a cut above or below

I subscribe to a blog/ezine called BMEzine because I like piercings and tattoos.

Body Modification is an interesting topic, and has a pretty extensive sub-culture around it. Like anything, there are extremes in this sub-culture.

There is the mild tattoo or piercing end, like tramp stamps, and tribal armbands, to larger piercings, nipples and large tattoos, through to genital piercing, scarification, branding, needle play (play piercing), saline injecting and suspension.

There is however, a much more extreme version of body modification which has fascinated me for a long time. The fascination I feel is similar to that very human need to look at a car accident, a dead animal or vomit and shit when we should really look away. I am talking about self (or assisted) mutilation (such as genital bisection) and self (or assisted) amputation.

Why do people do it? There couldn't possibly be one single explanation, and not all of them are scarred by abuse and drugs.

I'm not here to analyse what they do, cos I ain't no doctor, but my strong stomach sometimes threatens to turn when I look..... but I still look.

would you live here?

Over the holidays, I have caught up on a lot of TV and it struck me that the recurring themes in many programs make some places seem potentially terrifying to live.

Sun Hill from the BBC program The Bill is only a smallish part of London (in the fictitious suburb of Canley) however there is a thriving gang culture, with drugs and murders normal fairly common. Any new police on the beat are often knocked off by a gang, a crime boss, a bad cop or a vengeful victim of an unsolved crime.

Bradfield is another fictional British town brought to life by the creators of ITVs Wire in the Blood. The police in Bradfield are faced time and time again with serial murderers, child molesterers and other crazed criminals, whose antics are only ever uncovered by the very clever, and conveniently local psychologist and profiler, Dr Tony Hill.

Cardiff is a real city featured in the BBC Doctor Who spin-off, Torchwood. Futuristic bisexual swashbuckler "Captain" Jack Harkness and his team of super tough and intelligent not-quite-cops protect Cardiff from aliens and freaks from the future, all intent on blowing up or taking over the world. Why Cardiff? The city has some soft of temporal fault line, making it a beacon to all sorts of other-worldy and other-timely monsters and buggars.

Now, I don't watch Home and Away or Neighbours, but it seems that our own Summer Bay and Erinsborough are equally as exciting. Tiny coastal Summer Bay has experienced serial killers, stalkers, people coming back from the dead, kidnappings and who knows what else. Erisnborough is a tiny pretend suburb with one pub. Somehow it sustains all manner of lawyers, mechanics, home businesses etc., as well as having their fair share of hit and runs, murders, schemes and plots.

There are clearly better places to live, but with the property market doing what it is doing lately, maybe the deaths, crimes and explosions will keep prices low in these lovely (if fictitious) places.