I’ve had to simplify my life some, and this means (among other things) cutting down on the number of blogs I have.

I’ve pulled all of my posts into one place, and now blog only under my real name, India Drummond.

If you want to find me, you can see me in all my bitter goodness at: http://www.indiadrummond.com/

I hope you will join me there!

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My new favourite site, Cake Wrecks was brought to my attention by a Facebook friend, and the first time I went there, I spent no less than two hours with tears streaming down my face from laughing so hard.  Although it wasn’t how I’d planned to spend my day off, it was worth it.  It’s the only site I’ve found which has the words “perverted vegetable rodeo” on it, which really is enough of a reason to love it right there.

This site is devoted to professionally created cakes that have gone horribly wrong.  Some are like the pic above, with a huge WTF factor, while others are full of funny misspellings or the baker writing the decorating instructions ON THE CAKE (as in “Happy Birthday - I Want Sprinkles”).

Another favourite site is Passive Agressive Notes, which is pretty self-explanatory, although you’d really have to see the site and dig around for a few minutes to understand why other people’s frustration is so funny.  This one is a combination of a crack-up and a scary vision into the demented minds of other people that makes you want to say something nice to all your coworkers just in case today is the day they show up with a nine mil.  Just sayin’.

One I ran across last year was Crummy Church Signs which I think might only be funny if you live in the South (USA) where people actually put up signs like this in front of churches.  My British husband doesn’t really get it.  Well, he gets the fact that the signs are mildly horrifying, but he doesn’t really get why people put the signs up in the first place.

If you know of a hilarious site along these lines, please share!

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I grew up believing that romance novels are trashy.  Yes, I can hear you all saying, “But they ARE” all the way over here, but think about it.  Really?  What’s trashy about them?  Are they badly written?  Some, yes, but not all by any stretch.  Jane Eyre isn’t anything but a very old romance novel, and no one calls it trashy.  Well, you say, but it’s a classic!  A classic is just something that’s survived.  Like me.  Not all classics (unlike me) are really any good.  Try reading Moby Dick and then tell me with a straight face that you enjoyed it. 

So if it isn’t the quality of writing that makes it trashy, what is it?  The cover art?  Yes, some is laughably bad.  I love the spoofs on the Longmire website, one of which I’ve shamelessly stolen here.  So we do often judge books by their covers, which is another reason I’m pretty happy that I now own a Sony Book Reader, because I can read whatever the france I want and nobody gets to judge me for it. 

But sci-fi and fantasy are also riddled with bad cover art, but no one says “Trashy” before the phrase “Sci Fi” or rolls their eyes they way you’ll get if you tell someone you have just finished a good romance novel.

So, I decided to test my prejudices and I’ve started downloading romance books.  I blame Charlaine Harris, actually.  I fell in love with the TV series True Blood on HBO (watched on the web because it hasn’t come out in the UK yet, dammit), and have since read all her Sookie Stackhouse novels.  Actually… I read all 8 of them in about 2 weeks.  Seriously.  And I don’t even LIKE vampire stories.  Talk about trashy.  I get images of Béla Lugosi and get the giggles.  Sorry, Anne Rice, but even if you take the comical aspect away, how on earth is cannibalism sexy?  Tell me that?  Anyway, that’s another rant altogether.

Anyway, I could go on and on about what makes romance trashy, and by now you’re probably worried that I will.  Either that or you’re shouting “Too Late!” at your monitor.  I’ll skip it all and get to the point. 

Write this one down, Ethel.  It’s the s-e-x.  If men talk about sex it’s bawdy and perhaps coarse, but boys will be boys.  If women talk about sex… and I’m talking about grown women here… it’s trashy?  It’s trashy to write about it, read about it, and for gods sake, don’t think about it either!  That leads down a path of decay!  Or maybe it’s just that most romance books deal with love and relationships.  By god that IS trashy!

Because I’ve been reading a few romance books lately…. probably… 40 books in the last 4 months. (I’ve got a lot of catching up to do… Jane Eyre was the last one I’d read!)  Some historical, some modern, some futuristic and a couple paranormal (that’s what they call vampires and ghosts these days.)  And I will tell you… some were really crap.  No doubt about that.  But there were a few that made me laugh out loud, got me misty eyed, and even made my pulse go a wee bit faster.  But guess what…. none of them were trashy.  Imagine that.

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Apparantly the actual charge is something like hacking.  CNN reporters are such a bunch of drama queens.  Murder!

But I think the absolute best part of the story is here:

The woman used login information she got from the 33-year-old office worker when their characters were happily married, and killed the character. The man complained to police when he discovered that his beloved online avatar was dead.

It reminds me of the young guy that went to police after being beaten up by a pack of old ladies at a Sarah Palin rally recently.  Allegedly.  Or something.  But the point is, if I were a 20 year old man that went to an enclosed space that was guaranteed to be full of activists of quite the opposite point of view from me, I wouldn’t admit that little gem of stupidity, much less that mob mentality had seized a bunch of seniors and I’d gotten my ass handed to me.

And that’s what this is about really….. good judgement.  We expect our political candidates to have it, we want our bosses and our employees to have it, our teachers and even strangers, and then we go off and do things like give our co-workers our passwords after engaging in some “virtual marriage” (as if the real thing isn’t hard enough, we have to pretend to do it online as well) and then are so shocked and surprised when they go postal on us after we tell them that we’re done with them that we call the police when we’ve been virtually wronged.  You know what?  There’s enough real wrong in the world to worry about this idiot guy’s virtual hurt.

I seriously hope the cops end up just laughing at the guy and saying ‘Umm, this is why everyone with brains ever told you never never never give out your password, no matter what kind of virtual nookie you’re getting.”  And then I hope they add “Dumbass.” just for good measure.

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20 years later and hopping on a plane for a quick visit to ailing parents (it used to be a desperate need to be on a beach, or shopping that would make me drop everything and go, but no more) turned into a month long ordeal involving swollen ankles, thrombophlebitis (which includes steroids, pain killers and a heating pad), an aching back, and really most of the time wanting to be back home, not that said parents aren’t good company, but more that I’ve become a creature of habit and I like my habits.  In other words, I’m getting old.

Not that I’m complaining about getting old.

Okay wait yes I’m complaining about getting old.

I was prepared for the wrinkles and the grey hair, but I suppose I always thought that life would be fabulous.  Or if life wasn’t fabulous, I certainly thought I would be.  Maybe once the cloud of jetlag lifts, I’ll be able to figure out what the hell happened.

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But the tables have turned.  Yes, Radox, the manufacturer of a men’s soap in the UK has decided that men are so stupid that putting ‘for men’ isn’t quite enough.  No, to let the guys know this product is really for them, they’ve actually gone all out and put penises on the packaging.  Perfect for the caveman in search of shower gel.

Not only are they penises, but they are ebullient, happy looking fresh penises.  In a cluster.  Umm.  Yeah… Come to think of it, maybe I don’t want to know what they’re selling here.

I used this shower gel once just to see what would happen.  It was pretty disappointing. 

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So I looked down, and was completely ooked out.  I’m not a tidy woman, but I am clean, and I realised my hands were resting on something completely repulsive.   Exhibit A shows the keyboard after I’d cleaned the left side of it:

This is not the interesting part.  See I do realise that most people clean things all the time.   This is pretty much what I saw, except that my keyboard has more of a grey tint than brown (well after I cleaned it, anyway) but the lighting here makes it look like I took this photo in a darkened bar.

The rant comes in here:  I freaking hate digital cameras.  Oh sure they’re lovely and when you take pictures of your cruise to Florence, you get nice sharp images of the twisty roads and perfect skies.  But that all comes at a price: seeing a bit more of reality than you really want to see.  Case in point:

Yes, I was actually putting my hands on that… every day. No wonder I got sick last week. In fact, I feel a little nauseous looking at it now.

Life is not flattering at 10.2 megapixels.  I really don’t want to see my world in razor-sharp 3 point focus.  And I can do quite a lot of this reality-checking record-keeping with a rechargeable li-ion battery that allows me to take up to 520 shots in single-frame shooting mode.  Yes, now close-up facts can now be in my face all day long and recorded forever.

If the camera did this to my keyboard, you can only imagine what it did to my face.

I miss the days of fuzzy inexactitude… of flatterying distance… of polite need-to-know reality. 

I also realise, dear readers, that missing any type of days is a sign of getting O. L. D.  Girl-fren has always warned me that getting older ain’t for sissies.  I see it’s also not advisable for those with a weak stomach or an expensive camera.

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Which brings me to the point that although the English language IS an amazing thing, the people that speak it are just downright kooky, which I think counts for a lot more than the language itself. That’s like blaming the car for the accident and not the drunk who was driving it.

Here’s one example of said kooky behaviour: we say shit all the time that we have no clue what it actually means, or sometimes we know what it means, but don’t think about the words that make up the expression. A good example is “you can’t fool me… that’s the oldest trick in the book”. Unless you’re a whore, you probably don’t actually have a book of tricks, and even then I guess you’d have to be an old whore to have an old trick book, unless you inherited it from another old whore, in which case I guess you could be quite spritely. And even if you are an old whore with an old book with tricks in it, there’s really no accounting for why your old tricks would be fooling anyone. Except their wives, maybe.

Now let’s forget the whore for a second and assume there’s a book of dastardly tricks out there, designed for fooling people. Where the fuck is it and how do I get a copy? Because I’m telling you, I fool no one, and it’s starting to get on my nerves. Besides, the expression (that’s the oldest trick in the book) seems to imply that the oldest trick in this mystical trick book is somehow the worst, so I’d really love to get a hold of the methodology for some of the newer tricks…. some trick so tricky that no one has seen it before… except maybe the guy that wrote it in the book.

And who is the guy? The trick-collector-writer-downer-in-the-trick-booker. Because I’d like to find him, beat him up, and steal his job (and his book).

See… English speakers are a bunch of crack-heads.

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Hubby rated the film somewhere between “watchable” and “compelling”, but not quite compelling, he was quick to add.  I suppose that falls in the category of “just a tad more than slightly interesting”.   (We use a complex scale in our house.)

Now I liked the idea behind the film, and have no trouble imagining this as possible, as ridiculous as it seems.  If it seems your life is too boring to be fictional, the “hero” in the film was a compulsive, awkward tax collector who counted how many steps it took to get everywhere and the brushstrokes he took when cleaning his teeth.  I’m boring, but at least my personality isn’t that painful.  So I qualify as character-worthy, at least on that front.

I think my problem is not my character, but my author.  She’s a real frickin slacker, and my life is probably stuck in the bottom drawer of her desk because she can’t decide where she wants the plot to go, so I’m not being properly narrated, which tells me why I don’t know what’s going on myself half the time.   Some people stress about wanting to know the future.  I’d be content to know what’s happening now.

My guess is, in fact, she’s probably taken some low-paying secretarial job where she ends up getting coffee for some overbearing, sweaty boss who doesn’t realise it’s not 1964 anymore.  She probably imagines writing plot notes that come to her in a flash of inspiration on cocktail napkins, and maybe even tells people that she does, and she probably carries a notebook with her for just such an occasion.  However… I think she’s deluding herself.  She hasn’t actually written a word in months, and doesn’t bother fantasizing about what she’ll wear for her jacket-cover photo anymore.

You’d assume that having created a character such as myself she’d be possessed with creative juices, or at least a nice mango squash.  However, she’s let herself get lonely and carved a rut, judging by the evidence at hand.

I’m not sure what one does to wake up their author, to say, “Pardon me, but life in your filing cabinet isn’t as stimulating as one might suppose.  Could we get some literary devices going please?”  Because I could use my narrator back, although I could gladly skip the the foreshadows.

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Darren Mack, 46, pleading guilty in Las Vegas in November to murdering his wife, and also accepting a judgment for attempting to kill the judge handling his divorce (after first insisting on his innocence): “I do understand … in my (current) state of mind that shooting at the judiciary is not a proper form of political redress.” [Las Vegas Review-Journal, 11-5-07]

What the HELL was he thinking? Does he mean, maybe, that being sorry should be enough for taking a shot at the Judge after he was found guilty of murdering his wife. instead of something reasonable like, oh, ”listening to his Higher Angels” and filing an Appeal to a higher court or, maybe, simply voting against hizonner when he next stands for re-election?

What do you think,  Bitter Readers?   Is it me? Or maybe this guy’s lock-and-load attitude reflects current stress management practices.  Nevermind! It’s prob’ly just me.

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