Everybody loves a good furore

I'm sure you'll all be thrilled to know there have been no more bread-related incidents at our place; I have reclaimed my role as buyer of the fluffy wheaten stuff...

Just in time for our winter to arrive and me to promptly convert my breakfast to porridge. I know. The irony is too fantastic.

In other news, the local broadsheet newspaper has just fired a columnist for tweeting. I know, I thought part of her job description would be to raise her profile and that of the paper she writes for, but apparently controversy is not a paper-selling theme (having said that, the Age has now entered the arena of sticky brown stuff.

Amid the who said what about whom (let's face it: 140 characters leaves not a lot of room for contet or subtle textual nuance) we seem to have missed the substance of the matter.

I find it damn offensive that the majority are happy to see an eleven-year-old child paraded about in very adult styling - it's not Catherine Deveny with the problem, it's the society who accepts, even lauds and celebrates this presentation.

The sickos who offer beauty parties for eight-year-olds? There's a big fat difference between these kids playing dressups with mommy's stuff and going to a salon where an ideal is foisted on them.

Two years ago I had to sit a class of ballet students down and give them the body image talk.

You're all nodding, right? Because they're ballet kids. Surely they all idolize the hyper-thin... Yeah. In five years they might. Eight-to-eleven year-olds. Mouthing the "My mother says some girls are too fat to do ballet."

Too fat for the Australian Ballet, yes. Too fat for one forty-five minute class each week? Please.
Don't even get me going on the six-year-olds who sing (unprompted) ALL THE WORDS to Pussycat dolls songs... While shaking their miniature prepubescent rump in a manner to warm the ...lap
of the most repressed pedophile.

The problem's not what she tweeted, it's that the subject material was there.