Me on the Twitter

So I've decided to join Twitter. It's been a momentous decision I will soon regret. I mostly made it because blogging is too hard.

I joined today in honor of NaNoWriMo. I thought it was the least I could do in honor of novel writing month. Quite literally the least I could do. Because novels are actually longer than blogs I hear. Geez.

Volcano Blues

Here's a picture from the plane on our way to Ireland of the volcano spewing ash that made us have to fly to Iceland around the spewing volcano to finally get to Ireland. But we did. Get there. And hopefully it will allow us to leave one day.

The Evil Clown Interview

A KFC Triviality is a Terrible Thing to Waste

So I'm watching Celebrity Jeopardy the other day which is strange because I never watch Jeopardy, I mildly hate it because I don't know the answers. I also can't do crosswords and only the easy sudoku. I fear this means I'm only moments away from senility. I tell myself that writing will be enough mind exercise. Then I read that those who write in long sentences are less likely to contract Alzheimer's. But what's long? So be a Faulkner and not a Hemingway, not that it helped with the alcohol and shotgun.

Where was I? Am I mental already? These sentences aren't nearly long enough. Celebrity Jeopardy: David Duchovny was in the lead but lost it all because he didn't know who Colonel Sanders is/was (how does one verb a dead person who lives on as brand pitchman?). So the rough beast keeps slouching towards Bethlehem.

61 ACROSS Place to get drunk in the kitchen?

Trademark This

So I'm writing response letters to some creative nonfiction essays, and I notice one of the students keeps capitalizing laundromat. So my marginalia cries, "Why? What's so proper about this laundromat?" Then I go to type up my comments and every time I type laundromat Word forces the capital Laundromat. Seriously? I do a little reading and it turns out it's just one corporation protecting another.

My love of Word is no secret. Here's another autocratic slip that shows the foulness of the MS soul. Too much? The point is that just on practical terms forcing the capital is a mistake because it makes the reader stop because the registered trademark is for a washing machine, not, as everyone understands, the place one goes to use a washing machine.

But more importantly, when words become part of the language, they belong to the people, not a corporation. Get over it kleenex.

Copyright

© 2009

S. Craig Renfroe, Jr.

Give the Show a Disembodied Hand

Went to see Evil Dead: The Musical last night, and it has restored my faith in musicals. In my humble opinion, zombies and lots of fake blood would improve any musical. Take The Sound of Music, for instance.

NatPoMo v. NaPoWriMo

Not since sitting about the large conference table in grad school and unselfconciously spouting the term PoMo (postmodernism, natch) have I had such fun as April. I get all aflutter just thinking about bugging Heather with the term NatPoMo. And then I heard about National Poetry Writing Month...NaPoWriMo. Haha.

Good News/Bad News

Guess what? No, really guess. No, it's not that. Nope, not that either. All right, I finished grading. Hooray! Much like the last time I finished grading I felt like sharing. And much like last time, Heather brought me down with this news: among the 1000+ new species found in that Mekong River place is a spider big as a dinner plate (not pictured).

This Just In: My Replacement

Okay, once again I am way behind in discovering things people already know, but it appears the Japanese have invented a boyfriend pillow! My days are numbered.

How to Blog

Here, in a helpfully numbered fashion, I will tell you how to blog for fun and profit. Mostly for profit because once you have that fun will naturally follow.

1. Live life. Many bloggers forget this one, but it is essential. You need to go out into the big, dark world and find something mysterious and terrifying, then wrestle it to the ground and in this way have an experience. Once that is done, you must come directly home to your computer where you will set it all down in words or else that experience will be completely meaningless and lost in your ever fading memory. If you’ve done that, then you’ve completed the first step, but that’s not all. Go on.
2. I cannot stress this one enough. Click the publish button. If you fail to do this your post will not appear on your blog, and you will, in fact, not be blogging.
3. Do not put any pictures on your blog. First, readers do not like pictures because it makes them feel childish. Secondly, if you do, you will be sued.
4. Make people read your blog.
5. Set up an account with one of those places that measures the hits your blog gets. A hit is the measure of how many times a person clicks on your blog. This count, in theory, measures the amount of people reading your blog when, in fact, it can’t actually tell if they clicked on it by mistake or are painstakingly crocheting your words onto a pillow. Don’t worry about that. What is important is that you put the total on your blog, so that people can see how many theoretical people are reading your blog. If you do not do so, you are a coward. And no one likes a coward. Especially a coward who blogs.
6. Some people will tell you not to measure your stats with other blogs. They will tell you that blogging is not a competition. They are wrong. The numbers are all that matter. Obsess over them endlessly. Hits are as good as money (see the Money section below).

Congratulations! You are a blogger. Enjoy your success.

Troubleshooting: Marketing. Let’s pretend people aren’t reading your blog. What to do?

1. Make your family read it. First, tell your family that you’ve started a blog. They will not read it. Second, tell them that you’re talking about them in this blog. Some of them will look into it. Be sure to say rude things about one family member in particular, usually the one who is least likely to read the blog. Your brother, perhaps, who sells irrigation equipment and accessories. After a while rotate which family member you choose to ridicule. The more negative, the more likely your hits will go up. Corollary: the more hits you get, the less you will be invited to family functions, which will have the advantage of giving you more time to blog.
2. Make your friends read it. First, do not tell your friends that you’ve started a blog. Instead, write several long posts about them where you use their full names. They will inevitably find the blog while Googling themselves. They will feel a secret thrill as if they’re reading your secret diary, when in fact they are falling for your secret plan.
3. Get more friends.
4. Go to any random blog and leave a comment. The comment doesn’t even matter, only that you link it back to your blog. In fact, the comment should be something inscrutable. For example, just write “Turnip!” I would also recommend an exclamation point. The blogger and the blogger’s audience (i.e. that person’s friends and family) will inevitably think to themselves who is this person that has written “Turnip” with an exclamation point and then click on your link to uncover the mystery. Presto! More readers.
5. Pay people to read it. Warning: this step may cut into your profits.

Troubleshooting II: Money. Why are you not rich yet?

1. Hits are not as good as money. Only money is as good as money. Hits, however, can be converted into money.
2. There are programs like Adsense that will place ads into your blog and based on a complicated geometry problem decide how much money to give you from these advertisers. I suggest you not do this because this is what we in the biz refer to as “selling out.”
3. A far better and easier way to capitalize on your blog is to, as we like to say in the biz, be “discovered.” This is where a person with a lot of money reads your blog by accident and decides you are brilliant and wants to give you a lot of money to be your sponsor.
4. An even easier way to capitalize off your blog is to convince your significant other that the above shadowy sponsor will find you sooner the more time you spend on your blog. Suggest to your significant other, therefore, that you should quit your job in order to dedicate more time to the blog. Enjoy not working.
5. Finally, sell things on your blog. Like transcripts of this very “How to Blog” manual, available here for only $9.95!

You have completed my online course on the fundamentals of blogging. You are free to put the button “S. Craig Renfroe, Jr. Approved” on your blog (WARNING: This button is trademarked and the sole property of S. Craig Renfroe, Jr. Any attempt to actually put said button on your blog will result in a lawsuit).

Copyrighted 2008 (One final tip: be sure to put this at the end of every post so that no one steals your beautiful ideas and makes more money off them than you do.)

I Will Defiantly Go

So I'm grading. My favorite part of teaching. If only I could just grade--that would be the best. Not to sound like the curmudgeonly old man that I will inevitably become, chasing kids out of my yard with leaf blowers or chainsaws, you know, whatever's handy, but I have to say: "definitely" is not spelled "defiantly." Though, I see it misspelled that way so often why don't we just change the spelling? It would cause me less stress. And hey, most of the time it fits. I think it's defiantly a good idea.

It's Back to the Salt Mines

Do people actually mine salt? That aside, I am back, back and so soon after being gone. Back to work, but I refuse to whistle. You will not hear a whistle out of me. Not a one.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

Yes, I may have two musical recommendations here within days of each other...but...well...you look funny...

Oh No, The Irony

Jesse Helms, the Big No, is dead. And it took an Irish radio talk show for me to find out he died on the fourth of July--the Irish are obsessed with politics. I am not so obsessed but feel like you should know what's right (treating people like human beings) and what is wrong (most human beings). I only comment here because as I've noted in the past, like Jesse, I'm a graduate of Wingate U., a place indebted to him for support. I met him several times, though he only stared at me, whether with disdain or incomprehension, I'm not sure. And I'm grateful for meeting the Dali Lama because of Jesse who brought him to Wingate--hating Communist China made strange bedfellows. He was also responsible for me meeting Henry Kissinger, Bob Dole, and Dan Quayle--for which I'm not so grateful. As part of my job at the college library I moved all of his papers around in the stacks before the Helms Center opened--occasionally reading some until I discovered how dull they were. Jesse Helms is gone and he will be...gone from now on, never changing, truly conservative.

WARNING: Grey Goo

Have you ever wondered will the world end in fire or ice? Had you wondered this you wasted your time because the world will, in fact, be ending in grey goo. How do I know? Because of the wonders of the Internet (A quick aside: I used to get worked up over having to capitalize the Internet, but now I realize it is a proper name for that space where all the weird, terrible, wonderful urges of the world get refined into points of light, and so just as you capitalize Kalamazoo so should you capitalize the Internet). Anyway, so I was going to my goto site Google, though I have documented our rocky relationship, and though I have a Google bar right there in the top right hand corner of my browser, I still type in the site, but this time, instead of clicking down to the auto-fill Google, I hit enter on "goo." Instead of sending me automatically to Google or to some page trying to sell me Goo.com, I wound up on the Wikipedia page for "grey goo." Naturally, I took this to be a sign and was intrigued.

What is grey goo? Why it's "a hypothetical end-of-the-world scenario involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-replicating robots consume all living matter on Earth while building more of themselves (a scenario known as ecophagy; eating the environment)." Of course. So apparently, nanotechnology will just turn us all to a grey goo byproduct in it's heedless lust to reproduce. One more thing for me to be worried about. What is wrong with machines and their carnal programming?

The only answer: we must teach nanobots abstinence.

April Is the Cruelest Month

So after thinking all day about and almost missing it, I've finally come up with my April Fool's joke.

Here it is.

Hilarious, right?

Warning: Poetry WILL Kill You!

I bring you sad tidings from an article in the Guardian by Marc Abrahams on the life expectancy of writers. Here are the depressing results:

"The Cost of the Muse: Poets Die Young, paints a mathematically ghoulish picture. Poets drop off earliest, Kaufman explains, but authors in general are not a long-lived bunch."

Heather, nnnnnnnnnnooooooooooooooo...

CPCC Reading and I Am Not Deaf

Okay. So I was going to be all literary and blog about the poetry reading, but Heather has forced me to face my aging.

First, we blog the CPCC Literary Festival (oh wait! I mean, the CPCC Arts Festival because after Irene Blair Honeycutt left they gutted the literary bit and threw in some other arts). Since there are fewer lit events and I have the hell schedule this semester, I only got to A. Van Jordan's reading, which was well worth it and gives me a little hope for the festival--the sparse crowd cast doubts on that glimmer. Beyond the fact that I have a special place in my heart for people who use an initial for their first name--so many people drop it or think its pretentious to hold on to that initial and to them I say, screw you, that's my first name and it's not going away. Anyway. A. Van Jordan gave a great read with personas from Einstein to Richard Pryor.

Anyway, so that was all literate and whatnot. But then, Heather goes on and on (Heather resents this representation) about this noise kids (kids these days!) are using for cell phone ringtones because it is at a frequency too high for old ears to hear, so they could be sitting in class and get a call without the teacher knowing it. First, as a teacher--those bastards! Secondly, I was very afraid I would not be able to hear it and thus old and thus closer to death, etc. But I heard, thank God Almighty, I heard it. That's right I am not old. Or I am at the very least not deaf. You hear that Death! So here is the noise.

Just kidding, here's the real noise. If you can't hear it...you my friend are old. My condolences.

Condiments Kill

I have food issues. One really: I don't eat condiments. This simple principle simply pisses people off for no apparent reason to me. And they demand to know why. My reply, "Why would you?" These so-called people clearly didn't grow up on the PSA below.