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Just a conundrum I came up with while watching the preseason Vikings game vs the San Diego Chargers last night.

Which weighs more? A Vikings offensive lineman, or the average fan in the stands?

Seriously.

A very attractive lady goes up to a bar in a quiet rural pub. She gestures alluringly to the bartender who comes over immediately. When he arrives, she seductively signals that he should bring his face closer to hers. When he does, she begins to gently caress his full beard.

“Are you the manager?” she asks, softly stroking his face with both hands. “Actually, no,” the man replies.

“Can you get him for me? I need to speak to him,” she says, running her hands beyond his beard and into his hair.

“Can’t,” breathes the bartender. “He’s not here. Is there anything I can do?”

“Yes, there is. I need you to give him a message,” she continues, running her forefinger across the bartender’s lips and slyly popping a couple of her fingers into his mouth and allowing him to suck them gently.

“What should I tell him?” the bartender manages to say.

“Tell him,” she whispers, “there is no toilet paper, hand soap, or paper towels in the ladies room.”

NOTE: I would like to apologize to my regular readers for the above joke. Normally I do my very best to poke fun at the MAWB Squad. In this case I failed in my usual duty. Like I said, I apologize and it won’t happen again.

I thought Scrappleface was supposed to write satire??

This leaked draft by W is clearly not. In my opinion, pop it in an envelope and send it off as it is. Well done Scott!

Yup, that’s her

She’s just thrilled with me right now. I took her camping and she came back with a broken toe on her paw. And if that isn’t bad enough, I let the vet wrap it up with silly wrappings that make her look goofy.

She’s so photogenic when she’s pissed at me.

Vet says she’ll be good as new in 4 weeks. Just in time to start getting her ready for hunting season!

Of course there are these other less miserable pics of her before she went and had too much fun.

Who says babies and alcohol don’t mix???

Her two favorite things in the world. Chewing on her friend Timber, and water.

Another blogger closes up shop and Doug muses some good points on the rewards of blogging.

Now I don’t claim to be an expert on blogging, but I’ve been doing it for almost 4 years now, so I got the longevity thing going for me….which is nice.

I’ve seen some come and some go. And both categories include some excellent bloggers. Why are they excellent?? I’ll get to that.

First, I’ll get to my most important point, which is the biggest mistake I see in new blogs. Some new bloggers start with the idea in mind that he/she is gonna become a huge blogger and pull in massive amounts of traffic bringing fame or fortune or both. What they aren’t told is unless you are a known name (see here and here) ahead of time, you aren’t gonna pull in major traffic for a long long time.

It takes time to just get the hang of blogging. You’ll have well-written insightful posts that completely bomb. You’ll have incredibly stupid and poorly written posts that are inexplicably a complete success. You’ll accidentally delete your entire site, when you were just trying to change the font size.

Then it takes time to build an audience, which will rise and fall for absolutely no reason whatsoever. You’ll get links from major bloggers and get a burst of traffic and then suffer the inevitable downfall when it becomes obvious that very few of that traffic translates into return traffic. You’ll get comments from people claiming you are the scourge of Western Civilization. You’ll get emails informing you of a paternity suit…or maybe that’s just me.

In the end you’ve put in alot of time, energy and soul into your blog and what do you have. You have a blog. What were you expecting?

Trust me, don’t do it for the traffic. Find reward elsewhere. Consider traffic a bonus. If you do it for the traffic 99.999% of you will be sorely disappointed and prematurely quit. And rewards are plentiful and Doug hits on many of them.

Secondly, what is a success. Well that depends. What is it you are looking for?? If you said traffic, re-read the first half of this post and then eat your keyboard. So what are you looking for?? Interaction? Improving writing skills?? Venting? A hot chick in a mini-skirt??

Success takes many forms. And another big mistake I see alot of new bloggers make is trying to emulate another blogger (heh, I did it myself once). Trust me…don’t. If people can already find it elsewhere, why should they come to your blog? Ignore that if you are offering free cake or something.

But seriously, be original. Some people get by writing serious commentary. Some people haven’t posted a serious thing since they’ve started. Some people post daily musings of life, the universe and everything. Some people write humor. Some people do a mix of all the above. Which of these is a success?? I’d say they all are. Each draws their own audience and for different reasons.

I’ve had someone say to me, “Well I wasn’t really in the mood for something heavy and serious, so I just checked out what you had to say”. Ok, works for me. That’s my niche. You want something serious, insightful and well written, you go elsewhere. You want off-beat, bad-grammer, offensive and sarcastic, you come here.

Define your own success, and judge your blog by that standard only.

So you see, I’ve already clearly violated the rules of my niche, so I gotta wrap this up.

And I this is why I judge by my own standard because I had a really clever ending in mind but I forget it when I got up to let my dog out. So I’m falling back into my niche….crappy rambling eclectic ranting raves. Which is rewarding and successful!! So we’re all happy. Well, except you, who has just spent the last 10 minutes having to read this crap.

Best of luck!

Man Down!!! Another blogger closes up shop.

Shameful (and funny) Confusions from the right and the left.

In one post, that meanie St. Kate reduces me in rank AND reveals her biggest weakness. Sometimes things are just too easy. I’m accepting applications for my Super Duper Revenge Squad.

I link this because it’s really funny AND I want to see how many blogs we can string together linking to one item.

Sometimes the greatest breakthroughs aren’t intentional…

Finding IEDs From the Air

Although Lockheed Martin’s Sniper ATP was developed to improve targeting and identifying of enemy assets, service personnel have found an added use for the system: spotting potential IEDs, says J. Morri Leland, business development Sniper XR. “An aircrew in a F-15E was directed to look in a specific area near Mosul where there was detected insurgent activity. Equipped with a Sniper pod, they found a hole along the side of the road, but it wasn’t just a whole,” he says. “With the Sniper pod they could tell that it had squared edges-a rectangular hole. They saw activity in the woods nearby and directed ground forces to come in. All this while they were orbiting. A Stryker team showed up and they confronted the folks in the woods. Fifteen minutes later there [were] 20 people coming out of the woods with their hands up.” Ground forces found 150 different IED devices stored in the woods, along with trucks and the personnel, all because a pilot was able to recognize there wasn’t something right about the hole dug along the side of the road, Leland says.

When you combine American ingenuity and technology great things can happen indeed. Let’s hope this isn’t an isolated incident and that this actually works on a widespread basis.

Some of you have already noticed the new banner at the top of the page.

It was one of four new ones that I had made up. It was the one I liked best at the time.

Let me know what you think.

And I’ve been meaning to do some housekeeping chores on my site, so you may see things move around a little now and again. Feel free to comment, complain or heckle in the comments….preferably about the changes.

Was making my rounds of the left side of the MN blogosphere when I noticed a….well, disturbing post. The writer is still salivating over what basically turned out to be a flop as scandals go. Yes we’re talking about Karl Rove. But the odd part, was the writer was praying the following was all true:

Now it is being further reported by a source that is less than impeccable that the looming indictments of several members of the Bush Administration, not to mention Judith Miller and others, will be on charges including treason, perjury, and obstruction of justice surrounding not only the illegal attack on Iraq, but, even more ominously for those involved, 9/11. The source further describes a turf war scenario pitting cronies of the administration against career military and intelligence figures who have been (ab)used by the Bush people as scapegoats for inaccurate information leading to both the Iraq War and the 9/11 events that enabled it.

Let me see if I got this right. You are praying that:
The administration is filled with traitors
The government has lied to us
The government deliberately planned the murder of thousands of it’s citizens
The government decide to just start a war for the fun of it.
There is a desperate power struggle in the highest branches of our government

Wow, that’s some pretty powerful stuff to be praying for. And pretty awful. Now why would you pray for that?? Oh yeah, to further your personal political agenda.

Plus earlier in the post he hints at his desire to see a certain political opponent dead. Now I understand that people disagree with each other. Hell, I disagree with myself half the time. But to wish death on someone over something as petty as personal politics?

Cute.

Next time you pick a goal, you might want to be a little more selective. Or if not, at least choose your words a little better.

Well this is a meme that seems to be all the rage recently. So much so that damned if I know who I should even send a hattip to. So I won’t. Instead I present you my top 5 idiosyncrasies

1) Silence. Not allowed. I must have something going on in the background. TV, radio, video game, etc…there must be noise in the background. My television if virtually always on, even if I am rarely paying attention to it. Basically I paid quite a few hundred dollars for a glorified white-noise machine.

2) In email, I gotta get the last word in. No matter how stupid, I have to send the last email. It’s required. I’m so paranoid that the other person may be expecting some response that I feel compelled to do so. It’s stupid, it’s annoying, but damn it, it’s me.

3) I have a file cabinet, that I don’t file things in. Oh sure, I set them on top of the file cabinet and maybe twice a year I will take the pile and file it. But I seem utterly incapable of simply opening the damn drawer and putting the item in the correct clearly marked folder.

4) Fingernails must be short. I almost always have a nail clipper within hands reach. Seeing white on the edge of my nails bugs me to no end. On occasion, I have been someplace and they grew longer and I really tried to let them stay that way. I had even convinced myself I could get used to it. I can’t. They must be short.

5) When filling my gas tank, even after the nozzle clicks off, I always seem to give it a few more squeezes to fill up the neck of the tank to the very very top. I don’t do it to get to a even dollar amount, I just feel the need to get it as full as possible.

After writing all these…wow, I’m messed up. I think I may have a severe mental condition. Which isn’t something I haven’t heard before, but still, hearing it from myself takes on new credibility.