Celebrating stupid

I was going to tweet something along the lines of "Thank you Internet, thank you stupid people! Another novel idea is born".  Then I thought what if everyone thought I was referring to them, because social media has that bizarre effect.  I posted song lyrics on facebook once and everyone thought I was having a nervous breakdown.  Everything gets twisted and taken personally.  I used to post cryptic status updates so only those in the know would get the message then others started responding based on their own very misguided interpretations.  You can lock individual updates down now so code is no longer necessary.

Anyway, that wasn't the point.  The point is you can sit there torturing yourself over inability to come up with a new storyline when really, if you spend ten minutes online, there's a wealth of them sitting there waiting to be picked up.  Grab your local paper and read the small, obscure stories and let your imagination run wild.

I guess I get the 'invent a back-story' thing from my Mum.  She was always looking for reasons for the strangest of things.  "Ee, I wonder why that is" or "What did he do that for? Isn't it weird" were just a couple of her catchphrases.  I wish she'd had the confidence to write what she was wondering.  There would have been some great fiction spun from a shoe in the middle of the road or the clouds making a peculiar shape one morning.  The difference between Mum and me is that I had her as a Mum.  Thanks Mum.

So I've had a great bolt of inspiration striking me out of the blue this morning just looking at a ridiculous news story online that would never have come about in itself without stupid people.  I mean people with a severe and potentially fatal lack of common sense, not people as a whole as in stupid weather, stupid traffic.  People in general are not quite as stupid as those spectacular few who lull you into a false sense of security by surviving into adulthood then do something monumentally stupid.  Those people.  You know the ones.  They do things like light a match to check for a gas leak.  There are so many ways I could go with this idea that it might become a whole tribe of offspring from one apparently hermaphroditic thought.  Really should blog off and jot some notes down!