The only...
Ginger thing I can think of is an expression some people use when dealing with the assholes of the world - and that is "I want to beat you like a red-headed step-child". Meh - not much of anything Im afraid.
(Subway Riding the rails underground, Sat 27 Feb 2010, 14:20, Reply)

I am "a ginger"
It was a pain when I was a kid, of course, but there are plenty of other things you can be victimised for, no use complaining.
As an adult you're encouraged to laugh about it, which is fair enough, it's the English way, you aren't supposed to take it seriously.
But under it all it can't be denied that there remains a genuine social stigma attached to having ginger hair, for men at least.
It's not as simple as ginger = ugly, but you're immediately a few rungs down the pecking order when it comes to finding someone to take to bed.
The solution? Move abroad. The anti-ginger thing seems to be almost universally British. (We're also the place with the highest proportion of gingers... make of that what you will...)
It was never my motivation in coming over here, but it's absolutely a bonus when your hair colour is an exotic novelty rather than something to dye or shave off.
( Zuowan, Sat 27 Feb 2010, 13:36, 2 replies)

Have any of you been...
... to the ginger zoo?

www.ginger-zoo.co.uk/
( browser still relating boring anecdotes into a void on, Sat 27 Feb 2010, 13:26, Reply)

Coo there's a Facebook site for everything
www.facebook.com/search/?q=ginger&init=quick#!/pages/Im-Friends-With-a-Ginger/260581251942?ref=search&sid=665863571.15816986..1

57,000 fans and counting. So Nerrr!
( Bootsthealchemist is barred from the Masterchef Facebook page, Sat 27 Feb 2010, 12:34, Reply)

My boyfriend's nan
used to tell him that ginger people smell of hotpot.
(ilovemyslippers, Sat 27 Feb 2010, 12:31, 2 replies)

mmmm...
i just love ginger men.

nuff said.
(PrincessTinkle is charlie brooker's secret wife, Sat 27 Feb 2010, 12:26, Reply)

Tenuous?
I'll give you tenuous...

I was in Israel once - working on a network install and I often used to wander down to the Wailing Wall and watch the religious nuttery. But one guy caught my attention. A typical religious Jew, with the ringlets and beard but he was GINGER!!

So most days, while eating my lunch I'd watch him. I'd occasionally catch a glimpse of him early in the morning as I made my way to work and it was always the same. He'd be standing facing the wall, bending and swaying as he mumbled his prayers.

So one day I waited at the wall and waited for him to finish. Exactly as the sun went down he mumbled one last prayer and started to walk away.

"Hey, Duracell!" I yelled "Can I have a quick word?"

He stopped, looked at me, and sat down on a bench and gestured to me to sit beside him. We talked long into the night about the Bible, philosophy and religion. And then I asked him about what I really wanted to know.

"What, exactly, do you pray for all day at The Wall?"

"I pray for justice in the world. I pray for the Jews and the Muslims to put aside their differences and recognise that we both pray to the same God. I pray for understanding. I pray for peace. That's what I spend my whole life doing"

"And do you think God listens" I asked gently.

"No." he said bitterly. "It's like talking to a fucking wall"

Cheers

Shoehorned *that* fucking old one into a tight QOTW....
( Legless Mister Stabby - shanks for the memory, Sat 27 Feb 2010, 10:15, 2 replies)

Speedie the Rent-a-Cat
For all the vitriol we've seen poured out over the last couple of days in the direction of our more Celtic-looking compatriots, we seem to have forgotten that some very beautiful things were born with the ginger gene being expressed in their phenotype. Enough of us have covered those comely, flame-haired Irish wenches with hypnotic green eyes that just make you want to misbehave...sorry, where was I?

Oh, yes - what about kittehs? I know a lot of you are fed up with "teh fluffeh," but I feel it's time to balance the atmosphere of this qotw by telling you about a big, fat ginger tomcat.

Scientists would argue that, among common domestic animals, dogs are more intelligent that cats because they can be taught to perform a far wider range of tasks that any feline. Admittedly these tasks tend to be fairly useless (sit down, come here, bring back the stick I just threw away, please don't jump up - yes I know you're pleased to see me but you're a big dog now and you're pinning me against the wall and I'm afraid you want to bugger me), but it's true that you can't teach 'em to a cat.

Cynics, however, would argue that cats are more intelligent. Yes, the dog learns to cling to us and do what we tell it, because it knows that's the most reliable way to get fed and walked. But the cat has gone one further, because he knows damn well that he can swan around the neighbourhood all day without a bye or leave and by about 8pm you'll always get worried and go looking for him, and then he'll endure your fuss for ten minutes on the condition that you feed him and allow him to bugger off to bed. (Probably your bed, in fact.)

Speedie was one such cat. He and his brother had been adopted from an animal rescue place by a family who lived across the road from my parents. To his credit, he was a very friendly cat, who seemed to enjoy human attention and affection to the extent that if you picked him up and held him for more than five minutes, he'd probably forget that you weren't some sort of comfortable treehouse and promptly fall asleep, leaving you wondering whether it was better to wake him up or just find somewhere to sit down without disturbing him.

However, he knew all too well that he didn't have to spend all day in the same house as the people who owned him. Oh no. As a lot of cats seem wont to do, his "day shift" would involve wandering across the road to another house and finding somewhere round there to pester you, steal food or just curl up in a big orange ball and go to sleep. Come dusk, his owners would be out in the street calling for Speedie and his brother, and that was our cue to discreetly boot him out of our own house with an encouraging prod in the direction of the house where he was supposed to live.

We sometimes got the impression he didn't particularly want to go back there, only to be locked in the house for the night. I remember having to go and knock on their door one evening for whatever reason, and the second they opened the door a bolt of ginger shot past my ankles and I heard a cry of
"Oh! Stop Speedie!"
My reactions being what they've always been, it wasn't even worth trying. He ran out of their house and up the nearest tree. The whole family stepped up to red alert and ran out to surround the tree, calling to their absconding cat and trying to coax him down by waving cat biscuits at him. By this stage I'd forgotten why I'd gone over there so I just sort of wandered off.

And given the contrasting environments of our houses, you could hardly blame him. Back at Speedie's real home, they had three young girls. All very excitable, and all with very high-pitched voices. My sister and I, by comparison, were fairly quiet. Even after I took up the bass guitar, Speedie, it seemed, preferred to endure the noise of me failing to coax feedback out of a bass amp rather than being at home where he would be petted, prodded and squealed at.

Speedie, however, was something of an ironic name. Admittedly when he slipped past my grasp and shot up a tree, that was certainly quite speedy. But the majority of the time, the fat little bugger wouldn't have managed more than a reluctant trot, and even that was usually prompted by a kick up the arse. My sister managed to pop him onto the bathroom scales once and triumphantly announced that he weighed over a stone (about 6.35kg* or 14lbs). So he wasn't obese. Just portly. Our portly orange friend. (My sister's rather elderly piano teacher once met the Orange Friend and exclaimed, in a wonderfully Lady Bracknell-esque voice: "What an ENORMOUS cat!" You probably had to be there...)

Orange Friend's ability to sleep knew no bounds. I do wonder what he did of an evening, locked up in his proper home, but usually by about 7am the following day he'd be crying outside our back door. And the moment you let him in, he'd rub against you briefly in a cursory gesture of thanks and then sod off to find something comfortable to sleep on. This also led to the hilarious sight when my sister, back from a long night out, had crawled back into bed in the middle of the day, only for the cat to climb in and curl up right next to her. The saucy old bugger.

Sadly, all good pets come to an end, even if they're not your own. A few years ago, Speedie suffered a stroke and passed away. I think most of the street was quite upset to hear of the demise of this cat who had been a source of amusement for so many years - I think his owners may have been a little surprised by the amount of condolence they received (a bit like a widow receiving letters of condolence from all her late husband's mistresses...but in a fluffier sort of way). He'd become such a part of our everyday lives that it was very odd to get up in the mornings and almost go to open the back door out of habit because you expected him to be there. Odd not to be woken up on a Saturday morning after someone else had let him in and he'd jump on your bed and try to force you out of the way to make room for himself. Come to think of it, the most abiding memory of Orange Friend will probably be his quest to find new and strange places to go to sleep. Rest in peace, Speedie. You were a Truly Awesome Cat.

*_{Apparently the average weight for a male domestic cat is 4.5kg. Though this is taken from the SeaWorld website, so I don't know whether that's dry weight or wet, or indeed whether to trust them given the broadly non-aquatic nature of cats...}
(LongJohnBaldry, Sat 27 Feb 2010, 10:14, 3 replies)

Slightly tenuous link to gingerdom...
Reading through these answers had made me think back to my primary school days, particularly to a diminutive classmate with ginger hair, a ratface, and yellowing buck teeth. Due to these teeth, he was universally known as Colgate.

I don't think a day went past when he didn't get the shit kicked out of him for something or other, he didn't even seem particularly arsed, most of the time he bounced. His home life wasn't the best either, his dad was basically a combination of Jim Royle and Onslow off Keeping Up Appearances, fused to his armchair surrounded by empty cans and overflowing ashtrays, barking obscenities whilst his mother silently fumed at her terrible, terrible choice of a life partner. Or shat out another kid, there were about 8 of them.

After primary we went to different schools, though I did still ocassionally batter him when I saw him round town, out of a sense of nostalgia maybe. That and he just wouldn't stop insulting or pushing you until he got his beating.

As we grew older, he became more and more interested in petty crime, vandalism, shoplifting, and glue sniffing. After a certain amount of leniency by magistrates, due to his cheeky side (he could be pretty funny when he wanted, though usually just abusive), there was no choice but to hand him a custodial sentence. Prison didn't go too well for him, shall we say, and he emerged a changed man, hunted, insular, and with a new-found smack habit. With no qualifications/experience of work, a criminal record and increasing dependence on heroin, he got locked into the classic cycle of offending, jail time, probation, reoffending, jail time... He's what you'd call an institutional man now, either that or he's dead.

I look back on the hard time he got from me and others at school, the taunting, beating, social isolation and degradation he went through every day. I look back, and I think to myself...

If I somehow manage have a ginger kid, I'm going to drown the little freak at birth, as there is a clear, demonstrable link between ginger hair and heroin dependency.
(Gertcha_cowson NAH MATE, Sat 27 Feb 2010, 9:36, 1 reply)

In the school where I teach...
... there are three classes studying triple science (Biology, Chemistry, Physics, as separate subjects). They are given a boring letter-based code, but nobody refers to them by that code.

One class is larger than the others (a quirk of timetabling) and is known as the 'big triples'. One class has 4 students all called 'Tom', and are of course known as the 'Tom triples'. Can you spot where this is going? In the last, and most unfortunate triple group (triple 'E') there are 6 ginger kids, out of a class of 19, and they are of course known as the 'Ginger triples'.

Handily, science offers many opportunities for these children to be subtly (and less subtly) mocked. The gene that gives people ginger hair and fair skin (the MCR1 gene) is a recessive one, a 'weaker' gene. The 'Ginger Dinosaur' that was found a few weeks ago (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8481448.stm) was a particular favourite.

I should stress that this is entirely consensual ginger-baiting (and there are classes in the school where it would most definitely NOT be). The class have even decided to monitor the ginger jokes made by one teacher: if he reaches 1000 over the 2 years of the GCSE course, he has to reward (compensate?) the class with sweets.

In many ways, I feel perhaps I am not mature enough to be a teacher. In other ways... I mean... what are the odds of 6 of them in 1 class?
(Serotonicity was a naughty boy on..., Sat 27 Feb 2010, 9:23, Reply)

One side effect
of being a titian-haired goddess is that some people like to imagine you're a right goer (there's enough posts here to represent that particular stereotype) and apt to shag everything in sight. Women also tend to assume you're out to pinch their husbands, which may be why I seem to have more men friends than women.

In my last long-term job it amused the gossips to link me romantically with everyone from senior management to the latest work experience kid. My better friends kept me up to date with the latest stories - and there were many.

My particular favourite was when word got around that I was seeing someone on the staff of the works Local. This time I'd actually been seen canoodling with the guy, on more than one occasion. Hot on the trail of gossip one of my colleagues took a friend of mine aside and demanded to know the identity of my latest squeeze.

'Well ... that would be *Mr* boots' came the reply.
( Bootsthealchemist is barred from the Masterchef Facebook page, Sat 27 Feb 2010, 9:20, Reply)

I am a Queen Elizabeth
and have had to abandon my favourite snack since school, when my friend said "you know Alex, there's nothing quite so disguting as the sight of a ginger boy eating wotsits". :-(
( browser still relating boring anecdotes into a void on, Sat 27 Feb 2010, 8:49, Reply)

My daughter
is a redhead, and she stinks of fish.

Yours,

King Neptune.
(kitescreech still here, Sat 27 Feb 2010, 8:04, 1 reply)

Gingers are ugly! DON'T DATE THEM! SHUN THEM IN PUBLIC!
I don't actually go so far as to encourage it, but I do delight in hearing other straight guys say they don't like redheads. Like so many others, I have quite a thing for redheads! And I'd rather have less competition. I'm not a very unattractive dude, but despite flirting with and hitting on every single redheaded gal I've ever met, I've yet to find success. Closest I've come was once making out with a gal who had freckles.

I've been so open about being interested in beautiful, lovely red hair on a gal that my last girlfriend, who was quite the stunner by anyone's standards, grew such a complex over it in the early years of our courtship that her email password was "notaredhead". She was quite torn up about it.

And yes, for the record, I felt terrible about it when I found out.
(jessemoya, Sat 27 Feb 2010, 6:14, Reply)

Lyrical misshap
I work in a huge pub that used to be a railway institute. Well on weekends people book the upstairs rooms out for functions. Mostly birthday partys where people find out there not as popular as they thought they where.

SO generally me and my mate are then stuck behind a bar listening to the same tat music with pretty much no work to do.

To pass the time we dance like loons and play a few games like change the pitch of your voice for every word you say and the ever popular change the lyrics .

Well one particular friday night we had the pleasure of staffing a young girls 18th and as usual twenty members of her family turned up and about four friends.

Well we made the most of it and got straight into singing Valerie by amy shitehouse, with the changed lyrics

"Well Sometimes I Go Out, By Myself, And I Look Across The Water.

And I Think Of All The Things, Of What You're Doing, And in my head I Paint A Picture.

Since I've Come Home, Well My Body's Been A Mess, And I Miss Your ginger Hair, And The Way You smell of piss "

Just as we got to the last line the music cut out and the lights came on as the birthday girl went to make a speech.

If your reading this i'm really sorry eightteen year old ginger girl who's birthday we probably ruined by singing "you smell of piss" in full volume in front of your family.

In my defence it was funny.
(shake'n'bake Tally Ho, Biatch!, Sat 27 Feb 2010, 4:24, Reply)

Ginger scientists
are engineering a savage race of 'Super-Gingers' - more ginger than hitherto existing gingers.

Details here.
(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Sat 27 Feb 2010, 3:59, Reply)

For those who weren't convinced
by the young woman a few pages ago:


(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Sat 27 Feb 2010, 3:56, 2 replies)

Maybe I was some kind of pervert but she had me fascinated.
This ginger haired young lady was the most stunning I have ever seen. There have been one or two a little like her, but to this day decades later I remember her quite clearly, even her unfortunate name. I can still see her standing in the school yard aged 17. An absolute standout.

I don't think I have ever seen anyone thinner this side of an anorexia case. The bodice of her dress hung down in a loose fold without even the hint of a pair of saucepan lids beneath. Behind and to the sides the dress fell in a straight line from neckline to hem, it might have been on a hanger in a wardrobe for all the evidence of a body beneath it.

Above the neckline it looked as if her chin had slipped two inches and given her a projection at the front of her throat. The lack of chin was compensated for by buck teeth that a squirrel might have found attractive. Her hawk nose was covered in great freckles and it was all topped off with the reddest hair I have ever seen. Ginger stick? She fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. Then she climbed back up and fell again. Twice more. My teenage self was fascinated. At times I could hardly keep my eyes off her. She was like a horror flick on legs. She gave the hots - almost.

I'm sure she was a very nice girl. She'd have to be with the awful hand that she'd been dealt, poor kid. Maybe she filled out a little and had enough sense to stay out of the sun later but I wasn't around to see it.

EDIT This is a shite post but she popped into my head this morning for no reason then I saw the QOTW was gingers. Coincidence?
(Redemption blamed it on the Bossa Nova since, Sat 27 Feb 2010, 3:36, Reply)

This is my son. Game Set and Match.

(theremin put the lotion in the basket on, Sat 27 Feb 2010, 0:31, 23 replies)

I have a bit of a soft spot for ginger ladies.
Or rather a hard spot, as it were. I'm seeing my third russet-crested lovely as we speak. Pretty, freckly beast from Queensland.

If things go off track, I'll gladly come up to England. I'm guessing my odds would be better since you lot seem to have an aversion to the fairest of the fairer sex.
(Ladyfingers is in your wardrobe,, Sat 27 Feb 2010, 0:18, 1 reply)

I hate my self for my intolerance!
and i can't pin down it's origin, but i have an inborn hatred of gingers.
No-one else i know has this racial discrimination-esque views of hair colour.
But it's not even all ginger haired people, it's one segment of them;
the really pale, brightly orange, sometimes oily and generally short ones i dislike.
i hate myself for it, but i can't seem to stop myself avoiding them.
(Anti-unplaceable because you know it makes no sense, Sat 27 Feb 2010, 0:07, Reply)

Nicky Bailey
He's ginger. Played quite well tonight as well.
( milkybarnick is calming down Boris on, Sat 27 Feb 2010, 0:06, 2 replies)

Ginger or Mary Anne
Which would you rather do? The debate continues...
(tingtwatter Eating loads of red meat since, Sat 27 Feb 2010, 0:01, Reply)

I've always had a thing for ginger girls...
but I never done one :(
(The Archduke of South London I'm in your Girlfriend eating her organs, Fri 26 Feb 2010, 23:46, Reply)

my very (exclamation mark exclamation mark) ginger haired friend jokingly wore a purple jump suit to college
this sadly caught the attention of a gang of idiots from the lower school who followed us home. the only reason he didnt get beaten to a pulp was because we encouraged other people from the college walking by to fall into formation around him and one girl whipped out a can of deodorant and threatened to blind the leader chav if he came any closer.
(ladyintheradiator, Fri 26 Feb 2010, 23:09, Reply)

My ex was ginger
She also had no areolas.
(rhyswynne - on every social network mullarkey known to man, Fri 26 Feb 2010, 22:48, Reply)

Tesco
I was in Tesco today and I saw a couple of red headed children. They both looked rather shifty and looked as if they had wigs on. They must have got the ginger from their Mum, as their male parent wasn't ginger.
(lympicita_ie, Fri 26 Feb 2010, 22:23, Reply)

Why so much anti-ginger sentiment?
For me, it is simply teh fear! So pale and weak-looking, yet so hair-trigger ready to lose the plotmental.
Then again pale ginger men are a particularly common gay fantasy shag. I just don't understand it.
(alspicer, Fri 26 Feb 2010, 21:53, 1 reply)

Ginger Sex
I've had the pleasure to have carnal knowledge of two gingers.

In both cases, their penises were alarmingly larger than any other I've seen.

I'm sure this says something.
(skrinklelada, Fri 26 Feb 2010, 20:57, 7 replies)

I would

( MatJ LOOK, Fri 26 Feb 2010, 19:38, 1 reply)