Fish empathy

I know it's a serious thing and I do love fish and think they are my friends not my food and the quilt seems very beautiful but… it's just the phrase 'fish empathy quilt' that makes me totally unable to take thisseriously.

Sorry PETA. Don't dump horse poo outside my house please.

Vegetables: an update

Prince Charming has signed up for an allotment. So, we may soon have that vegetable patch. It won't be mine, though, he made me promise I'd let him do whatever he wants in it ( which will be herbs, beetroot and potatoes, knowing him) because I don't let him tell me what to do in the garden. By the way, the garden's coming on a treat. I've got 7ft-high sweet peas that smell gorgeous and the passion flower is taking over the whole place. You can almost pretend you're in a lovely cottage somewhere if you block out the sound of the car alarms.

Emo, I am

I've decided I quite fancy the bloke out of Muse (the singer, natch, not the one with the silly hair - I mean, really, with the money they earn he must be able to afford a decent snipper). According to a teenage friend of mine* that makes me officially emo. No, I didn't know what it was either, but it's apparently the latest incarnation of the over-sensitive teen. It's like a cross between indie kid and goth with a bit of riot grrl thrown in.

Anyway I'm sticking with my Matt Bellamy crush. Any man who can scream like that must be pretty damn good in the sack, surely. Plus, he stands on a stage with lots of lights and pyrotechnics and big noise and plays a guitar, and I've always been a sucker for that kind of thing. He'd have to fatten up a bit, otherwise I'd crush him, but I'm sure we could have a few solid meals of cider and pasties (he's from Devon, so that's doubtless his favourite meal) and he'd bulk out in no time. I'm mildly concerned that this might be his sex face, but hey, we're emo so we'd surely be doing it in the dark anyway.





* I play online computer games, which necessitates spending some of my free time with teenage boys. Most of them are intensely irritating. I'd like to stress that I'm not some kind of Debra Lafave. And, by the way: eww!

A sub-editor writes...

Why oh why is there not a command in Indesign or Word to 'Find all bullshit' and 'Replace with sparkling wit'?

I mean, really:


The saw has been in use since the time of the Pharaohs some 4 _ thousand years. Its sole purpose is to cut wood in either a straight line or a curved one depending on the type of saw and its design purpose. Modern saws are vastly different to those early varieties, the quality of the material they are made from is far superior, and the technology applied during the saws development has made a more accurate, efficient, and easier tool to use.

'Its sole purpose is to cut wood'? Gaddam! And there was me trying to use a 14in tenon saw to hold up my trousers. If only someone had told me earlier.

I'm back! Back! Backer than back!

Well. It's been a long time; I shouldn't have left you without a dope rhyme to step to and all that, but anyway I'm back. Loads of shit has gone on, but it would take ages to fill you in, so I won't bother. In summary: bought house, couple of festivals, new nephew, migraines, put on a stone, played computer games (the last three may be related). Oh, not in that order by the way.

Instead I'm going to launch a new feature: Horrible Word of the Day. Mostly people have 'word of the day' things, well I'm a crazy alternative maverick misfit kinda gal so I'm just going to turn that whole concept on its head and have a word that I hate, instead. Punk or what? Yeah that's right.

So without further ado, today's wordus horribilis is 'unsightly'. I mean, who says that? Apart from deodorant/hair removal/cosmetics companies, whom I predict are actually going to appear quite often in this feature. Anyway, if you mean 'ugly', say 'ugly'. The word's been in use with its current meaning since 1375, for Christ's sake, and since before that in Old Norse and stuff (no I'm not making this up, look at this erudite source if you don't believe me) so who the hell are we to reject it? Whenever I hear 'unsightly' it immediately makes me think of armpit hair or zits because that's the kind of thing it's usually used to refer to, which makes it a very odd term to use for, say, screw marks in a piece of wood (for such, dear reader, was the context in which I came across it today and which sparked my current state of fulmination). See this thing here? You know what to call it.

Help me, Obi-wan Kenobi

I've got quite a bit of work to do at the moment, so what better time to piss about on the internet finding a new photo for my profile (right)? I'm a bit bored of the princess cake, so I decided to go for the best princess ever: ass-kickin' robo-babe , feminist icon and an early role model for me and many other women who grew up with brothers in the late 1970s/early 1980s. Let's face it, Luke wouldn't have survived through the first reel if it wasn't for her; and then, while he's pissing about "finding himself" by waving a big shiny stick around, she's getting on with fighting evil and generally getting stuff sorted out, like women through the ages before her and plenty of women to come after her.
Plus she got to shag Han Solo and we'd all like a go on that, wouldn't we.
And while I was looking, I found this. How cool? I need one.
This is just weird though. And slightly pervy in a way I can't quite define.

Bloody London gets all the attention

Oh great. According to BBC Breakfast it's snowed more in south London than it has here. Yet another example of the London-centric attitude of this country. It's just not fair. I'm joining the Countryside Alliance.

Hunter S Thompson dies

So

Farewell then, Hunter S Thompson.

You never meant shit to me.

But apparently, you should have done

So maybe it's time I got round to reading one of your books.

Reasons why living here is better than living in London, #687

It's snowing!!!!!!!!!

I bet Felicity Kendal never had to put up with this sort of thing

Oh woe. My compost heap has let me down. Like an unruly teenager, it has embarrassed me in front of my family.
When my sister-in-law came round with my brother and a lovely cake (I'm enjoying a hefty chunk of it now as it happens, washed down with a nice cup of tea) I took her out to view the Green Refuse Compacto-Decomposition Unit and she was duly impressed, but I couldn't help noticing that some of the floorboards nailed together to make the front side were coming adrift. I could only lean against them to cover them up and smile winningly in the hope that SIL wouldn't see them (she said she couldn't see anything amiss but dammit, I knew it was there).

Anyhoo. I've just been to Tesco's to buy supplies for a small gathering of friends I'm hosting this weekend to celebrate my 30th birthday (it's not a party, my official birthday party is happening later in the year). We've got cherryade, cream soda, three sorts of jelly, raspberry ripple ice cream (two tubs - I toyed with the idea of getting different flavours but really, you can't improve on raspberry ripple), champagne, party rings, happy face biscuits, pink wafer biscuits, jammy dodgers, burgers, hot dogs, dandelion and burdock, processed cheese slices, coleslaw, potato salad, onion rings, assorted crisps and lashings of ginger beer! The plan is to get really high on sugar and run around breaking things. I need TV for my bumhole!

An amusing situation with a chicken

...well, not really, but I have been Good Lifeing it up today, spending a good hour or so in the garden taking my compost heap up to the next level. I don't mean I put more scraps on it so it got taller, I mean that I have turned it from a simple heap of garden waste and kitchen scraps into a turbo-charged Bio-Waste Decomposition Zone(TM).
You may recall that I had fashioned rudimentary (but oozing with Scandinavian design flair) sides for my heap out of an old Ikea futon - actually, you may not, as my detailed description of the process was lost forever from the literary canon in an unfortunate blog-posting malfunction. Well, it had remained since then as a three-sided affair with large gaps between the slats of what was once the futon and really, although it looked cool, it wasn’t heating up properly and nature was not able to take its course. To make things worse, I’d been banging on to Nice Next Door Neighbour about how an aerobic composting system was much more efficient than his anaerobic plastic bin that he got from the council, even though I had no idea what I was talking about and was totally making it up.
Once again, though, it was the Nice Next Door Neighbours who came to the rescue. My Organic Fertiliser Production System(TM) now has a fourth side constructed from the neighbours’ floorboards – old ones, that they’re replacing, I didn’t just barge in and start ripping up their living room floor - and is covered on all sides with their old living room carpet (dog hair still attached for extra insulation). It even has – get this – a lid made of carpet, which can be folded back for convenient access and then replaced to keep the heat in. And the whole thing was achieved by some very satisfying nail-bashing which made me feel very capable and post-feminist even though most of them are well on the piss.
It’s now overtaken the woodpile as my number-one pride and joy. I’ve caught myself looking out the window admiring it twice already and I’m really looking forward to my sister-in-law coming over tomorrow afternoon so I can show it to her.