12 Days of Blogmas, Day 12

Here's your last chance to win a gift card! You remember what to do, right?

1. Look at the pictures.

2. Try to figure out what Christmas carol they represent. Today it's the carol's title.

3. Leave a comment with your brilliant solution. Or be all funny and sarcastic and forfeit the Starbucks gift card, even though you have a four-latte-a-day-habit, and I'm looking at you, Susie Sunshine.

4. If you're right, you win a $15 Starbucks gift card. (Or an iTunes gift card, if you think Starbucks coffee tastes burnt.)

5. Remember, the phrase probably includes little words--basic verbs, articles, pronouns, and prepositions--that produce pretty strange results in Google Images. After all, it's Deck THE halls WITH boughs OF holly, and when you do a search for the, with, and of, you come up with pretty random images.

So look for the nouns. Christmas carol-y nouns like angels, mangers, stars, nights, oxen, and asses.

7. OK! I'm done! And so is Christmas. Gloria in excelsis deo, not to mention alleluia.

12 Days of Blogmas, Day 11

OK, here we are at the second-to-last day of Christmas. Which means it's the second-to-last chance for you to enter my contest.

You remember what to do, right?

1. Look at the pictures.


2. Try to figure out what Christmas carol they represent. (Usually I show the first line of the first verse, i.e., "Silent night, holy night" because just "Silent Night" would be too short.)


3. Leave a comment with your well-reasoned and thoughtful solution. Or take the opportunity to make fun of me.


4. If you're right, you win a $15 Starbucks gift card. (Or iTunes, if you prefer Dunkin Donuts coffee--and who doesn't?)


5. And here's a hint, because honestly, the emails are getting to me.
   
   Most of the time, the phrase I'm using includes little words--basic verbs, articles, pronouns, and prepositions--that produce pretty strange results in Google Images. After all, it's THE first Noel and WE three kings OF orient ARE. And when you do a search for the, we, of, and are, you come up with pretty random images.
   
   So look for the nouns. Christmas carol-y nouns like angels, mangers, stars, nights, oxen, and asses.



6. Also, in today's contest, I repeated a preposition from one of my previous days. And Manet was not painting an angel.



7. OK, angels little birds. It's out of the manger nest with you.

Ready?

12 Days of Blogmas, Day 6

On the sixth day of Christmas, your true Poppy gave to you ... another chance to win a $15 iTunes or Starbucks gift card by figuring out which carol is represented by these Googly images--where each image represents a word of the first line.






Good luck!

Numbers

Yesterday was a momentous day. You know how it's so cool when the car odometer turns over a really big number? Well, this week my Sitemeter went over 100,000.

Which would be kind of impressive, except I've been blogging for almost four years.

Yes, that's right, folks. Back in the stone age when I started blogging on my TRS-80, there was practically no one in the blogosphere. Well, except for early adopters like dooce, finslippy, Jen Lancaster, Melissa Summers, and the Daily Kos.

And now look how crowded the blogosphere has become. According to Technorati, every day the blogosphere (I swear that's the last time I use that word) welcomes 175,000 new blogs. And over 1.6 million posts per day.

It's like a Ponzi scheme of egomaniacal blathering. And yet, even with all this new competition, my hits continue to go up.

Yes, even without the steroid effect BlogExplosion produced when I joined in 2006 (and which completely jacked up my hits what with their Rent-My-Blog and Battle of the Blogs and all the other ways they've devised to get people to visit) more and more of you came by.

And of course, there are the people who are here for Christina Aguileras's butt crack, grotesque acrylic nails, shower dildos, and transvestite giraffes.

But you come. I mean, check out my numbers!

Oh, I know we're not supposed to talk about our hit counts. The same way we don't talk about our weight, bra size, and age, we don't talk about how many hits we get.

Well, "we" don't. But I do. Because basically, I have no shame.

So here you go: 178, 38DDD, and 51. But those numbers are just the beginning of my lack of boundaries! Check out these numbers:

On the last Monday of April, 2008, I had 173 hits.
On the last Monday of April, 2007, I had 74.
On the last Monday of April, 2006, I had 129. (Those are probably BlogExplosion hits.)
On the last Monday of April, 2005? I had four.

Now, am I impressed that it has taken me three years to go from four hits to 173? Of course not. Do I expect you to be impressed? No. But think about it. In the entire month of April, 2005, I got 167 hits. Now I get that in a day. This month I've had over 4,500 visitors.

These aren't "Woot! If I put ads on my blog, I'll sit back and watch the money roll in!" numbers.

But somehow it makes me really happy that I sit here typing in my drivel, and about a hundred and fifty of you show up every day to check it out.

So anyway, thank you. You are wonderful. And you have fabulous taste in on-line "literature." So let me know whether you'd like me to come up with something different--maybe pictures of Angelina's tattoos? Men who wear toenail polish? Just let me know. I've already admitted that I have no boundaries. I'm frank. I'm fearless. I like to think I'm funny. And when it comes to attracting readers? I'm a whore.

Guess whose blog is the number one result when you Google "baby shower dildo?"

That's right. Mine.

And I've got the hits to prove it.

I've given some thought to retitling the entry in question "The Adventures of a Baby Shower Dilbert."

But then I remember how much I enjoy messing with people.

Barbies Winner!

OK, I was really busy and there were a LOT of comments. And that is why it took me a while to do the drawing for the three new-in-box "Limited Edition" Barbies you were all so excited about.

Can I just say that I really enjoyed the comments? Especially the ones that used outrageous amounts of flattery? My other favorites were the ones that tried to evoke huge volcanic eruptions of hot molten guilt on my part. It didn't work, but I appreciate the effort.

You see, I am long past feeling guilt for anything other than my own stupidity in holding on to these Barbies for so long.

I mean, think of how many opportunities I've had to put those Barbies into a Toys for Tots bin. But no, I held out for Internet Stardom Whoredom!

----
For the drawing, I had 198 comments to deal with, so I headed over to random.org to work some random integer magic. But then I realized that not all 198 of the comments were actually people wanting to enter. Some of them were blackbird saying that while the Barbies were lovely, she thought she'd pass. Others were Joke, making fun of me (which seems extraneous when I write this blog, the one you're currently reading, to do exactly that.)

And then there were the people who entered more than once. I dumped the duplicate entries. I also snipped anyone who entered after the cut-off time of 5:00 p.m. Sorry, people, but I left you out of the running to make the odds better for the people who managed to enter on time. I'm cruel--but fair.

So that left me with 183 names. Then I added Jen Lancaster to make a total of 184.

So I plugged 184 into the random thingie. And the winning number was 169. And this left me using my left hand to count ... down ... 168 comments ... while ... I ... scrolled ... down ... the ... screen ... with ... my ... right ... hand. Which, not surprisingly, was easy to fuck up.

This resulted in much frustration and swearing as I started the whole ... long ... laborious ... process over again. And again.

And then, That Stuff Muffin I Married rescued me from my English-major stupidity.

Why not, he asked sagely, count up from the bottom?

So that's what I did.

(You know, he's just brilliant. And when I burst into grateful tears and hugged and kissed him, he looked at me calmly, pushed his glasses back up his nose, and said. "Well, dear--I am, after all, a computer scientist." Which is bullshit. He's an attorney. A smart one. Who doesn't stuff Barbies into every single one of our house's orifices.)

But I digress.

The winner is: Mandi. Who left this comment:

So I found you again through Jen's blog, originally heard of you from Susie Sunshine (I am sad she left her blog)... all that is beside the point, any who, I would love to be entered in the drawling for the Barbies because my "daughters" would love these, I have 2 daughters...one of them should like them right lol if not I have 3 nieces! Hey free barbies..I'll take anything free...they are free right? Haa haa

February 01, 2008 10:01 AM

(Just so you know, I've tried to accommodate Mandi in every way, including typing this description of the "drawling" with a really annoying affected version of Long Island Lockjaw. You can't hear it from where you're sitting, but I sound exactly like James Spader in Pretty in Pink.)

So anyway, Congratulations Mandi! Email me your address and the Barbies are yours.

To everyone else, thanks for playing! If I don't hear from Mandi in three days, I'll hold another random drawing, so keep the flattery and ass-kissing coming. A better woman would be above enjoying that sort of thing, but I LOVED IT.

Time's a-wasting

For your information, the chair in front of my desktop computer has been designated an official handicapped parking spot. This is so anyone who is officially handicapped, for instance, me, can sit here without fear of being ticketed.

And what am I doing sitting at my computer, you might well ask, since it's obviously not adding to my blog.

Well, I've been wearing a splint on my right wrist for a while, and it certainly put a dent in my blogging. But I am descended from Puritans, and, even though I was out of commission as re: blogging, I felt it my duty to discover new ways to waste time on the internet. Ways that don't require anyone to use an injured wrist. So that even the splinted amongst us can waste as much time as the able-bodied.

And it was surprisingly easy. All I had to do was switch from right- to left-handed mousing and I was in business.

So in the off-chance that you find yourself with way more time than you know how to fill, here are a few ways to waste time on the internet without having to do so much clicking and typing that you risk developing tendonitis:

1. On-line shopping. OK, I know, duh. But really, wasn't it lucky for me that our clothes dryer blew up on Thursday? Because this gave me the opportunity to shop on-line for a new one. This meant that instead of driving to an appliance store and buying a new dryer, I sat around, read consumer reviews, compared prices, and did all kinds of other consumer-related nonsense, when all along, I had every intention of 1) hitting the Abt website and 2) ordering their bottom-of-the-line Maytag gas dryer. Which is exactly what I did, after I felt I had wasted enough time.

2. Researching not one, but two possible car purchases. Not that I'm trying to suck up to my neighbors by copping some jazzy new wheels, but our cars are old and really, it's time we got something more reliable. With cup holders, even. Well. Just start hitting up eBay Motors and Edmunds.com and cars.com and Yahoo! cars and Consumer Reports and various car manufacturers' sites and your ability to waste time on the internet will go from zero to 60 in five seconds, baby, yeah!

2. Lurk on various fashion and makeup boards I don't usually bother to read, like Makeupalley, Beauty Buzz, and Who's the Fairest. This can get kind of depressing after a while, because I end up feeling more intelligent than about 85 to 90 percent of the posters. And believe it or not, this is not a feeling I enjoy. Let all the other cocksure assholes enjoy the sense of being intellectually superior to all they survey; I'll pass.

I mean, eventually it becomes depressing. Really, after a while you wonder whither all this fancy technology? (Like, for example, did you know that large numbers of people watch television and post to message boards at the same time? Mostly with a running commentary about how dumb the show they're watching is? Um, excuse me? I mean, do you want to become some kind of human I/O device, merely taking in data from one device before relaying it through another? How about turning off the television set and [gasp] reading a book? Or [gasp] having an actual conversation with another human being? Otherwise, aren't you really living in a bubble? )

3. Become an internet crank. See above.

4. Read blogs. Oh. Um ... so, you're telling me you knew that one already? OK.

5. Search for and download totally obscure music. It doesn't matter whether you actually plan to listen to it. I use Limewire. I also use commercial sites like the iMusic one, but where's the fun in that? User-to-user sharing is much more weird and random.

6. Search for and download video files--preferably episodes of obscure long-running series with a squid-like devoted fan base, like Mystery Science Theater 3000. That way you can enjoy the geek factor, as well.

7. Pick a few new extremely active Usenet groups and lurk there. On the advice of my pal Fiddledeedee, I started reading alt.gossip.royalty. Wow. Between the Camilla-bashing and the Diana-bashing, this was better than a triathalon of professional wrestling, an all-female roller derby, and a Krystal/Alexis catfight on the old Dynasty program. The great thing about this is these people are frothing. at. the. mouth. But it's not about anything to do with the United States, so it's actually very refreshing.

Here endeth the report on "How I Spent My Week in a Splint."

In case you're wondering, I did a few R/L things, as well. No, really, I did.