Oddments No. 3

Weekly bric a brac from Padraig O'Morain

Photo by Ijcybergal (Flickr)

Coffee beats beer?
Strolling in Nice on a Sunday morning I pass a café where men sit outside drinking small cups of coffee. Given the absence of booze, I assume they're Muslims. On another street I pass a bar where two Aryan types are drinking beer. I realise afterwards that the men drinking coffee looked happier than the men drinking beer.
So, am I ready to abandon the beer for the coffee? Sure. But only on Sunday mornings.

L'Oréal pour les hommes - c'est pour vous ?
I am one of those guys who won't be seen wearing makeup this side of the funeral parlour. I think I'm still a member of the majority in this, though it's changing it's changing slowly.

My eye was caught recently by a blog by journalist Natasha Hughes in the Sydney Morning Herald in which she expressed amazement at seeing the groom at a wedding wearing what she called "slap-full coverage foundation."

Now, I don't know what "slap-full coverage foundation" is but her amazement reminded me of my own surprise at one manifestation of the interest in men and makeup. Last year on my blog I wrote a single paragraph piece under the heading Men, eyeliner and sex appeal in reference to something I had read somewhere else. Since then, this headline has been consistently in the top three drawing readers to the blog.

Why? You don't see that many guys going around wearing eyeliner unless they're Goths and I don't think the Goths are big readers of mine.

Do some of us have a secret habit? Are there lots of guys standing in front of the bathroom mirror wielding the eyeliner and slapping on the "full coverage foundation" and then removing it before the wife comes home?

Well, I'm sure there are some, but that many?

Actually there is one possible use of male make-up which I hadn't come across before. One guy responding to Natasha Hughes' article revealed that he finds "a little concealer" is always useful "to hide those bags under the eyes after a big night."

So there you are, chaps. If a night on the tiles has left you unable to face your usual jumbo breakfast roll, just pop into the pharmacy and ask for a little concealer.

So, how would you like to die?
Here are three questions that brought me up short. They're from an article by Joan Halifax in the Buddhist magazine Tricyle. The article, about the care of dying people, invites readers to ask themselves these three questions and to reflect on them:

What is your worst-case scenario of how you will die?

How do you really want to die?

What are you willing to do to die the way you want to die?

As the article says, "Practicing dying is also practicing living."

Or is it? Over to you.

Got an opinion? Comment here.

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