I Want You to Write a Theme

Oh! The theme I’ve been waiting for all my life. Listen to this sentence: “A Red Ryder BB gun with a compass in the stock, and this thing which tells time”. Poetry. Sheer poetry, Ralph! An A+! – Miss Shields reading Ralphie’s theme, in his fantasy, from A Christmas Story.

OK, now it is Wednesday evening and I am still flopping around, still trying to come up with a theme for the next day’s post.  Dan?  Dave?  Chris?  Is there anyone else out there ready to come to my rescue, once again?  Actually, this searching for a blog topic is a theme, but it is also a recurring theme, so I think that I will pass on using it now.  I’m sure it will be there again, if I ever need it and certainly if I don’t want it.  I have an idea for another movie post and another photography post, but it feels too soon to use either of them and more importantly looks like too much work for tonight.  Instead, I think that I will go for one of those stream of consciousness posts, no central theme, just a little of this and of that and hopefully enough of something worth reading.

Wednesday was a pretty good day, at least for me.  Anne stayed home with a cold though.  See what comes from hanging around with those runny nosed guttersnipes?   I have an interesting project to work on this month.  I wish that I could bore you to tears with my telling of it, but I can’t, so you are safe.

NPR is now holding the sixth edition of its 3-minute-fiction writing contest.  I have entered two of the previous editions.  Entries for this round must have a character that tells a joke, a character that laughs and a character that cries.  My muse had an idea or at least a joke that filled the bill, but it is a bit lewd … 😳

A man walks into a bar.  He and the bartender get to talking and the bartender explains to the man that he has a horse, but the horse is really depressed. The man says, “For a free beer, I can make your horse laugh”.  The bartender says, “You’re on!” and the man goes over to the horse and whispers into its ear.  The horse laughs.  The bartender congratulates the man and gladly serves him a beer, but even after the man has finished his beer, the horse is still laughing and it is starting to get annoying.  At this point the bartender offers the man another beer, if he can make the horse stop laughing.  The man says, “I can do even better than that, for two beers, I can make your horse cry.”  The bartender agrees.  The man goes over to the horse again and the horse immediately bursts into tears.  Mystified, the bartender asks the man, “How did you do that?”  The man explains, “The first time I spoke to your horse, I told him that my member was larger than his.  He didn’t believe me and laughed.  Second time, I showed him I was telling the truth.”

Needless to say, with this story rolling around in my brain, there is no room for anything that might actually be entered in the contest.  I could try polling my muse again, but she is rather incapacitated.  Maybe I should have stuck with the searching for a blog post theme after all.  Sort of a theme within a theme idea, always an old saw in the theater, movies and now even blogging.

My above mental request for help, was answered and in just the nick of time.  Chris sent me this evening picture of Monterey’s Cannery Row.  Back in John Steinbeck’s day, Cannery Row smelled of fish canning factories.  Nowadays, it is a tourist attraction.  It also happens to be the neighborhood that Chris’ new, high-tech employer has set up his shop.  Not too shabby an area to work in now.  I’m guessing that he shot this picture before work, because there are no tourists on the sidewalks yet.  Am I right, Chris?  Enjoy, everyone!

My Blog’s Report Card

WordPress, emailed me the following post, that I have dubbed a report card.  I call it a report card partly because I did so well on it, but also because it does accurately capture how well this little old blog did in 2010.  Normally, I am reticent to disclose statistics on readership.  It seems to much like disclosing how much money one makes, but since WordPress encouraged this disclosure and supplied the content for this post; who am I to turn down a guest post?

I don’t know if WordPress grades on a curve or as with most of the emails they send me, are just consistently upbeat, but I usually appreciate their cheerleading and this personalized shout-out is even more endearing.  So, I would like to thank them for another year of great hosting, great free hosting.  I would also like to thank Joy, the blog czar, for promoting this blog to WordPress’ Fresh Pressed page, twice in 2010.  Both posts are listed below as numbers one and two top attracting posts.  The remaining top attractors are from the previous year.  This shows that some posts have staying power.  Most of all, I would like to thank you the readers of this blog.  Finally, I would like to thank two special women, Kayak Woman at ababsurdo.com and Karen at cliffsvic.com for all of the nice referrals.

2010 Year in Blogging  

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Healthy blog!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

Featured image

About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 35,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 4 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, there were 368 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 1060 posts.

The busiest day of the year was July 27th with 1972 views. The most popular post that day was Do NOT Approach Buffalo.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were wordpress.com, ababsurdo.com, facebook.com, cliffsvic.com, and digg.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for m is for the many things she gave me lyrics, johnson shut ins, downhill, regenaxe, and photofunia animation.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Do NOT Approach Buffalo July 2010
67 comments and 16 Likes on WordPress.com

2

The Bike Stalker April 2010
54 comments

3

Johnson’s Shut-Ins July 2009

4

M Is for the Many things she gave me … May 2009
5 comments

5

Photofunia and Animated GIFs June 2009
3 comments



Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, …

I treasure the comments that this blog receives, almost as much as I value the friends and relatives that make these comments.  As much as I love your comments though there is a dark side to the blogging biz that I have never shared with any of you, until now.  I’m speaking of course about spam comments, but of a better class of spam than you might be familiar with.  No Canadian pharmaceuticals have been advertised here.  Especially no Viagra spam.  No, these spam comments are much more homespun.  WordPress has a facility, Akismet, that corrals all of this spam and every few days or so I press one button and they all disappear.  All nice and neat, but just as showbiz routinely turns inward and creates a play within a play, so does yours truly blogger here also find himself getting introspective.  Here are just a dozen of the several dozen spam comments that Akismet has intercepted in the last few days:

  • You are a very clever individual! – Pink Lingerie [ooh, lá lá!]
  • Hey y’all make sure you check out www [that really narrows it down]
  • Wow! This blog is sick! How did you make it look like this!? [complement?]
  • I seriously enjoyed reading your site. Wonderful material and i’m sure i’m not the first person who finds it exceptionally beneficial. [well, actually]
  • You are a very capable individual! [don’t, please stop; please, don’t stop]
  • fnyi84x3q5rw1w7txx7410jl1 [garbled? spam from another planet?]
  • Your blog has been the highlight of my day. – Colon Cleanser [sheeat!]
  • I adore this blog site layout! How do you make it!? It’s very nice! [when I catch them, I grind up the spammers into a fine paste, then I …]
  • Well, all things considered… [luv the radio show! don’t get the comment?]
  • You made some good points there. I did a search on the topic and found most persons will consent with your site. [Umm, I’m married, you know?]
  • I really enjoyed this blog. It’s nice when you read something that is not only informative but entertaining. Greet! [you almost had me there]
  • питательная маска + для рук [wait for it, … looks like Greek to me!]

I should apologize to the Hormel people for using as a graphic for this post, a picture of their product’s label.  But the duality of spam has been around for decades, meat product and internet trash.  I believe that as that sage of modern American publicity once said, “There is no such thing as bad press, it is all just press.”  So I defer to that goddess of publicity, Mae West, and I refer Hormel to her also.  So how did the word spam transition from meat to internet?  Sounds like another blogging opportunity.

Folks, I’m back on the morning shift again, where I belong.  I’m getting too old for doing those evening posts.  See you again tomorrow morning.

I See Dumb People

I see dumb people, walking around like regular people.  They don’t see how stupid they are.  They only see what they want to see.  They don’t even know they’re dumb.  – A “quote” from the movie The Sixth Sense

The topic for this post germinated after I heard this news story about a man who dialed 911 and reported that a suspicious package had been placed on his front porch.  A police officer was dispatched and questioned the caller, “Is this the package, sir?”  “Yes, officer, that’s it.”  “Sir, I see that the package has the Amazon logo on it.   Have you recently ordered anything from Amazon?”  “Um, ah, oh yeah, I ordered a Kindle.”  Book’em Danno!  Case closed, another dumb person is caught in the act of being stupid.

With this preamble it is with some trepidation that I mention that I have checked out from the library the book, Blogging for Dummies.  I like the Dummies series and its competitive series, The Complete Idiot’s Guide.  Both series cover their subjects of choice with a breezy and witty style all the while informing the reader to depth that is surprising and belies the two series’ titles.  Anne is less enthusiastic about these books than I am.  She is still reserving her judgment about them and is waiting for the publishing of Ventriloquism for Dummies.

I am reasonably happy with this little old blog of mine, but in addition to the daily search for new fodder, I am also always keeping my eye out for new directions to take this blog.  To that end, I had to check out the Huff Post article about a half-a-dozen great time-wasting websites.  I would have loved to be featured among them, but unfortunately my blog doesn’t have a schtick like the ones featured in the article do.  I have chosen to discuss the three that I liked best.  I didn’t choose the Shiba Inu Puppy Cam, because I thought that it was too dumb.  Wait… Stupid, Stupid, Stupid!  These are the three sites that I liked:

  • Please Fire Me is a supposedly anonymous website where readers can submit their own stories about how stupid there co-workers are.  This will work until the first reader’s post actually results in a firing and then the once begging to be fired ex-employee turns around and sues this website.
  • Hungover Owls touches upon my sense of avian adoration and features photos of sleepy owls after a supposed long hard night of drinking.  Each picture is accompanied by quipped captions that drive the joke home.  Basically, it is about dumb birds instead of dumb people.
  • Middle School Proverbs is the site that I liked the best.  For example, when the site’s author laments about the sentence, “Dog, I heard she got deportationed to New Jersey.”, so many things wrong with that sentence.

Anne could supply similar if not better fodder than is published on Middle School Proverbs.  She has daily access to the same deep well of material, but her sense of propriety prohibits me from sharing the same stories with you, that she shares with me, every evening.  Look back upon your life.  When were you ever at a lower intelligence level than in middle school?  In middle school all you have to do to see dumb people is to simply open up your eyes.