Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Post #7 - Books & Bruises


B.J. Boomhauer is a collector. His farm is strewn with packrat treasures as small & common as wheatback pennies and as large as an early 1970s firetruck (that still runs). He and I trade a lot of junk...err...vintage treasures. I guess the distinction depends alot on whether you're the buyer or the seller.

He knows I like books. I don't just enjoy reading books, I like the tangible item itself - sometimes the content is irrelevant. I have lots of books and, like vinyl records, seem to accumulate them without even trying. One day, B.J. called me up and offered a box of books.

What kind of books?

I don't know. They're books. You want 'em?

How many are there?

I don't know. It's a box. It's full. You want 'em?


Of course I'll take them. They're free. Maybe there's something interesting in there. Perhaps even something I could sell. Instead, what I got was a box full of romance novels. Lots and lots of romance novels - Harlequin, Silhouette and the like - some dating back to the mid 1970s. I get a chuckle out of the covers but, as a literary genre, nothing in the box interests me.

Well, one thing was interesting. A big portion of the books were all love stories centered around Arab Sheikhs: Surrender to the Sheikh, Hide-and-Sheikh, One Night with the Sheikh, Sheikh Surrender, Taming the Sheikh... There were dozens of similiar titles. I cannot help but imagine some repressed Baptist Alabama hausfrau getting all hot-n-bothered in the Wal-Mart book aisle, fantasizing about her dusky desert warrior.


Which reminds me...


Remember when I posted that photo of the big bruise on my ass that I got from a dog bite? You may or may not be aware that many people across the globe have a fetish for bruises. It's a fetish I never really gave much thought to. I certainly wasn't thinking about it when I titled the photo "ass_bruise.jpg." So now, if you do a Google image search for ass bruise, my ass bruise is in the top ten results. Put those words in quotation marks and it's the first image returned.

I get up to 50 unique hits a day from people doing image searches for
ass bruise. People around the world are looking at my bruised ass. A good percentage of the hits - perhaps a third - come from Middle Eastern countries such as Iran, Egypt, Kuwait, U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia. (Eastern Europe comes in second). Apparently bruised asses are popular in that part of the world.

Bet that Dixie hausfrau never read about anything like that in her romance novels.

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