Total Dismay

I don’t know about any real listing system for people in the blogosphere. I think various little cliques that have some statistical significance claim to be A-listers.

Anyway, I am going to talk mysteriously about the fact that an A-list blogger, self proclaimed or otherwise, has been called out about his link-baiting posts. The man who did the cookware color assessment suggested that a slightly more restrained and finessed use of this technique would be useful for us K-listers as well. These are posts in which a blogger makes a controversial statement with the premeditated intention of getting readers with strong views to link to the post.

I have done this myself on occasion. And I am going to do it again now. And, yes, I know you’re not supposed to let everyone know that you are link-baiting.

Edit: I had seven very controversial and inflammatory statements all typed up and ready to publish. I even did a spell check on some of the nasty words that I don’t normally use. And then I wussed out.

I would like to point out that the front runner in the BCA’s for Best Blog Of All Time is about cute animals.

When I was a college student I spent two summers working at an international airport. I was employed by the federal government, ostensibly to work on grounds maintenance. This was my first introduction to the wonder and the glory that is the pressure washer. People who have never used one, have no idea what they are missing. If you think of water pressure at the stream coming from your bathroom shower or your garden house, you have not yet lived. Water is a force to be reckoned with. I loved using the pressure washer at work to clean the gunk from the underside of the lawnmowers.

I would choose an electric pressure washer over a gas model. I say this the washer is often a time saving device. If you have to go to the garage to buy more gas or oil, or if you can’t get the thing started, you aren’t saving time or effort.

This is the last installment from the afternoon when I opened up my MS paint and let fly with the unedited creating. I haven’t been planning out my episodic release of this precious work. I have been throwing one up on the blog whenever I happen to be sitting at this computer. I tend to play musical chairs with the computers in the house. There is one more family members than there are computers.

I have probably mentioned my lack of stuff on this blog before. Being happy with what you have is one of the best feelings in the world. So what was I doing at a car boot sale this Sunday? Well my kids are involved in the SPCA, which had a table set up, so they wanted to check it out.

Here are the treasures that one of them found there:

I had no intention of buying anything, unless I saw a book at the SPCA table. My wife bought a book by Elizabeth David. I bought three audio cassettes. The one that I was happiest about was Look At Them Beans by the late Johnny Cash. It is unfortunately a bit worn out.

Cass didn’t make many rules for Self Portrait Sunday. Since there isn’t a rule about manipulating photos, I thought I would have some fun with this week’s post. I did the thing with the mirror. I was about to post the picture and I decided that the flash was just too, um, flashy. So I opened up MS Paint to see what I could do to the flash to tone it down. Nothing I tried was working. I didn’t like the way the picture looked with the camera cropped out along with my right arm. I decided go overboard with the thing and just copy and paste my left arm on to my right side. The rest of the work is all just filler. I even built a stone wall hiding the kitchen doorway and all the kitchen stuff. Click on the image to go to the original photo

This is a randomnly chosen YouTube video from a whole list of responses made to a young dude’s call out for people to show off their homemade instruments. I myself have made instruments in the past. I have nothing to show for this effort as I have left them all behind in various locations.

I am going to to some quick depictions of what I have made:

This was made entirely of softwood. I had found a bag of horseshoe nails in the pantry from when the farm was my grandfather’s. I fashioned them into frets and friction ‘machine heads’. Because of the materials, this instrument had good volume but it could not be tuned with a lot of tension. I composed one strange little song that I liked the sound of and then it became a decoration. I think that it has since been destroyed. I made it when I was 14. It took about 48 hours.

I am not going to bother drawing a picture of the lap steel that I made. It was basically just a hardwood slab.

When I was in my late teens, I used to host jam sessions and parties at an abandoned cape cod house on my parent’s farm. One of my friends was into a lot of the hard rock cliches and he just had to smash a guitar and set it on fire one evening. See my feelings on the subject here. Anyway, I grabbed the fretboard and machine heads so I could recyle them later. this is a drawing of what I made from recycled materials. I used some cut and paste recycling for the picture as well. I made this one with a built in piezo under the bridge. You can get generic piezo buzzers from electronics stores for a buck or two, and a female jack for a few more. Feedback was the issue with this thing.

Here’s another fabulous work of art from the day that I was trying to shut off the right side of my brain for a while. I’m looking at this one now and getting a tiny bit creeped out.

I have one of those FireFox plugins that underlines misspelled words. I was going to comment on the fluid nature of language and mention that it doesn’t recognize creeped but now I see that it doesn’t recognize FireFox or plugins either. At least blog is considered a word. My coworker may have added that to the list, he’s the person that installed the spell check to start with.

This is something that I have to try out. This new site called whogets.com offers members the chance to win prizes, some of them worth as much as $600, and all you have to do is write 100 words or less telling the other members why you should be the one who gets it.

There is a preliminary round before that happens. Seven people are chosen from all the applicants before the voting round starts. That’s interesting. I took a couple of statistics courses in college and there is a rule of thumb about only putting seven items on a graph. It’s like the optimal number of things for people to differentiate between for some neurologically hard-wired reason. People on the internet break this rule all the time. I think I might make a draft of my 100 words explaining why I desperately need item X so I can be ahead of everyone else…

This ant is carrying a spikelet of grass across the alleyway. He was doing a very good job of it. I hardly had time to go back to the house for my camera. One day a few weeks ago we watched an ant trying the same task in a strong wind. To the casual observer, it was impossible to even tell which way he was trying to go. If I had known where he wanted to go I would have picked him up and put him there. This sounds like a parable, for what I do not know.

Air conditioning is necessary, but the over-use of cooling appliances contributes to global warming and also the US ‘addiction to oil.’