Ellie vs. Beautiful People

Apologies for not updating this sooner. I've been..... actually, sod it, I haven't been remotely busy, just astonishingly lazy.

So, on with "Wot's been going on lately".

Stuff Wot Is Going On Lately
Well, we're halfway through the Annual Depression. By which, I mean "January and February". Seriously, there is no fucking point whatsoever in these two months. Think about it. You round off the end of the year with December, which, due to Christmas, is basically a month-long piss-up. You spend it gorging on whatever delicious, high-fat snacks come to hand (Quality Street, pigs in blankets, stuffing....), drinking your bodyweight in booze because "it's festive", and spending a fucktonne of money on gifts, nights out, etc. Occasionally, the annoying little bastard in the corner of your brain (the same one that tells you to go to bed when you've been up all night streaming Japanese game shows) pipes up and goes "Er.... sorry to bother you, I can see you're terribly busy sticking your face into a vat of mulled wine, but I can't help but notice that you have a liver that looks like ET, a waistline that requires its own wheelbarrow to cart it around in, and so much debt that Bono's been in touch, asking if you want him to organise a concert to help write it off."
But you ignore the annoying little bastard (who looks a bit like Dr Christian Thingy off Embarassing Bodies) and continue to eat until your nipples leak goose fat. And then the alarm clock goes off. Usually in the form of having to put up your calendar for the new year. And you realise that it's going to take you til June to detox, lose weight, and pay off your overdraft/credit card/loan shark.
January, for this reason, is generally spent in a pit of despair. And then February rolls around. "Oh good", you think. "We're properly into the new year now, I can start functioning as a human being again, and greet people without having to ask about their Christmas."
Unfortunately, February isn't much better. There isn't anything to look forward to. It's cold, wet, grey and depressing. Like my Great-Auntie Sue (she was a miserable old bitch before she went senile, so no-one in my family could be bothered to find her a decent nursing home). There's only one public holiday that anyone pays attention to, and that's Valentine's Day. And even if you were looking forward to that, you won't be by the time it actually arrives, because everyone you know (me included) will be harping on about how it's a waste of time, it's all about marketing, if you love your partner that much, why not get them cards every day, etc. So you're stuck with two options: ignore it altogether and risk offending your partner, or get in the spirit and have your single (and not remotely bitter about it) friends telling you precisely what a mug you are for spending £3 on a neon pink bit of cardboard with a teddy on it.
As for me, I intend to spend most of February hiding in my bedsit and sulking because I forgot to get a boyfriend in time. I don't particularly want one, you understand, I just want something to parade around so I can convince myself that I'm a normal, high-functioning person. To be honest, I think a pony would suffice. Ponies are noisy, smelly, irritating, and mostly owned by girls who think they're the only person to have ever owned one. It's a perfect substitute for a bloke.

Anyway, in my own long-winded way, I was getting to the tale of Beautiful People.
For those of you who don't know, BeautifulPeople.com is a dating website exclusively for the very... exclusive (read: shallow). It's for those people who don't quite have the personality required to find a partner in real life, but can't possibly go on the normal dating websites because there's ugly people out there, for God's sake.
The site works by asking new members to submit photos. Once those are uploaded, "proper" site members have to rate them on a scale of 1-10, based on how attractive they think you are. If, after two days, you get over 5/10, you're in.
Personally, I'd never heard of it until reading about how they took the New Year Detox one step further, and got rid of any members showing signs of having gained weight over the festive season. Seems harsh, doesn't it? Well, no. As the article states, there are genuine reasons behind it, honest.

"As a business, we mourn the loss of any member, but the fact remains that our members demand the high standard of beauty be upheld," said site founder Robert Hintze.

"Letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model and the very concept for which BeautifulPeople.com was founded."

Ah, that's OK then. I like how he refers to "letting fatties roam the site", like they're merely a common pest. Personally, I had to get the exterminators out the other week because I had a fattie nest at the back of my block of flats. Mars bars spiked with arsenic works best, incidentally.

Anyway, I was so amused/fascinated/slightly horrified by this story, that I decided to have a go myself. I got about a four out of ten, and was promptly booted. Bugger. There go my dreams of modelling.
It was to be expected though. For a start, my photos were in colour. I was only wearing makeup in one of them. And on top of that, I have a face like a sack of perineums. It was never going to go well. But I did notice that a lot of these "Beautiful People" seemed to have studied at the Myspace School Of Flattering Photography, which operates on the following principles:

1. Holy camera angles, Batman! If you take a photo from just above your head, it will make your eyes look larger, your initial chin look smaller, your extra chins look nonexistant, and it also makes your hair look fairly shiny, as the camera flash bounces off it. Otherwise known as the "SIF" angle (Secret Internet Fatty, by the way). Also, if you're a girl, this is the perfect opportunity to make sure that viewers are looking anywhere but your face.
   
2. Pump up the contrast. It makes colours brighter (and thick people will always say "OMG YOR EYES R SO BLU!" because they genuinely haven't noticed the difference between an altered picture of you, and how you actually look), and also does a remarkable job of hiding your acne and dark circles.
   
3. Black and white is flattering.
   
4. So is Sepia.
5. If all else fails: Photoshop.
   

Consider yourselves told.

A bit more stuff wot has been going on.

• Alex Reid won Celebrity Big Brother. In all fairness, he came across as.... OK. Nice-but-dim, basically. You get the feeling that, at home, Jordan wins every argument by jingling keys in front of his face, whilst he drools, claps and giggles like a toddler in front of CBeebies. Speaking of the devil, on his interview, she made an appearance. You could practically see her pupils turning into £ signs.
  Besides, I was rooting for Basshunter, who came up with the immortal line "I did touch bass, and I definitely hunted something". The man's a poet. Someone get him to re-write the national anthem please.
  
• I've noticed that Susan Boyle and John Prescott have yet to be seen in the same room at the same time. Hmmmm.
  
• Not content with being the corporate equivalent of Myleene Klass (ie: absolutely fucking EVERYWHERE), Virgin have decided to get a bit more aggressive with their advertising. In this case, Virgin Active Gyms, not content with just advertising in papers, magazines, on billboards, etc, decided to really get people's attention by...er.... sending out a scrote of students ("scrote" is now the collective noun for a group of students, by the way) to shout through megaphones about getting fit. At 8:00am. In a residential area. And more importantly, they woke me up. Fuckers.
  So, I did the decent thing, and wrote a snotty complaint to the gym in question. I don't usually DO complaining. I'm not very assertive. My Mum is, and I spent most of my childhood curling my toes with embarassment when she went through her reciept at the till in Sainsbury's and inflicted her wrath on whichever poor drone was stuck with serving her. I spoke to someone who worked there during the peak of her reign of terror. Apparently, if the manager saw her come in, he'd make a point of hiding a few streets away for a couple of hours until he was sure she'd gone.
  But in this case, they woke me up. That's generally not advised. So I sent an angry email, telling them that this is an area in which there are new parents, people who work night shifts, people with disabilities or serious illnesses, etc, and people who just don't appreciate being woken up by slack-jawed cretins shouting through megaphones about some overpriced hole full of meatheaded posers. I also told them that this was doing nothing to dispell the stereotype of all gym-goers being obnoxious, braying twunts who love nothing more than bellowing about how much they can bench press, whatever the fuck that is.
  The next day, I got a phone call. Now, I am a fucking pansy. Like most internet nerds, I am happy to have a go at someone behind a wall of text, but not over the phone or face-to-face. So when the bloke said "I'm the manager of Virgin Active...", my automatic response was that of sphincter-spasming terror.
  
  "Um... hello."
  "Hello. Now, I recieved your email earlier, and just wanted to apologise."
  ".....really?"
  "Yes. I understand that the megaphones were a bad idea, and you are right, it wasn't the best area to do it in. We just wanted to be motivated, you know?"
  "OK, and I get that, it probably would have worked OK in the city centre."
  "Perhaps. Anyway, we don't want you to think we're....er.... meatheads, as you put it. And we'd like it if you could come down and see for yourself that we're not like that. Would you be interested in guest passes?"
  
  And there we have it. Moral of the story: being a mardy bitch occasionally gets you somewhere. OCCASIONALLY. Didn't work too well for Heather Mills. Over and out!