The Price of Tomatoes Has Fluctuated Again

I was flicking through some sites last night / this morning, looking for photographs of the cast of Buffy naked and smothered in apricot jam, and lo, it was borne in upon me that for most sites, Gothic(k) = completely crap. Everyone and his suicidal underage girlfreind wants a website, but when they get one what do they do? Put it under wraps indefinately while they sit around looking for Anne Rice characters to name themselves after. Yahoo ran out of permutations of "Lestat" in 1998, when the number of digits that you'd need to stick on the end would no longer fit in the User ID box. (They'd have run out even sooner if more Goths could actually spell "Lestat" properly.) Riceans have been forced to unearth more and more abstruse pseudonyms. I'm thinking of starting my own internet company: LameVampiroidNames.com- we'll do the searching for you. Employing the sevices of two 17-year-olds called Louis98781 and Louis99521 to do the actual reading (let's face it, they'll never get proper jobs anyway so I can pay them under the minimum wage- hell, I could probably pay them in eyeliner) LameVampiroidNames.com would provide the discerning unimaginative dipstick with a suitable monniker... for a modest fee, natch.

It's a surefire success. However, I don't feel that the world really needs yet more web pages consisting of a dribbly red blood graphic,
some truly bad poetry typed in red on a black background, and a link to Sanguinarius.org. No, we don't need more Goths- we need better Goths!

Let's have a Goth retraining camp. Lock'em up for a couple of weeks and don't let them out till they've read a Patrick McGrath novel or two and can quote from more than one Baudelaire poem. Don't tell me I'm being unfair. You need the about same vocabulary for Suskind's Perfume as you need for Interveiw, you don't need to learn any scary new words.

They'd thank me for it one day. Let's face it, if your online persona is going to scream "effete trollop with delusions of intellectual superiority," you might as well be able to tell your clique from your cliche. N'est-ce pas, mes enfants?