Emergency sex and other desperate measures
I’ve been feeling rather ragged lately mostly on account of the power cuts. I’m enough of salad and instant soup. The upside is that I’m getting to bed much earlier than usual. I’m reading Emergency Sex (and other desperate measures) by candlelight and loving it. Give it a read.
Talking about reading, I find it hard not to read everything and anything . . . including the Customer Complaints Book that I saw hanging by a tatty string in the toiletries aisle in Bon Marche, Borrowdale. I didn’t expect to find that anyone had actually taken the trouble to list their complaints, but lo and behold there were several entries. Of course many of them revolved around the High Prices of commodities but someone else took the supermarket to task for keeping the fleshy parts of pig heads for the staff and leaving only the teeth and noses for customers.
Maybe I will stick to instant soup.
Yesterday an article on NewZimbabwe.com caught my eye about a Zimbabwean woman hotelier who allegedly forced a young woman to have sex with her. Here’s an excerpt:
On arrival at the house, the girl said she noticed there was no-one else in the house and asked Chirove where the guests were. She said Chirove told her she wanted her help in preparing for the party before the guests arrived. The state alleges Chirove then led the girl to her bedroom where she locked the door immediately after the girl had entered. She then dipped her hands into a traditional clay pot besides her bed and instructed the girl to do the same. Chirove then allegedly ordered the girl to open a calabash, where there was a strange creature, about 45cm tall, “hairy like a baboon, and looked like a human being”. Chirove is alleged to have then ordered the girl not to tell anyone about the incident, lest the creature followed her home. She then ordered the girl to undress and lie on the bed on her back.
Between short hairy baboonlike creatures, cold dark nights and pigs teeth, I’m feeling a need for Emergency Sex and several other desperate measures to get me through the winter.
Tuesday, June 12th 2007 at 9:10 pm
Hi Ms. Clark,
I’m writing from Open Source, a public radio show based in Boston, Massachusetts, and
distributed around the country.
Two years ago, we started what’s become a yearly tradition for us called Blogsday: http://www.radioopensource.org/blogsday-2007/
Based loosely on Bloomsday, which celebrates James Joyce’s “Ulysses” as an evocation of the world in a single day (in Joyce’s case, June 16, 1904), the idea is to create a mosaic portrait by reading excerpts of blog posts written all over the world on the same day, for one night, for one hour, on live radio. This year, we chose this past Tuesday, June 5, to collect posts from, and the show will air Thursday night from 7-8pm EST.
I’m writing because we loved this post, and it’s on the shortlist to be included among our Blogsday Best of the June 5th Blogosphere collection. Congratulations!
On Thursday night, we’ll bring in two accomplished and agile actors to read excerpts from our collection of posts on the air. I can’t guarantee that your post will make it onto the show at this point (we’re still knee-deep in our favorites), but you’re a finalist.
We can’t pay anything — this is public radio after all — but we can guarantee a respectful treatment, a large radio audience, and a link on our blog.
Let me know if you have any questions. I’ll try to send another email if I can confirm that your post will definitely be on the show beforehand, but if things get too crazy I may just let you know after the fact.
Best,
Sam G.R.