Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

Go forth and find out what your name REALLY means in the Sexy Name Decoder!

Here’s mine:

Ha. Ain’t that the troof. Though how does one adeptly need anything? Can I want something inadeptly?

Courtesy of Lore Sjoberg, the guy behind The Brunching Shuttlecocks, The Book of Ratings, the Cyborg Name Decoder and the Monster Name Decoder--in short, one sexy fucking geek.

p.s. Feel free to copy and paste the code into the comments so we can all see what you got. 

Deep in the back file cabinet, in the recesses of the Harlequin office, there exists a file folder. It hides behind the “Confidential: Grave Location, Jimmy Hoffa” folder, and the sealed file marked “Truth about Turin, Shroud of.” It’s even nestled in the shadow of the “Dion, Celine: Home Planet Location” folder.

It’s the “Forbidden Titles” file. A list of titles so bad, even the folks down in the Harlequin Presents office aren’t allowed to look at them, for fear they wrest control of the empire away from the publishers and wreak havoc on our understanding of romance as we know it.

Your intrepid Smart Bitches, though, they know how to jimmy the lock on an old metal file cabinet, while holding cosmopolitans in one hand and a stack of Bombshells in the other. Behold: the titles you will never see in a Harlequin Presents novel.

The Painfully Shy Computer Geek’s Russian Bride

The Italian Tycoon’s Restraining Order

The Basement-Dwelling Mama’s Boy’s Virginity

The Stupid White Man’s Dark-skinned Secret Baby

The Heiress’ Purple Cheekbone Bruises

The Crack Whore’s Secret Babies, All Three of Them, Plus a Couple of Toddlers, Too (Hey Man, Who can Keep Track Of All Those Moving Things When You’re High?)

The Boardroom Mistress’s Sexual Harrassment Lawsuit

The Porn Star Thinks Positive

The Morbidly Obese Lady’s Secret Pregnancy

The Heir’s DID Mistress’s Other Personality’s Mail-Order Bride”

The Hungarian Tycoon’s Yugo

Love in the El Camino

The Billionaire’s Incontinent Wife

The Spaniard’s Mostly Virginal Bride, Because Anal Totally Doesn’t Count

The Greek’s Underage Cambodian Whore

A Scandalous Accounting Discrepancy

Pregnancy by Turkey Baster

The Billionaire’s Bulimic Supermodel Mistress

His Secret Weeping Sores

Bound by A Really Fat Dominatrix

The Disobedient Bottom

Herpes Infection of Revenge

Expecting the Playboy’s HIV Test To Come Back Negative

Fellating the Father of the Groom

The Secret of Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch

The Mediterranean Mogul’s Secret One-Testicled Lovechild

The Sheikh’s Obnoxious Halitosis

Bookseller Chick has a most excellent entry up about the salubrious effects of reading Harlequin Presents while enduring the vigors of organic chemistry class. But my favorite part is right at the end, wherein she explains how to play the Harlequin Presents game:

I’ve always believe that Harlequin Presents covers can be used either to a.) make one weird blackmail note, or b.) summarize a whole new plot for the upcoming month. To do this one must first collect six Harlequin Presents. For our example we’ll use the six that came out for the month of November:

Pregnancy of Revenge by Jacqueline Baird
The Italian Doctor’s Mistress by Catherine Spencer
Bound by Blackmail by Kate Walker
Disobedient Virgin by Sandra Marton
Sale or Return Bride by Sarah Morgan
The Greek’s Bought Wife by Helen Bianchin

Do not try to make sense out of the titles. I don’t know what the Sale or Return Bride means either; it doesn’t matter. You are now going to rearrange these titles so they make a sentence (or a couple of sentences). Feel free to add in important linking words like (if, then, and, or longer phrases). Your result may look like so:

Although Bound by Blackmail, the Disobedient Virgin refused to be the Italian Doctor’s Mistress and instead chose to be The Greek’s Bought Wife. Even though he considered her to be his Sale or Return Bride, she would carry his Pregnancy of Revenge with love.

I want to play! I want to play! I’m going to use October’s titles:

Expecting the Playboy’s Heir by Penny Jordan
His One-Night Mistress by Sandra Field
The Brazilian’s Blackmailed Bride by Michelle Reid
A Scandalous Marriage by Miranda Lee
The Greek’s Ultimate Revenge by Julia James
The Spaniard’s Inconvenient Wife by Kate Walker (hehe, I initially read this as “incontinent")

Et voila:
After being His One-Night Mistress, Calliope Kourios found herself Expecting the Playboy’s Heir...and being forced into A Scandalous Marriage! But she couldn’t be The Brazilian’s Blackmailed Bride, because Calliope had a secret...She was already The Spaniard’s Inconvenient Wife. Can she find a way out of this quandary, or will she have to use The Greek’s Ultimate Revenge?

I bet you can play this game with traditional Regency titles, too. Have a whack at it, kids! It’s good, clean fun!

Yes, that’s right: We’re going to put up YET ANOTHER sidebar item. This one’s going to be a collection of our greatest hits. Someone who’s new to the site can browse some of our best bitchery and get a feel for the site, while those of you who’ve been around for a while can re-visit old favorites and snicker away.

A lot of our bitchery is made extraordinary only because of the comments--my ramble about rape in romance is largely an incoherent mess, for example, but the people who contributed comments made it a lively and informative discussion. I’m also thinking of instituting a “best tangent” category because some of our best and funniest posts veered sharply off-topic, like that time we started ripping on the Thundercats and He-Man in a Covers Gone Wild entry.

So, what would you classify as some of our best articles/reviews/discussions? Here are some of the more memorable ones for us:

15 Things That Only Happen in Romances

Talking About the R Word

You Like Me! You Really, Really Like Me!

Defining Romances: No Ickiness, Please

Romance: It’s Only For Monogamous Hetero Couples!

You Read Like A Girl

Erotica = Literature, Romance = Formula. GOT THAT? (this is one of my favorites mostly because of E.D’Trix’s absolutely horrifying excerpt of a salmon-y sex scene she had to edit)

On A Wicked Dawn

The RWA will never link to this site...

Carpathian Madness (aka all Carpathian novels by Christine Feehan)

You’re shittin’ me. Please tell me you’re shittin’ me (a.k.a. The Big RITA Trainwreck)

The Contemporary Romance Drinking Game

Paranormal Romance Chit-Chat, now with Bonus Paranormal Drinking Game!

Man Titty Contest / Vote for your favorite haiku/ oh, literate tit!

Masturbation and fanfic and WOO DAMN loads of TMI in this entry so be warned (this makes the grade because of the spam haiku)

Post your suggestions in our comments, and we’ll trim this down so it’s a manageable 10- or 15-item list.

I’m finally catching up on my blog rounds after five days of little to no Internet access, and saw that I’d been tagged by Nicole.

Hear Ye, Hear Ye! Herein Be The Rules For Yon Meme!

*fanfare by pretty boys in tights and those tunics with the long, fluttery sleeves*

1. Delve into your blog archive.

2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to).

3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).

4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions. Ponder it for meaning, subtext or hidden agendas…

5. Tag five people to do the same.

OK, this is a bit tricky. The first 10 posts to this blog are closed entries as Sarah and I futzed around with the template and the inner workings of ExpressionEngine.

(One of the closed entries does contain a bit I’m particularly proud to have written; to wit: “On your knees, foolish mortals! I am the mysterious sloe-eyed Chinkie in the top left corner, and I have powers beyond your ken!")

(No, I won’t give the context to that. It’s funnier that way. Go ahead and guess what I was talking about, if you’re so inclined.)

Anyway, I’ll do the 23rd and 33rd entries, just because I’m feeling loquacious today.

The fifth sentence for Entry Number 23 (ignoring the bulleted list) is: “Hey Sarah, are you having a romance novel day?”

This was back when most of the people visiting this site were looking for trashy and/or Dominican bitches. That entry was my sad, sad attempt to drop Google a big old hint as to what our site was about. I guess that would qualify as a hidden agenda.

Entry Number 33 is a classic: PBW foamed at the mouth about reviewers, and I foamed right back. Big old rabid foam party, that entry. And sentence number 5? Well, it makes me snicker a bit: “And then right around paragraph 8, she starts losing it.”

Hey, it only takes me about 3 sentences before I start losing it. And no hidden agenda or subliminal meaning in that entry that I can see. Subtlety, thy name is not Candy.

As for five people to tag… Hmm.

Doug, Kate, Lilith, Bam and Stephen.