Where is Yellojkt Now? - Internet Edition

Judging from the rather meager posting rate on this blog, one could assume that I have taken a long hiatus from blogging, but in reality nothing could be further from the truth. As a recent study suggested, actual real blogging is on a mild decline but all sorts of quasi- and para-blogging sites are booming. So rather than focusing on the flagship of the Foma* blogging media empire, my increasingly deficit-disordered attention has been frittered away on all sorts of side endeavors. Here are but a few of the places where you can find my nuggets of wisdom:

FourSquare – One of the features of my blog used to be me taking photos of places I go on business and then asking readers to guess where I am. FourSquare, the stalker-friendly social network has made that pointless. Now I am constantly updating with all the bizarre, obscure, and/or mundane places I find myself on my travels. So if you really care, you would already know that I have eaten at Blue Hill in New York, crossed the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge in Cincinnati and had ice cream at the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport Amy’s. My little mindtwist on the site is that since everything is done on the honor system, I like to check into places I really haven’t been to. For example, I am the mayor of Clark’s Gun Shop in aptly-named Remington, Virginia despite having only set foot in there once. Also, if you see me check into a strip bar like The Cheetah in Atlanta, I’m just messing with you. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Gawker/Wonkette/The Awl – I started reading Wonkette back in the Ana Marie Cox days right as the Washingtonienne story broke. Ana is long gone (although I still hang on her every tweet) and Wonkette was unceremoniously set on an ice floe by Gawker Media only to thrive and form its own unique community and ecosystem. Similarly, several Gawker alumni formed The Awl as the anti-Gawker to prove that Nick Denton is a good person to have as a former boss. They regularly post some of the most thought provoking and intriguing stories, plus lots of videos of bears. As for the mothership, despite their recent password fiasco (which did snap me out of my lazy ways), I am still a faithful reader of the revolving door stable of writers at Gawker. I recently did some brand consolidation, and I am now known as Pop Socket across all three websites. What that does for me other than build a stronger case against me at salary review time, I don’t know.

Twitter – Twitter is the crack cocaine of micro-blogging. Quick hits, a short rush, and an empty queasy feeling of regret mixed with a hunger for more. Increasingly this is where I publish my non sequitur bon mots and random links rather than constantly annoying the insular circle of folks on the Achenblog. It’s also the clearinghouse for all my other social network postings since they all make linking to Twitter just a little too easy.

Tumblr – The newest addition to the Foma Media Empire is my long dormant Tumblr account. Tumblr tries to bridge that Goldilocks range for when a Tweet is too short and a full blogpost is too long. As my energy level for my way-too-long posts (this one as an example) wanes, I may be putting more and more here. One feature I am moving off of Facebook is my Inexplicably Popular Photo item where I post a picture from my Flickr photostream which shows a sudden above average level of viewing for no apparent reason. The 'no apparent reason' eliminates all views of cheerleaders and Glee cast members on the grounds they are highly explicably popular.

Flickr – Speaking of Flickr, this is the culprit starving the most time away from my limited but seemingly far too available internet time. I had developed a serious backlog in posting photos from my most recent vacations. I have finally gotten all the way though the 2009 road trip in Big Sky country and am now focusing on organizing the ones from the Spring trip through the desert Southwest. I’ve got to get caught up because I just got back from Puerto Rico with several hundred pictures and I have trips to Kentucky Bourbon country and Ireland planned for this year. I suspect both of these places will be outstandingly picturesque.

Facebook – In all trend pieces about the death of blogging, Facebook is usually named as a prime suspect. My beef is that since Facebook is a closed system, anything posted there has a very limited readership. I would like to think that the Google-driven masses who stumble onto my blog are looking for something other than pictures of Miranda Cosgrove naked, but the stats don’t bear this out. Still, my ever decreasing chance at internet fame is contingent upon being discovered by someone somewhere. I’ve just read a few books on Facebook (reviewed here) and they keep making a big deal out of the fact that Facebook requires the use of real names. I hope the master algorithm never realizes that one Yellojkt Yellojkt is a pseudonym. My account under that name predates the one under my real name which I keep up as a ruse to fool my spouse and old high school friends (a demographic with a good bit of overlap). So if you haven’t ‘friended’ my online avatar (which frankly, is far more interesting than the man behind the mask), feel free to do so.

Dishonorable Mention:

Formspring – I’m a sucker for getting an account on every silly platform that comes out, mostly to prevent claim jumping on the highly desirable ‘yellojkt’ user name. I discovered Formspring through my just-graduated-from-college niece so this is clearly something cool with the kidz. The format is round-robin questions and answers. Other members ask you questions and your answer is posted on your page. So without a critical mass of people in your circle to ask you question, it’s mostly crickets chirping. Sara Benincasa has parlayed this into a schtick and an artform, but I just don’t see these catching on even with as much time on my hands as I seem to have.

BlatantCommentWhoring: What social media takes up your time?

Air Blogging

I am currently at 34,000 feet using my AirTran GoGo WiFi free trial. It would be more useful if the airplane seats were wide enough to touch type instead of hunt and pecking to avoid jabbing the people next to me with my elbows.

We were in Atlanta for the Georgia Tech homecoming. The Yellow Jackets defeated #4 Virginia Tech 28-23 in a game where GT led the entire second half but could never quite put the game away until they caught the desperation onsides kick with less than two minutes to go.

While in Atlanta we ate at two more Top Chef cheftestant restaurants. That is us posing with Chef Eli as he prowls the dining room at the end of the evening. Look for those reviews in future posts. Hint: Don't knock fois gras as a dessert until you try it.

I also took tons of pictures of the Rambling Wreck parade which is always a hoot. Few of the really daring entries really work well, but that they work at all is amazing. In a way that makes them like blogging from the center seat in coach on an airplane. The novelty that it can be done at all is what makes it interesting.

For Ma

(click to embiggen)

No, your eyes don't have double vision, the image above is a parody of my site done be the far too funny VE. One of his recurring projects is to poke fun at the blogs of his readers in descending order of comment frequency. Being fairly far down the list (not that I don't read all his posts, just some merit a snarky retort more than other) I knew this was coming but it still delighted me to see it happen.

At first I didn't quite get it until I realized he changed Foma to For Ma and then used all my standard sidebar items to make me look like a mamma's boy. Well played, sir. And as nonsense it is truly fantastic.

Liveblogging The Oscar Live Blogs

Tonight I am going to go for the ADD award by following several websites that are liveblogging the Oscars and posting the best of the comments. The ones I am following are:
Jez: Jezebel
Ablog: Achenblog
WaPo: Washington Post
EW: Entertainment Weekly
Def: Defamer

Here goes nothing.

8:22
Ablog (CqP): Matthew Broderick looks fine in his grey steaked hair.
Jez: Tracie: marissa tomei's forehead=botox
WaPo: Liz Kelly: Ick -- that Vanessa Hudgens dress looks like a cast off from "Too Wong Foo." What was she thinking?

8:38
Me: Hugh Jackman does a pretty fair Billy Crystal complete with a Wolverine plug. And Anne Hathaway is a good sport.
WaPo: Jen Chaney: Yes, this number isn't very X Men. [snip} He's clearly taking a page from Billy Crystal.
EW: Thom: Ah, a Wolverine plug. But somehow I don't think any of the X-Men fanboys are still watching. They must have decided this was the Tonys and flipped the channel.

8:47
MyWife: Goldie Hawn has had a few surgeries. Look at how tight everything is.
Jez: tracie: this will sound weird, but goldie hawn looks so much like my aunt maryellen, particularly in the chest/boob area.
EW: Mandi: Goldie Hawn as Worst Dressed?
WaPo: Jen Chaney: I don't know, I think Goldie's dress is a little snug.

9:00
Me: I am so hot for Tina Fey.
Ablog: (Raysmom) Tina Fey's dress is absolutely gorgeous.

9:07
MyWife: OMG! Jennifer Anniston.
Me: So?
MyWife: Brad and Angelina are there too. They just cut to them. You miss everything doing that (referring to my blogging)
Jez: hortense: Headline on US Weekly tomorrow: "Angelina Laughs At Jen's Joke"
Anna: or it will be: "Was Angelina Faking Finding Jen's Joke Funny?"
hortense: "Angelina: Laughing With Jen, Or At Her?"
Def: JenniferLina CatfightWatch: Jennifer Aniston moves from stage right to center stage—withing queef distance of Angelina Jolie.
WaPo: Jen Chaney: A little tacky. And yet, it's what we all secretly wanted, isn't it? {snip} And do we really need to explain why they cut to Angie? We all know why. At least they wanted until a moment when Angelina was smiling.
EW: Mandi: Brad and Angelina laughing at Jennifer having to talk about animated pandas instead of saving the world and its children.

9:33
Me: Natalie Portman is getting more and more Audrey Hepburn every year.
Def: For some reason they're allowing Natalie Portman to present with her boyfriend Devendra Bernhardt.

9:41
MyWife: (about Jessica Biel) They don't look in a mirror first?
Jez: hortense: Jessica Biel= worst dressed list?
WaPo: Jen Chaney: And if I may quote a previous chat commenter, here is Jessica Biel in her "diaper." She is doing a salute to the scientific and technical Oscars, which she hosted a couple of weeks ago. Presumably in a different diaper.

9:58
Me: Why does 'Mama Mia' need a drumline. And they better cut to a reaction from Meryl Streep.
EW: Thom: Ah, so Baz Luhrmann is responsible. That explains a lot. I think he was trying to do a musical montage like "The Elephant Love Song" from Moulin Rouge, but this so didn't work.
Def: Wow. Baz Luhrmann just mounted the worst Oscar number since this disaster. It was like something you'd see on a cruise ship hosting the AVN Awards.
Jez: i like the drumline in white tie
ABlog (rd): It certainly is an interesting production. Hugh Jackman gets kudos for pulling out all the stops. Still, somehow it thematically reminds me a bit too much of Rosie O'Donnell's variety show. All over the place.

10:30
MyWife: Sound editing is the only category we've seen all the movies in.
WaPo: Smith is now presenting sound mixing. This is one way they are saving time, P.S. By having the same presenters rattle through several categories in a row. Which makes sense.

10:39
MyWife: You had Heidi Klum followed by Tim Gunn back to back.
Jez: tracie: two project runway-ish commercials in a row?

10:55
Me: The Slumdog sweep is in high gear. I keep thinking 'Jai Ho' is 'Tally Ho'.
Def: An insomnia-curing medley of best scores results in WINNER, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE's A.R. Rahman bringing down the house with a prepared bit about his wife, followed by a slow burn that would make Jack Benny envious. Just kidding—that was really awkward. Rahman redeems himself by throwing off his Nehru jacket, displaying a surprisingly ripped physique, and launching into song.
EW: Mandi: I think the only thing that will save this show now is Hugh making a joke about how slow it feels, and taking off his shirt to give it a jolt. Who's with me?
EW: Thom: And the Slumdog sweep continues. For those of you counting at home, that's five awards so far.

My comment used on the WaPo chat:
Fo, MA: Peter Gabriel not singing is also known as the Phil Collins snub since he didn't sing it when he was nominated. The Academy must hate Genesis.
Jen Chaney: As far as the Academy is concerned, they do not seem to have an invisible touch.

11:11
Me: The Death Pool Montage! Finally! Oddly tasteful. Best applause in descending order: Paul Newman, Sydney Pollack, Harold Pinter.
Def: The In Memoriam segment finally enters the HD era. We begin with Cyd Charisse—begin scoring your 'In Memoriam' Oscar Montage Pool accordingly. The Grieve-O-Meter seems to be functioning, with the needle flipping right towards the end with Sydney Pollack, Paul Newman. WHERE'S HEATH? He was squeezed in last year, but is there some Academy law about not double-dipping? He died in January 22, 2008. Also—no George Carlin. And Charlton Heston barely registered with the audience. But wait—no George Carlin?! That's an outrage! Oscar controversy!!!
Jez: Sadie: I hate how it's an applause popularity contest!
WaPo: In Memoriam: I thought I heard (or maybe it was wishful thinking) that producers were going to drown out audience applause for this montage, because it really is the cruelest popularity contest ever. Jen Chaney: It is. But they didn't.

11:28
Me: This Best Actress bit is like an American Idol vote-off.
Def: The ActorTron 2000 spits out five more amazingly well-preserved Academy Award winners.
Jen Chaney: Okay, the one flaw in this multi-presenter thing is the thanking goes on a little long.
A-Blog (mudge): I gotta say, I really like this format of having five presenters and their doing a direct address to the nominees. Although I do miss seing a minute or so of the clips.

11:49
Me: This thing might actually be over by midnight.
Jez: dodai: How much over are we? It was supposed to end at 11:30 right?
Jez: tracie: 25 minutes over
EW: Thom: The show clocked in at three and a half hours exactly. Is that what you guessed in the office pool
A-blog (fb): Ok, time for lights out. Toodles boodle and sweet dreams.

12:06
Me: And that goes double for me.

25 Random Things About Facebook

1. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg who was a student at Harvard, the same school Bill Gates dropped out of to found Microsoft.
2. Zuckerberg dropped out to become CEO of Facebook.
3. His friends sued him when they found out he used their code.
4. They sued him again when they found out how much Facebook is worth.
5. Facebook is estimated to be worth about fifteen billion dollars.
6. I have three Facebook accounts.
7. Yellojkt Yellojkt is for my imaginary friends.
8. My real name is for my family and people that don't know I blog.
9. Mo MoDo is so that I can leave comments about Maureen Dowd on blogs that require a Facebook account like Huffington Post.
10. Facebook has been banned by the Maryland General Assembly.
11. The 25 Things About Me Meme has been done over five million times.
12. Claude at Baltimore Diary is one of them.
13. The Girl From Park Heights is another.
14. Time Magazine finds the 25 Things meme very annoying.
15. The Wall Street Journal tried to figure out who started it, but couldn't.
16. Slate is looking too.
17. Dan Zak of the Washington Post wrote a 25 Random Things List about the meme.
18. The 25 Things meme requires you to forward it to 25 friends.
19. I don't have 25 friends on Facebook.
20. Yellojkt has 17 friends.
21. My real name has 14 friends.
22. My son has 587 friends.
23. Stanford teaches parents how to use Facebook to spy on keep up with their kids.
24. I do a lot of silly memes.
25. I don't do memes that come from Facebook.

B.A.D. To The Bone

Tomorrow is Blogroll Amnesty Day, which at first blush seems like yet another random traffic-generating scheme of somebody's, but it really has a colorful and tragic history. Jon Swift was alarmed to learn that 'amnesty' was a euphemism for 'delete.' Some major blogs did a Stalinist style purge of all the little blogs on their blogroll and granted themselves amnesty from their actions. Rather than cotton to that, Jon Swift and skippy the bush kangaroo decided to turn it around and make the occasion a celebration of little blogs.

To participate, you are supposed to highlight five blogs smaller than your own. Thanks to the long tail of blogging, there are always blogs smaller than yours. Yes, that means even you. My problem was how to identify which ones were actually smaller than me. I respect and admire all the blogs on my blogroll and that sort of stat-measuring contest struck me as a little unseemly, but I had to go by something.

Nonetheless, I ran each blog through Technorati to get their “Authority” which is just a measure of how many other blogs link to them. It turns out that of the blogs I read, thanks to my endless BlogWhoring and LinkGrubbing, I’m bigger than about two-thirds of them. Since that didn't seem right, I ran the urls through Alexa.com which claims to measure traffic. By that ranking, I came closer to the middle of the pack, which sounds about right.

Now, none of the blogs I put on my blogroll are huge by any means. The Biggest Swinging Dick on the list is Blogography who is still small potatoes compared to Dooce and her ilk, proving yet again there is no justice in this world. So among the blogs that have both lower traffic and lower authority, these folk deserve some more attention.

Trusty Getto: Trusty is one of my oldest and dearest blogfriends. We seem to have struck it off from the start. When I first started reading him, was going through an ugly divorce, but since then he seems to have found happiness with a new lady friend since he doesn't talk much about his personal life any more. He is a prominent ambulance chaser lawyer in Ypsilanti and his blog has been outed, so nowadays he writes a lot of good insidery stuff about Michigan and local politics. He seems destined for higher office some day. And he has the least hair of any headbanger I know.

Mooselet Musings: Another blogger that has been with me from the start is Mooselet who is an expatriate American married and living in Australia. For some reasons Americans down under write great blogs.

Baltimore Diary: Claude is an old buddy from the early days of The Comics Curmudgeon that just turns out to live in Baltimore, the capitol of comics-snarking. His blog sometimes cut to the bone with his takes on the Baltimore City Schools bureaucracy. I just feel bad that I keep snubbing his very excellent parties.

FlasshePoint: Yet another Comics Crumudgeon buddy, Flasshe has an excellent random thoughts style blog that veers from topic to topic, much like mine, only wittier and more succinct. I keep wanting to steal features from him like the Pet Peeve Of The Day and the Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog.

Architectural Dance Society: Just the title alone is a keeper. 2fs is perhaps my most intellectually deep blogger-reader-commenter and has a fantastic blog about music I have never, ever heard. But he always makes it fascinating and relevant. Frankly, it shocks me that my blog just barely edges his out in those clearly useless statistics. A guy this smart needs to much more widely read.

A Little Night Music: For music a little closer to my tastes, I read The Mistresses of the Dark excellent blog. She is a huge Elvis Costello fan and always has excellent lists on Fridays. She is also lots of fun and just a day-brightener every time I read her blog.

The Conical Glass: I've noticed that an awful lot of my blogroll is music oriented, even though my blog really isn't. Sue does my other links one better in that she actually owns a record company and a web design firm. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, so she gets to go to all sorts of unique cultural events I can only dream of. She is an erstwhile Baltimoron as well, so we also have that connection.

Grateful Dating: Jamy holds a special place in my heart because she actually asked to be on my blogroll. I live vicariously through her various dating travails and her active life in DC. She recently got back from a six-month sojourn in France of which I am deeply frenvious.

That brings up my Blogrolling In Our Time Spy Tribute which may or may not pre-date Jon Swift's Liberal Blogrolling Policy. To be on my blogroll is to be read by at least one person. I read every blog on my list, big or small, at least 3-4 times a week and sometimes daily. The blogroll is hand-coded and is in an order that makes sense only to me. It is not reflective of anything resembling favoritism, size, topic, or frequency of commenting. I infrequently drop people from it and since they never seem to notice it's just as well.

My only pang is in calling any of these blogs "small". There are no small blogs, just great blogs that don't get read as much as they should.

BlatantCommentWhoring™:What 'small' blog should I be reading?

Updated 10:30 p.m.: I forgot Mooselet. My apologies.

No Duh News

In further proof that I have waaaay too much time on my hands, I have started yet another blog. Called No Duh News, it is devoted to those news stories that have made me stop in shock and slap my forehead screaming "No Duh!" Or at least mumble "Of course."

The format is a blog title that is the headline of an actual news story somewhere, a quote from the article that states something profoundly obvious and a quick sarcastic comment from me. So, it's basically what I do all day long anyways.

I started the blog at the beginning of the year as a project in beta. I have redone the template twice and changed the name once (adios, The No Duh Awards which was a take on The Darwin Awards, but I like the succinctness of No Duh News better). For nearly a month now I have managed to find several items a week worthy of my notice. If you haven't been reading it (and absolutely nobody has) you have missed such epic revelations as:

• Mark McGwire took steroids.
• Lots of people saw Obama get inaugurated.
• Teenagers have sex even when they promise not to.
• The U.S. tortured prisoners.
• People who drink too much end up having sex.
• The economy really sucks. Really bad. I mean really, really bad.
• If your husband dies because you set his genitals on fire, you can be charged with murder.

Here's where you come in. First of all, subscribe to the blog because it's mildly amusing, has quick, easy to read posts (which in and of itself is a huge differentiator from Foma*), and you have nothing better to do.

Then, e-mail me tips with news stories that have made you go "No Duh!" I have even set up a special e-mail hotline for just that purpose at noduhnews -AT- gmail -DOT- com. And I will be sure to pass along the news and the credit.

No duh!

Weblog Award Logrolling

Nothing spells excitement like a phony ridiculous contest (see NajuReMoNoMo) and awards shows are the king of phony. The 2008 Weblog Awards are underway and in a desparate attempt to draw pageviews, nominees are encouraged to get their readers to vote early and often since these awards have all the integrity of an American Idol knock-off.

Of course everybody wants their own blog to win, even if they don't admit it. What is more interesting is what other blogs they read and recommend. In my little circles it does seem to be a fairly incestuous bunch, not that there is anything wrong with that. Let's take a look:

Best Humor Blog

WONKETTEE endorses COMICS CURMUDGEON
FRANCESCO EXPLAINS IT ALL endorses COMICS CURMUDGEON
VIEW FROM THE CLOUD endorses MATTRESS POLICE
THE ROAD LESTER TRAVELLED endorses MATTRESS POLICE
Handicapping: This is Josh's category to lose. I've never heard of Mattress Police but two blogs I read and respect have. It may be worth a mercy vote just to give it some cred.

Best Comic Strip

COMICS CURMUDGEON endorses MEDIUM LARGE
WONKETTE endorses MEDIUM LARGE

Handicapping: This is the only category I really, really care about. Medium Large is currently trailing Day by Day by just over a hundred votes. DbD is a whiny reactionary piece of slime that makes Mallard Fillmore look fair and balanced. Not that Medium Large is anything but unbalanced, just in a good way. If you vote anywhere vote here.

Best Liberal Blog

COMICS CURMUDGEON endorses WONKETTE
WONKETTE endorses TALKING POINTS MEMO

Handicapping: Wonkette is so crushing the competition that it is throwing a bone to a blog that probably really deserves to win. That would be an impressive show of sportsmanship if it weren't really a "fuck you" powerplay on the part of Wonkette by saying that not only will it win the category, it will pick who comes in second.

Best New Blog

WONKETTEE endorses ~ synthesis ~

Best Small Blog

WONKETTEE endorses RUMPROAST

Handicapping: These two endorsements are just Wonkette throwing its weight around. Wonkette has a devoted following of minions that are willing to jump off any bridge just because Wonkette is doing it. Their ulterior motive is to downvote some rival PUMA blogs, so I heartily support their efforts.

Best LGBT Blog

COMICS CURMUDGEON endorses BILERICO PROJECT
Handicapping: I'm a little ashamed I don't know any blogs in this category, but if someone has the good taste to read Comics Curmudgeon, they are worthy in my eyes.

Finally, the Good Sportsman Award belongs to JON SWIFT who is a contender for second place in the Best Humor Blog category. On his blog he has listed all the blogs from his rather expansive blogroll that are nominated in other categories. Since Comics Curmudgeon is lapping the field in this category, I heartily suggest giving Jon some moral support as well.

And if and when I'm ever nominated for anything anywhere (hint, hint) I hope I can count on as much support as these folks are giving each other.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: have you ever been nominated for anything? Or do you have some other contender you would like to pimp?

Blog365 Wrap-Up

On New Years Day this year I published my ambition to be a member of Blog365, a meme or contest or challenge or something to post every day of the year except Leap Day. So now it is time to reconcile.

The definition of “posting” was left purposefully vague so that as broad a definition as possible was allowed. Since at the time I had three blogs going (the other two are Dowd Report – the world’s best and only blog devoted (and we mean that in the creepiest sense of the word) to NYT columnist Maureen Dowd and China Sights – a photojournal of my trip to China in 2007), I figured that as long as I posted to one of them, it counted. Even by that standard, I didn’t quite make it. A check of my blog against the calendar shows that there were 50 days when I didn’t post anything anywhere. Some of that is due to vagaries of the clock and calendar. If you look at days where I made two posts either the day before or the day after, the count goes down to 32 days.

My longest dry spell was from June 29 to July 7 when I was on vacation in Cape Cod. Our rental house had wifi service which was in almost constant use by one teenager or another, but I kept busy enough touristing and socializing to not really have time to blog. I saw that as a good thing. Towards the end of September I also inexplicably went a week without any new material on Foma*, even though I did make four posts for the Dowd Report.

By another measure, I more than met the spirit of the challenge. Here is the count of the total posts I made by blog:

Foma* - 217
Dowd Report – 152
China Sights – 44
Total – 413

That exceeds the rate of one post a day by comfortable margin. During the past year I also uploaded 1,457 pictures to my Flickr account, which by the rules of Blog 365 count as posts. But I mostly did those in bulk, so I’m not taking credit for those.

I put China Sights on hiatus after the Olympics and Maureen Dowd went on an extended leave without warning me, leaving Foma* all alone as my flagship blog for December.

Did I enjoy the challenge? I sure did. It made for a lot of logistical planning and decision making. I did manage to blog every single day of my trip to England which I probably wouldn’t have done had I not been under the challenge.

Am I going to do it again? Not on your life. Judging my the number of missed days, I clearly am not up to the rigors of that kind of schedule. I admire daily bloggers, but I just don’t have the schedule flexibility or the creativity to keep it up on a semi-permanent basis.

So what does the next year hold? Foma* is definitely not going anywhere. I will continue to post 3-4 times a week or as the mood strikes. At any given time I have a backlog of a half dozen post ideas I’m kicking around as well as my snap reactions to current events, so I hope I won’t burn-out anytime soon.

I do need to do some work on the plumbing of the blog, which takes away from the actual blogging. The template needs a refresh and I would like to upgrade my header to something splashier.

I’m a “learn by doing guy” and teaching myself video-editing is something that is on my agenda. I have a huge backlog of video from my trip to China two years ago that I would like to futz with, although I’m not sure what is the best way to release that.

And I do love all my readers which is why I am such a BlatantCommentWhore. I know there are a lot of competing blogs, podcasts, social networks, and porn sites out there way more fascinating than my humble exercise in narcissism, so I appreciate the time you spend reading my incoherent ramblings. You can’t have an exhibitionist without a victim and I thank you for continuing to walk past my virtual front porch.

Finally I want to wish everybody a Happy New Year. And the Fourth Annual National Just Read More Novels challenge begins tomorrow.

Elf You

Two years ago, I found a silly dancing Christmas elf gimmick on the web (yeah, there's a first for me) and linked to it. Maybe it's because I credited it to Office Depot instead of OfficeMax or just some quirk of the Google Authority Hype (or GAH!) but a few days ago my blog traffic to that two year old post just exploded (which for me means literally dozens of hits) as people began searching for seasonal goofy gimmicks. And who am I to resist?

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

The Office Max Elf is now powered by JibJab which gives you more choices of dippy dances. Since I am also the King of Cheesy 70s Music, I decided the disco dance version suited me best. And I might was well use the most recent picture of me, which is this one. You can see if I've changed any in two years (the original picture is probably even older than that).



So go ahead and make your dancing elf. It's the spirit of the season. And there's never anything wrong with making fun of yourself on the web.

Pi-Mile

In my BooksFirst post this month, I made fun of so-called "stunt journalists" that do things that they otherwise wouldn't just so they can write about the experience. I have to confess that I am a stunt blogger. I frequently pick activities based on their blogworthiness. I'm in Atlanta this weekend for Family Weekend. While the ostensible purpose of the trip is to see our son, who is showing a severe lack of homesickness in every way, I'm going to be able to squeeze several blogposts out of the trip, including this one.

While out of town, I try to vary my exercise routine to match what is available. The GT Hotel and Conference Center where we are staying so as to be within walking distance of all the activities, has a decent workout room, but the weather is too nice to stay inside.



In 2007 I blogged about Pi Day which is March 14th every year. I mentioned in that post that Georgia Tech sponsors a 5K race every year called the Pi-Miler because it is 3.14 miles in length. They have made it a year round activity with the creation of the Larry Brown Pi Mile Running Trail. The sheer geekiness of concept is just genius.

The trail is really just a route along existing sidewalks that goes around the campus and passes nearly all the major attractions including Bobby Dowd Stadium (at Historic Grant Field), the Tech Tower, the Student Center, the Campus Recreation Center (which was built around the 1996 Olympic Aquatic Center) and Alexander Memorial Coliseum (aka the ThrillerDome aka The Tit).

It seemed like a perfect route for a morning jog. This summer I started jogging some mornings and have built up to about a mile at a time. Over three miles just seemed to much to even imagine. But what a cool blogpost it would make. At first, my goal was just to get as far as I could without walking. By the time I had gone from Fifth and Techwood to the CRC, I realized I was over halfway there.

So I decided to see if I could make the whole circuit. Even when my iPod locked up, I resisted the temptation to stop and rest. The Fates were tempting me, but I refused to give in. The course makes it easy to set smaller goals along the way. There are sidewalk markers every quarter mile in addition to the arrow imbeds to make sure you take the correct turns. All you have to do is press on another quarter mile thirteen times in a row. By the time I reached the north end of Ferst Street in the shadow of Ted Turner's empire, I knew I could make.

I passed tailgaters setting up for the game and high school bands unloading for their part of the halftime show. And them I got back to Fifth Street and had just one uphill block to go. I poured out my remaining energy and tagged the sign where I had started and gasped in triumph.

It took me about forty minutes to make the full circuit, which is hardly a marathon ready pace. But I had never run more than a mile and a half at once before. And what kept me going was the thought of how lame it would be to blog that I had to stop and rest. By making it a continuous run, the stunt had become blogworthy. I had run 3.14 miles just so I could brag about it on the internet.

So who says that blogging can't be good for your health?

BlatantCommentWhoring™: What have you done just to have something to blog about?

Madame Unmade

I swore never to blog about this topic again. But like a disingenuous Al Pacino in Godfather III, they keep dragging me back in. Yesterday afternoon I indirectly learned of an AP news story that went thus:

A woman police believe to be convicted Washington escort service operator Deborah Jeane Palfrey committed suicide, officials said Thursday.

And there in the fifteenth paragraph was that name. The parallels were too eerily similar not to be mentioned. And sure enough, wherever the DC Madam was discussed, such as on Wonkette, some show off brought it up.

My narcissistic first reaction was a pit in my stomach and the thought that my blog traffic is going to explode for all the wrong reasons. I was right. Here is a graph taken about 11:30 last night displaying a classic exponential decay curve:

Depending on whose stopwatch and turnstile you are using, I got between 20,000 and 25,000 page views yesterday. Here’s how they broke down:

Really Desperate Housewife	8,516
Brandy’s Back	8,673
HoCo Hooker Update	568
Brandy Britton, RIP	652
Cute Baby Pictures	985

The Cute Baby Pictures post has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand, but seems to be enjoying some sort of halo effect benefit from all the other traffic.

As oddly obsessive as I am about my blog statistics I have never kept a running track of my busiest days. The time Defamer linked to my Studio 60 Drinking Game was huge. And everytime Josh of Comics Curmudgeon finds something of mine worthy of mention the traffic it sends is twice as much as the time before. But clearly this incident has to be the new benchmark.

I’ve said it before in my protests-too-much voice that I would rather have ten regular readers than a thousand rubberneckers. This is pretty much that case writ large. Fortunately, the web is big place where people have short memories and there are lots of shiny objects. There will be echoes and aftershocks, but I hope this is a coda to an odd bizarre story that is finally closed.

I’m not really in mourning, but this is the third suicide of someone I don’t really know that has drawn my attention in the past week. The phenomenon both puzzles and concerns me. It’s such a harsh and permanent solution to a problem. Palfrey was facing a potential 55 years in jail (but likely only to be sentenced to four to eight) and had sworn she was never going to serve time. And she didn’t.

For those of you who feel (rightly, I think) that the whole Palfrey imbroglio has been pruriently overplayed, I offer this comparison: Ken Lay the pirate at the helm of Enron was looking at a potential twenty to thirty years in jail when he died of a heart attack before his sentencing.

BlatantComment(MetaphoricalOnly)Whoring™: Draw your own ironic conclusions.

Postscript: This Washington Post Palfrey piece is particularly poignant.

The Master Schedule

When I signed on to post a blog post every day for a year, I knew it would be tough going. One reader even predicted I would become bored with the gimmick. Well, it’s nearly a third of the way through and I have for the most part succeeded. Rather than force a lot of drama and anxiety into my blogging, it has given me some pace and structure.

The rules of Blog365 state that any blogpost anywhere counts and even allows for things like Flickr uploads to count. While I haven’t resorted to Flickr tricks, I have used some gimmicks. I really write three separate blogs: Foma* (I like it when people include the asterisk), my flagship blog: Dowd Report, “written” by my Maureen Dowd obsessed alter ego, Mo MoDo; and China Sights, a photo blog of my visit to China last year.

The key is that China Sights is the safety valve. I have a nearly unlimited reserve of pictures to blog about that make for a quick and easy post when the time crunch gets too great. I’m so guilt-ridden about using this shortcut, that I will often post three or four related posts in rapid succession which can be a bit dizzying depending on what order you read them.

The structure comes from the publishing schedule of Maureen Dowd’s New York Times column which comes out Sunday and Wednesday. I like to post about these as soon as possible while they are fresh. So a typical week of blogging works like this:

Sunday: Dowd Report. I usually have all morning to read the column and research the silly pop culture references that are my focus. I try not to get to worked up about the politics itself because plenty of other people do that already.

Monday: Foma*. If I have a lot of free time on Sunday, I can leisurely work on an entry to be posted later. I often also spend Sunday uploading pictures to Flickr or doing other nuts and bolts maintenance.

Tuesday: Foma*. Since it is one post per day and the Monday entry is usually up in the morning, I have a day and a half to come up with the next one. This is usually posted late in the evening.

Wednesday: Dowd Report. This is the most difficult post of the week. I try to get it written and posted before I go to work. I’ve learned to hack the url of the NYT columnists pages, so sometimes I get a sneak peak at the column Tuesday night so I can collect my ideas.

Thursday: Foma*. If I can get a Foma* post written by Thursday morning, that keeps with the general every day-and-a-half pace I like to keep.

Friday: Dealers Choice. I sometimes write posts about what other bloggers have written about the latest Dowd column as a Dowd Report Blogwatch item or I’ll have something time sensitive I want to get into Foma*.

Saturday: Any Of The Above. Depending on what I posted to on Friday, I will do one of the other two blogs on Saturday. I like to make sure that either the Friday or Saturday post is to Foma* so that I don’t go too long between posts.

So in any given week I will have posted at least four times to Foma*, twice to Dowd Report and once more to whatever strikes my fancy. This may sound very rigid, but it’s really quite flexible and has taken some of my procrastinating tendencies out of the picture.

Now if only I could get the rest of my life into this level of order, I’d be doing fine. But I can only control what I am in charge of.

BlatantCommentWhoring®: Do you blog on a routine or whenever it strikes your fancy?

Cables And Wires And Dongles Galore

Faithful readers will recall that I made the plunge into the world of high definition television recently. One of the first things that got hooked up to it was my son’s Wii (which is only 480p for those of you that follow these things).

We had the Magic League (remember them?) and one of the players was wearing an obscure tee shirt with an funny logo. He said it was based on a web cartoon called Making Fiends check them out). Curious, we wanted to watch some sample episodes so we fired up the Wii that has a built in web browser and started watching the deranged but funny cartoons. Unfortunately, the quality was fairly poor and the navigation really clunky. Wiimotes are great for playing games but lousy for typing in url’s.

A couple of weeks later, we were planning our summer vacation with two other families. We’re planning on sharing a vacation rental and we wanted to reach some consensus on which property to get. We used a video to S-video adaptor to send the signal from my wife’s four-year old MacBook to the TV. The image was also grainy, but serviceable. It was also awkward barking commands at my son who was sitting at the laptop running the mouse and keyboard.

I remembered that the TV has a VGA input suitable for a computer. I knew I had a spare VGA cable around but it turned out to be female to male and I needed male to male. Even more than that, the laptop has a non-standard outlet that Apple calls mini-VGA so I needed a mini-VGA to VGA converter and a VGA cable. I daisy-chained that all together and adjusted the resolution on the laptop. Voila! I was surfing the web in crystal clear full color.

My wife gave my the url of a YouTube video she wanted to watch. Youtube videos look awful on a bigscreen no matter what, but the tinny sound out of the laptop was something I could do something about. I had two choices. I could use a 1/8” stereo wire and run it straight from the laptop into the television or I could use a 1/8” jack to RCA cable splitter and use the auxiliary input to the home theater system. I settled on the latter even though YouTube video through anything is just as bad. What did sound good was the AOL.com full CD listening party stream of the new Hillary McRae album while I was surfing blogs with my feet up on the couch.

While I was at MallStoreOfWires I noticed that they had a very small USB cordless mouse. That would go a long way to freeing me from having to keep the laptop within arms distance. That took a certain amount of experimentation to learn that while the arm of the sofa made a terrible mouse pad, the seat cushion next to me worked fine. Coupled with a Bluetooth keyboard, I can be anywhere in the room as long as my eyesight is keen enough to read the text.

My wife also has a newer PowerBook from work that is, of course, incompatible with with all the adaptors for the MacBook. It’s video connection is mini-DVI which converts to standard DVI which then connects to the TV with a DVI to HDMI cable. The DVI cable resulted in some weird stuff. Program windows (like Firefox) that appeared on the laptop screen wouldn't show up on the television. But then the Mac program Dock only worked on the TV. It was like the set-up was haunted. I gave up and switched back to a VGA cable and fiddled with both the Mac and TV settings until I got a really great full screen image at 1280 x 768 (the internal video card will support higher resolutions, but the TV won't). Still, it's a great image.

So here is the full list of items sitting in the backet o’cables next to the TV:

Mini-VGA to S-video convertor
Mini-VGA to VGA convertor
Mini-DVI to S-video convertor
Mini-DVI to DVI convertor
6 foot DVI to HDMI cable
6 foot male to male VGA cable
6 foot male to female VGA cable
6 foot 1/8” stereo cable
6 foot 1/8” to RCA cable
6 foot S-video cable
USB mouse
Bluetooth keyboard

And that doesn’t include the various sundry Wii peripherals.

The point wasn't to brag or show more pictures of my BigAssTV, but to take some baby steps towards convergence and see what I could lash together using my existing consumer electronics inventory and some cables. Now that I've completed the proof of concept phase, I can move on to exploring online video options and go from there.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Is a 48" monitor too much or not enough?

Post 500

I don’t make a big deal of milestones on this blog because I just don’t pay that much attention. But when I noticed that I was approaching 500 posts, I took notice. Five hundred is a lot of anything. I don’t bicycle 500 miles in a summer. I own less than five hundred CDs (well maybe that many, I haven’t counted lately). Five hundred is two hundred more than the Spartans that stopped the Persians. Okay, those aren't good examples. Let's just say five hundred is a lot and leave it at that.

It’s taken me nearly three years to reach this milestone. Over the years I have waxed redundant on all sorts of pop cultural phenomena and strip mined my meager uneventful life for hopefully amusing anecdotes. My biggest fear is to start repeating myself. I often find myself putting together a particularly pithy phrase only to vaguely remember using it before. I'll use Google to check for prior art just to keep me from plagiarizing myself.

When you include the bon mots and vignettes I leave in the comments of other blogs or in the boodle of the Achenblog, I have a body of work that exceeds the ability of my rapidly declining memory to catalog. I fear that when I hit blogpost 5,000 sometime in the late fall of 2025, I will have become the doddering uncle that tells the same story at Thanksgiving dinner year after year.

I'm just daily astonished that the world is a big enough place that there exists a couple of dozen people willing to spend a couple of minutes a day just to check out what sort of disjointed ramblings I have most recently cobbled together.

And that is where it comes full circle. I never would have made it to 500 posts if I hadn't found my particular sad and demented but sociable niche of the blogging community. One of the odd virtues of the virtual world is that it can be an itimate and personal place. As those porchfront sages Ed and Frank used to say, "Thank you for your support."

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Am I deserving of kudos or am I just tooting my out of tune horn?

Asking Permission

This post is a sequel to Begging Forgiveness.

I like a little visual interest on my blog posts. I usually add at least one graphic just to interrupt the huge block of my babbling underneath the title. I also like to use my own work if possible. If I have a photo even remotely related to the topic, I will use that. My Times Square Flag Still Flies post was mostly inspired by the fact that I did have a picture of the building that got bombed and it creeped me out a little bit that you never know when and where news will occur. For my Gary Gygax eulogy, I went and took a picture of my own D&D dice rather than find a stock image and I wove the distressing condition of the dice into the story.

Other posts of mine like where I mock celebrities I use commonly available publicity shots of my objects of scorn. I really have no qualms about using these photos which, while not in the public domain, are clearly in the public sphere. Since I’m usually snarking about something, I feel I can mount a pretty decent “review and comment” or “satire” defense. At least in my own mind. Nobody’s ever called me on it and Ces is actually impressed with my signs of creepily obsessive devoted fandom.

But some topics need a visual clue that I don’t have, so I go Googling. For my follow-up D&D post where, according to the quiz, I’m an elf wizard. I did a Google Image search and in the first page of results, was this terrific image (click on the link, it really is just perfect) which came from the blog of DPI Studios. I downloaded the image to my hard drive and then uploaded it to Blogger.com. Since Blogger (which is owned by Google) has nearly unlimited storage, I feel better and safer doing that rather than deep-linking to the original image. I have some scruples.

When you do that, the link on the image in the post goes to the full size source stored on the Blogger server. This can be easily edited to redirect wherever I want. What I did with the elf was link the image to the source blogpost of DPI. At the bottom of the post I also included a link to their main homepage. I don’t usually include explicit image credits, but I thought these guys merited it.

Having just been burned on the Rock Album Meme photo guy going ballistic, I decided to do the decent thing and send one of the image owners an alert that I had used their illustration that they had posted on the web where anybody could find it. I phrased the e-mail so that if they never responded, I could assume it was okay with them:

I have a blog and wrote about Dungeons and Dragons and needed an image of an elf wizard. I found your site through a Google search and downloaded to my own server (actually Blogger.com's) an image you recently created. I have credited DPI Studios and linked the image to your blog.

Please let me know if this is not an acceptable use of your artwork. Thanks for your cooperation.

But they did reply. And they seemed a little puzzled that I even bothered to ask, but they didn’t like the idea.

Yeah, I really wish you would have contacted us before you put that up. Since that piece was done for Green Ronin Publishing we can't give you permission to use it. I feel bad having put it up with out a Green Ronin copyright notice, I'll have to change that.

Thanks for your interest in our work and thanks for asking permission.

They were kind enough to suggest some other images, and I did replace the original one with one of the “permission granted” alternatives, but it wasn’t quite as perfect a match.

Most of the time when I “steal’ an image it’s from a website that clearly didn’t create it but got it from someplace else themselves (like the Google Search image I put on this post for purely prurient purposes). When, like the fine folks at DPI Studios, it’s clearly original artwork, I think it’s only right to link back to the source and credit the heck out of it.

I’m still not sure about the whole issue of whether it’s easier to beg forgiveness or ask permission. I do a blog post a day somewhere and to wait around for a reply granting permission for an image when I don’t even have an example of what I intend to do with it seems like a prescription for rejection. I think I will continue to figure this out on a case by case basis. And if I’ve used something of yours on my blog, just let me know and we can discuss it reasonably.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Do you put images on your blog, and if you do, where do you get them?

Begging Forgiveness

On of the funnest and most popular memes I did recently was the Rock Album Cover meme that combined a band name, an album title and a Flickr image for a cover. The image is taken from a group of highly rated photos. Most of these pictures are from professional photographers and carry a copyright. The photo that got selected for me was by Roland Lacson of rlphotography. About a month after I posted the meme, I got this message through Flickrmail:

This has been brought to my attention, so I'll be civil here & hope you understand that I have every right as to the reason for this message. This is in regards to MY Image ( River Rocks #4) you posted on your site @ blogspot.com W/O MY PERMISSION! I don't appreciate it & am disturbed. Taking into account that at least you had the decency of crediting me, I'm still disappointed that you disregarded what I clearly & specifically stated on my profile, I mean were adults here so just put yourself in my shoes...

Sure enough. On his profile page is this disclaimer:

ALL IMAGES ARE COPYRIGHTED, PLEASE DO NOT USE WITHOUT PERMISSION...

Not a lot of ambiguity there and I’m definitely in the wrong here. I sent back this apology and explanation:

I apologize for my unauthorized use of your copyrighted image. I have removed the image from the blogpost in question.

Intellectual property rights and the protection of creative work in the digital age are frequent themes on my blog and I was wrong to use your image without seeking your permission.

I used it as part of an internet “blog meme” where bloggers made mock-ups of fictitious album covers as a creative exercise. Your picture was randomly chosen from a pool of the highest rated images on Flickr, of which you should be rightly proud. I and several of my readers and fellow bloggers expressed concern that the “rules” of this game tended to select possibly infringing images. At least one other participant found a way to do the task by only using images available under a Creative Commons license that allow non-commercial derivative work.

My only rationalization (and it is pretty weak) is that my use of your work has no commercial value to you, me, or any third part and can’t possibly have affected any potential revenue for you. I would like to know how you became aware of my blog and if you would have done so if it weren’t for my clear crediting of your work.

I realize that I have destroyed any potential goodwill between us by not asking your permission in advance, but I would like to restore the image to that one blogpost as credited under the clear understanding that it remains your intellectual property. Please let me know if this is acceptable to you.

You did ask me to put myself in your shoes. I am a hobbyist photographer and blogger and make no money from my publicly posted pictures and written works. I have, on admittedly rare occasion, been asked for permission to use my works on other websites (and in one case a printed book) and have always granted permission provided I am credited and linked to. I understand that your standing as a professional artist would cause you to have a different reaction to circumstances under which I would have been flattered rather than outraged.

He replied with this:

Appreciate the gesture & I accept your apology. Regardless of usage be it commercial or non, it is common courtesy to seek permission for something that does not belong to you, by nature I have no problem if my image is used as long as I'm asked first & equally important given the info as to what purpose & due credits (Which I Acknowledged), that's all.

So in light of your sincere message, your request to have the image reposted to your blogpost is hereby granted.

I appreciate the cooperation of Mr Larson and have endeavored to follow his advice. It’s not always easy but it is what’s right.

Next Post: Asking Permission

BlatantCommentWhoring™: What would you have done if you were in his shoes?

Rejoinders

Part of the joy of blogging is reading and commenting on other blogs. Often a quick comment I leave makes me ponder a topic that I sometimes later expand into a full blogpost. Today I take three smaller ones and give you a trifecta of what are extended blog comments.

Mooselet has a great exegesis on the practice of following shoppers through a parking lot to their car in order to take their parking space. She calls it “stalking”. I call it “vulturing”. Either way, it involves driving very slowly behind people laden with shopping bags hoping their car is in the aisle they are actually in rather than some adjacent row that would make the exercise pointless. Parking lot technique is one of the many areas in which I am inferior to my wife. She knows which aisle to go down and how fast. She can spot potential victims across the parking lot and maneuver herself so that other cars are cut off.

I take the typically male tactic of snapping up the first available space regardless of proximity to any nearby entrance. My obviously deficient parking theory is that by getting out of the car as fast as possible, the extra time spent walking is less than the time spent stalking, resulting in getting into the store faster. I’m still not sure how this is wrong, but it clearly is.

When I do park near a department store door, it somehow tends to be the one to the lingerie department. Most of the time, I can humor my wife and accede to her directing from the shotgun position. However, after Halloween, the crush of holiday shoppers frays my nerves so much that I voluntarily relinquish my masculine birthright to drive and let my wife drive to the mall. Where she vultures with the skill of California condor.

2fs rants on his pet peeve of occasionally and randomly getting charged full price for drink refills at dining establishments. In the relentless effort of businesses to make customers perform the duties previously performed by employees (think of self-serve check out lines), many fast food restaurants now let patrons pour their own drinks. In those places it never makes sense to buy a cup size larger than small (which was easily the jumbo a decade or two ago) since more soda is free. Some sharp industrial engineer has performed the calculus and decided that the labor saved on the minimum wage counter help outweighs the value of the soda taken by surreptitious seconds and thirds and the walking-out-the-door top-off.

In the places that still meter liquids I will sometimes pay the extra dime for the bigger cup so I just don’t have to go back to the counter and jump the line for a refill. The one place I commonly get the biggest size available is ChainChickenPlaceClosedOnSunday where I have developed a taste for diet lemonade. I think they do offer free or low cost refills, but I just want as much as possible.

Free refills is a symptom of the high-fructose corn syrup gluttonous society that is peculiarly American. One of the many pieces of travel advice visitors to Europe get is that not only are drink portions small and expensive, the concept of free refills is up there with voluntary tips as an inexplicably yankee practice. Still, I agree that if the market is going to free refills, the few places that rip you off for a new cup don’t deserve our collective business. Name names, so I can organize the boycott.

Finally, Her Royal Highness, Queen of Everything Courtney has seen the specter of single gender schools get raised again. This is one of those evergreen educational “reforms” that become the rage on a regular basis. At least since all the elite male-only public high schools were turned co-ed decades ago. Here in Baltimore, old timers will mist up nostalgically for the old days when Baltimore Polytechnic was a bastion of testosterone. And they see some weird slight that adjacent Western High is still all-girls.

Same sex schools seem to be similar to school uniforms: solutions in search of a problem. One decade they are the answer to meek girls getting overshadowed by guys, particularly in math and science. The next year, they are the way to engage rambunctious young men. There are always studies “proving” (and don’t get me going on the educational industrial complexes complete abuse of statistical methods) the advantages of them, but the results can usually be dismissed as the result of the Hawthorne Effect.

There is a certain civilizing influence in having to attend classes with members of the opposite gender. If anything it humanizes the objects of your teenage lusts and teaches some social self-control. My parents threatened to send me to Jesuit High, the local all-boys Catholic school. I was given a reprieve when it turns out that they didn’t offer German or Calculus. I breathed a sigh of relief. From the days of my Model United Nations geek-festing, I came to notice that when outside the hearing range of their chaperones, the Jesuit teams, despite being impeccably well-dressed and conservatively groomed were just social animals. They practically bayed at the moon. Controlling for tuition payment, the co-ed private schools never seemed to be as out of control.

Of course, my opinions are prejudiced since I met my wife in high school, which would never have happened at Jesuit. What other doors that would have opened, I don’t know, but I’m happy where the traditional co-ed system took me.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Tackle any topic or go for all three.

Blog365 Day Of Rest

Under the rules of Blog365, the latest silly self-aggrandizing scheme I have signed onto, no post is required today since 2008 is a leap year and Leap Day is not necessary to make 365 posts within a year. Some bloggers have interpreted that to mean that participants are forbidden to post on Leap Day, which is ridiculous.

For reasons that may become apparent soon, I prefer to go the President's Day route and celebrate Blog365 Day Of Rest (Observed) on the day of my choosing.

That is all. Carry on.

Traffic Patterns

Comments are not the only way to measure blog success. There are dozens of ways to track all sorts of traffic patterns. And a lot of ways to goose them. Every now and then when I have a comics-related post I will link to it in the Comics Curmudgeon comments and it will generate hundreds of pageviews, but rarely any comments. It's nice to have hit and run readers, but it's better if they can be made into regulars. There are all sorts of memes and link exchanges and places to pimp your blog, but if all you are doing is tricking people to your site, it won't create steady long term readership growth.

The blog traffic generated by cheap gimmicks or weird Google coincidences is pretty ephemeral. Sometimes for some reason a particlular post will become suddenly popular. Back when my traffic was in the low single digits daily, I called them a BlogStorm. I still get them and they can be more severe now that my GoogleAuthority (however that is figured) is much higher. Usually I can figure out what site is linking to me or what current event suddenly make an old post relevant again, but sometimes it remains a complete mystery.

Last week my traffic took an uptick with lots of searches for variations on "Walker/Browne wife". And this isn't the first time such an odd search creates a flurry and then disappears. Several other times I have been inundated with people trying to find "Hi Lois drunk neighbor". My only theory is that whenever there is some web trivia scavenger hunt that relates to the Walker/Browne comic strip oligarchic dynasty, I get the benefit of it since I am one of maybe three blogs that have ever discussed the relationship between Lois Flagstone and her brother Beetle Bailey, not to mention Hi's dipsomaniac neighbor Thirsty Thurston. There, you got your damn answers. Now leave my blog alone.


I used to be addicted to Sitemeter stats and would compulsively check them 50 or 60 times a day but got discouraged when I learned that most visitors to my site were hopelessly LostGooglers search for some occasionally very prurient things. When I was polishing my template (now that would make a great euphemism) as part of National Blog Posting Month, I consolidated my blog RSS feed to Feedburner and my documented subscibers went from 5 to 82 overnight. I had a much larger audience reading my blog on purpose then I realized. From a not wasting time point of view, Feedburner stats are much better than Sitemeter since they only update once a day. I briefly hit 102 subscribers the other day only to fall back down to 92. I have no idea what pissed off ten readers in 24 hours, but I guess 300 pixel high pictures of Charles Krauthammer's mug will have that effect on folk.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: How do you track your traffic? And are anywhere near as obsessive compulsive as I am?