Last night as The Wife and I were heading to bed, she gave me The List of her favorite things– that I need to leave alone, and that if I do, I’ll be all right in her book, or maybe I should say if I leave her alone, I won’t be marked down in her book.
What prompted this recitation, of all things, was my going to get a handkerchief from a drawer in our dresser.
She: “That’s not the plaid handkerchief, is it?”
Me: “Why?”
She: “Because that’s my favorite handkerchief and I don’t want you using it.”
Me: “Why?”
She: “I told you, because that’s my favorite handkerchief and I don’t want you using it.”
Me: “No, why is it so special?”
She: “It’s like 30 years old and it’s all old and soft and it’s like my num-num.” [As if they now use sandpaper for handkerchiefs NOW?]
Me: “It’s 30 years old?!?”
[Addendum: "It came from Tracey Dooley's dead grandfather," she tells me today. "I like hankies. She hooked me up."]
She then told me, though, not also was this plaid handkerchief– which if I might say, is one of the ugliest handkerchiefs ever stitched into existence, no matter whether 1978 or 2008– her favorite handkerchief, but also that the orange handkerchief was her favorite handkerchief. [Probably because the green contrasts so nicely with the orange when you blow your nose, you know?]
For some reason, I then asked her if the handkerchiefs were left alone, then that’s all she needed (a la Steve Martin in The Jerk).
She: “Well that and the pens…” (For her holy view of pens, see here.)
Me: “So just those two handkerchiefs and the pens?”
She: “Well, no, there’s more…”
Me: “Wait, I have to write this down.” [at which point I proceeded to get a notebook to transcribe all that follows herein]
She: “My Chapsticks.
Italian bread — the heel.
The piece of pizza — the one with with the bubble of cheese in the middle.
And the heel on the meatloaf.”
So as you can see The Wife is a simple, kindhearted soul who doesn’t need much (not that I’m saying she is a jerk, mind you).
…blogger. That’s right. Sorry, for those of you looking how to be a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious lover, you’re at the wrong place. The Ominous Comma threw down the gauntlet to his favorite bloggers to write a funny post that included helpful technical tips or educational material to help new bloggers. He asked established humor bloggers already on Humor-Blogs.com. Since I am not an established humor blogger and responded only once to one of his posts with a comment, which for some reason wasn’t approved by him. I suppose I’m not erudite enough for him, even though I have a college diploma too (let’s not talk about GPAs, though, please), or maybe it’s that I never served in the military like he did, so maybe I’m not tough enough. Whatever…but I still like the guy enough to respond to this meme even though I wasn’t tagged by his almighty, droll self (and whom I shouldn’t even begin to pick on, because not only will he kick my ass, but he’ll kick my ass authoritatively). Since venturing forth into the blogosphere, lo, these last trio of years, and having had at least six blogs, five of which are still sailing the seas of the blogosphere here, here is a little of what I’ve learned thus far (and still am learning as you shall see) in my journey (in no particular order):
For each article in an enhanced feed, show full feed. I learned this today from a friend, who sent me this message: “First: THANK YOU for updating your RSS feed so it displays your whole post instead of a snippet.” No one wants to read a half-assed post in a feed. They want the whole ass, baby, either in all its bootylicious glory or in all its butt-ugliness ugliness with the pimples and all. Once people see it, they won’t want to turn away, either because of its luminosity or its offensiveness like this crazy crack whore.
Another reason is you might see the first pagraph and shrug your shoulders, but then you realize like Jeff in Coupling, there is not only the word “breasts” but also pictures of breasts, though sometimes if you’re like Leigh Online you can get rid of ambiguity from the start with a great title like this: show us your t*ts!!, for which half-assed feed or not, you want to click on, especially if you’re a guy or hey, you could be a lesbian for all I know, who am I to judge? which in a roundabout, rambling way brings me to
Titles: Have a title that will catch people’s eyes in a feed so even if you only give your readers a half-assed feed, they’ll still want to read it…
Like this one: Wanted: Your Witty Responses(which makes me think “Hey, I can be witty and I can respond, maybe he’s talking to me.”)
Or like this: Celebrities I Have Dreamed About(ooh, almost as good as Leigh’s in tantalizing the reader to click there, isn’t it?)
Or this one: Death by Strangulation(What would make a person want to strangle somebody? I’d like to know. Oh, that, Catherinette. I see. I don’t blame you.)
But this one, Playin’ Catch Up that begins with “It’s been 10 days since I posted…” I mean, yadda yadda, we’ve all been there, but you’re already breaking another thing I’ve learned post regularly (I mean, look at this blog as a shining, nay, luminous example of that).
I’m also a member of a another group here in the blogosphere, a book blogging group, where all some do is post the headline by the group The Sunday Salon. While it is required of posts, why not add something to it to catch readers’ eyes? We already know to whom you’re writing, but which book or books are you going to discuss, book beyotches (which is another tip if you’re a humor blogger, don’t use too much vulgarity unless you’re established like the beyotches already mentioned)? Why should I read on? Which is what you might be thinking at this point. So let me get to my third tip:
Graphics. Include them, even if it’s totally random like this:
Bonus: When people see someting like this in your full feed, they then want to read your post. Only don’t do like I did earlier tonight, publish the photo without text to your blog when you meant to save it as a draft. It will still show up in your reader and then when you delete it, people will get a 404 error or something similar.
So to cover that up, go to StumbleUpon and find another random photo:
One, which not planned, has breasts. I only clicked like three times (honest, honey, and uh, sorry, Mom). Well, I had some other tips, but now I’ve lost my train of thought completely for some reason.
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Before YOU completely lose your train of thought, click over HERE to vote for this post and then check out some of the great bloggers like those mentioned earlier in my post. Don’t forget to vote.
Updated: 7/17/08: So far, I’ve gotten one vote on this post, but at least 15 folks who have looked at it. I mean, come on, folks, click, click, click. It’s not that hard.
The last time I left you, I was talking about more things that make you go hmmm…and then WTF?!*@$*! Today, I think specifically of things that make my wife or me go, “WTF?” when we think we hear one thing and it’s actually something else entirely being said. And for those of you mommy-bloggers surfing past this, that “F” stands for “Fahrvenugen,” nothing else. I know that it doesn’t make any sense, since Fahrevenugen means joy of driving in German, but ach, well.
A few years ago, somehow in the course of a conversation, I mentioned to my wife that I liked listening to Sibelius. That he was so sublime. Or something silly to that effect. She said she thought I was making the name up. I told her no, I wasn’t. “Jean Sibelius or Johan Julius Christian Jean Sibelius was a Finnish composer of the later Romantic period and one of the most notable composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His music played an important role in the formation of the Finnish national identity,” according to Wikipedia, that great wealth of online information (ha).
So now every time we hear something about Sibelius on NPR, which is really so often since we listen to it all the time (okay, we don’t, but our doppelgangers do in that alternate universe where we are cool uber-intellectual-types — who, by the way, know synonyms for “cool uber-intellectual” that sound much more erudite than this), she says to me, “Ah, Sibelius, I love his work.”
Which brings me to today, in which this is what I heard from the bedroom while we were getting ready for a graduation party we were attending for a neighbor who had just graduated from high school:
“We keep missing Harzog.”
Or I should say, this is what I thought I heard as that clearly made no sense, since I don’t know Harzog. But my mind in its normal stream-of-consciousness way jumped to a name I had heard in the past: Herzog, the title character of a novel by Saul Bellow. You probably remember Bellow from some of his other novels, Dangling Man, The Victim, Seize the Day and Henderson the Rain King — at which point, now you should be saying: “Ah, Bellow, I love his work.” Regardless, according to an introduction to the book in this handy reading guide from Penguin Books for the book:
Winner of the National Book Award when it was first published in 1964, Herzog traces five days in the life of a failed academic whose wife has recently left him for his best friend. Through the device of letter writing, Herzog movingly portrays both the internal life of its eponymous hero and the complexity of modern consciousness.
One word: yaaaaaaawwwwwn.
No, I’ve never read the novel, but then I told her it was part of a trilogy, with “Son of Herzog” and “Grandson of Herzog” being the sequels.
“You’re just making up that, aren’t you?”
According to the aforementioned work, and vast research done with the help of Wikipedia, yes, I did make that up.
Which leads me in a roundabout way to that very song by Yes.
For years, my wife said she thought the lyrics were as follows:
In and around the lake Pilots come out of the sky and stand there
I told her that no, the lyrics were as follows:
In and around the lake Mountains come out of the sky and stand there
Which I’ll be honest, I am not that much of a prog rocker that I knew the lyrics off the top of my head. It’s just that for some reason, I used the above video in a post recently (I don’t remember where, but I did).
Aside: If you think those lyrics don’t make any sense, in context, the rest don’t help any:
One mile over we’ll be there and we’ll see you
Ten true summers we’ll be there and laughing too
Twenty four before my love you’ll see I’ll be there with you
At least, they didn’t help me. I don’t know about you. If you’re some twisted f (again, that stands for Fahrvenugen or in this case Fahrvenugener, which even though I had four years of German in high school, I’m not really sure if that’s correct, although somehow I doubt it) and you understand what this means, then more power to ya.
So what exactly was my wife saying that I misheard when I thought she said:
“We keep missing Harzog.”
It was this:
“We keep missing Car Talk.”
Many a Saturday morning, we listen to Car Talk and this morning in our busyness, we forgot (okay, we do listen to NPR all the time, even listening to Garrison Keillor sometimes, even though we don’t know the synonyms for “cool uber-intellectual” that sound much more erudite than that and as people who listen to NPR, hell, we should know those words and use them regularly and not use words like hell in casual conversation or blogging, unless we think we’re like Ira Glass in This American Life and we have some miserable story to share about how much some aspect of our life is like hell).
Speaking of Jagermeister, and where that stuff goes when you’re done drinking it brings me to the subject of today’s post: plumbing and crisis.
Two nights ago, my wife and I had a crisis, not not a marital crisis per se, but a plumbing crisis, which for some of us who went to college straight from high school is a crisis of the highest magnitude. Now while my wife may have a different view on her blog here, as I remember (cue: Wayne’s World flashback music):
I was on the phone with my mother, when suddenly I happen to notice that the sump pump in our basement is running an inordinate amount of time for it not having rained all that day. I heard it in the background, but it hadn’t quite registered yet. I comment to my wife: “Doesn’t that seem to be running a lot?”
“It does,” says she.
“I’ll go down and check it out.”
Herself: “No, I’ll go down, so I can see for myself.” (As if I can’t ascertain the situation on my own, being as mechanically inept as I am and all.)
Myself: “Oh, Mom, I gotta go. I’ll have to call you back.”
I get to the basement first and there’s water flowing out of a bendable plastic pipe (I don’t know the technical term; I’m such a mechnaphobe that I admit sheepishly that I Googled plumbing pipe, but couldn’t come up with the right terminology) that’s attached to the sump pump. It’s flowing onto the dirt floor of our basement (mind you, we don’t have a fancy enough place for a finished basement or this really would have been a crisis; imagine a carpeted floor –shudder).
Myself: “Uh, hon, I don’t think this is supposed to be happening.”
Before I know it, my wife, still in her night gown and barefoot, is putting the pipe into this other pipe (PVC pipe, I guess, although what the “P”, the “V” and the “C” stand for is beyond me) that is coming down from the ceiling. Or trying to put it back into this other pipe and not having much success as the pipe comes out of the place to which it’s attached and hits her in the feet. An expletive follows, and after she connects the pipes, I hear water gurgling up in our bathroom on the first floor (the only other floor of our house, not counting an attic that holds rats, bats and squirrels).
Myself: “Uh, hon, I’m going to go check that out.” (Of course, in a much more exasperated way, much more.)
I run up the stairs to the bathroom and find water, or what I assume is water, dirty water, flowing into the tub and into the toilet.
Myself: (No, “uh, hon” this time and definitely with much more exasperation.) “Take that pipe out of there. It’s flowing up into the tub and the toilet.”
Herself: (In a loud voice, to say the least) “Okay, but then what are we to do?”
I say we should call the landlord — and the plumber, whom he has told us to contact in case of an emergency, which I believe, this qualifies.
At one point, I’m on the phone, leaving a message for the plumber, and my wife is in the basement talking to the landlord, and we have this cross-conversation going.
Myself: “I’m calling the plumber.”
Herself: “He’s calling the plumber.”
It’s like a play-by-play for our landlord, which I’m sure he appreciates.
Later, I learn that dirty water wasn’t water, after all, after I saw toilet paper with some other, well, let’s say, detritus, that flowed into a laundry sink in the basement.
The plumber “snaked” (whatever the heck that means) the pipes that night for at least half an hour, which scared the bejesus (is that with a capital B? I don’t know. Is it less sacrilegious, if it’s without the capital? as a church-attending Catholic, I’m going with that view) out of our cat, let me tell you, and now everything (okay, not everything, but at least our sump pump is working again) is right with the world.
