September 19, 2008 Rants, religion

We’re Canadians, and while we may watch American movies and television shows, listen to American music, read a good many books from that country and peruse US-based websites, we still do our best to avoid paying attention to the nitty-gritty of what goes on in American politics. This gives us the pleasure of being able to express an opinion when there’s a joke to be made or a bon mot to be dropped, but does not force us to have one at the ready every time some loud mouth at a bar wants to solve the world’s problems over a beer. There are some issues though that we find harder to ignore than others, and one of the main ones in this year’s presidential race is the fact that someone on one of the major tickets believes the Flintstones was a forerunner in the reality TV genre.

Now, we’re not knocking Sarah Palin solely on the basis that she was brought in to pacify the religious kooks who fancy McCain a heathen radical. Obama cut ties with the nutter “reverend” who was acting as his “spiritual adviser,” but that was only because it was politically expedient to do so after years of filling that wackjob’s collection plates. Palin, however, is the only candidate on either side to supposedly subscribe to the idea of young earth creationism, which holds as one of its core beliefs the idea that man and dinosaur existed at the same time.

We say supposedly because the media has been oddly silent on whether one of the “Big Four” carries the kind of notions in her head that should disqualify her from guiding the dramatic arts program at a rehabilitation center, never mind being given the wheel should the aged man at the top of the ticket keel over while throwing out the first pitch at a baseball game.

Palin’s appearance on the scene has (rightfully) frightened so many people that her head has become one of the world’s most photoshopped (click here and, well, look up) and the reports on her have been driven more by a desire to run her back into the wilds of Alaska than they have good reporting (see here).

The UK’s News of the World for example ran the following in a column by Fraser Nelson: (No link available, but trust us, it appeared in the September 14 edition).

MATT Damon asks if US vice-president candidate Sarah Palin believes there were dinosaurs 4,000 years ago - suspecting her religious views mean she doesn’t. Palin goes one better: “When God gave the dinosaurs the ability to poop oil 6,000 years ago, he certainly didn’t intend for us to leave it in the ground,” she says.

NB: Dinosaurs died out 65million years ago. Ask her running mate John McCain: he probably saw it.

As much as we enjoyed this and the headline “McCain Saur It”, this little tidbit was actually “sourced” from the following article on Crystal Air Productions, a satirical website, which also reports on an environmentally themed car that runs on excrement and lets us know that John McCain has extended secret service protection to a polar bear.

What little legitimate coverage there has been of this has been worrying indeed. The UK Independent quotes a resident of Palin’s home town, saying that he had discussed her creationist beliefs with her while Palin was mayor:

“I pushed her on the earth’s creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. And she said yes, she’d seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them.”

Now, granted, this was just one guy, but we’re talking about Wasilla Alaska here, a town with a population of 5,469. This is the kind of town where not only does everybody know everybody, but everybody owes everybody else five bucks that they’ll get back to them next payday. One person in a town that small is equivalent to 3 million people if you extrapolate to the wider US population, and that’s more folks than you could squeeze into the Creation Museum even if you used a shoe horn and a whole tub of slick.

Palin should come clean on whether her beliefs are being wildly misquoted by people who bear her a grudge, or if she actually is of the opinion that man and dinosaur existed side by side and perhaps that every household had a giant octopus wash the dishes. It likely won’t lose her the election. Heck in Canada, the vast majority of people believe in the theory of evolution, Stockwell Day, a prime ministerial candidate at the time, remarked that there was “scientific proof” that man and dinosaur coexisted. He’s now the public safety minister, which makes us feel… well, not safe.

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September 17, 2008 Mad Science

Mathematicians would like you to believe there is a hierarchy in the sciences, with them at the top. They would also like you to believe that two parallel lines eventually meet in a point at infinity, the justification for which is very clever indeed as they are very clever people and clever enough to put themselves at the top of a hierarchy of their own design .

Second on the list is physics as you can’t have physics without math, followed by chemistry, which you cannot have without the principles of physics, then biology, which requires chemistry and physics. If you don’t get the idea by now, none of these disciplines, unfortunately, will be your calling and perhaps the local police college, or selling Florida swamp time shares, is a better vocational option.

Further down this hierarchy, which you can imagine by kicking a small stone of the edge of the Grand Canyon and seeing where it lands (or calculating its trajectory, using the principles of physics), is sociology, or, as one wag I went to high school put it as we were discussing possible college majors “the study of the obvious”.

One such study, right out of our own home town no less, concluded after more chins stroked than a Hemingway look-alike contest that “job insecurity can lead to anxiety and depression, which can then cause cardiovascular and other physical ailments”. Another conclusion reached that’ll curdle milk and set off the gongs on grandfather clocks within a ten-mile radius is that “Lower-status, non-permanent jobs expose employees to hazardous work conditions more often than permanent jobs of higher status.”

With such heady data at one’s disposal, this is high time, hot on the heels of Labor Day (for those of you interested in humming along to the Best Work Songs click here) to march into the boss’ office and make a pitch for a few extra shekels and if that fails, make the fall season live up to its name and see if you can throw your back out and claim disability.

September 15, 2008 Uncategorized

There are hundreds of millions of blogs in the blogosphere and like the universe, and Rosie’s waistline, it’s expanding. Fortunately, there are many more millions of readers. So, how does one carve a tiny portion of cyberspace out of this enormous juggernaut as we can say, with a hint of immodesty, we did with http://www.thesharkguys.com/?Here, in no particular order, are 20 tips to gain a wider audience for a blog.

1. Register a unique URL. Nobody is going to remember c427tripod.com/index. It’s $10 well-spent and can be attached to a primary email as a signature. It’s also helpful when creating a brand and accompanying, hopefully memorable banner. [We are currently in the process of doing this very thing]

2. Blog often. Infrequently updated blogs are soon relegated to Google’s backwaters.

3. Have unique content, but not too arcane that it’s alienating. Know your niche (rhymes with ‘quiche’ in Canada, ‘witch’ in the US). Ours happens to be everything to do with drinking culture, with the occasional bit of pop culture shenanigans thrown in, like 25 Horrible Bands Named after Places the Top 10 Best NFL Names as well as the occasional DVD review.

4. Join a social and media networking site like DIGG, Gather or Zimbio

5. Submit a blog to as many blog search engines as possible. These include, but are not limited to, Technorati, Yahoo and Google. In fact, a veritable cottage industry has sprung up, of competing and/or niche blog internet search engines. Have a knitting blog? Submit it to an Arts & Crafts subsection of a search engine and compare traffic to similarly-themed blogs. They typically request a button be placed on your site in return.

6. Post interesting pictures. A sizable portion of readership will happen upon sites while looking for something completely different. Who knows? They may like what they see and stick around.

7. Blog often, but not too often, unless it’s a quality post.

8. Create a blogroll. What’s this? It’s simply a link to friends. Have a blog about beer? Check out who else does, whether it’s brewers, aficionados or sellers of beer-related merchandise and particularly those with high traffic or high quality. Befriend them. Post on their site. Ask about a reciprocal link. These are usually mutually beneficial and bloggers are typically more than welcome to sign on and vice versa. Having many people add you to your blogroll increases your web ‘authority’, used by some, such as Technorati, in their ranking scheme.

9. Invite guest bloggers. Draw their audience over to you and vice versa.

10. Post a lot of comments. This helps Google ’searchability’, and draws the curious over to your site. Make friends. Reach out and touch someone, not literally of course.

11. Allow open comments from readers. Don’t restrict what they can post, as this is irritating. People like to read what others have written in response to blogs and like to participate. This should be encouraged (of course, bigotry and the like can be deleted)

12. Be timely. Did some celebrity do something stupid over the weekend? Have a blog commentary ready for Monday morning. Don’t delay, as the crest of the media wave will be missed.

13. Create unique content. Have a unique and fun Top 10 List? Post it, and send it to sites that post Top 10 Lists (the blogosphere is full of these). Happen to notice a funny sign coming home from work? Perhaps some glaring grammatical error or some really clever bit of ad copy. Take a photo and upload it. There is a popular humor blog devoted to, of all things, unnecessary quotation marks. Play a musical instrument, or have a pet that does amazing tricks? Again, take a video and upload it.

14. Allow readers to flag your postings. At the end of each posting, allow readers to ‘Digg’, ‘Stumbleupon‘ or ‘Del.icio.us’ the blog. These are social bookmarks that give readers an opportunity to check what they like. If it’s popular enough, a posting could spread through cyberspace like a wanton brushfire. A cool site that is an agglomeration of these addthis.com

15. Facebook. As with the above, add a Facebook link to the bottom of a blog which allows readers to post content onto their sites.

16. Use ads sparingly. There is nothing more annoying than a site overwhelmed by ads distracting the reader from the content.

17. Choose blog titles wisely. For the purposes of Google searches, it can’t afford to be too clever. But at the same time, it has to attract eyeballs with something catchy. Check out Google Keywords. This will tell you how popular a particular phrase is, and how hotly advertisers are competing over it.

18. Be open. For better or for worse, we live in a confessional world. The seemingly mundane goings on of south Illinois farm life may be of interest to an urbanite in San Francisco.

19. Label posts and internally link to previous ones. Readers can keep track of whatever topics have been blogged about, and find earlier posts done on the same topic.

20. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, WRITE WELL. At the end of the day, quality counts and it’ll have people coming back for more.

Christopher Lombardo is co-author of The Man who Scared a Shark to Death and Other True Tales of Drunken Debauchery (Penguin 2008) and co-author of the humor blog, The Shark Guys www.thesharkguys.com

September 12, 2008 weird news

An 'artist's' take on what could have happened had the delivery been accepted.

Delivery work can be tough. Fearing repo men or the religious, most people don’t welcome knocks on their doors from strangers, and the ranks of mail carriers are filled with psychopaths driven to it by a combination of bad handwriting and the Zip Code system. So, there it is, sympathy expressed for the challenges of delivery work. Nonetheless, the person responsible for the following blunder still has to put on the pointed dunce cap and sit in the corner (a practice sadly abandoned by all but the very best schools).

The unnamed (a kindness) delivery company received an order for 12 barrels of lager - that’s 2,000 pints for those of you shouting at your monitors that we were off in the headline - to be delivered to Windsor Castle, a pub in Maidenhead, a town about five miles away from the royal digs. Somehow, the delivery guys missed both the address and the word “pub”, following Windsor Castle.

They showed up with the beer haul at the gates of Windsor Castle, but were told that the beer, which could have made for one jubilant jubilee indeed, had not been ordered by Good Queen Bess, and that Prince Philip damned their eyes for having the bloody nerve (In the interest of the historical record, we made that second part up).

The pub-owner, who had been expecting the booze to arrive for England’s football match with Croatia, was concerned that the order wouldn’t arrive before he received a call from an officer who had a confused delivery driver with him.

“I couldn’t believe it. I honestly thought it was a hoax but the officer insisted he was genuine and wanted confirmation that we were expecting a delivery,” he said. “We have received mail for the royal household here before but I think this is the first time they have received anything meant for us.”

As for the Queen, she was amused, well her spokesman at Windsor Castle was: “It was very funny. But there’s no way the Queen sits down in the evening with a pint.” It should be noted that she prefers a wee nip of whiskey in the evenings, as do her alcoholic corgis, whose exploits we chronicled in The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death: And Other True Tales of Drunken Debauchery.