The joys of bad housekeeping: The slattern and the lantern fly

Will a 'self-cleaning' oven save you mindless hours spent scrubbing, scourer in hand and cleaning fumes up your nose? asked the April issue of Australia's Choice Magazine.

Why pay more for a needless labour-saving device?
The consumer organization that publishes Choice performs a needed service, advocating for consumers on many important issues such as healthy-food labelling as opposed to healthy food, but on this question, I must ask you —

about those mindless hours:
Do you spend them cleaning your oven? If so, then may I suggest that you don't need a self-cleaning oven, but counselling?

Or better yet, spend your first freed hours reading Florence King's Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, one of my all-time favourite books.
Beating Beeton in every way, including originality, this joyous bible for bad housekeeping and attitude has been a tower of temporary props that has served me perfectly well ever since I first read it, to hold up my views on the relativity of impeccable properness.

Burning sterilises
And the inside of an oven is too dark to see, and you're not eating the walls and floor of it anyway, are you? But what do you look like and smell like after a session spent with your head and arms in an oven's maw?

Worth above rubies
Cleaning an oven is only the most egregious of badly used mindless hours, but what joys can be found if you reach the level of the Proper Slattern!

Night view of a properly cared for window casing:

The next day, after a proper cleaning:

Lantern fly - Eurinopsyche arborea (I think), Fulgoridae