Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

Vancouver is known for it’s seafood, especially salmon.  Some great Chinese, Japanese, and Viet cuisines for sure. 
Don’t miss Purdy’s for the chocolate.
BC is famous for it’s wine and fresh produce.

You might find some Maple Syrup on the breakfast table…

Otherwise enjoy it!

Well, in the wake of the unbelievably horrible news about what journalists working for Murdoch’s News International are doing, came something.

BBC “Question Time” is a political discussion programme, and of course it was all about the News of the World phone tapping scandal. Hugh Grant just totally rocked the panel. He played a Prime Minister in “Love, Actually.” I think he should do it for real. He was completely awesome.

A clip of Hugh Grant doing his stuff:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14073260
Hope that link works for you.

Love Hugh Grant even more now.

And the last romance I read, Dancing in the Moonlight (and I enjoyed it), did reference condoms.

Hugh Grant has forever erased the incident with the…sorry, it’s gone.

MY library just got a copy of Iron Duke! I checked out! Its very interesting. I have just started reading it. I looked for this book before but they didn’t have it. I did a happy dance to see the book. Not great world news, but good for our library!

I read a book (bugger, the title escapes me at the moment), where the couple in question were very, um, funny (but in a hot-for-each-other way), and when the hero is madly fumbling around for his condom, it adds humour and tension with the frustrated couple - but this is one of the rare scenes where the contraception has added to the story. Mostly I find it an intrusive safe sex message better left for another kind of campaign…

But, then again, I have read some incredibly hot scenes where the condom isn’t around, so they use their imagination to get around the ‘if it ain’t on, it ain’t on’ issue.

“Pleased with his concern for her”????  Yikes!

I read less and less new romance because the sexism hurts so much.  But if this text is something a so-called researcher wrote to test attitudes to condoms, they needed to make it neutral on all other issues.

If I had been in that survey, I would have nixed the condom passage on grounds of stupidity and sexism, rather than condom use.  The fact that it isn’t romantic comes a long way down the list of its problems.

Ye gods.

I was reading Sarah Morgan’s new book “Doukakis’s Apprentice” last week (excellent, btw) and, while there was no rustling of the condom packet at the crucial moment, one of the characters commented at some point afterwards that they had used protection. I thought that was an interesting way of dealing with it because it didn’t ruin the moment with the practicalities, but definitely contained a reminder that protection was a good idea.

Sarah — I enjoyed your piece on ‘glomming’, a useful word that American English took from Scots and Gaelic, but that passed us (British English speakers) by.

I know the feeling only too well, not only with novels but with music, hobbies and so on.  Discovering something new that delights one, and then going on to research the subject to an extreme degree.  It can become obsessive.  It’s actually much the same process that one has to go through when writing a (non-fiction) book:  if one is not emotionally consumed by the subject and all its ramifications, the impetus fades.

I just had a serious Netflix Glomfest on Downton Abbey. I watched all 7 episodes back to back.  I had watched all of Upstairs|Downstairs on the plane from Heathrow to Miami and needed something similar to glom on. Now I’m jonesing for something that has an actual resolution since I don’t know when the next season of either is due out.