our blog, everything falls apart, has moved to our own domain! i will no longer be writing my nonsense here so please click here and don’t forget to bookmark us. so why have we moved? well, all free sites have limitations and that’s not good for us creative bods. we have had our own domain forever (only a slight exaggeration) and the only reason we hadn’t attached our blog to it was because we didn’t know how. i finally cracked a few days ago and cried out “how hard can it be, for crying out loud?”

well… it turns out that on our server, it’s pretty bloody hard. i’ve spent the last, i don’t know how many hours, delving into databases and code installing the “miraculous 5 minute installation” from wordpress. believe me people, it is not miraculous and it takes a damn sight longer than 5 minutes. many hosting services have one-click installation. ours is not one of them. i had several lengthy live chats with a very helpful guy in russia (yes, all their help desk staff are actually in russia!) only to discover that the databaseinformation that they give you are actually wrong. this means that you find yourself just one step from finishing and you get an error message. the message basically translates as “you have just wasted another hour of your life and there’s sod all you can do about it. want to waste another hour?”

anyway, i got it done in the end and my happy dance was definitely something to be seen. our slightly senile surreal web designer made the beautiful template makes our blog look like ours at long last. expect lots more gadgets and interactive baubles in the future.

don’t forget to bookmark us since this will probably be the last post from here.

see you on the other side…

so, i’ve been in the naughty corner for ages now and it’s about time i got down to the nitty gritty of why i’ve been there. i haven’t updated this blog because…. i’m writing a book! yes, dear reader, all 6 of you (although i think one of you got fed up of waiting for this post and stormed off in a huff), a proper serious grown-up book. it’s called “invisible” and is the collection of my writing about the roma (pejorative: gypsy) that i have posted over the last five years at my grown-up blog “this is not my country“. it will be available as an ebook from the 1st of october and will contain my own original photographs from the settlements i visited. i am also hoping to find a publisher to back a paper and ink version at a later date.

join my other blog’s facebook page for regular updates about the book and much much more.

that’s all for now. back to frivolous nonsense once the book is done!

do any of you use twitter?

if you are asking ‘what the hell is twitter?” then you probably don’t use it, although those of us who do could ask ourselves the same question.

basically, it is a social networking system that allows you to send and read people’s “tweets” which are text messages of up to 140 characters. in a nutshell, it’s your facebook status without all the other paraphernalia.

over 100 million people use it, mostly for very dull and pointless purposes. but there are some people (very, very few) who are able to be genuinely amusing in 140 characters. perhaps the most famous is stephen fry (mentioned in the previous post). the woman who claims to be his wife and mother of his 5 or 6 children, mrs stephen fry, is perhaps even funnier (she also has a blog). another bastion of british comedy, john cleese is still alive and twatting like a loon.  the fucking queen is amusing but not amused. and god has a sense of humour, believe it or not. shit my dad says is worth joining twitter for but one of my absolute favorites has to be the funniest dog on the planet, bLoOMeRrOoNeY. she’s the only person (or animal) who merits using capital letters on this blog.

and there’s the dilemna. you cannot enjoy the pearls of nonsense on twitter unless you actually join and most people really don’t want to bother with any more internet crap. but if you do want to broaden your horizons beyond facebook, twitter can be fun and has also broken news before some of the major news channels. tweeple knew about the earthquake in haiti long before the msm picked it up and when the icelandic volcano trapped travellers all over europe, twitter was invaluable for hooking up and sharing rides to get home.

so if you need more entertainment but have the attention span of a gnat, join us and lots of other silly people on twitter. and don’t blame me if you get addicted. i’m sure there’s an online therapy group for tweetaholism and twitterhea.

happy tweeting…

you might be wondering what happened to your delightfully devious diva of derision this week. alternatively, you could be out enjoying yourself at the seaside. or perhaps, and i doubt this very much, you couldn’t care less. well…. i’ve been deep in qi land. a marvellous british comedy programme where incredibly funny people sit about being quite interesting.

the premise of the game is that stephen fry asks difficult and sometimes impossible questions and the panel get points for being right but more importantly, for being interesting. points are deducted for being obvious, boring or wrong. alan davies is the regular contestant and has the dubious pleasure of getting the least amount of marks in each show, usually in the minus numbers.

it’s hard to describe to people as it often descends into a rambling and hilarious jumble of one-liners and rants blurted out in rapid succession by people with brains the size of norfolk. it often descends into delightful riffs on bottoms (both back and front), cocks, diarrhoea (arse gravy) and homosexual innuendo. but for all its public schoolboy humour, it’s actually quite interesting and very, very funny.

and you do learn an awful lot of nonsense. according to the qi elves, the chinese invented almost everything, the greeks invented most of everything else and the british did very little of anything except invent some brilliant comedy shows.

spot on.

normal blogging will resume once i stop laughing…

yesterday, i was cruising around facebook, feeling very grumpy that everyone seems to be on holiday and decided to write a post today about how social media is ruining my life. however, this morning vishy showed me a link to “the most ridiculous album covers of all time” at the huffington post and it restored my faith in the internet’s ability to enrich our existence. the record cover above had me giggling like a five year old. so i thought i’d get creative and come up with the first 5 album titles for bad mathematics:

1: tits and souvlaki

this came out of a very productive and silly meeting with major tom at our house. on his way in he picked up one of those sad leaflets that get thrown at your door on a regular basis. it was for a local kebab place and featured a very well-endowed girl who seemed to be riding a giant souvlaki. a fantastic failure of everything that is design but inspiration for the muddled mind of a diva.

2: cassi and her communist sisters

this is a long-standing joke between the members of the band. people always pick out the frontperson and assume that everyone else is hanging about in the background for effect and don’t actually do anything creative. nothing could be further from the truth in the case of bad mathematics but it does make a great title.

3: f#@&! s*&@$!?*!go** ?ki***

over the years, in our endless battle with language, we have developed a kind of nonsense gringlish half-witted vocabulary which we all sort of understand, although andreas is the master. he has the ability to reel off a diatribe at break-neck speed and then turn round and ask us what the hell he just said. fantastic.

4: pornography

one of the most popular bad mathematic’s songs, thanks in part (i suspect) to the title. we have never been known to shy away from controversy even going as far as making most of it up. so what the hell, let’s go straight for the censors with this one.

5: bad mathematics greatest hits or the best of bad mathematics

i think we should release this one first so that we can win the “tackiest band you’ve never heard of” award. how brilliant would that be ?

vote for your favorite title or come up with some of your own in the comments. surely you have nothing better to do on this fine tuesday…

if you haven’t done so yet, go and join mountain of love on facebook. our mate piers marsh is feverishly working away in the studio and has posted a tasty teaser on the fan page.

there is something deeply wonderful about friends working on creative endeavours and being fuc*!ng good at it. it’s not about whether they get famous (or even any recognition) for doing it. it’s the fact that they have the guts to do it anyway. in this case though, i’m pretty sure that this album is going to be big and us fans of mountain of love can boast that we heard it first.

best of luck piers.

we’re with you all the way

there has been a lot of talk in the bad mathematics posse about totty. what is totty, you might ask yourself if you live on the other side of the pond ? here is the urban dictionary definition

(british informal) people, especially women, collectively considered as sexual objects

let’s set the record straight once and for all. totty might be talked about (loudly) on a regular basis by the male species but us girls talk about totty just as much. we just don’t talk about it with you.

there seems to be a misconception that girls talk about boys in terms of future husband material. will they be a good provider ? will they be dependable ? will they be faithful ? of course, this is utter bollocks. we talk about men in the same way as men talk about women. have they got a nice botty ? will they be good in bed ? in general, (and this is a generalisation. as are all my ramblings) we are not attracted by bank accounts any more than men are attracted by our cooking abilities.

no. we want totty. and we want to be able to talk about totty without feeling like a man-eating bitch from hell. i’m not advocating panting and drooling in the street. that’s just nasty. just an appreciation and acceptance that human beings find certain other human beings totally tottylicious.

back when our parents were young (for those of us born earlier than the bloody eighties), women were supposed to wait around for a suitor to choose them, date for a respectable amount of time, get hitched and then spend their married life lying back and thinking of england. surely times have changed? perhaps not as much as we’d like to think. nice girls are still not supposed to chase the boys like rampant little bunnies. we’re not supposed to get all hot and bothered when we see a bit of man totty. but we do. but we only talk about it with our girlfriends.

what i suggest is that instead of getting angry and upset at the menfolk talking about us as being hot, lets be more open about what we find hot. let’s get that dirty laundry out and shake it about in public.

men like to be considered to be totty. most of my male friends would give their left testicle to be thought of as totty. why don’t we tell them they’re delicious and how about a romp in the sack ? we’ve been told that they won’t respect us if we do. this is a lie. men who don’t respect women don’t respect them anyway. whether they sleep with them or not. real men love women and love women who know what they want and go out and get it even more.

so let’s talk about totty. what turns us on? what turns us off ? which bits drive us mad with lust ? who’s your fave totty at the moment ? i’ll start…

i like nothing better than a nice tight backside. men who are well-toned but not built-up. large but elegant hands. i don’t really have a “type”. i’m the girl who had a major crush on jack dee and also fancies johnny depp and al pacino. i once saw john malkovich on stage and not only nearly fell over the balcony, i’m pretty sure i did dribble on the patrons below. fave totty at the moment… warwick brown (gary dourdan from csi). phew! damn… those eyes!

it’s about 35degrees over here, going on 45 now. time for a cool shower.

let’s have some totty talk in the comments……

i am rather shocked today. i was innocently surfing about (wishing there was some actual sea involved)  and came across several lists of stupid 999 calls and, of course, i immediately wanted to share this idiocy with my six readers. so here we go with my top ten in no particular order.

Caller: My wife’s left me two salmon sandwiches which was left over from last night… and I’m a sat in the chair here and she’s out there decorating. She won’t put any food on or anything for anybody, I don’t know what….

Caller: Hello… I know this is gonna sound stupid but a pigeon’s been run over… and I’ve got no money to phone the RSPCA or anything…

Caller: I want to know what year the internet first came out I can’t remember.

Caller: Hi. I’m next to the M32, city centre… there’s an M32 city centre sign. Can you inform Animal Rescue that there’s a grey squirrel with no hazelnut trees please.”

Caller: The emergency is… I am at Lockleaze… and I would like to get home…

Caller: There’s no emergency except that there are no buses in Crow Lane…

Caller: Well, I don’t know who to call. Can you tell me how to cook a turkey? I?ve never cooked one before.

Caller: I’m in Huntingdon, looking for Homebase and I can’t find it.

Caller: “I’ve dropped the remote down the back of the settee and I need someone to change the television channel.”

Caller:“I’ve had a dream that I was unconscious and I’ve just collapsed.”

while it’s generally very amusing to poke fun at the foolishness of people, i am disturbed that people with genuine emergencies often complain about not being able to get through to 999. what am i supposed to do next time there’s a spider in the bath?

our great friend c came over last night and we sat down and watched “it might get loud”. vishy has been suggesting i watch it for ages now but i thought it sounded a bit wanky. jimmy page, jack white and the edge get together and play guitars. sounds great for guitarists but a big fat yawn for the rest of us.

what i saw instead, was a meeting of brilliance. three people who live, breath and love what they do and who communicated something deeply human through their playing. that desire to express themselves.

the respect they have for their fellow musicians was beautiful to witness. something that seems to have been forgotten by so many artists. their acknowledgement of where their music comes from, the people that came before them, those incredible musicians whose names so few people know, was like music itself.

the best moment for me was seeing jack white sitting and listening to sun house “grinnin’ in your face”

one man against the world in one song

i could almost feel that moment of revelation he experienced. that moment when he realised that music didn’t have to be a certain way. music can just be.

brilliant.

i urge you to beg, steal or borrow this film. well, don’t steal it because that would be wrong but you know what i mean. and to all you non-guitar players out there, it couldn’t be further from a big fat yawn.

ps: notice how i managed to sneak porn into yet another title here! got to get people hooked somehow.

it’s been a while since i wrote any nonsense here and much has happened in the world. not that i noticed while it was happening. the big news was that chelsea clinton got married to some bod called marc. no idea when mark came to be spelled with a “c” or when it became acceptable to name your child after an area in london but there you go. people are strange. in other celebrity news, alicia keys married someone called swizz beatz and now we have a silly name competition on our hands. the prize used to be held by the artist formally known as prince who became this unpronounceable symbol

jordan and peter andre called their daughter princess tiaamii, poor child. life is hard enough for kids without inflicting ridiculous names on them too. but they didn’t start this cutesy nauseating trend. bob geldof and paula yates should be held partly accountable for fifi trixibell (and paula again for heavenly hiraani tiger lily with michael hutchence) but they are not the worst offenders. here’s my list of the worst of the worst:

shannyn sossamon (i had to look up who the hell she was!) called her boy, audio science.
geri halliwell settled on blue angel for her girl? boy?
arthur ashe’s boy(?) is called camera.
david duchovny and tea leoni skipped the thinking up names bit and went straight for kyd.
jermaine jackson continued the rampant insanity in the jackson family and called one of his kids jermajesty
but i think the prize has to go to mr frank zappa who cursed his children with the names moon unit, dweezil and diva muffin

i should point out that my name, cassi with an “i” is not to be included in this diatribe about silly names. it is a unique and rather beautiful name, befitting of a diva but if i was having to name a child these days, i’d go for something that would really stand out like george or mary. the naming equivalent of not having a tattoo or having real boobs.

what’s the silliest name you’ve heard?