The Second Occasional Word Verification Contest

You keep coming back and I'm not sure why. It could be for entertainment, but that's doubtful. Maybe you just need to see that something in the world changes. Maybe you just need to see if I'm still alive and that the hitmen you hired are doing a terrible job. But no matter why, as I keep posting, you keep coming back. You take and take and take. It's time to give a little.

Yes, it's time for the Second Occasional Word Verification Contest. The first contest was a modest success and a lot of fun for me at least, so we're doing it again. Here are the rules, reprinted with permission:

Go to the comments and find a word in the word verification that sounds like something. Refresh as many times as you need to get a good word. It could sound like some foreign food, a disorder of some kind, but obviously it's best if it sounds dirty. Fairness tells me to only let people enter once, but my desire for entertainment outweighs that, so enter as many times as you like.

You can either post only the word, or post the word and give a fake definition to it. A winner will be selected for word and definition. The prizes are my grudging respect and half-hearted admiration, respectively. Just imagine if you win both! The winners will be announced Monday. I'm the judge of the contest. Sleeping with the judge dramatically improves your chances of winning.

Participation in the contest is NOT optional! Sleeping with the judge, sadly, is.

Good luck, and let's not keep this clean.

I fought in a war

At the recommendation of the always-brilliant Bears Will Attack, I decided to check out what the world had to offer via the "Next Blog" button at the top of blogspot blogs. While most of the stuff is pretty mundane (and LOTS of blogs on their first post), it's pretty interesting to see people using it as an online diary, talking about their home purchases, what schools they've gotten into, their exams coming up, etc.

The one blog that I found that I loved though was one called, perfectly, Maggot Eaten Corpses, started by a 16-year-old in New York. On first glance, it seems pretty offensive: posts about how Hitler wasn't really that bad, how women should shut up and get back into the kitchen, how violence is good for kids, etc. But then you realize that when he's not deliberately trying to make people mad through predictable arguments, he's being a dead-on stereotype of a teenage metalhead. And that, my friends, is quality comedy.

He's obviously trolling for comments, so I left him one:

Great blog, ED! I found it through the "Next blog" button and it's the best satire of a death-and-darkness obsessed 16-year-old I've ever seen. Absolutely hilarious, and great in the detail: pretending Hitler did a good job, calling everything "bullshit", making sure to get Cannibal Corpse plenty of mentions (nice touch!) and my personal favorite, deliberately misspelling "reek" in this post. Dead-on and genius stuff.

Is that mean? Was I wrong to do that? I hope it doesn't push him over the edge...

As usual, blame the English

As if we needed any more reason that English is the most ridiculous language ever invented:

Collective Nouns

A fluther of jellyfish?! A murmuration of starlings?! A descent of woodpeckers?! I refuse to believe that the people who made up this crap were serious. Here's my proposal: it's just a bunch. Whatever the animal, whatever the number, it's a bunch of 'em.

It couldn't get any more ridiculous than that, right?

Wrong.

A smack of jellyfish?! And didn't we decide on a pit of vipers? Why do we also need a generation of vipers? Then you scroll down to the people: An exaggeration of fishermen?! A multiply of husbands?! A malapertness of peddlers?! Come ON!! Who do they think they're kidding?!

An itch is scratched.

Gone bad, but was it good in the first place?

What's the expiration date on a joke? If you come up with something funny to say, and you like that joke yourself, is it okay to use it again when around different people? It's something that always makes me feel a little cheap and that I'm so uncreative that I have to latch on to whatever I can get, but it also seems a shame to throw out a perfectly good joke when it's still fresh and potentially enjoyable. But on the other hand (realizing that I'm at at least three hands by now), there's something that's inspiring about one joke being in one moment for one person or group and then after that, the moment's gone.

Discuss.

Annoying mistake in a saying #1

In a new and likely very short-lived feature, I'll be pointing out where people use the wrong word in a common saying. Grammar and spelling mistakes are one thing...that's just ignorance, and I'm a firm believer that ignorance is blitzed (uh, I mean, bliss), but trying to use a figure of speech or saying and getting it wrong is just plain...wrong.

Entry #1, which hurts in more ways than one:

"In that faithful 8th inning, Oswalt was unable to get his curveball under control and so he went to his fastball more and more."

It's "fateful", dude! FATEFUL!!! There's nothing "faithful" about it! It doesn't make any sense!

Thank you, and goodnight.

Why I write such crap blogs

A few posts ago (don't feel like counting), I clumsily tried to explain how I felt that music styles don't die out, they just go away for a while and then are reborn in a new way when they're rediscovered. I then found it explained in a much better way and in fewer sentences in an article on Mars Volta in the last issue of MOJO:

Forget the fib your trusted history tomes have sold you: the evolution of rock music can't be charted as some clear linear progression, artist passing influence unto artist, united in some utopian quest for future sounds. The truth is a much more chaotic, intriguing beast, where ideas are born, explored, rejected and forgotten, then rediscovered, re-upholstered and juxtaposed by later generations.

I am shamed, and I can't decide if it re-inspires me to really work on my writing, er, "skills" or if just makes me want to give up and just leave it to the people who are better at it. Either way, I'm sticking to this little word practice page. Lucky, lucky you.

It's a blog blog blog blog world

(Disclaimer: I know that doing a blog about blogs is considered crude and gauche. I know that the blog elite will lift their noses and turn their heads in disapproval, and my membership to the Blog Club will be revoked, with the council barely being able to contain their laughter as they tell me, "I'm sorry...there's just nothing we can do." And maybe my children won't be able to play with their blog friends anymore and will instead have to find playmates among the less privileged children who will hitch up their overalls and ask, "Whut's a blog?" and my children will have to hide their faces, hot with shame. None of this scorn will stop this post!)

A lot of wonder goes into the appeal of blogs. Nothing new there. But I've realized that what I really like about reading people's blogs is that, somewhere along the line, somewhere in between the days of writing long letters every day and the invention of TV, we lost the art of sharing the random thoughts and observations in life, and blogs are a way of finding that art again. Sure, there's little things that close friends will be able to talk about, and observational comedy is the order of the day, but it's hard to throw out a random thought in ordinary conversation without looking like some sort of egotistical freak. So everyone just learned to let the conversation flow naturally and learned to keep their comments to themselves and hope that the conversation would eventually flow to an appropriate point to share.

Now people have a way to share those little things and I'm loving it. It's just funny that it took the invention of the most massive of mass media for us to enjoy sharing the little things of life with each other again.

That's all I have for you today. Scraps.