Must-Have Gadgets

Can’t wait to get your hands on the new iPad? Not me. Now, I am a big Mac fan - the computers, not the burgers - but isn’t there such a thing as too much technology? Still struggling to get my noggin around the latest ‘how-did-we-ever-live-without-that?’ piece of ‘essential’ hardware I’ve been suckered into buying, up pops another gizmo, without which, excommunication from the modern world is surely imminent. Geeks will snigger at such naiveté, but what exactly does Apple’s latest ‘must-have’ do that a phone/ laptop/ iPod/ paper and pen can’t? Wash the car? Iron shirts? My cupboards are crammed with ‘the next big thing’:  Betamax player, Sony Watchman, Psion organiser, a robot vacuum cleaner and the combination calculator/ cigarette lighter (yes, really!) that seemed somehow indispensable after a sake-soaked lunch in Tokyo. iPad? iPass.

World Cup Songs

More contemptible than any cynical Argie tackle, isn’t it time World Cup songs were shown the red card? Mercifully, England - presumably distracted by Embrace’s World At Your Feet and before that, woeful tripe from Ant & Dec and The Spice Girls - have no ditty this year, the players advised to focus on their game - and, boy, do they need to, Fabio! Thierry Henry may have done us all a favour, albeit inadvertently; with Ireland dumped out, there can be no reprise of 1990’s Give It A Lash Jack, while fellow failures, Scotland, are denied the chance to bludgeon us with the caber toss that was Ally’s Tartan Army. Official anthems fare no better; witness well-know er, South African Shakira’s 2010 effort.  With lame lyrics such as ‘When you fall, get up, oh oh. And if you fall, get up. oh oh..’ it’s entitled Waka Waka. Nuff said!

Your Big Gay Day

For fash-pash lesbians about to enter a civil partnership, the question is what frock (or not) to rock on your big gay day? With such ceremonies still a fairly new trend, no ground rules exist. On her fashioneditoratlarge blog, it’s a dilemma currently exercising Grazia’s Mel Rickey, soon to make an honest woman, so to speak, of the similarly stylish Mary (Queen of Shops) Portas. The butch/ femme cliché of trouser suit and tulle meringue - as favoured, respectively, by Ellen Degeneres and Portia di Rossi -  cuts no ice with Mel and, despite heavy rotation on the Spring catwalks, I’m guessing matching denim dungarees mightn’t look so hot when the Rickey-Portas’s revisit their wedding album circa 2020. For gay guys, it’s an equally difficult call: are bare torsos, leather chaps and matching tattoos ever what to wear when being whisked up the aisle?