Room 101 - Pet Hates

People in the UK will probably remember the comedy tv series, Room 101, based on the radio series of the same name, in which celebrities are invited to discuss their pet hates and persuade the host to consign them to a fate worse than death in Room 101 ( named after the torture room in the George Orwell novel Nineteen Eighty-Four)

Come close and let me whisper a great and terrible secret .... we have a Room 101 here in the library. Yes, really! It's true. To get to it, you have to be trussed up like a Christmas turkey and thrown down a trapdoor. (All those who went down there in the past never came back up again ... )

Anyway, what would YOU put in Room 101?

I'll kick off with:
1. Pickled onion flavoured crisps (ugh - yuk!)
and
2. Authors who put themselves in their own stories! :

Oops! Down the trap-door I go!

But before I do, let me mention one of my pet hates - restaurant menus with spelling/ punctuation errors! I was once on holiday on a small Scottish island, and vowed not to eat in or shop in any place with such errors. Had I stuck to that vow I would have starved to death! One cafe offered "bean's on toast" while the little supermarket advertised "Fresh strawberry's".

Off now to the torture room, which for me will be full of spiders, daddy-long-legs and misplaced apostrophes!

Ooh, I think my Commodore Vic 20 game programming book. I'd also put a certain professional Science Fiction author in the room but that would be cruel and unusual punishment for the rest of the items in the room.

I cringe whenever I read or hear someone misuse "Myself", as in Susan and myself went to the store. Don't they teach pronoun usage in school now?

I have borscht soup and warm goats milk on my listing. The other thing is people who think they are better then anyone else.

CS

I'm with you there.


Dang. I'm down the chute AGAIN. (Wait... does it matter if I'm RIGHT?)

Censorship. In any form by anybody for any reason.

The sound of an electric fan drives me nuts. Also when people refer to their dad's sister as their "ont" I feel like smashing them in the face with a pumpkin pie. I also despise pumpkin pie, BTW, and believe that it is only good for sticking pictures on the wall, or smashing people in the face.

Oh well, IME lots of writers do that, although they may not use their own pen/screen names--but the characters are modeled on themselves. That's pretty natural, I'd venture.

"Snakes! Why did it have to be snakes?" --Indiana Jones [Harrison Ford], "Raiders of the Lost Ark"

I'd definitely end up facing snakes in the Ministry of Love. "Don't do it to me, do it to Miss Thrashbottom!".. --C.K.

Guilty as charged. But in my defense I plead that it was when I was just getting started and it was this psuedo-autobiographical thing. I'd never do that now. It was the whole "Certificate of Correction" series that ran on for a three part series, a novel and a novel. All written 12 years ago.