[Daily Mail] God this is the worst article ever. Local idiot Liz Jones chimes in with over 1,000 miserable words about how every tattoo a woman wears is a “tramp stamp” (and not just those placed in the manner displayed on the comely young lass in the above photo), and how all these misguided starlets are just ripping each other off forever and ever, with regard to everything:

Yes, I am talking about tattoos, the most tasteless, tacky, tawdry, terrible plague to infect our nation since mad cow disease.

Ha ha oh right, this clown is from Britain, where everybody gets BSE all the time, probably because the cows are all tattoo sluts. Tattoos are definitely worse than bacteria prions that eat your goddamn brain.

It is nigh on impossible these days to find a young, famous, beautiful woman who has not got a tattoo.

A reasonable person may notice this trend and note that perhaps there has been a paradigm shift and that, hey, pretty girls like tattoos, so maybe they’re not this uglifying force that some have thought them to be. Alas.

Danish model Freja Beha Erichsen has 12, including the word ‘float’ on her throat, while English rose Lily Donaldson has just the one – words of nonsense about her family on the inside of her left wrist.

What we can take away from this is that Liz Jones does not have a family, because she buried them under her house, but if she did, she would surely not do something as stupid as get any “words of nonsense” about them tattooed on her body. She would not “feel” any “feelings” about them, or try to “remember” or “pay tribute” to them. Because she is nature’s most perfect, soulless killing machine.

Musicians have long adored tattoos: Janis Joplin had a floral tattoo bracelet, which has clearly inspired the tattoos sported by Joss Stone, who has garlands of flowers on her feet.

The words “clearly inspired” suggest a direct causal relationship. I’ve never listened to Joss Stone and probably could not pick her out of a line-up — is there any reason to believe that she got flower tattoos because Janis Joplin did first? Based on the nonsense that comprises the rest of this article, I’m going to guess no, and that in addition to being a sensationalist, Liz Jones is also a piss-poor logician.

What I hate most about all these celebrity tattoos is not just that they have spawned a rash of copycats the length and breadth of the nation, it is that tattoo wearers think that by writing on themselves, a la Angelina Jolie, they are somehow ‘alternative’, ‘deep’ and ‘profound’, that they have meaning in their lives.

Wow, she is still talking. I’ve skipped several hundred words already and this thing just keeps going. I feel like I’ve always been reading this.

I particularly detest the tattooing of names of loved ones, a la Johnny Depp and his ‘Winona Forever’, or David Beckham and his tattoo of his son Brooklyn’s name. It is as if the person is trying to say: ‘I love my son/boyfriend/wife more than you love yours.’

Someone’s projecting!

When I mentioned this saddest incarnation of the tat to Helen Mirren, who has the Indian Lakesh symbol, meaning ‘whole woman’, inscribed just below the thumb on her left hand, she rolled her eyes. (Helen Mirren is, by the way, the only woman in her 60s I can think of who doesn’t look ridiculous sporting a tattoo).

She got hers when she was drunk one night on a theatre tour in Minnesota. ‘It was years before tattoos became fashionable. I’m appalled they have become middle class,’ she said. ‘There is no respect for rebellion any more.’

For what it’s worth, Helen Mirren, in addition to being a pretty tremendous actor, also thinks that date-rape is a hilarious joke and that woman should just get over it, so perhaps she is not the most astute cultural observer of all time.

Jones then ends the article by telling a brief story about her friend’s grandmother, who is a holocaust survivor, and thus has a concentration camp number tattooed on her wrist. According to Liz Jones, this is the only sort of tattoo that it is acceptable for a person to have nowadays.

[News.com.au] Here we’ve got an uncharacteristically positive story about Body Integrity Identity Disorder and amputation as a viable course of action for those suffering from it. The proponent, Christopher Ryan, is a psychiatrist at the University of Sydney, and, while he doesn’t propose just cold cutting off folks’s legs whenever they want, he does admit that, after the proper evaluations have been done, many can be effectively “cured,” and that such procedures should be “likened to plastic surgery.”

“I realise that the idea strikes almost everyone as lunatic when they first hear it. However, there are a small number of people who see themselves, and have always seen themselves, as amputees,” he said.

“They are often miserable their whole lives because of their ‘extra limb’, and we know that at least some of them feel much better if it is removed.”