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Saturday, August 30, 2008

Moderation

Sorry, all—comment moderation has been turned back on.  The spamming had calmed down for a little bit but it’s back with a vengeance lately.  So now we’re back to the method of me having to approve all the comments before they show up in the blog.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

Sunday, March 04, 2007

Another weekend down the toilet

Thanks, all, for the swell captions you left accompanying Buster’s picture the other day.  The one I had been thinking of was most closely echoed by Bet’s “too much catnip, maaaaaaan” (not surprising, as Bet and I share a brain)—I was going to go with “I am never drinking Jaegermeister again.”  This was an exhibition, not a competition, however a couple of my favorites were Mike’s “Okay, Boo, now what do you see?  Boo?” and Duke’s riff on Wrath of Kahn/Moby Dick: “For hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee, thou brown whale!”

Hey, I don’t know if y’all know this, but KirstenK has a whole new blog going on over at Olive Fingers, which she actually writes in occasionally!  Not only that, but she’s got a project going on called Up in Your Beeswax, where she interviews people.  And she interviewed me!  You can go there now and read it if you want to.  Or don’t, see if I care, Dear Reader.  However, I will say that’s it’s a fascinating subject (me) and you’re doing yourself a grave disservice if you ignore it.

See how that last paragraph started out like I was pimping out someone else’s blog, but then by the end I’d brought it all back around to me?  See how I did that?  If you enjoyed that, you might also enjoy the Billy Wilder essay I wrote in my movie blog today.

I wonder if the bathroom’s free yet.

Nope, still occupied.

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Sooner or later, everyone comes to Stennieville

Every once in a while I like to check my site stats and see what the traffic is like for my site—how many people show up here, how they get here, etc.  It’s just because I’m interested in you, Dear Reader.  I want to know what makes you tick.  And the best way to find that out is to see what search strings have brought new visitors here in the last month.  Here follows my favorite ten search strings from the last month:

1. “cute cat pictures”—well, here’s one for ya.

2. “everything you are doing is bad. i want you to know this.” - My people.  This is a quote from Ghostbusters II.  Don’t be ashamed to admit that you liked it too.

3. “from hell’s heart i stab at thee! shakespeare” - That’s not Shakespeare.  That’s Wrath of Kahn.  Okay, and according to Duke, it’s also Moby Dick, by Herman Melville.  But it’s definitely not Shakespeare.

4. “johnny cash giving the finger” - should give you this result.

5. “movie kings road robert young and robert cummings” - I think you’re thinking of King’s Row, with Cummings and Ronald Reagan (but not my dear sweet Robert Young).

6. “sunset blvd dialogue may i say you smell special” - alternately, you could search for “Lamest Billy Wilder dialogue ever.”

7. “worst cd mix ever” - Aw, come on.  Mine wasn’t that bad.

8. “frank sinatra i kissed a girl” - no, that was by Jill Sobule.

9. “old movie in black and white. husband kills wife” - well, that narrows it down.

10. “black pussy needs white cook” - Hee. Dumbass surfing for porn misspelled “cock.” 

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

A blog from the past

I started this blog back in 2002—in fact, almost exactly five years ago.  My first post was March 1, 2002, so the five-year “blogiversary” is coming up.  Originally it was created by Blogger, and then after a few months I moved over to Greymatter, which I liked a little better so I stuck with that for a while.  Then I started using pmachine, and finally upgraded from pmachine to Expression Engine, which is the application I use now to run my blog.

Where am I going with this?  Oh, I remember.  When I switched from Blogger to Greymatter, there wasn’t a way (that I knew of) to import my old blog entries into the new application, so my first five months of posts remained over in Blogger—and for a while there was a link to the old archives, but eventually I dumped the link.  Mostly because I forgot about it, and also—well, who the hell wants to read my blog entries from April 2002?

My answer to that is still “nobody,” but for the sake of completion, I’ve begun the rather drab task of dredging up the old entries from Blogger and manually entering them through Expression Engine, and back-dating them appropriately.  When I’ve finished, I can dump the old Blogger blog for good, and for the sake of posterity, five years’ worth of blogs will all be housed in the same place.  The old comments are all gone, however.

It’s weird to go back through posts from five years ago.  When the blog was new and exciting, I wrote in it every day, sometimes two or three times a day, but usually very short entries—sometimes just a link I found funny or interesting.  I’ve found a lot of broken links in the old blogs, in fact.  I’m trying not to edit the entries at all (even though it’s tempting to correct something, or add a line or two that might clarify what I’m talking about), but I have been deleting the links.  Oh, and removing references to work.  Apparently in 2002 I had no compunction about naming names, but I’m more jaded and a lot more careful now.

Occasionally I’ll stumble upon something that makes me laugh, and as an example of tooting my own horn, I hereby present my first rant, about buying a lamp.

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

I have returned!

Hello, Dear Neglected Reader.  No meme or nothin’ for you last week.  I know, I know.  Let it out.  Shhhh, shh shh… Just let it out.  That’s my Dear Reader.

So yeah, I was Away On Business last week.  I love saying that, it’s very Big Shot, isn’t it?  It’s very How to Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, very late ‘50s, early ‘60s Corporate America, when the men wore skinny lapels and skinny ties to match, and huge skyscrapers in New York City each housed just one huge freakin’ company.  And the women wore cat-eye glasses and got chased around the desk.  That’s what “Away On Business” brings to mind for me for some reason.

But this isn’t the ‘60s, so the business conference that I attended did not include strippers or whores (damn it!), although it did include cigars and cocktails on the last night.  I partook of the cocktails, but not the cigars.

So I didn’t blog last week because I was busy schmoozing (or trying to schmooze; it’s not really one of my skills) and learning all about the exciting future of I.T.!  I know how jealous you must all be.  The closest I came to “schmoozing” was striking up a friendly conversation with one of the engineers there, and later my boss teased me and said the guy was into me.  This is why I don’t schmooze.  It’s why I don’t flirt too, come to think of it.  It’s all the teasing.

The conference was fun (by whatever stretch of definition that “fun” can include I.T. Industry Business Conferences); if nothing else it was a break from the routine, it got me a needed break from the office, it was educational, and it was on the company’s dime.  The hotel was swank.  Seriously, the beds in my room—I thought I’d died and gone to heaven, only to discover that heaven is in fact a Marriott hotel.  Nice plush down comforters (I am TOTALLY buying one of those, dude), big spacious tub, and a great view of downtown Tampa, even a little view of the harbor.

Now I’m back at work.  Back to being a Little Shot.  But at least my kitties are glad to have me back.

Friday, October 20, 2006

Meme - About Blogging and Memes

How meta!  A blog meme about blogging and memes, which I found here.  A simple questionaire:

What first got you started blogging?  ThePete said I should have a blog on my website, way back in 2002.  He MADE me.

How often do you post to your blog?  Four or five times a week to the regular blog, Daily Trivia is five times a week, and the movie blog—depends how many movies I see.

Do you have more than one blog and if so, how are they each different?  This one is my personal blog, where I just talk about whatever’s going on in my life or what’s pissed me off recently.  Daily Trivia is obviously the daily trivia question, and the movie blog is where I review the movies I’ve seen.

Where did you first hear about memes?  I really don’t remember.  Someone in our little blogging community started doing the Friday Five or the Monday Mission or something, and I followed suit.  I’m a follower at heart.

Do you remember the first meme you participated in and if so, what was it?  I don’t remember, but I went and checked my old Blogger archives.  My first meme was one of the Friday Fives (now defunct).  But I failed to give credit to whomever I was copying, so that will remain a mystery.

Do you run any memes yourself and if so what are they?  I was going to say Daily Trivia is kind of a meme, but people don’t take it back to their own blogs and write about it, so that’s not a meme.  I don’t run any memes; I hunt for them elsewhere and post on on Fridays.

How did you find this meme? At Garysaid.com, hunting for a Friday meme.

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Shameless comment begging

So, apparently there have been some problems with my comments for the last couple of days, which Bet alerted me to this evening.  If you can read this, please leave me a comment!  And if you have trouble leaving a comment, please use the Contact link above to e-mail me and let me know.

(Yeah, I’m really only doing this to get comments.)

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Yahooligans and thieves

Dude.  Where does Yahoo get off?  Surfing the internet the other day, minding my own business as I am wont to do, don’t you know, and my eye catches an ad for My Yahoo:

What. The. Fuck.  That is mine.  They frickin’ ripped me off.  Not just the road sign idea, but “Population One,” which I stole from Robbie Fulks’s song “Rock Bottom: Pop. 1” several years ago.  I stole that way before they did.  I bet Yahoo doesn’t even listen to Robbie Fulks!  Does anyone remember when my website used to look like this?  You be the judge:

Thieves, I tell you.  Thieves.  I’m not a litigious person by nature, but I wonder if I could actually file a suit.  At the very least, I might get a little nuisance money out of them.  They’ve got pretty deep pockets, don’t they, over there at Yahoo?

Monday, October 24, 2005

How do you people get in here?

I went through my web stats the other day and had a good time plowing through all the Google and Yahoo search terms that brought newcomers to Stennieville in the last few months.  Some of them are obvious—like I knew when I posted that tampon blog that it was likely to attract an unsavory element.  So yeah, lots of searches for that.  I prefer to think that it’s just underinformed 12-year-old girls with no moms or sisters who are typing “diagram of inserting tampon” into their search engines.  But I know it’s probably 47-year-old men.

Other search terms that brought people stumbling into Stennieville are a little more perplexing.  I give you a small sample here:

“secret to jogging”—boy, did you come to the wrong place.  The secret to jogging is that it sucks.
“the world is black the world is white song”—I can help you there.  The song title you’re looking for is “Black & White” by Three Dog Night.
“i love lucy plot outlines”—Seriously, someone needs to look this up on the internet?  Turn on your TV, there’s probably an episode on right now.  Whatever plot you see, that’s pretty much the only one they used..
“gee shucks ma’am”—Mickey Rooney was searching my blog!
“en la komencodio kreis le cielon kaj la teron”—Is that Klingon? (I do maybe vaguely recall this having to do with a Daily Trivia question, come to think of it.)
“andie mcdowell porn”—Why.  WHY?
“fellini midget beach”—that’s pretty much every movie Fellini made.
“sidecar christ”—no, I think the one I used was “Christ on a bike.”

I like that some people seem to type whole questions into Google or Yahoo or their search engine of choice (Ask Jeeves, maybe?).  Here’s a few questions that have brought people to Stennieville searching for answers:

“what do women think about a large ring of keys to things”—we don’t like them.
“what does capisco mean”—“Capisco” means “I understand.”  But if you have to ask…
“where to buy sunglitz repair and shine”—Oh, I know this one!  It’s not called Sunglitz anymore, it’s Hair Toys, and you can get it at SleekHair.com.
“what is that called when black and white people couldn’t be together”—umm, racism?
“which sally hansen wax product works the best”—if the one I used was any indication, none of them.  Go pro.

There’s many more, I’ve barely even scratched the surface.  But maybe I’ll save them for some other day when I’m stumped for a blogging topic.

Monday, June 27, 2005

Summer Break

I’m a little worn out on Daily Trivia right now.  I realize it’s practically the only blogging I do these days, but I think maybe I just need a little break from it.  Anyway, the GBABOT is starting to run out of questions to ask you all.

To make up for it, I’ll try to post some actual content from time to time in the coming weeks.  But I think Daily Trivia is going to take the month of July off.  And this final week of June.

Here’s the answer to Friday’s question:  Paul Revere shouted “My shoes are on fire!!” as he rode from Boston to Lexington.  Okay, not really.  Apparently he shouted, “The Regulars are out!”  The Regulars were British troops.