Lady Adventure

The Price of Fame

This is going to be a serious post.
This month I have received a portentous signs of my impending fame (cough): I've received anonymous nasty comments. I mean, aside from the offers of viagra (thank you, will consider it once I have grown the appropriate appendage) and referrals to porn sites (can barely control my boobess, don't want to watch someone else wrestling with theirs, thank you kindly), I also receive comments from an anonymous user who signs off as Jane or Jane Doe or Janie D. Aside from having a bit of a personality crisis, she also likes to vent her spleen at the world in the form of trying-to-be-sarcastic-but-not-quite-getting-there comments. I am quite entranced that someone somewhere has the energy to send me half-a-dozen nasty little comments that serve no real purpose. Constructive comments, yes please, but things like "really ugly" doesn't help me make the world a prettier place till I see what you understand by "really pretty" (and it you link to Botticelli's Venus, I can only warn you now: I can't crochet that. He wins.)

The fact that I don't publish these comments is mostly because I reserve them for my own private mirth (sorry, I mean, I weep into my cornflakes when I get them.) I am always very touched that anyone would make the effort to make a nice comment; likewise, I am bewildered that someone would make the effort to leave a nasty one. I mean - you have to, like, log on. And type it. And it never gets published. You could just click the website away, but instead, you torture yourself reading all the posts and picking out ones to comment on. This is a stupendous amount of effort to no significant end. It must be kind of disheartening after a while.

That's why the latest message upped the ante - my troll decided that I obviously can't speak English, so made a special effort to go into Google Translate and butcher the German language instead:
So bohrend. Hässliche Häkelarbeit auch. 
So oil-drilling. Ugly crochet too.
Now, the second bit I can forgive. Beauty's in the eye of the beholder etc. But I was fascinated by the idea that the adjective chosen by this succinct anonymous poster is drilling. My blog is drilling. Take that, Yarn Harlot. I bet your blog's not drilling!

I was about to grab the phone and announce to various friends that my blog has been compared with an oil platform, when it occured to my that it was, in all likelihood, the result of the poster's inability to use a bilingual online dictionary, as the verb 'to bore' in English has more than one meaning.
Awwwwww.

In any case, all of this didn't help when I misdirected my wrath at another anonymous poster using a similar name (probably even her own, I bet). Janey logged on to read about crochet and got a brief tongue-lashing instead. Obviously, a tongue-lashing is only effective if directed at the right person. I think it would be nicer to apologise to Janey in private but I can't: I have to say I'm very, very sorry in public. As you correctly guessed, it was not for you and you unfortunately just happened to have the same name and anonymous profile. Even if it sounds flippant, I am very contrite and dearly wish I could have vented my pithy spleen at a person who deserved it instead of an innocent and undeserving bystander. If you wish to change to attic24's blog, please do. She photographs tulips and ladybirds and squees at baby toes. I don't think she scolds her readers.

So come back Jane/Jane Doe/Janie D: I need you to bring me back down to earth and tell me how rubbish my blog is. For a while there, I was feeling kind of good about myself. I've obviously got too big for my boots. Come on back - all is forgiven!