Which spelling to choose? Nobody knows.
The more observant among you may notice that my blogs are now properly formatted, with paragraphs and everything. The very kind Mr Andrew Lederer informed me of the fancy code I need for that kind of thing.

In fact, all I have to do is put a 'p' at the beginning. I'd been putting 'p's and '/p's all over the place, and what good did it do me?
None. None at all.

I shouted a lot at a busybodying old woman this evening.
There had been some sort of awful crash at the top of Upper Street (in Islington) and the cars and buses were all backed up. Upper Street is pretty narrow, so I decided rather than try to wind through the already chaotic mess of traffic, I would go on the pavement.

I am fully aware that bikes are supposed to go on the road, but I figured in these circumstances it made more sense. However it's always when you have thought something through, and are making a particular effort to be cautious and not go fast, that some busybodying twat decides to chip in with "you should be on the road!"

And that's just what this woman did.
I was having none of it. One thing that really pisses me off is when people make assumptions about me, and also people who pipe in when their opinion really isn't wanted - and she had cleverly managed to get both into one little irritating comment.

So I turned back around and said, "I'm sorry, but I really think you should mind your own business, I'm cycling very slowly and not doing anyone any harm".

I was about to cycle off, thinking 'that showed you, old woman' - when she retorted with "fuck off, you stupid bitch". This is not the response one expects from a little fat sixty year old.

So then I got mad.

I wheeled back round on her, and shouted 'I'm sorry, but I'll thank you not to swear at me like that. If you actually USE YOUR EYES - if they still even work - you'll see that there is a MASSIVE traffic accident and it's impossible to get by on the road. That's the reason I'm on the pavement. I wasn't doing anyone any harm, so maybe next time you should shut up and mind your own business"

She said, 'Well, if I see a policeman I'm going to report you"

I said, "Oh will you? Will you indeed? And I'm sure they'll be very interested, what with the MASSIVE ACCIDENT to try and deal with; I'm sure they'll be very interested in a young girl going at one mile an hour on a tiny bike."

She said "You stupid little bitch. It's really dangerous"

I said "IS IT? IS IT DANGEROUS? I'll show you dangerous in a minute if you don't shut up! Just because you're old doesn't mean you know everything!"

I was properly mad.
Someone came up to me afterwards and said 'good for you'.

Of course, legally I was in the wrong, but that's not the point. She was a stupid old woman. And I couldn't believe someone that old would use such bad language. At one point I actually felt like punching her.
Dear me, this English repressed rage is a funny thing.

In other news - this week I am doing the very exciting job that is DATA INPUT. Yes that's right - I am lucky enough to be spending 8 hours a day putting people's business card details into a database. I am getting repetitive strain injury already and I've only been doing it a day.
Oh well, at least I'm putting that Cambridge English degree to good use.

HANG ON....

Well, I'd better go. I have a tasty boy to kiss.

Ruth x

Some silly twat keeps doing 'trackbacks' on my blogs, just writing strings of nonsense...I don't even really know what trackbacks are - it's some kind of special comedy spamming, no doubt.

Strings of nonsense
Ropes of fear
Bits of grizzle
In your ear
Threads of piffle
And gobbledeegook
All of this
Is verbal puke.

That's my new poem.

SO. Hello there peoples of Chortle. I was delighted to see that my old blog (back in the days when these blogs were in the forums) has outpaced all the others with a rather snazzy hitrate of 8700...not so much now, I fear, what with me only writing about once a week and having little to nothing to say about my life.

SO. I had a root canal today. I had one done 3 years ago and the stupid snivelling little woman did such a bad job that I had to pay £500 for a specialist to put it right. Apparently there were four 'fragments of instrument' INSIDE my tooth - which I'm guessing means bits of her drill fell off inside my tooth - rather than that she deposited little bits of flute and tuba there. Stupid moron.

I also fell off my bike this morning. People who were in Edinburgh might have seen me scooting around on my little 70's raleigh shopper...well, it has special folding handlebars that you can twist round and adjust - only I'd done rather too much of said twisting and adjusting, and this morning while I was riding it the handlebars fell out of their socket, and I fell onto the pavement. Fortunately I was going really slowly, so I didn't hurt myself too much. I fell like a little child onto my hands and knees - but I only have a small scrape on my knee. I'm well tough. The distressing thing was that after falling off I had to try and quickly fix the stupid thing and then spend 40 minutes racing over to my dentist appointment, worrying all the time that it was going to happen again and I would fly off under a lorry. I didn't, fortunately.

For some reason, I've been invited to a film premiere this weekend. It's all very exciting, but I can't help wondering how or why they have invited me...I'm quite sure I'm not top of anyone's list of important people to invite to a premiere. Still, I'm not going to complain.

Mice are invading my house. I accidentally typed 'mince' then, which would be funnier but weird. Mince is invading my house! Perhaps if mince were animate it would mince as it walked along. It seems likely. The attack of the mincing mince! Not a very good idea for a film.

But yes. Tiny flurries of grey keep rushing around the edges of my kitchen. The beasties are coming for me. I keep having visions of rats leaping at my from inside the toilet. Unlikely, I feel. But possibly a better idea for a film. A cockroach leapt out of a toilet at me once. That was in New York.

I am not keen on this new trend for leggings. Ladies all over London are displaying a new fantaticism for hideous lycra leg-clingers. For me, leggings were enough of a disaster in the 80's (refer to previous photo of me in floral leggings and matching t-shirt, aged 9) to even consider an attempt an reviving them a-la-2006. Bullshit. I love fashion but most of this season's stuff is just a joke. Ludicrous brick-shoes with "hello, I'm obese" massive tent coats, leggings (or "footless tights" as some silly people are calling them) - which supposedly show a 'skinny' contrast to the 'volume' of the fat-coats; it's all a pile of crap. Give me a 50's dress and a pair of Manolos any day.
In fact, give me a pair of Manolos every day. Someone. Please.

Ok, time to go. It's 11.15 and I have to watch 'An affair to remember' before bedtime.

Many loves to you my friend,
Rufus McBobbins x

Well, my Chortle blog-writing has been very poor of late. I've started one a couple of times, then got distracted by the idea of coffee or running away from the mouse that keeps coming for me, and ended up never finishing the post.

Hey ho.

...Brief pause while I get distracted making some coffee, see a mouse and end up dancing about on a chair shrieking for half an hour...

Hello again. Blimey, it's bloody freezing in my house. The winter seems to be coming and going at the moment - one day it's beautifully cold, the next it's piffling around still being a slightly muggy autumn.


So. I did one of those Avalon showcase things last night. They're always entirely petrifying - you have no idea who's in the audience, busy writing you off their 'any chance of getting a job' list. Actually it wasn't so bad. CRAP! I JUST SPILLED COFFEE ALL OVER MY DESK.
Hum.

I went to my grandma's this weekend. It was fun - she lives in a little village in the Peak District - there are horses and fields and rivers and everything - the sort of things you begin to forget exist if you stay in London too long. A lot of my family came over - 18 people in fact, and that isn't even all of them. Family resemblance is a strange thing. There are two sets of identical twins, and many of us look very similar - I think the Turkish bit must have quite strong genetics (my grandad was Turkish). Why am I talking about this?
I don't know.
I don't know anything any more.
Anyway, my 14-year old cousins (who are twins) had brought along a rather hilarious dvd of them messing around with a video camera - usually the sort of thing families watch out of politeness, smiling and nodding - but this was actually funny. The most disturbing part about it though, was seeing how similar their sense of humour and way of acting was to mine. I'm not sure I've developed much since the age of 14. But pish, I like it that way.
I could philosophise with you about the myseries of existence if you wanted, but I think I'd rather throw myself around a room accompanied by 'Macho macho man'.

I seem to be going over my past week in reverse order, so that brings me to Friday, which was spent temping and then going to a friend's birthday - unfortunately I arrived so late (actually not that late - I think midnight is still a respectable time to arrive at a party) that the birthday girl had already become so paralytic that she'd been taken home in a cab.

...Another brief pause where I wandered off to play Take That's 'Back for good' on the piano...

Last week was spent temping at Nickelodeon. Today I have a day off and I plan to spend it buying ingredients for sugar-free oatbran muffins. I'm crazy like that.

I'm not sure there's a lot else to report in the world of Ruth. Or if there is, it's either private or not worth talking about.
See you soon mofos
RP x

So. As you see, my whole Edinburgh blog has now been transferred over to this special new section. In case you're interested, it took exactly one hour.

I am annoyed. I have been watching a pair of Manolos on Ebay for a whole week. They're mental (green with 3D strawberries) but I like them and they were only $60. I was all ready to bid at the end of the auction and then forgot about them and didn't remember until too late.

I realise there are more important things for a girl who already has 51 pairs of Manolos to worry about, like 'friends' and 'leaving the house' (I haven't been out in daylight for two days now) but damn it, I wanted those shoes.

Tomorrow I have to go to the dentist, probably to get my tooth pulled out. It has gone wrong, and now looks more like a small piece of black than a tooth.

I need to do more gigs. I haven't really got my arse into gear since returning from Edinburgh, in terms of live performance. I have spent most of my time writing songs, and pondering what to write my film about. My trouble is, I'm not enormously good at organising things. I can sit quite happily writing away for 12 hours at a time, but when it comes to calling people, booking gigs, and all that general 'interaction' business, I'm not so hot. That reminds me, I keep forgetting to call my friend. Bollocks.
Not to call my friend 'bollocks' - that would be rude.

That joke doesn't really work written down.

I'd better go I suppose. 1am.

1am (One a.m) looks the same as 'LAM' or even 'I am'.
This is something one notices when one has spent 2 days not leaving the house.

Bingle bangle bungle
I don't want to leave the jungle
Oh no no
no no no
Oh no no
No no no.

Ruthus Hound x

Now then. I'm trying to figure out if this is how I post in this new bit. Is this how I post in the new bit?

All this fangly technology.

I'm trying to work out how I move all my old posts over to this bit. That might take a while.

In other news: I felt a bit sick earlier, then ate some mackerel, which didn't seem to help.

Better go for now.

RP and her gang of elephant muscateers (I can't spell that word).

Oh and PS - I did watch that programme on penises and it was very disappointing. I don't know why I was expecting it to be any more than cheap titilation, but it really was dreadful. It said nothing of any actual interest, it was just two people making banal and sweeping social comments, interspersed with repeated footage of a fat man with his cock out. And the man from Cyprus wasn't on there. Boo.

Kick ass! It totally looks like I'm going to be getting my own blog in the actual blog section. The section's been set up, I just don't know how to post stuff there yet.
But watch out, Ruthie P and her mundane ramblings are on their way...

I wonder how long you could live on cabbage before you died of malnutrition?

Ruth x

PS There's a programme on Channel Four tonight called 'The World's Biggest Penis'. I think I've already seen the man who'll be featuring in it on holiday in Cyprus. I didn't personally see the penis in question, but my boyfriend was confronted by it when he went into the men's changing rooms. I think it disturbed him quite a lot.
The man was very odd though. We were laughing at him (secretly) previous to the penis / changing room incident because he was sitting in a tiny pair of trunks (the awful kind that sit far too high on the waist; like a pair of seventies granny pants) eating chips, but squeezing a little individual bit of ketchup from the ketchup sachet onto each individual chip with a great deal of concentration
This obsessive behaviour was explained subsequent to this with the massive penis exposure. The poor man has probably never had sex. Women probably run screaming from his massive donkey schlong.
I was wondering though - there must be freak women with massive oversized fannies...couldn't you just advertise for one in the classified section of the guardian? "Massive penis man seeks big fanny lady for freaky fun". Something like that.
I hope my mum doesn't read this.

Baby wo-wo
Oh yeah.

That's a bit from an Alice Cooper song.
I only know this because it's on Wayne's World - not because I like Alice Cooper.

The problem with "real life", I find, is that not much happens.

I went out dancing at the weekend, a man asked me if I had any pills. I find I tend to get asked this quite a lot - noone seems able to believe that I could dance with quite so much fervour without being out of my head on drugs. I wasn't on drugs and didn't have any. Then I went home on the night bus, which was driven by a man who seemed to very much enjoy stopping FOREVER at EVERY bus stop for no discernible reason.
And that's pretty much it.
I watched a weird film (Tarnation - it's basically a two-hour long art film / drug trip that was interesting, but did look rather like the director had gone through every possible special effect on Imovies, making sure he used them all)

I've also been writing some ideas for a topical radio show and then making my housemates think I'm insane by sitting alone in my room talking to the computer in a funny voice.

I'm really hungry.
There are two solutions to that - either 'food' or 'get thinner'.
I wish I could have both.

I fancy watching 'Nine to five' starring Dolly Parton.
I have no idea why.

Ha ha - a man outside my window is trying to get into a parking space that's too small for his car. He'll never do it.

That's the sort of thing that keeps me entertained these days.
Somebody help me.

R x