More comments from the readership

May 3, 2009 | Filed Under Fan Mail, Reader Responses | No Comments

From: “Jacq”
Subject: COMMENTS – thanks for a great site

Dear HBI,

I found your site today, bouncing in on a random blog weblink, and have just had a joyous few hours of reading some of the most hugely entertaining & thought-prodding pages i’ve read anywhere for a long while.

So thankyou. Really. I was cruising the magazine aisles at the supermarket again today, flicking through sci-fi titles & a ‘customise your PC’ mag (for once with no curious guys wondering if I’d got lost looking for the women’s aisles) and I couldn’t resist trawling the women’s titles. Ngh, yes I know, but done in the spirit of enquiry to test if any of them (oh god please, any) had anything remotely interesting to say.

Admittedly that’s an exercise a bit like going back to sample your own ear wax – never any good the first time and repeated testing won’t make the experience any more palatable. However I do like to keep my rile-quotient up and this is a good way to achieve that (naturally *the* best way being to read internet comments, there’s so much anger in cyberspace i’m amazed it doesn’t just explode in a volcano of worldwide vented spleen and cover half the world in abandoned apostrophes and a petrified layer of ‘teh’s).

Of course the offending items (sic) were all full of diets, body-hating mantras, celeb-watching-body-hating, celeb-diet-secrets, celeb-baby-routines, secret-body-hating-celeb-baby-exercise-diet-watching. Er, did I miss out a buzzword in any of those combinations? I suspect they’re written by random-phrase generating subroutines, hell if it works for mission-statements it’s going to be sufficient for the limited range of concepts allowed  anywhere near one of those glossy ana-adverts.

I keep threatening to take some pre-written post-it notes and slap on a few salient comments in a non-permanent protest against the overwhelming tide of pap. A sort of futile one-woman Wake Up Call attempt to prod some schmuck addicted to the promise of A Better Life If You Look Like This!’ to question if they really, really are happy reading the same laxative-induced anal leakage week after week?

See how a simple thankyou so easily turn rantwards?

You’re corrupting me with your insidious HB philosophy that life is supposed to be fun. Shhhh! Don’t make me laugh so much at your acerbic asides to the utter twonks whose email excerpts you share; don’t make me use my brain to distinguish fine subtleties in behaviour that differentiate emotionally abusive behaviour from the healthy relationships we’d like to aim for; certainly don’t make me question my own behaviours when some are mirrored and mentioned and shown up to be not quite as healthy as I would have liked to think. Well, you just went and did all of that. So for that you can just be roundly applauded, so there. Tough cheesy wotsits.

And, not content with beginning a sentence with a conjunction (see? I even need the Grammar Fairy), I’ve bookmarked your site and intend to come back and have a thoroughly enjoyable read again very soon. Not an ‘effin diet in sight, unless it’s how to bake flakey pastry made from the fat harvested from celeb cosmetic surgery. Mmmm. Would love to get that article into the glossy weeklies. Sense of humour my non-lipo’d buttcheeks :P

Mackette The Knife