Wife Swap goes wrong

nstead of what we have in the UK called ‘Wife Swap’, in the States it’s called Trading Spouses, I’d have thought a far less catchy name. I suppose Fox, the network on which the show airs, didn’t want any association with the sexual antics side of the term which Channel 4 was deliberately courting when they named show.god warrior
Sometimes, Trading Spouses goes wrong, very wrong. When a Louisiana woman called Marguerite Perrin returned from her swap, she went into mild melt-down. In response to the ‘dark-sidedness’ of the family she was traded into, she declared herself a God Warrior, a phrase which has now made its way into the zeitgeist and has become a phrase of note, with depictions of her raging face used on bumper stickers and model clay dolls.

from the LA Times’ Calendarlive.com:

To this day, Perrin said she does not understand what went so wrong that she kicked a camera crew out of her Louisiana house and broke down. A devout Christian who owns a dance studio with her 24-year-old daughter, Ashley, Perrin traded homes with Jeanne D’Amico-Flisher, a 47-year-old hypnotist and pressure healer from Boxborough, Mass., who reads tarot cards and has a syndicated radio program called “Love Talk USA” with her husband, Chris.

WMV Trading Spouses clip

via Overyourhead.co.uk

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‘Common’ Errors in English?

From Washington State Univesity comes the website of the book, a page that lists literally hundreds of crazy, insane and embarassing mistakes that people make when writing and speaking the language. It’s a hoot, especially Stock and Trade, Guild vs Gild, Calm, Cool, and Collective, and Callous vs Callused.

Common Errors in English

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Headaches and heartaches

I’m going out with a really great guy at the moment and I really like him. We’ve been together a lot, almost constantly, since we actually got together mid-term and I really like that. I feel completely comfortable with him because I think we were both pretty open from the start and aren’t averse to talking about the idea of ‘us’. This excellent state of being means that I have a couple problems that I’ve not experienced thus far and as a result I’m slowly melting like the Wicked Witch of the West in her cauldron. I’ve never had to do this before and it’s eating me up; I’ve never had to buy Christmas presents for anyone who I’m really into and had to wonder, ‘what will this say’?
I’ve never been in a relationship over Christmas, odd in itself. And I’ve never had to worry so much about what the gifts say about me what they say about us and what they say for us.
Everything I consider in my mind as I go about the day, could be an option but it’s either too boring, too traditional, too insignificant, too impersonal, too expensive or too showy. I’m not being miserly when I say that it’d look bad to spend too much money, but at the same time it would be bad to not spend enough. I always think it’s bad if a gift could be purchased from any city, if it’s from a chain that’s as likely to be in his hometown as mine. If I give something, it doesn’t make sense for there to be a chance that he could have bought it and simply didn’t because it wasn’t good enough!

The days draw closer that I have to mail these things off and it’s not come together yet, it’s not gelled in my mind and so I’m left trying to desperately think of something that’s less than what I’ve got, but at the same time, more.

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