This blog post made me literally laugh out loud. And then I kept reading the hillbilly part, excerpted below, and laughed some more:

“I hope they can start the car, when they get here,” Ian worried.
“Well, if they can’t, they’ll tow us home, won’t they?”
“Oh, yeah. Of course.” Ian was relieved.
“We won’t be forced to live here for the rest of our lives, like people you read about in the papers.”
“Yip,” said Ian in a hillbilly voice. “We bin livin’ here fifty years. It suits our purpose.”
“It’s a simpler way of livin’,” I hillbillied back at him. “We just livin’ off the land, well, livin’ off this car park. Back to Nature.”
“We jist couldn’ git home one night so we jist stayed here and we like it,” Ian agreed.
“When times are hard we jist eat shit,” I chimed in. “When folks park their cars and go into Sainsbury’s to do their shoppin’, we put the shit on their cars to heat up, cuz their engines is still warm. We cain’t do it on our own car cuz she don’t work no more.”
“We ain’t botherin’ no one,” said Ian. “‘Cept maybe the folks whose cars we put shit on. Sometimes they take exception to that.”

So, you should read this article, “Everybody Hates Mommy.”. If, after you read it, you’re thinking, “Man, no one I know hates mommies; this must be a figment of this author’s imagination,” read the comments.

So I was correct: bragging about Spike’s food consumption was just asking for him to throw all his dinner on the floor. I keep threatening to throw all my food on the floor, too, just to see what the appeal is, but as I will also be the one to have to mop it up, I just can’t bring myself to do so.

In Facebook news, yesterday I defriended someone for the first time. Oh, what fun! I would consider defriending the author of the following status messages if I didn’t find them so irritatingly entertaining:

Jenny McHappy Elation is gonna DRINK SOME ICE TEA!!!!!!!!!!!!! ~~WOOOO~~and then I’m gonna TAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Jenny McHappy Elation LOVES CAKE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Watch out b. crocker!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Jenny McHappy Elation is gonna cook up some SKETTY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 Yum!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Then her friends comment that she is such a good cook, can they come over for dinner, et cetera. I can only hope that somewhere, Jenny McHappy Elation has an exclamation point-laden blog where she is writing the following:

Y’ALL!!!!!!!!!!!!! I have the most BORING facebook friend!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! She doesn’t use ANY EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I bet if she ate my sketty she would!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! LOL Gotta go drink some KOOLAID and jump in da pool OH YEAH !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I made this the other day. It was worth it. I ignored those stupid berries, though.

Can we just forget I said I was going to read Lolita? Thanks. I just read Can You Ever Forgive Me? Memoirs of a Literary Forger by Lee Israel. Do you like tiny memoirs where people pretend to be sorry for the things they did but are really very proud of their work because their forgeries are hilarious? You’ll love this, then. Here’s some stuff about it.

• 2WITCHY
7TITHRS
SNKTFYD

I get twitchy, I get sanctified* (although it took me a minute), but 7TITHRS? The Diplomat sent me that one. My guess is “seven tithers” and his is “seven tit hours.” Any other guesses?

• I’ve been reading (slowly, I may add) Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh. I aspire to write a truly silly book one day (complete with ridiculous character names) and have some blurbist write on the back that my book is “in the spirit of Waugh’s Decline and Fall; a true nonsensical masterpiece.” I have the feeling it took Waugh approximately two weeks to write and that he was drunk a lot during the process. One day, I shall give myself a drunken two weeks alone with a typewriter and see what happens. I have a feeling it would be something like this:

Onec upon a tine there was a nam maned Horace McSludgebucket and omg I’m so drunkkkk

• Do you know about Sexy People? What about Fuck You, Penguin? You’re welcome, internet.

• Jaxxonians, have you been to the downtown Keifer’s and had a burger lately? The burger with the mozzerella AND THE FETA DRESSING? Jesus. I ate one yesterday and could eat another four or so today, too.

• Also, gorjus killed John Updike.

*These sound like awesome song lyrics.

This article about the effects high gas prices are having on people in poor, rural areas (like the Delta) breaks my heart. Be sure and click through the slideshow for added heartbreakery — especially the photo of the man putting $5′s worth of gas in his truck.

It’s late (early?) and I am attempting to celebrate the return of my ankles with some online shoe shopping. I go to Zappos, where they let you put in your size and how much you want to spend and then give you your results. So, internet, should I show off my slender, bony, fluidless, twig-like ankles in these hot little numbers or these?

Dear Zappos,

Do not offer the option of shoes under $39.99 if they are only going to be suitable for people named Nana.

Thanks for nothing,
Sally

I can’t stop looking at this picture and laughing.

Y’all, I am tearing up National Poetry Month this year! Each year I forget how hard it is to find interesting poems that I can heartily endorse — ones that I haven’t posted before, that is. Oh well.

Yesterday I took Elsie, aka White Cat, aka Elsers, aka Elser Selsers, over to Rachel’s (my coworker) house to live. Cat abandonment! I know it’s for the best, as Elsie and Pete do not get along and Pete is such a pill that making him happy is kind of a priority. Elsie has been with us for a year and after trying for a year and keeping our house shut off into two halves and having a crazy cat who poops in the dog’s bed when he’s stressed, we had to do something. I was very sad about giving her away but glad she gets to live in a house where she’s the only kitty. I will miss the way she used to sit on the edge of my sink and tell me all about what’s going on on One Life to Live every morning. That’s the only thing I can figure out that she was saying. She’d see me get in the shower and say nothing, but then the moment I emerged she was all rarr rayrrr rarrrr? And I’d say oh yeah then what happened and she would say rar rar rarrr rarrrrrr!! And I would say nuh-uh you are making that up — Dorian Lord can’t still be on that show.

Anyway, so after having a few good boo-hoos about it (when I left Rachel’s house Elsie was hiding under the bed, and imagining what was going on in her little kitty head — which was probably more where’s my food? and less woe is me, no one loves me, here I sit under the bed, totally abandoned — set me off for several hours), I had finally recovered when Larry told me about something he read online.

Larry: I wasn’t going to mention it, but did you see that story where they thought there was a newborn in the trash can at Wal-Mart?
Me: Uh, no.
Larry: It turned out to be a burrito.

This set me off into the most hysterical laughter I have experienced in years. I was crying, I was choking, I was laughing in a totally new way that sounds nothing like my actual laugh, and when I was able to speak I kept asking questions that made me laugh more, like “was the burrito wearing a diaper” or “was the burrito crying” only I don’t think it sounded like English. Larry sort of laughed nervously the way you do when you see someone have a fit or a seizure (ok, imagining Larry standing around laughing while someone has a seizure is now making me laugh all over againl). He found the article and printed it for me, and then reading it in black and white made me start hysterically laughing all over again, and I could only make it through the first line without crumpling up the paper and laughing some more.

Here it is. I hope the word “only” in the second sentence brings you as much unbridled mirth as it did me.

The back page essay in the NYTBR this week was about literary dealbreakers (“It’s Not You, It’s Your Books”). Read the article, then go read the accompanying blog post about it. Be sure and read the comments.

I can’t get enough of this website.

I just thought you should know.

So I was reading the first chapter of How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard online, and this paragraph is not only true, but also fills me with dread/makes me have hives:

Reading is first and foremost non-reading. Even in the case of the most passionate lifelong readers, the act of picking up and opening a book masks the countergesture that occurs at the same time: the involuntary act of not picking up and not opening all the other books in the universe.

I have felt that guilt before — that by reading this book, I’m not reading all the other great books out there. I generally have this feeling when I start a really stupid book. HELLO GREAT WORKS OF LITERATURE! I SHUN YOU FOR THIS TREACLE.

In other news, I read that today on Ellen, Heidi Klum said that Britney Spears taught her how to use a diaper correctly. From Us Weekly‘s website:

“We were talking about babies and diapers and she explained to me a lot of things about diapers I that didn’t know,” Klum told DeGeneres.

“You know these sticky things on the side? I never knew that they were there. To close them in the front, I was always putting string around. I had no idea,” Klum said.

Please note the part where she says a) she didn’t know how to use a diaper and b) that she used to tie string around her babies.

I’m doing the [your age] x 365 thing, where I’m writing 34 words about a person I know every day for the next year. It’s over on the sidebar, or you can click here.

I don’t know if you all hate the Fergie song “Big Girls Don’t Cry” as much as I do — get this: at the Concert for Diana, Fergie said, “This song is about hope. I’d like to dedicate it to Diana,” thus making everyone, including the ghost of Diana, vomit — but apparently Rich at Four Four does as well, as evidenced by this great post, which includes this golden sentence:

Actually, asshole, big girls do cry — it’s just that most big girls haven’t had extensive Botox and/or plastic surgery to fix their methfaces, and thus still have full use of tear ducts.

(Bonus points for this, from his post Justin Timberlake, Douchebag: “And god, what a douchebag he is. His middle name is Massengil. Instead of a nose, he has a nozzle.”)

If you are as in love with AB Chao as I am, you will pore over these photographs of her home, featured on Apartment Therapy.

If you want more, more! here’s her Flickr page as well.

Dear Whoever’s Supposed to Write Me a Letter in the Modern Letter Project:

WHERE IS MY LETTER.

Love,
Sally

P.S. Has anyone gotten theirs?