiet little English seaside town (or a Welsh one come to that – have another look at Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood). Or do the weird dreams that some of the girls like Lily and Violet are having, and the presence of Tammy, Elune and Juliana in the town at just this time, point to something other, something totally out of this world we think we know so well?

Read this book and you will never be able to visit a small seaside town again without remembering it and looking twice at the men and women who pass you in the High Street and along the Promenade, and three times – or more – at girls who come up out of the sea where no girl went in. 

The first definition is nonsense, of course.

The  second  is the original and comes from the 14th century. And yes, I suspect that if Mariah had been around in medieval times (perhaps she was in a previous life!) she would have made a great courtesan. Which is a polite word for slut. Or puta in Spanish. Which is my kind of woman. Or person.

Who decides what is moral and immoral anyway? The Church?! The Imams?!

Here are couple of the images I found – really sluttish and my favourites.

Happy Christmas, Mariah! I love you!

Here’s what Kanti Burns wrote about Carnival on her blog and at Lulu.com (where you can order the paperback):

At first glance this novel set in Cartagena, a port in the south-east of Spain (an alternative Spain, not quite the one you and I know and love) seems to be just another sissy story.

Believe me, it is not.

All right, yes, we have the feminisation of a submissive male at the hands of assorted women – and men – many, but not all, of them taking overt sadistic pleasure in what the poor thing bears (and bares); so I suppose, if you must categorise everything, it does belong basically to the TG/sissy genre. At the same time though, it is one of the most cross-genre books I have ever come across – perhaps because Martin is one of the most complex characters I have ever come across in a work of fiction (or in real life!).

He is good, utterly good, in a world of people who, if not wholly bad, definitely have no concept of the kind of selfless goodness, the unswerving kindness, that is Martin’s chief characteristic. But alongside the totally irrepressible good nature, he is a mass of contradictions.

Tame, but at the same time wild in a way few of us ever are.

Timid – yes, a sissy – but with far more courage than anyone else in the book, a “man” who would lay down his life and not just for a friend – he has no friends – but for a complete stranger he happens to bump into, literally, while they are both hiding during the Carnival Parade.

A much abused skivvy who is also a very professional yoga and aqua-yoga instructor.

Humble as a whipped dog but with something of the super-hero deep down inside him, and he knows it.

And as he himself observes of the poor wimp Pablo, there is something doomed about him: he doesn’t have a dream. Martin has a dream.

This novel was apparently first published under the title Sea Change, which was most appropriate in one way (though I prefer Carnival) because Martin’s own dream is to be a mermaid.

I am not going to tell you whether his dream comes true, but I will tell you that this is a world in which mermaids exist. All right, some are girls wearing plastic tails. (I want to try that some time!) But others are girls who have been operated on, turned into mermaids. (This is a theme Gilbride seems to have a bit of a fixation with – it comes up even more dramatically in his story The Rose of Harlow.) And then there are real mermaids – the result of genetic engineering?

I have referred to Martin here in this review always as “he”, but only because it is difficult to contrive the switch from “he” to “she” in the course of a brief review. Anyone reading the book, however, will be thinking of the protagonist as feminine, as the heroine of the story, long before the author in fact makes the switch from “he” to “she” and from “him” to “her”.

Definitely for adults then, but if you are an Adult, don’t miss it!

Nothing I can add to that. Thanks, Kanti.