Simon Wood's Blog

Watch your front people!! :-) “A good friend will always stab you in the front.”
― Oscar Wilde

Yes, I'm talking to you. Your personal cleanliness and freshness is appalling. Isn't it time you washed your hair, brushed your teeth, used some deodorant and did something about those stinky feet? Now, I'm not being harsh. I'm just being educational. I think it's my duty to tell you that basically, you reek!This is the message most TV ads send about you. Not only that, you're fat and ugly. You all need to eat better and see a surgeon. And don't go thinking this applies just to the ladies. You chaps aren't any different. You're just as smelly and not only that, you're going grey and bald to boot and if you don't do something pronto, no one will ever want you.It's amazing how many advertisements go out of their way to tell you what a disgusting person you are and that if you don't do something about it, life as you know it will be over. For fifteen minutes an hour, you're bombarded with images telling you that you aren't such a great person and your kids and spouse will hate you for it, unless you buy this product or service. It's nice to think that your disgusting afflictions can be so easily remedied.This form of advertising isn't unique to the US. The United Kingdom isn't any different. It might explain why Britain uses more soap per capita than any other nation in Europe. But that might have a lot to do with the French once describing Britain as "the dirty man of Europe." Maybe we just misunderstood. :-)It would be interesting to conduct a global study to determine the numbers of people with low self-image from country to country. Would there be more neurotics in countries where there is more negative advertising?It makes me wonder. . .if the TV networks were to run fewer adverts that attacked society, would the need for drugs like anxiety medication Paxil diminish? Is there a big conspiracy between advertisers, personal cleanliness products and the drug companies to make you all think you're smelly so you'll lather up and pop pills by the bucket load to compensate? Makes you think, doesn't it?Now, I'm not saying you should let yourself go. We don't need the stench causing the hole in the ozone layer to get any bigger or create any more dead zones in the oceans. I'm just saying that like everything in life, moderation is fine. You don't need an entire closet to put all your personal grooming products in--a nice wall cabinet will do. Anything more is just overkill.So if you come across a less than fragrant person in your travels, don't say, "Soap it up there, stinky." Say instead, "You smell, but that's okay. You're still a wonderful person."

This man knew his stuff...

“Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.”
― Mark Twain

Or this could be titled: no one listed to Kevin McCarthy, so why should they listen to me? If you’ve ever seen the end of the original INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, you’ll understand. The alien body snatchers are taking over the world and our man McCarthy is trying to warn a world that doesn’t care. I feel like Kev McCarthy. The end is coming and I’m the only one who sees it. I feel I’m losing myself--not to aliens from a dying planet, but to an insidious electronic invention of human design. People are unaware of the evil they’re bringing into their homes. I bet you’ve got one already, maybe two. This infection has been eating away at you and you didn’t even notice. I bet you tell your friends how much you love this technological advancement and how they should they should get one too--you don’t even realize you’re spreading the infection with your deluded lies. Have you guessed what it is yet? No? Well, I’ll tell you. It’s the Digital Video Recorder or DVR.No, no, no, listen to me. Stop laughing. This isn’t crazy talk. Listen to my experiences with DVR and tell me you haven’t exhibited the same symptoms. My cable provider started it. They offered me a deal on DVR to compete with TiVo. Free installation. Low monthly subscription. It sounded like a great idea. I wanted the ability to pause live television and even rewind it. I wanted to record multiple shows and fast-forward through the ads. I let their technicians enter my home and implant the disease in my living room.At first I didn’t notice anything different. I set up my recording schedule and watched the programs pile up in my library. I loved all the features. I especially loved the time it saved me. It was time I could spend doing other things. A one-hour show, in reality, runs just over 40 minutes without ads. Ah reality. I use that word, but I don’t know what it means anymore. I remember being told once that a sign of insanity is the inability to tell one second from one hour. I can’t anymore. How can I, when an hour is only forty minutes and those forty minutes can be experienced now, then or later? When I sit down and watch TV, what am I watching--the past or the present? I have become too accustomed to hitting fast-forward or rewind. I sit down to shows in progress and can watch them from the start. I get a kick out of watching the time clock showing me catching up with now. This may sound like the ravings of the insane and maybe they are as the things I’ve told you are only the beginning. While watching live television I have tried to fast-forward beyond the present, forgetting that I’m in the now. So far, I’ve kept my confusion to the TV world, but I have urges to apply this to the real world. When I’m stuck in the middle of a boring conversation, I want to hit delete or fast-forward to the end. I want some moments to never end and I wish the remote would pause the world for me so that I can live the moment forever. This is crazy of course, but when I stop believing it’s crazy, I’ll know it is too late for me. I fear I’ve lost Julie already. She’s locked away in her DVR world and only leaves it to contaminate others with her misguided lies.I know some of you have experienced the same happenings. So while there is still a piece of me left, I beg of you to throw out your DVRs before they destroy you like they have destroyed me. It really is now or never...or is it then or never...

I had some music playing while I was writing the other week and a song came on and I thought that song perfectly sums up my books. Then I got to thinking, people talk about the soundtrack to their lives, then there must be a soundtrack to my books. So I wasted entirely too much time going through my iTunes and came up with a top 10 that embodies my books. Of course, my initial list exceeded ten songs, so I do have some honorable mentions: Awolnation: “Burn it Down”, Reeve Carney, Bono & the Edge: “Rise Above 1”, Otis Taylor: “Nasty Letter”, Shinedown: “Second Chance”, Duran Duran: “Come Undone”, Mud Honey: “My Little Toy Gun”, Fitz & The Tantrams: “Moneygrabber”, The O Jays: “Back Stabbers.” But here’s the songs that made it to the top 10:#10 Beck: “Farewell Ride”#9 Tricky: “Hell Is Around The Corner”#8 Portishead: “Sour Times”#7 Social Distortion: “Machine Gun Blues”#6 Everything But The Girl: “Walking Wound”#5 Neil Finn: “Sinner”#4 Soft Cell: “Tainted Love”#3: Sneaker Pimp: “Post Modern Sleeze”#2: The Eagles: “Life In The Fast Lane”#1: Cage The Elephant: “Ain’t No Rest For The Wicked”Ain’t No Rest… is the song that sent me on this wild goose chase. Watch the video and you'll understand why! Enjoy. :-)

I think we all get this feeling. "Deja poo: The feeling you get that you've heard this crap before." ~Anon Credit goes to Paul Bishop who I stole this from.

I suppose every country has a food associated with it that defines its national identity. For the English, it's fish & chips. For the Canadians, it's bacon. But surprisingly, for the Americans, it's not what you would think. No one may be willing to admit it, but it's cheese. I don't know if it's a self-conscious selection or not, but Americans have an obsession with this dairy product. As a foreigner in the US, it really sticks out. It's as though cheese has some mystical power. It's touted everywhere. Food manufacturers boast the amount, the types and the number of cheeses they use. Papa Murphy's (obviously started by an Irish-Italian) claim that they put at least a pound of cheese on their pizzas. Taco Bell's new Quesadilla has three kinds of cheese and nothing else. Kraft claims that cheese is spelled K-R-A-F-T. Phonetically, I'm still struggling with that one, but I take their point. Essentially, cheese is the dairy gold that we all must have.

What burger joint doesn't ask, "Do you want cheese with that?" The waiters at my favorite Italian restaurant are disappointed that I continually reject their advances to scatter a little Parmesano on my salad, my pasta and my tiramisu.

Before you think I'm crazy, my suspicions were confirmed when a study last year said Americans eat too much cheese and consumption is at dangerous levels. I'm not sure how they know this. I have visions of some machine somewhere with the needle quivering in the RED LEICESTER danger zone. Either way, Americans eat 30lbs of cheese for every man, woman and child. That's 450 Millions Tons a year!!

Cheese certainly seems to be a deal clincher here. I'm looking to buy a new car in the next year and knowing how strapped the car industry is, I wouldn't be surprised if cheese doesn't make an appearance. "What do I have to do to put you in this car today? How about under-sealing and 5lbs of Monterey Jack…?"

But I have yet to be swayed and I remain strong under the immense pressure I'm placed under.

I wonder if there is a darker reason for cheese to be touted so hard. Does cheese have similar properties to Solent Green and am I the only one to realize this?

So, for me, the next time you're asked, "Do you want cheese with that?" Say, "No." You might start to see the truth behind the power of cheese.

I’m terrible coming up with the names for the supporting cast in my books, so I tend to use the names of friends and family. For the current book I’m working on, a couple of friends if I could incorporate the names of loved ones who'd recently passed away as supporting characters, which I’ve done.

Now, I’m thinking it might be nice if I expanded this tribute. So if you’ve lost a loved one or a close friend and you'd like to have their name featured in my next book, please leave their name and who they were to you in the comment box or email their name to me at simonwoodwrites@yahoo.com. I can’t promise I’ll use every name, but I’ll do my best.

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The world summed up in eleven words.

“The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
―Oscar Wilde

I can't handle orzo pasta. Like the Eskimos and the concept of snow, Italians have 300 hundreds different words for pasta. For those of you who don't know which is orzo, it looks like a giant grain of rice. And that's where my problem lies.My brain strips a thread when it comes to orzo and I can't eat the damn stuff.The problem is that my eyes see rice, but my tongue tastes pasta, and my brain merges them in a bad scientific process to create a taste that is neither. My mind totally crashes and I have to spit the stuff out. For me, it's totally inedible.I've tried a few times, but I can't do it. I've tried conditioning myself before eating it. I look at the plate and I chant to myself, "This is pasta. It's no different than fusilli or penne. It's pasta. Not rice. Pasta. Got that, idiot."I pick up a forkful of the stuff and it all goes to pieces. My brain starts thinking. "Hey, I know its pasta, and don't call me an idiot, idiot. But it does look like rice. Rice. Ew, this rice tastes funny. I don't like this."So, I don't eat orzo. Just the idea of the stuff makes me wrinkle my nose. Julie has to act as monitor, so that I don't accidentally order it with something. She says things like, "Remember, that's the weird pasta, Simon, so don't order it."She says this like I'm weird or something and shouldn't be allowed out unsupervised.Now that's weird. Don't you think?