What do you do when you hear of the death of a humor blog directory that helped you get to where you are today? Yep, nowhere but with lots of funny friends with whom you all have gotten there together.
A. Mock it with a question as above.
B. Curl up in a fetal position for several days and bemoan the loss to all the world via Facebook, Twitter and now your blog.
C. Call up your sister and leave her a cryptic message, making her think that you have a real emergency.
D. Eulogize it with a blog post in which you provide lots and lots of links to many of the blogs of those funny friends you met on the directory that was more than a directory to some of us. It was family, man, family!!!!
E. All of the above
Personally, I’m opting for E. Okay, I won’t lie, I didn’t curl up in a fetal position for several days. It was only several hours I was in the fetal position and I’m glad most of these people aren’t in my family, because many of them are batshit crazy, but the rest is true, including the part about calling up my sister, Lisa, author of the blog Boondock Ramblings.
It all began this past Friday when I learned of the death of Humor-Blogs.com (because of hackers) from a blogger friend of mine, Kathy Frederick of The Junk Drawer, one of the many bloggers that I met through the site.
Okay, not really. According to my wife, Kim of Dispatches From the Northern Outpost, it began when a friend of hers sent a link to a post about a JCPenney catalog by a blogger named Johnny Virgil on his blog named 15 Minute Lunch.
Based on that one post, my wife read his entire archive and discovered Humor-Blogs.com, which she then joined.
Then she introduced both my sister and me to the site, and we joined. The rest is history. We all went nowhere together like the lyrics to that Billy Joel song: “And we would all go nowhere together/ We said we’d all go nowhere together/ Yes we would all go nowhere together.” And so we did, except we had cameras, we didn’t pass the hash pipe (we were selfish with each of us having his own hash pipe and keeping all the hashish for himself) and we haven’t suffered any PTSD (as we’ve dealt with our stress with laughter and, of course, hashish).
Who are we? Well, over this weekend, I’ve thought about that and here’s an incomplete list of those I remember whom I met through the site, many of whose blogs I still read and which I encourage you also to read, if you don’t already:
Rob Kroese (Mattress Police), the founder of Humor-Blogs.com and author of Mercury Falls
Jenn Thorson (Of Cabbages and Kings)
Jeff Lee (View from the Cloud)
Brent Diggs (The Ominous Comma)
Joel Bezaire (Crummy Church Signs)
Leigh Floyd (leighonline)
Chris Cameron (Angry Seafood)
Don Lewis (Its A Funny Thing)
Meg (Prefers Her Fantasy Life)
Margaret Andrews (Nanny Goats in Panties)
Doug (Taunt Vortex)
Jamie (Mad Science)
Michael Wolfe (Predator Press)
Mark A. Rayner (The Skwib)
Harris Bloom (Why Me? The Life and Times of Harris Bloom)
Lincoln McCardle (Canucklehead)
KiKi Walter (flibbertigibbet)
Leeuna Foster (My Mind Wandered…and it never came back!)
Candice Sonnier Stroh (Life According to Candice)
Sue Erwin Seese (Farvel Cargo)
Julia D. (Homemade Hilarity)
Sandy (Wit’s Bitch)
John Bray (Nonamedufus)
Catherinette Singleton (Bridget Jones Has Nothing on Me)
Bee (Bee’s Musings)
Chelle B. (The Offended Blogger)
John J. Savo (The Authoring Auctioneer, now The Savo Auctioneers)
Don Kingery (Beyond Left Field)
Alice (Honey Pie)
Shawn (The Shark Tank)
JD (I Do Things So You Don’t Have To)
Kathcom (The Magick Sandwich)
Kevin (Always Home and Uncool)
ReformingGeek (Confessions of a Reforming Geek)
LOTGK (Grassy Knoll Institute)
Haley Keppel (Talk of the Dog)
brookeamanda (now Babbling Brooke)
VE (VE’s Fantastical Nonsense)
Thaddeus (Army of Epiphenomenon)
The Office Scribe (Asleep Under My Desk)
Siren (Idiot Girl In Action)
Lidian (Kitchen Retro)
Matt (formerly of That Tears It… and of late, featured on Review Spew)
Bex (The Blog of Bex)
Uncle Beau (The Nothing Report)
Deb (Debbie Does Drivel)
Kirsten (The Soccer Mom Files)
Greg Johnson (The Trials of a Madman)
Sam Fracas (fracas)
HappyHourSue (Happy Meals and Happy Hour)
Tricia (papercages)
Rickey Henderson (Riding with Rickey)
As is my custom, when I don’t know how to end a post, I turn to the ubiquitous YouTube:
Thanks, Rob, for the memories and all the bloggers I was able to meet through your site, among them the bloggers listed here, many of whose blogs still live on. As Brent Diggs said on my Facebook page after I eulogized there, “Thanks for the memories, let’s keep making them.” Let it be so.
