Beauty and the Beast - a whimsical musing on women, men and vanity...

Yup. Cut the chin a bit. The model is hideous. Sheesh, can you believe this...

This billboard came up just down the road from my house. This reminds me just how thankful I should be for being born a man, and how I empathise with those who are opposing the image industry for women. This is just one billboard, but in the newspaper, in the magazines and the internet, we are inundated with billions of pictures of drop-dead gorgeous models. Then we wonder why women are so particular about how they look. If men had their skull drummed with the constant stanza of "must be beautiful', 'must be skinny', 'must have abs'... let's face it, guys, we would also be just as paranoid.

Happily (for men), we are not. Of course, there are some adverts out there promoting the media specialist's idea of the ideal male beauty (which presently seems to be metrosexual and feminine, akin to the K-Pop boy bands... boy, do some of them look prettier than the Wonder Girls!), but most of us just chuckle and admit defeat - a gut, a balding hair and a face only a mother could love, but so what?

K Pop boyband 'Beast'. Never has a band name been so inappropriate...

Not that we would not benefit from some grooming discipline. For myself, my maxim is 'more than one minute combing my hair is just wrong'. So I reckon that a visit to the Spa would undoubtedly improve my looks. But that visit is postponed and I procrastinate ad infinitum. We men are simply too lazy to pander to our physical beauty. Yet we do have our vanities, but they manifest in the strangest of things - our cars, our toys, our LEGO and comic collection, our mountain bikes and our 'high brow culture', our tattoos, cellphone and laptops, our books and our music collection. For you see, the train for Perfect Manly Beauty left our station a long time ago. So we simply took another vanity train, that's all.

It's 3.30am, sunshine. Just finished work and I thought I would write a bit before I sleep. Have a wonderful day!

wa min Allah at-taufiq

Hate has no place in Islam

Love will show the Way