Hi All,
Ok so I don’t usually do this kind of thing but for Joy, I will make an exception. Joy the Baker is one of those bloggers that has it going on. She might seems like a shallow hipster from an initial glance at one of her posts, she might seem like someone as vacuous as a turnip who could care less about anything but shoes and doughnuts and her latest baking pan but if you actually bother to read her posts rather than just ogle at the food porn that she so lovingly crafts, you will instantly realise that this girl has chutzpah. I don’t know what chutzpah actually is. You see I am an Aussie and that is a Jewish word. I am in love with the Jewish vernacular…who couldn’t love words like “Chutzpah” and “Shmendrik” and “Pisher” and “Schlimazel”, all spoken with passion and with an image of Woody Allen and his glasses sliding errantly down his nose burned into my psyche for all time. If you would like to get versed in Jewish insults you can find 22 of them here in this wonderful post by “The Editor and the Beast”…
Joy has Chutzpah and under all of the hipsterescent blog speak and polished food porn perfection it really is worth the effort to read her posts. Today she turned 32 and you know what? Today’s post is dedicated to “Joy”. Here is her 32nd birthday post and I particularly love the list that she writes at the end of it. We should all write birthday lists like that :). Feel free to head over and see what got me tapping away at this aberration of a post that is a decided departure from what you, my dear constant readers, are used to imbibing when you come to visit on Serendipity Farm…
http://joythebaker.com/2011/07/angel-food-cake-with-vanilla-strawberries/
Now narf7 might have been around that block but she aint no holler back girl no SIR! And narf7 knows a little bit about pinching other people’s pictures and waving them about and pretending that they are her own. I didn’t know early on in my blogging career and waved with impunity but as soon as I learned, I stopped using other people’s images. How am I going to illustrate this post for Joy without images that are worthy of her customary awesome food photography and little heart at the bottom of the page…hmmm…not enough time (or inclination to be honest) to take lots of arty hearty shots…I know! “To the Bat mobile Robin, we are off to Morgue File!” Morgue File is a wonderful source of free images. You don’t have to join up, you don’t have to allow spammers to sell your first born when they turn 21 (unless you particularly want to that is…) and you get to choose from a large database of photos. You just click on the free photos button (because otherwise they are going to naturally direct you to their paying bit 😉 ) and type in what you are after into the search bar… for instance…narf7 wants “hearts” so narf7 typed in hearts and lo and behold… she gets pages and pages of “hearts” or…to be honest…what people load up as “hearts” which may, or may NOT be what you are after…it’s free folks, you take your chances! Here is a linky to Morgue Files. Have it tattooed to your left inner wrist if you are a blogger…it’s that valuable!
http://www.morguefile.com/archive
and here is my search for “hearts” so anyone out there with too much time can load up and see where I got all of the following images…a post in images…that you, my dear constant readers, are not usually privy to, but this post is less words and let the images tell the story so here we go…
http://www.morguefile.com/archive#/?q=Heart&photo_lib=morgueFile
Once upon a time narf7 wanted to do justice to a post by one of her blogging heroes, Joy, of Joy the Baker blogging fame. Joy takes amazing photos, Joy is a professional, Joy is hip and cool and everything that narf7 isn’t but for some reason Joy resonates with narf7 and manages to never EVER get thrown into the RSS Feed Reader equivalent of Death Row. I wanted a heart or two to pay homage to Joy and her wonderful photography so here we go…
Lets start where I actually wanted to start…a nice picture of a heart…
A heart in a coffee…that’s exactly the sort of image that Joy would like…but wait…she likes tea! (I KNEW there was more to this infatuation than just food porn…) this will NEVER do…
How about a nice heart shaped doughnut? A squiggle of fake icing blood and you have a true representation of what love is all about…but this image isn’t anywhere NEAR as classy as Joy’s wonderful images so I am going to have to dig a bit deeper…come on Morgue Files…don’t let me down…
I could stop here…I really could folks. This is just about what I was after but look a bit harder…that’s why these images are free…that top cupcakes icing has been compromised and as our lecturer would say “too much tension created by half cupcakes and quarter cupcakes and one eighth cupcakes…DO IT AGAIN!”…sigh…
That’s…sort of better…see that dent in the top right hand corner? And we thought that food bloggers had it easy!
Obviously if I am going to do justice and homage to Joys amazing photography I am going to have to look a bit further…the problem was, the further that I headed down the list the stranger the images became. This next image seems alright at first glance…
but it’s too shiny…good chocolate doesn’t look like that folks. Too shiny and plastic looking…NEXT!
How about this one? Candy hearts. You can’t go wrong with bright coloured sugar but again…look at bit closer and suddenly what seems like a collective of tiny diabetic coma’s becomes a bit more stalky/creepy…take note of the heart at the bottom…”meet me”…seems innocuous enough but the rest of the hearts have been turned over except for “marry me”…now forgive me for being a bit world weary and jaded but surely there should be SOME degree of separation between “meeting” and “marrying!”
Or how about this…pleading…or demanding? You get to choose…
From here the selection rapidly slid into a selection of the strange and the macabre. At first this message seemed full of dark foreboding…
Until I realised that further down the page it had a partner…
There…that’s better now 🙂
There are people that love chilli
Badly photoshopped tanks…at least the thought was there 😉
This appears to be a Cercis Canadensis… It’s heart shaped and something that a gardener could, indeed, love but it is a bit far off the mark for what I needed
Yup…it looks like a heart but that’s about where the similes stop
Far from finding a pretty little paisley or pastel heart image that I could use in my post, the images listed under “heart” were starting to make me twitch. Its starting to get disturbing and this is where you see just how “interesting” Morgue Files can be. Love is obviously a very subjective word to many people out there. I totally “get” the image of the egg below…if you don’t own chooks that have only given you an egg a week for 5 months and then you release them (hopefully so they run away and stop costing you an arm and a leg to feed for NO RETURN…) ostensibly to make them happy again and you start getting more eggs than you can deal with (after hunting them down in forks of trees and in the middle of blackberry thickets…) you KNOW that eggs = love.
“EARL!”…remember how Earl was sitting at my computer desk on my computer throne a couple of posts ago? NOW you know what he was up to! You might have tried to cover your tracks by calling yourself “Earl53” but I am onto you…no more leaving you alone with the PC till you are at LEAST 3! Joy just turned 32 Earl…a biker chick in a bikini is NOT going to make her feel better!
Sigh…then we have someone called “JusBen” who seems to take the word “heart” a bit too literally…his 2 entries in the “heart” arena are…
A heart monitor and…
A couple of lamb hearts.
I think someone needs to take “JusBen” aside and give him a little bit of a quiet chat about the sorts of things that people looking for “hearts” are actually after! At the risk of giving Joy the Baker a heart attack of her own should she EVER foolishly stumble over here to find Serendipity Farm in full possession of her 32nd birthday and linking it with lamb hearts…I had best move on quickly…
Another meaty heart. Yes, it DOES look like a heart and you might love chicken BUT it’s simply “wrong”! How about this lovely Rorschach blot of an image…hopefully someone’s child produced this and they have placed it here through blind parental love is all I can say!
I get the feeling that someone of the feminine persuasion forgot their anniversary and rather than get off the couch mid “Day’s of our Lives” to hustle their way to the closest petrol station to pick up one of those cheap scented car trees to make up for it, they decided to gift their partner (the long suffering “Ron”) this wonderful homage to their love…
You gotta love the bold statement and the underlined “Ron” just in case she forgot and put someone else’s name there…
Yeah, we are sticking with the egg = love theme with this image…
We can only imagine that this image is a warning message to we “heart” seekers?
I have NO idea at all why a pyrex baking dish full of stuffed and baked onions were listed under “heart images”. I am not even going to attempt to work it out. All I know is that I gave up on finding something suitable for what was GOING to be my original post around about now. Don’t get me wrong, there were some lovely images. My favourite one was this one…
A perfect representation of real love…”it’s on my shoe…course I love you!” :).
The last image is just plain terrifying…I will leave it here as a reminder to “be careful what you wish for…it might just come true…”
There you go Joy…don’t say I didn’t think of you.Have a happy 32nd birthday. You might be officially “old” but at least you can still take a better photo than these gingerbread zombies and the only place to go from here is up! Cheers…thank me later :).
Note, if my wonderful little treatise leaves you more terrified of MorgueFiles than excited and champing at the bit to go steal yourself your weights worth of images, try signing up for Pinterest. I did…after the ubiquitous waiting period where you are supposed to feel like you are being hazed or inducted into the Grand Moose club or something they approve you and you get to stick red pins into every single image you see online. After you steal it, you can repin it all over the place and fill up the interweb with your own Morgue of pictures and hints and tips and other “useful stuff” that we all know we are never going to look at or use ever again. I reckon those gingerbread zombies could do with having a big red pin stuck right through the middle of them…
Narf7’s job here…is DONE! Go forth my dear constant readers and fill your posts with beautiful, quirky and just plain downright terrifying images with impunity because “The Man” can’t touch you…they are ALL free :o)…just tell them narf7 sent you 😉
theroadtoserendipity 
May 25, 2013 @ 17:46:04
🙂 Nice! And Joy the Baker has some delish food and photography on her blog…I’ll be following her now. I’m feeling the need for some mighty good inspiration!
May 26, 2013 @ 03:59:56
She is one of my food porn sites…under all that “gorgeousness” there is a really good writer and she posts some wonderful recipes including some vegan ones so even I get a look in 😉
May 25, 2013 @ 17:46:25
Well you did find some interesting heart pictures, and some gruesome ones, and some pretty ones…. oh well happy birthday Joy lol x
May 26, 2013 @ 04:00:41
LOL! You are SO right Kymmy…all I went there for was a “pretty heart” to illustrate a post and suddenly it BECAME the post. You never know what you are going to write till you do 😉
May 25, 2013 @ 20:54:18
You also introduced some new ideas (to me). Deep Fried Butter?? WTF Stuffed Onions? Looking for this recipe. But Hey, im such a newbie, look at my latest post. I cooked my (That is MY) first corn cob tonight. I dont know whether i should run and hide in embarrassment since i share this blog world with some serious gardeners and cooks or just be thrilled. Being thrilled feels good so im going with that. I do love food art and also quirks of nature that replicate things, like leaves or even funnier, carrots. I have never ever grown a straight carrot. They look tortured and therefore funny, ripe for photos. I love iphone. Where ever i am there is the possibility of a photo.
May 26, 2013 @ 04:04:00
And if you can’t take a photo, there is always morguefiles! We found it through our media course (needs must when the Devil (read lecturer) drives!) and free photos are precious, especially when they don’t come with a whole lot of painful stipulations :). Cooking corn is an art. Check out what the Mexicans have done with the simple orb of yellowness and you will be amazed. Everything from porridge to bread to dessert to hootch! We humans are amazing when the need arises aren’t we? I would guess that Texas was the home of deep fried butter…either Texas or Scotland, America’s other heartland ;). Have a great Sunday and I bet that corn tasted amazing. Have you tried it left in the husk and thrown onto the BBQ? It is AMAZING 🙂
May 25, 2013 @ 20:58:05
Oh, checked out Joy’s blog. Now that’s serious baking and blogging.
May 26, 2013 @ 04:04:35
It certainly is. Food porn out the wazoo and her posts are entertaining and some of them are downright thought provoking. That’s hipsters for you 😉
May 25, 2013 @ 23:26:44
You got me laughing first thing this morning Fran and with so much creativity. I’ll have to check out Joy but meanwhile these comments you give us are really a ‘joy’. When my spare time is filled with so many minutes of food pic after food pic, it’s really fun to read your posts. I’m sure my favorite is the shoe pic…….. Happy Birthday to Joy, where ever she is !
May 26, 2013 @ 04:06:52
She is over there someplace with you Angela. A 32 year old hipster, producing some serious food porn and a great blog read at the same time. She even posts some glorious vegan recipes from time to time and I have been enjoying her site for a while now :). I just wanted to share morguefiles with you all. A great place to find a pic of a chunk of raw chook shaped like a heart, a series of stalkers and several disturbing gingerbread men that should be watched by the F.B.I.! Have a great Sunday 😉
May 26, 2013 @ 05:17:36
I did check her out and turns out I’ve been to the site before. Added her to my Reader. Thanks Fran 🙂
May 26, 2013 @ 05:21:29
Welcome :). She is one of my ONLY food porn sites because she can spin an amazing yarn and is a “real person”. Don’t you love that list? I am too scared to write myself a 50th birthday list!
May 26, 2013 @ 03:55:54
What a fun post. 🙂 I liked the shoe best, too.
I had to laugh at the You Don’t Know But I Love You one because it reminded me of Keith’s rendition of “Some Enchanted Evening” … “Once you have found her, never let her know…Once you have found her, NEV – VER – LET – HER – KNOW!” sung to Austin when he was young and in love and unable to tell the girl involved.
It’s all about love, and yay — Blogs for world peace!
May 26, 2013 @ 04:16:43
🙂 So true Christi, and if you listen to some of our most popular songs they are SO sung by stalkers! Think of Sting in “Every Breath you Take” and you just KNOW he is stalking her! “Every move you make, every breath you take I’ll be watching you…” creepy! I can remember my brother singing “Some enchanted evening” and “Moon river” into an old tape recorder my grandmother had let him borrow. Wish I had those tapes, I could make him dance like a puppet! 😉 Have a great Sunday Christi and enjoy your glorious spring weather. Our weather is glorious here as well. Sunny but frigid and blissfully cool. Brunhilda is simmering like a trouper and it’s time I started soaking some beans and making some serious winter food preparations. Glad you liked my nonsense post for Joy 😉
May 26, 2013 @ 10:48:14
Hmm I remember you and I singing Rolf Harris’s Sunarise into that tape recorder Fronkii!
May 26, 2013 @ 12:49:32
Yeah Pinky but we could care less if anyone heard us 😉
May 26, 2013 @ 05:53:19
I think this is a wonderful post! You’re writing just flowed joyfully, and Happy Birthday to Joy!
May 26, 2013 @ 06:02:42
Here’s hoping she NEVER stumbles over this post! 😉
May 26, 2013 @ 07:51:49
hahahahahahaha,..Such a lovely & funny & well written post, I agree here!
May 26, 2013 @ 12:48:33
Loved the Rorschach heart. As for lamb hearts, YUM!! But that’s me, I guess. Mum used to buy beef hearts (they were cheap when I was young); she’d simmer them with some seasonings and when cool, slice them for summer suppers or school sandwiches. I still love ’em!
great post and thanks for the links. I already like the morgue and I know I’ll like Joy’s blog, too. I have to read her list now . . .
May 26, 2013 @ 14:04:36
I used to love lamb hearts as well Linnie, especially the fat! It’s really no wonder why I couldn’t fit through doors at once stage ;). I used to dip them into seasoned flour after slicing them across and fry them DELISH! 🙂
May 26, 2013 @ 15:38:33
We could compile a list when I come over lol. And NO to cooked innards thanks, blah!
May 28, 2013 @ 04:21:38
I don’t think you can buy any “innards” these days except for hearts and livers Kymmy and my daughters buy all of them for their dog so none left for you! ;). You will have to do with Calzones, oven wedges (homemade with spices and herbs), Stromboli, Steve’s world famous chilli and chips, Steve’s Soup Dragon soup and fresh homemade bread (that you help us to make…no slacking HERE young lady! 😉 ) and anything else that you can fit in including all the cakes you can eat! 🙂
May 27, 2013 @ 22:00:12
Brilliant and very funny. I may have nightmares thining about those gingerbread folk though 😉
May 28, 2013 @ 04:22:50
When you think that someone out there had the presence of mind to actually list those gingerbread horrors under “heart” and “love”…you have to wonder at that diabolical mind don’t you! Let’s just hope it isn’t any of our neighbours…I am pretty sure about mine (ancient technophobes…) but you might have to vet yours more closely…just sayin’! 😉
May 28, 2013 @ 04:33:11
I have my suspicions…. 😉
May 28, 2013 @ 07:35:37
Lovely images Fran. You really put your heart into this post!
May 28, 2013 @ 10:41:49
HA! Very “punny” Jean 😉
May 28, 2013 @ 17:59:44
Hahaha you are very funny and this cheered me up so much last night when I read it. I have never really explored the ‘free’ images on the net as I just click away photohrea and plaster them on the blog. I hate pinterest but I know I am in a minority, so must keep quiet about it. (And not to drag traffic to my blog so do take the link out but you might be amused by these heart toast pics x Joanna
May 29, 2013 @ 04:19:05
Love the toasty goodness and so does Zeb by the look of it :). I pinched the pics and promise not to use them anywhere but on my desktop to remind me that somewhere in the world, someone is actually able to bake a loaf of bread that not only LOOKS like a loaf of bread but that someone/something (read “Zeb”) wants to eat… and be careful with Pinterest, it creeps up on you! I am one of those people that loves to cram things into boxes (I must have an accountant living inside me 😉 …indeed my 31 year old son and heir IS an accountant 😉 ) and Pinterest fueled a need to stuff things into compartments that didn’t involve increasing the clutter on Serendipity Farm. A win-win situation 😉
May 29, 2013 @ 12:08:07
I “Heart” you. I loved reading y our post today. I am not sure what my problem is, but I don’t seem to be on the computer much these days. I “heart” reading your posts too!
OH – and your should go check out the food porn on Zeb Bakes….. Joanna – who just commented above me. Love her bread posts (and all the other ones too!)
no heart posts from me (oh, where were cards with hearts) but I have a great photo of a tomato smiling! http://emilysincerely.wordpress.com/2011/07/04/smile/