I’m famed among friends and families for often buying greetings cards that are a little close to the bone; the more suggestive the better, as far as I’m concerned, and if the maker has thrown a little bad taste in there – well, so much the better. Obviously, I keep it clean when it comes to my older relatives, but I’m lucky in that most of the people I know either share my slightly black sense of humour or at least appreciate that any offensive sentiment was meant 100% as a joke.

Which is why I was slightly disappointed to hear that the US retailer Target had been forced to withdraw a card that made a reference to the late singer Whitney Houston, despite it having been on sale in their stores long before she died. I find it a tiny bit patronising that no-one batted an eyelid at the card’s message – “Next time you think of dating the bad boy, consider Whitney Houston” – when the star was alive and making an idiot if herself with her drink and drug exploits. Yet as soon as she dies we are all expected to act as if she was an angel who never made a mistake in her life; including removing any humorous references to her destructive relationship with Bobby Brown, which many people believe lead to her eventual downfall.

There are occasionally cards that are so offensive that even I issue a sharp intake of breath in the store (before going ahead and buying it anyway) but the day I take my advice on good taste from the family of a woman who sported such a devastatingly bad perm in the 1980s is the day I disconnect myself from my precious wind turbine and go crawling back to those red diesel suppliers who annoyed me so much last year. In other words – I’m going to carry on buying offensive greetings cards; and if anyone can tell me where I can get hold of that Whitney card, they can name their price…

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What’s the fascination with them? I mean we all like to receive a funny card for our birthday, and these days there are plenty around, but surely the comedy on them cannot be so great that the cards are worth the money just to keep onto and look at in your own house. Well according to my mum, they are. She has a particular like of those ones with fruits and vegetables doing and saying crude things. I must admit that I do like these ones, but when I got one for my birthday, a god luck one, a Christmas one, and a 2011 calendar with all of the pictures on it, I had seen too many!

That was last year; and this year she seems to have discovered the ones with a black and white picture of an old day scene, with some sort of inappropriate phrase being said in an unexpected way. If I get as many of these as I got of the vegetable ones I will go mad! I have seen hundreds of different comedy cards in the last few years since she became obsessed, and have even seen one mocking biodiesel storage tanks. I’m never sure what to expect next. Maybe she should apply for a job to make the cards, as she must have some good ideas of her own now after seeing so many of them.

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Birthday cards, anniversary cards, Christmas cards, Hanukkah cards… even Hurray, it’s your Wedding! and Happy Having a Baby cards… Now, this may be controversial but I’m going to posit a theory.

All of these genres of card could be improved with LOL cats.

I know. True controversy.

And let’s get this straight, I’m not advocating the use of the meerkats off the telly, or anything like that. But, let’s face it, what event couldn’t be improved with the presence of a cute kitten with a demonic expression above a tag-line provided by the genius of the internet?

None, that’s what. I mean, sure, the one I chose above might not have been the best example. But in truth I was a little stunned by the wealth of birthday LOLcats out there.

I mean, go ahead.

Google it. Google any word followed by LOLcats. There is no subject too dark or too… well, too odd, for someone not to have created a LOLcat for (or LOLdog, hamster, budgie- there’s no discrimination in LOLcat world)

And imagine the world of possibilities that lies ahead. Instead of giving you Aunty Mabel a lack-lustre card picturing a garden in watercolours, designed in the 80’s, you could be giving her a card depicting a budgie examining a tiny boat whilst musing on its design flaws in a squeaky mis-spelt voice! And they’re (largely) family friendly- something for Mabel (she doesn’t like to look up in the newsagent, because you never know, do you?) and your sixteen year old brother (he only ever looks up in the newsagents…) and all your friends.

They could be in 3D! (sort of…) We could incorporate fake fur fabrics! And a tiny motion activated recording that plays the card’s catchphrase in an unbearably cute voice!

IMAGINE THAT WORLD!

A strokable, practically interactive (well, if everyone you interacted with just said “om nom nom” in a high pitched voice on repeat) family friendly and hilarious greetings card?

Bring on the revolution!

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Everyone loves a really funny card. If you’re like me, you keep a collection of old cards underneath your bed. I have cards from as far back as my fourth birthday. Of course, while some are meant to be funny, others are just funny because of the terrible or hilarious things that people have written in them.
I still find cards a source of hilarity today. In part because of the different appearances of cards these days. Cards are no longer just your standard small A5 style folded paper. No, today’s cards can be just about anything. A giant paper card, cards made from PVC banners, or even an ecard.
One thing’s for sure, and that’s that cards are going to remain a part of our lives–no matter what they look like. Sure, it’s harder to keep an ecard or a PVC banner card beneath my bed, but you can be guaranteed that I’ll do the best I can to have them as keepsakes.
There’s something about cards that sticks in your mind. It’s partly because they represent a special time in your life, and partly because they show all the people who care about you. (Or, if they’re from your ex boyfriend or girlfriend, the people who now hate your guts). Going over your cards you’ll find a lot to laugh, and perhaps cry about, so it’d be a shame not to keep them.
Who knows, perhaps people need to start printing out those ecards so that they can still have them for reference later on. Although on the plus side, there’s no danger of them getting lost in a fire!

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I find it impossible to suppress my giggles whenever I hear the name Peter Smith. Well, it is a commonly used name and there is nothing funny about the name as such. However, the moment I hear this name, I end up remembering the funniest incident of my life. I went to my university computer library and discovered that the previous user had not locked out of his account. What is more, he had not even shut down the mail that he had received.

It seems somebody named Peter Smith had been sending online greeting cards to his own mail account. What is more, he made it a point to visit the sultriest web sites online and captured images of pretty woman in intimate postures. He then proceeded to convert them into e greeting cards.

He used these images to make very erotic electronic greeting cards and used to send them to his own account. Well, the person who discovered this ended up spending the word that here was a person who was mailing e greeting cards to himself. To do so with an ordinary greeting card makes sense because others would quickly realize that their roommate or co-student was a very popular person.

However, to do so on the internet when the account is protected by a password simply does not make sense. Chances are high that the person had to purposefully keep his account open in front of others so that they could discover how popular a man he was. To this date, I find this funniest incident that I have ever seen. Here was a person who tried so hard to prove his popularity that he decided to make his private e-mail account completely public.

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But seriously, the mistress of misery has some wise insights. At the site you’ll find Jane being sarcastic, Jane being snide, and Jane being very self-righteous. As you’d probably expected. Which is most fantastic.

Who knows what Austen would do if she was brought back to our society now. I personally think she’d struggle, and I definitely think she’d be a right pain if you sent her speed-dating. In fact, I happen to think it wouldn’t be worth it. She’d probably go and write a laboured novel about it, wouldn’t she? And you’d only have yourself to blame for that, then.

But getting back to the beauty of the online printing website of the modern day, at least Austen wouldn’t moan her skinny old bum off about that. With the speed and efficiency that these sites operate at, you can’t really go too far wrong, even if moaning is what you do best. (Then again, I’m sure Austen would find more things to moan about just when you least expect it…like the appearance of predictive text and the way all teenagers seem to not be capable of constructing a simple sentence…and really, with that one you couldn’t blame her…)

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Here are three of Debs’s outstanding card ideas for you.

1) Her Rooster: using a potato sculpted into one of her crazy Rooster shapes, Debs is quite the chicken expert. With a huge beak and terrifying plumage, this red-ink on white card card is nothing short of splendid!

2) Debs’s Diplodocus: yes, oh yes, she’s a bit of a dinosaur expert too, you know. Along with her friend Paul Horton they make dinosaur cards which would have almost certainly made it onto the set of Jurassic Park…had they been born a few years earlier. But there it is: you can’t win it all.
3) Debs’s pig cards: depicting a huge sow, these are a real winner. Debs cuts the design from lino and then uses ink to print with. The cards look great, the designs have sharp edges and each and every card is different from any other!

Basically, it’s really easy to do: buy some potatoes, some printing ink, a board to do this on – it’ll get messy – and you’ll be well away. Just be aware that the potato pieces won’t last forever. They will probably be good for up to ten prints, and then the ink will make them fall apart.

But still, that’s the fun of it: because then you get to create more and more like Debs!

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I always think how nice it would be to make my own greetings cards for a change. I know it would make my Mum cry – even if I am now 33 years old! However, I always leave it too late and end up popping out to the corner shop in a panic and picking up some horrendous effort with a cartoon bunny rabbit for female relatives or a painting of a steam train for males. You know the kind of thing I mean. The stock that long ago should have been consigned to self storage, but which they leave out ready for desperate idiots like me…

Anyway, this year I’m getting prepared early. I may have already missed most of the big birthdays in my family, but I have six months until Christmas. I figured six months was enough time even for me to cobble together a reasonable effort at home-made cards! I’ve bought myself a few cross stitching kits off the internet and have made a start on them. I used to do stuff like this a lot when I was a kid and I had hoped it was like riding a bike. Sadly, that has not proved to be the case and I have already had to completely unpick one kit after my robin started to look more like something you might see in the toilet bowl…

I’m hoping the grateful tears of my relatives will make up for all the hours of straining my eyes and pricking my fingers on the damn needle. Chances are most of them won’t even I realise I made the cards anyway!

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I went through a period a while ago of only buying friends and family Far Side greetings cards when it was their birthday. Or even using them for somewhat inappropriate situations, like the card about domestic violence in plants that I bought for my friend’s wedding day! I didn’t really care what message I was sending with the cartoon that featured on the front, as long as it made me laugh. It could have been a picture of a carte r4 or something equally uninspiring, but if Gary Larsen had done something funny with it, then into the envelope it went.
For those of you who haven’t seen a Far Side cartoon, my obsession probably seems a bit weird, but trust me; these were funny, entertaining and very, very quirky cartoons. They usually involved animals, plants or inanimate objects in curiously human situations and he had a particular love of drawing dinosaurs. Even if you’re not a Far Side fan you must have raised a smile at the cartoon and card showing a bunch of T-Rex’s smuggling cigarettes with the caption “The real reason dinosaurs became extinct”.
Every now and then there would the odd cartoon that just didn’t quite hit the spot – such as the penguin in a crowd of identical penguins singing”I just got to be me” but who was painted yellow so he did stand out from the crowd. Years later when I bought Larsen’s autobiography I found out that the penguin was always supposed to be just like his chums in the cartoon, but that the greetings card company had decided black and white was “too dull” thereby changing the whole tone of the joke. At least that explains why I didn’t get that one!

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The villas in Florida come at great prices because Florida is a destination area. I have stay in other villas, but I must say that the one that I frequent in Florida is the best. I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that the state is known as a big tourist destination. In Orlando, for example, millions of people come for all of the Disney theme park fun.

Disney was the reason that I came, but I also like Orlando simply because it’s a beautiful city. I received a great deal on the villa because there was a special for the extended length of time that we were staying down in Florida. I always thought that hotels were nice, but I had no idea about what nice really was until I spent a some serious time in the villas in Florida.

I was blown away by all of the nice luxury furniture and the beautiful floor plans that were available. I just couldn’t get over how nice they were when I stayed in one for the first time. It’s become a regular part of our vacation, and I’m still as impressed as I was from the very first stay.

The villas has so easy to rental, and you get a chance to specify exactly what you need. We checked on several locations online before we went down. I was able to get the available dates, number of rooms, and the exact location that I needed with a couple of clicks of the mouse. I would highly recommend a villa stay for anyone that is interest in a Florida getaway.

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