I was in Salt Lake’s best used book store, Sam Weller’s, last weekend. They had a whole section of old calendars and date books. I was looking through this section and I was wishing I could find a diary. I wanted to peek into the life of someone. I wanted to take home a handwritten journal that documented the life of a stranger. I wanted to hear their personal thoughts and know their intimate secrets.

At the time, I was clueless. At the time, I was just consumed with finding an interesting document of the thoughts and feelings of an ordinary person. I made absolutely no connection to the weblog phenomena at all. Sifry’s Alerts logged over one million weblogs on September 27^th. There are over one million journals, diaries, calendars and date books online right now, with more every day. Over one million people are out there, crying to be heard.

In the future, technology will be so advanced, that people will go home and want to touch a piece of wood. David Bowie (paraphrased)

Something is wrong with this society. I don’t know what it is, but people are LONELY. I’m not talking the normal loneliness that comes at times. I’m talking about a chronic loneliness that eats away at the soul. People are HUNGRY to talk. It only takes a kind word, a polite nod or a look straight in the eye to start the floodgates. I have been blessed with hearing the stories of many strangers and right now there are over one million more that are begging to talk to me.

Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other. Ann Landers (1918 – 2002)

I don’t really blame the television. We turn on our televisions and the voices make us think that someone is in the room with us, but those voices aren’t fulfilling the need. They are one-sided and they can’t hear us when we cry. They don’t even have the decency to stop talking when we weep openly. The fact of the matter, however, is that it is us who choose to turn the television on instead of seeking companionship when we are lonely. Are we so out of step with our emotions that we don’t know when to turn off the TV?

When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers. Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900), An Ideal husband, 1893

What is going on in our society? What is different? Was it always like this? Were humans always so lonely that they clung to the stranger who would hear their words? Is loneliness the definition of humanity or is this a new occurrence? My prayer was answered. I found one million journals to read and they are unfolding to me every day. Be careful what you wish for…

I made the mistake of typing in some of the searches that brought readers to me. Someone looking for the phrase “drunk parties” ended up finding me, along with a million and one porn sites. I wasn’t even on the first twenty pages for that search. Someone looking for the phrase “skater punk boy pictures” found me on page eight of the Google search. Not even Avril Lavigne made the top five on that search. Porn, porn, porn.

We had parties that Nero would have been ashamed to attend. Ronnie Hawkins

The irony of all of this is now I’ll score even higher on things that I probably shouldn’t have a score for at all. I’ve said the words that brought the searches in addition to the word “porn” repeated several times. Do I need to guard my words so closely? If the words “drunk parties” brings up over twenty pages of porn, what would the words “poking a cheerleader” bring? I used those words last week. Oh, let me check. Only four pages of porn before I showed up.

How can I guard my words so that I won’t show up on anyone’s porn search? Is that possible? Maybe I’m just the kind of blunt woman whose words will be grouped with the unsavory and vulgar. What I need to say would only become more convoluted if I tried to guard each word. For all I know, the phrase “swarm of dragonflies” pulled up a bunch of porn too. No, I will say what I think in the way that it most naturally comes out of my fingers onto the keyboard.

Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards. Lois McMaster Bujold, “A Civil Campaign”, 1999

Most importantly, it’s obvious these people weren’t looking for porn. They had pages of choices before my site to fulfill their fantasies. No, if they were looking for porn, the boring blurb underneath the name of my weblog wouldn’t have been enough to warrant a click. What were they looking for? Did they find it here? Should it even matter to me if they didn’t?

This is something I never had to deal with when I was putting my journal in a drawer. No one read it. No one found it while looking for erotica. No one found it at all. I can’t hide in the drawer anymore. If you were looking for hot lovin’ here, you’ll have to keep searching.

I’ve decided to time all my prewritten entries at exactly 5:00 am so that you know when to look for them and you can tell whether I was really up in the early hours writing. I just thought you’d like to know.

learning to walk again

That was the most heartbreaking Google search phrase of the month of February. They found my entry talking about Kristen’s stroke, but I’m sure they didn’t find what they needed. I gave no advice because I wasn’t the one who learned how to walk. I just had to sit on the sidelines and keep myself from trying to catch her when she wobbled.

She’s walking just fine now. Her speech is still a little slurred, but she is entirely understandable. Her quick recovery is nothing short of a miracle. I remember her begging for her parents to take her home. They told her that if she worked really hard in therapy, then they would let her go home. She’s home now with her cat and her computer and her newly painted bedroom. That’s the power of motivation: learn to walk and you can leave this lonely place.

One person was looking for a website to teach them to walk again, and all I could do was describe it from the outside looking in. I hope that they were able to find something more helpful a little further down the list. I hope they find all they need on that journey that I can’t spare them.

along came polly quotations, quote from along came polly dad, quotes from along came polly

On the disappointing side, there were three people looking for Along Came Polly Quotations. Since our Quotes of the Day website specializes in quotations, I feel a little guilty for not being able to help them. All I did was say, “I’m not going to see the movie, but the concept is intriguing.” How’s that for in-depth reporting? I guess I’ll leave that to the local news.

buttoned-up women, uptight men

I also got a bunch of hits for the Along Came Polly entry concerning the idea of repressed individuals. I noticed that irrepressible women, virile men, uninhibited person didn’t show up as search phrases. Could it be that all of us are looking for someone who is boring so that we can bring spice to their lives? Maybe just the people who end up finding my weblog.

changing in front of other women locker room, photo her changing clothes, photo weblogs locker rooms, undress jumper training bra

The perverts found me with my weblog entry, Conversations In Women’s Locker Rooms. I’m sorry, but I have no porn for you folks. I guess I need to choose my words much more carefully. Here’s a piece of advice for you, find your porn the way I did: find a friend with older brothers. They’re always willing to let the younger generation feed off their used and sticky Penthouse magazines.

lisa loeb haircut

Even though I wrote the entry in January, I’m still getting plenty of hits with this phrase. As an update, I couldn’t find any Lisa Loeb Glasses in Salt Lake City. It wasn’t until my last trip to Las Vegas a couple of weekends ago that I was able to find any. I had almost given up on even trying the Lisa Loeb thing, but then the Hot Topic at the Fashion Show Mall had some Lisa Loeb Glasses for me, so now I can look quirky with my straight hair instead of prissy. I changed my picture on February 25^th with my new look, just in case you didn’t notice.

pick my face

Hands down, the most disturbing search entry of the month. I can handle 13-year old boys looking for porn, but someone looking for a site about acne molestation is just too weird for me. I’m just hoping that they were looking for a cosmetic surgery clinic where they get to pick out their favorite cheekbones.

No time to talk about April Fool’s Day. I’ve got more interesting things to talk about than practical jokes.

caffeine withdrawals, caffeine withdrawal, caffeine withdrawal headache, how do i quit soda, how to quit soda, sprite soda carbonation, caffeine addiction withdrawal, caffeine headaches soda, caffeine withdrawal cold turkey, caffeine withdrawal remedies, advice on quitting caffeine

Hands down, the most searches hit me because I wrote the entry about how to quit soda. When I was quitting soda, there was no help on the Internet because there are so many herbal remedies trying to get your business. I guess my entry was the one voice that wasn’t trying to sell you anything. I hope it helped you guys.

cupcake, computer term for cupcake, #mormon cupcake   Ok, I’ll bite. What do these searches mean? Is “cupcake” a new slang for something that I wasn’t aware of before? Doing these searches taught me nothing I didn’t already know. Cupcakes are little cakes in paper cups. If there is a computer term for cupcake, I wasn’t able to find it and obviously neither were those poor searchers.

I did find a story about a guy that is using misspelled domain names to generate advertising dollars. This guy has registered thousands of domain names, each one housing thirty or forty pop-up ads. He makes a lot of money because of stupidity and poor typists. All the more reason to study up, learn to type and use Google instead of typing in what you think the domain name is. Cupcake was a hit because the guy registered a bunch of cupcake sites (i.e. Cupcake Party, Cupcake Patrol, etc.). I wonder if this is what those people were looking for. It doesn’t explain the Mormon thing, though. In fact, it makes me think that “cupcake” is some new slang for something pervy.

I found a really cool technical paper regarding The Cupcake Problem. I only understood the first page of this thing and it got all mathematical on me, so I stopped reading, but it showed me that there are people working on things that I never even conceived of. The Cupcake Problem is a study in which a younger child is given a task by an older sibling (who is in cahoots with the researcher). The older sibling says that they have just put some cupcakes in the oven and they need to be taken out in 30 minutes. It’s ok to keep playing on the X-Box, but you need to take out the cupcakes on time, got it? The researchers watch the younger child during that half hour, observing the number of times the child checks the clock. All of this has to do with calculating monitoring activities. It got really technical really quickly, but it showed me that there are cool people out there. Rock on, Paul Cohen, Marc Atkin and Eric Hansen.

I did find a funny site recreating the Janet Jackson fiasco in cupcake form. I found a news brief about a boy who drugged Mormon missionaries with cupcakes, but that was back in 2000. There was also a reference to the movie Orgazmo, in which a Mormon missionary is introduced to the porn industry. This movie was a hit at the underground theater here, but I never saw it. It sounded like it might be a little negative and I don’t really play that way. Apparently, “Cupcake” is the pet name for the missionary’s girlfriend back home. I wonder if that was it.

<?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />st john climacus, patron saint of obesity

Apparently, I’m not the only one looking for the Patron Saint of Obesity. I’ve had several hits with these search strings. Keep fighting the fight, searchers. It’s worth it.

%22gathering randomness%22

They found me on page 6 of the Google search. I don’t know if they found what they were looking for. These sorts of searches make me think that I don’t know what is going on. Do the percent signs mean anything? What about the number 22? The only reason I showed up is because there was a little note at the bottom of my entry about Gathering Randomness for the previous date. Is the percent sign some sort of wild card? Why didn’t they search for the number 42? I guess if they knew the meaning of the universe, they wouldn’t be searching.

bathroom exhaust fans stopped working

I have no idea what this person was looking for. I waded through seven pages of websites that were perfectly willing to tell me how to fix the problem. Maybe they were looking for someone who could fix their exhaust fans. Maybe my entry enticed him. This is how my entry looked at Google, “… for a second or two and then final darkness and an eerie quiet that I have never heard in that bathroom. The ever-turning exhaust fan had stopped turning. …” I didn’t know that my entry about Friday the Thirteenth would bring people because of the bathroom exhaust fan. How glamorous.

what does the dragonfly symbolize

Yes! Two people on this planet found my entry on dragonflies. They found my entry explaining exactly what I had been looking for. I had been wondering, “What does the dragonfly symbolize?” No single site was able to help me, but now, my entry is there for all those people in the future who want to know the same thing. Hint for the kids at home: dragonflies mean nothing or everything, depending on how superstitious you are and how much weed you smoke. Stay clean, kids.

iris/goddess

Honey, I think you were looking for Isis, not Iris.

That’s it for me. Let’s do this again next month!

“Matt started a web log. Now all my friends are writing web logs.”

Dan sounded a little jealous or maybe he was just amused at the commonality among his acquaintances. I felt like saying, “Why don’t you start a web log?” but the conversation had turned to Dan’s friend and his life with his wife, Stacey’s old friend from long ago.

The first web log I ever read was Real Live Preacher. It seems strange that I would be introduced to this world by a Christian, but I love his blog, despite his religion of choice. Do you ask what religion your plumber is when there’s raw sewage flooding your bathroom? No. When I’m bored at work, it doesn’t bother me that Real Live Preacher is Christian. He’s a good writer and that’s what’s important.

From Real Live Preacher, I found Standing Room Only. Hugh Elliott is another good writer who’s funny and down to earth. After reading the two of them every day for a month, I was convinced that I needed to start my own blog. It suddenly seemed so strange to me that I would just hide my writing in a file on the computer every day. Why did I do it for so long?

Because writing is hard. Writing every single day in a relatively coherent manner is difficult. Some days I feel empty. Some days I have such a hard time trying to explain why such an insignificant thing like a beat up van could spawn my thoughts about change and metamorphosis. Some days I feel like everything I say could be warped and construed so that it will end up on a porn search. Some days I’m confused by the means in which people found me.

Every day, I show up at the page. Every day, I start typing and let the words take me on a trip. That’s the beauty of writing every day, but the pain is that some days I start my blog entry typing, “Just show up at the page. One entry a day, that’s all I need. What am I going to write about today? What do I want to tell the world? I feel empty. What am I going to talk about? What am I scared to talk about?” It usually only takes a paragraph of writing like that before the real entry starts for me and I’m ready to delete all of the emptiness.

So, Dan, when are you going to start your own web log? Did I make it sound glamorous enough to inspire you? Come on… Everyone’s doing it…

matt strebe

I had several hits looking for my old friend Matt. Or maybe it was Matt looking for what people are saying about him. I still haven’t finished talking about Gifted and Talented. I stopped writing about that experience back in March, but the story isn’t finished. It was just too hard to describe how we became so close. Instant friendship is so difficult to convey in print and that’s how it was for me. I instantly liked these guys. I’ll get back to that story, I promise. Until then, you can read it again here: Gifted and Talented.

caffeine withdrawals, how to quit soda, caffeine withdrawal, how to quit drinking soda, quit drinking soda, quit soda, caffeine addiction withdrawal, caffeine withdrawal from soda, quit drinking sodas, quitting soda, remedies caffeine withdrawal, benefits of quitting soda, caffeine pop carbonation, caffeine withdrawal advice, caffeine withdrawal cold turkey, caffeine withdrawal headaches, headache withdrawals from soda, and more so much more.

The most hits again this month has come from my article, How To Quit Soda. I don’t really consider myself a health guru, but there are so many articles out there about this that are just advertisements for herbal products that I guess I am one of the few sober voices in the crowd. On another note, this month, I bought myself a rice bed buddy at Shopko that was shaped like an eye mask. I was so excited to try it. When I had a headache just a week ago, I put it in the microwave to heat it up. Unfortunately, I didn’t read the directions. Only the inner portion of the mask could go in the microwave and I ended up setting the Velcro on the mask on fire. Mike took it out of the house using the barbeque tongs and we didn’t lose anything important, but I ruined my new bed buddy before I even got to try it out. Disappointed, I put my craft fair bed buddy in the microwave to ease my headache and pouted on the couch at my broken new toy.   gym babe, adult weblog, babe gym, bra trying on dressing room, changing room perverts, desire temptation weblog   Sorry boys. Just move along. There’s nothing to see here. Just look at the next site on the list. I couldn’t write porn even if I needed to.

eat raw potatoes

I don’t know what you’re looking for, but yes, I’ve eaten raw potatoes many times in my life. Mostly when I was really hungry for dinner and my grandma asked me to peel the potatoes. She wouldn’t be watching and that would be a moment when I could get a little extra food without getting into trouble. I never got sick from eating raw potatoes. They don’t taste extraordinary unless your grandma is starving you in the misguided attempt to make you lose weight.

barbie with tan lines

Yes, I had a Barbie with tan lines. She was a Malibu Barbie and she came with a pale blue bikini. I also had a doll that was the same size as Barbie called Tuesday Taylor. She would tan in the sun. You could let her sun bathe and you could see the tan lines under her suit if you left her out there for long enough. She wasn’t really a toy for children with short attention spans because it would take hours for her to tan. Plus, only her body tanned, not her face, so her head looked really weird.

Tuesday Taylor had another cool thing about her. She had a swivel top head so that she could be blonde one minute and then brunette the next. Of course it didn’t work perfectly, so she really just looked a little bit like Cruela DeVille with two-tone hair. In this day and age, that’s completely normal, but back in the late seventies, no one had hair like that except bad guys. Eventually, the swivel got loose and we couldn’t keep her hair in one place. I don’t know why a swivel top head wasn’t as scary to me as a child as it is now.

calvin hardcastle

One person found me looking for my friend, Calvin. Whoever you are, dude, email me and we’ll reminisce about him together. I miss that skinny guy.

christian cognitive dissonance

Yeah, this has happened to me. It was that point where I really believed that the Apocalypse was going to come and God would kill me for not believing he existed.  I believed both things at the same time. I believed that the Apocalypse was coming and God was going to kill me. I believed that God didn’t exist and was just a story people made up to make us feel better about our mortality. I was in seventh grade and I held both beliefs as true for a long time. It took several years for the vision of the Apocalypse to fade and for the idea of a vengeful God to be categorized under “myth” instead of “fact.”

My entry on Cognitive Dissonance was about something else completely and came up on your search string because I said the word Christian. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to answer your questions. I don’t know if you’re suffering, but if you keep searching, I’m sure you will find an answer that is helpful to you.

bosu ball

Yes, my Bosu Ball finally came in the mail and I’ve been too damn sick to play with it. I’ve watched the video that came with it and I can tell you that everything that we did with the step in that class we could have done with the Bosu Ball. I guess they just keep the step because you can make it really tall or really short depending on your fitness level. I haven’t been back to the gym since that Saturday when I was brave and practiced on the Bosu Ball in front of all the people in the cardio area. I’m going to go back as soon as I can breathe without coughing or snuffling my nose. Until then, I’ll do easy workouts with my Bosu at home.

On another note, the character in the comic strip, Neurotica, had the completely opposite experience at the gym. She went to the Boxing Room at the gym and there was a really friendly blonde there who helped her through the class. I wish I could change my bad memory with a good one like that.

laura lund

Strangest of all, two people who were looking for me, found me. Laura Lund is my maiden name. I didn’t get any emails saying, “Hey, Laura! Long time no see! I found your weblog.” Maybe they were looking for a different Laura Lund.

I’ve been writing for so long that I’ve forgotten what I have told you and what I have kept to myself. Lucky thing I never lie because I would never be able to keep track of everything. For the last few months, the search string, “biggest ball of yarn in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Minnesota” has shown up in my statistics. There are only one or two people looking for that string, so it falls to the end of the list and out of my sight before the middle of the month.

It showed up again today, so I ran a Google search to see which of my entries was coming up for the “biggest ball of yarn in Minnesota.” I didn’t think that I had talked about Weird Al Yankovic except just recently when his parents died. I thought that it must be one of those weird fluke search strings. When it came up, I saw myself on the first page. This is what I saw:

Laura Moncur’s Weblog … There is probably a “Biggest Ball of Yarn in Minnesota” that could crochet an afghan, but I suspect that it would have spots where it was tied together, too …
http://laura.moncur.org/articles/2003-12-01-05-29.html – 6k – Cached – Similar pages

Even seeing this much didn’t jog my memory. I had no recollection of ever talking about yarn, so I looked at that entry. If you haven’t read this entry before or don’t remember it, go read it now and come back. I agree with everything I said, but I don’t really remember writing that entry. The afghan that I was working on in December is the same one that I’m working on right now. It actually is a bedspread, which is substantially bigger than an afghan, but it seems like it will never end. Mike and I measured it last Tuesday and I’m about ten skeins away from finishing it.

That sweater that was sitting in the closet, waiting to be put together is still there. I’ve lost over ten pounds since then, so I’m sure it won’t fit me when I finally put it together, so I guess it goes to The DI. That’s ok. I’m crocheting for charity. I can do that.

I wonder about those search strings, though. Are they looking for the biggest ball of yarn in Minnesota? Are they really looking for the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota and just screwing things up? It’s no wonder I’m on the first page of these searches. There aren’t any huge balls of yarn under makeshift pagodas in Minnesota. Yarn isn’t really all that interesting. Twine on the other hand is fascinating.

I just can’t stop thinking about this search string. Are they trying to find the lyrics to Weird Al’s song to which I was referring and just mixing up yarn with twine?  I love the Weird Al Song. It makes me imagine what vacationing with Homer Simpson would be like. Ok, maybe a cross between Homer Simpson and my dad. Especially with the Slim Whitman reference and the line, “This here’s what America‘s all about.” I just love that song. I want to go see the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota. Maybe they would let me crochet an afghan with it. I promise to weave in the ends.

I usually do this on the first, but I plum forgot it. I’ve been talking about search strings a lot this month. I have spent far too much time trying to figure out how people find me. I am trying to get everyone who is looking for something interesting to read while they’re at work to find me and I want to recreate it whenever I can.

I was obsessing over it last Saturday. Mike came into the living room and asked me what I was doing. “I’m trying to see how these people found me with the phrase “buttercup’s baby morgenstern”. I am on page 15 right now on Google and I’m not showing up. I know there are other search engines than Google, but…” He cut me off, “That’s not the half of it.”

Just like the rest of the web world, the S-1 Filing of Google is of particular interest to us. Everyone has their personal estimate of how many servers they have ranging from 10,000 to 80,000 based on the 250 million dollars they have spent on hardware. There is no predicting which machine you’ll hit and each machine is a little different. There is no way I can track this stuff and I should just stop looking at the search strings, but I find myself drawn to them in a sick and morbid fascination.

tan lines

I don’t know what they were looking for. They ended up finding my entry about Barbies. When I search for that string, there is a lot of porn, but I have a hard time believing that the sentences, “Malibu Barbie was totally cool because she had a tan lines underneath her bathing suit. They were painted on, and if you took her out swimming too often, they would chip right off. I swear, what kinds of kids test these toys?” would have attracted someone looking for porn. Did you find what you were looking for?

william f. clare, best friend jealous everyone likes her, andi glowing fingernails, biggest ball of yarn in minnesota

All of these have had specific entries written about them. There are more hits now because I’ve talked about all of these things in more detail.

bosu ball, bosu gym

I have searched using this phrase. I was looking for a Bosu Ball to buy so that I could practice at home and I wouldn’t get embarrassed at the gym again. I’ve also been looking for exercise videos that use the Bosu Ball. I’ve also looked for exercises to do with it on my own. I have none of that here. All that poor person found here was whining and crying. If I helped only one person out there, then it was all worth it.

lumps on my back

When I said I had lumps on my back, it probably sounded more dramatic than it really is. They aren’t real lumps. They are more like knotted muscles that are tight and uncomfortable. The more they are massaged, the more relaxed I am and the knots go away. If you have real lumps on your back, don’t check the Internet for information, get them checked by a doctor.

akhenaten – religious reforms

Sorry I couldn’t help with your homework. Check out a couple of books from the library and read them. Borrow an A&E video from the library. That’s how I learned about him. Potential essay topic: Religious reforms are dangerous to your health ? Go With The Flow and Live Longer.

beautiful sentences

Only one person was looking for beautiful sentences. They ended up catching me in the act of trying to create a beautiful and quotable sentence. I don’t know if I was successful and I don’t know if the person that found me was pleased. I have an entire website of beautiful sentences. You should check it out.

I have used it to keep track of the things that I want to read, see or hear. If I would hear of a book (or movie or CD) that was good, I would just put it into the Amazon Wish List. I used it when I was looking for something to read (or see or hear) on the library’s website. There are better ways to keep track of things.

Wednesday, I transferred all of the things that I just casually wanted from the Wish List to my Palm Pilot. There’s no easy way to do it. I just wrote them down in a memo titled “Movies to See” or “Books to Read” or “Music to Hear.” All of the things that somebody recommended to me that I some day might think were interesting are now in my Palm. I’ve condensed my Wish List to the group of things that I really want to own.

The strange thing is that it’s mostly DVDs of television shows. I want every <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Babylon 5, Northern Exposure, My So Called Life and Freaks and Geeks. I want every episode. I want them all. All the books that I had in my list, I just deleted them because I know that the library has them and I can check them out any time I want. Same goes for almost all of the music. The library will pretty much buy any music, even Parental Advisory albums, so I just check them out and listen to them on a binge for three weeks. After that, I’m pretty happy to give them back to the library and only check them out again when I miss them.

Now, I’ve cleared out everything that I don’t absolutely want. The necessities. The bare essentials. Like the Star Trek Original Series Phaser and the DVD+R pack. You know, the kind of things you need to survive. You can check out my Amazon Wish List and tell me if you think I’m missing anything important.

lds garments hot sweaty

I don’t know how I get in this situation. Seven people found me with this search string. I have never talked about the garments that LDS people wear under their clothing, yet I’ve shown up on this search string. I know it must have been my Wardrobe Malfunction entry that showed up on the list, even though it doesn’t show up now. Worse yet, who knew there were seven people out there in the world wondering about hot and sweaty LDS garments.

If you’re wondering about LDS garments, here’s the lowdown from a philistine. After you take your sacrament in the LDS temple, you are allowed to wear LDS garments. They are basically boring underwear that signify the vows and pledges you made in the temple. They are made out of really lightweight material and they are white (or dingy gray if you haven’t replaced them for awhile). You wear them under everything, including your bra. I’ve never heard anyone complain about them during the summer. You’re not required to wear them, but they are a physical testament to your vows in the temple, so most LDS people here in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Salt Lake are proud to wear them.

how to be witty

If I had this answer, I would be the queen of the world. I have been striving for witty for so long that I really think it may be impossible to be witty at all times. I think it’s impossible to be Chandler 24-7. All that we can hope for is one truly brilliant moment when we are supremely funny. If you have more than one, count yourself lucky. I’ve given up on being witty and usually just resort to pratfalls.

ghost stinky smell

Stinky Ghost seems to be entertaining the populous. Even though the swamp cooler has been changed, we are still having stinky ghost problems. We are blaming them on poor ventilation and open windows often. The worst is when we have visitors. I feel like I have to explain to them that I really am a good housekeeper. It’s easier to just blame it on the ghost.

mike pinkston, greg wagstaff

It looks like some of my old friends are looking themselves up on the Internet or other people are looking for them. There is at least one other Mike Pinkston in the world and several other Greg Wagstaffs. I haven’t been able to find websites of the “real” Mike and Greg. If they existed, I would link to them.

bosu buy one get second half off

I’ve gotten lots of hits because of all my Bosu talk, but this one takes the cake. If you had one, why would you want another one? The only reason you might want to is to balance one on one foot and one on the other, which would understandably be much harder. Or maybe if you owned a gym, you might want to buy several. Otherwise, just learn how to do it with one. Your sister-in-law can buy her own.

coolest things to do -travel -events -you -just -can’t ?miss

Wow! What are they? How the hell did I come up on this search string? I have no idea what the coolest things to do are when you are traveling. I’ve been to Vegas at least twenty times and I still couldn’t tell you what the coolest thing to do there is. I guess I would have to say that the RA nightclub at the Luxor Hotel is the coolest thing to do in Vegas, but I really haven’t gone to all the cool nightclubs in Vegas, so it’s hard to judge. I really have no idea what the coolest things to do and which events I just can’t miss. When you find out, will you tell me?

krcl

God, I hate it when I’m stupid. It’s funny when a search string comes up, I notice my stupidity, but I had read that entry at least five times and didn’t notice the error. I originally named the entry KRCL. If you read it back in January and you didn’t know the Utah radio market, you would have just breezed right past the error and never noticed it. When I saw those call letters in my search string, I was confused. I didn’t remember writing about KRCL. Did I talk about wanting to be a DJ and considering doing volunteer work for the community radio station? I found the entry and quite frankly, no I didn’t.

No, I wrote about The Death of KCGL, the most important radio station of my young punk life and like a bozo used the wrong fucking call letters! Well, in computer land, I can edit history. Just like Winston in 1984, I can change my entry from back in January to reflect the correct call letters and erase all evidence of stupidity, except this entry, of course. No, this entry is a physical testament to my poor memory and incredible ability to mix two entirely different radio call letters.

I’m empty. The last few entries I’ve written were half-hearted attempts rushed off in a flurry. Showing up at the page just isn’t doing it for me right now. I know I can’t be profound every day, but I feel like I have nothing to say. Maybe I’m just tired. I’m going to take tomorrow off and see how I feel on Monday.

When Mike set up my blog, he wrote the code and set up the database himself. My site is completely original and unique. The problem with original and unique is that whenever I want to change something, I have to beg him to do it. I have to ask him to upload new pictures. I am totally isolated from the process.

When I first started, I was ok with that. All I wanted was a place to publish my writing every single day. I was producing so much work that had no place to call home. Now, most of my nonfiction writing is able to reside right here. It’s not hidden in the desk. It’s not rotting on the hard drive. It’s here, for you to see and a shocking number of you want to see it every day.

Have I told you lately how much I love you guys? You log on to my site every day and read my words every day. You don’t need to comment. You don’t need to email me. You just show up every day to see what I have to offer and it makes me so happy to see your numbers grow. Thank you for coming here.

After reading Wil Wheaton’s book, Just a Geek, I felt a pang of guilt. He worked so diligently to get his site up and running. He fought long and hard with Movable Type to make it conform to his needs. All I did was ask Mike to write me a fully functioning weblog software package and within a few hours, he had it ready for me. I started feeling like a poser.

Then again, I told myself, I am not a programmer. I am a writer. All I need is a piece of paper big enough for the whole world to see. My blog was enough for that and in other respects not enough. All those little changes were stagnating on Mike’s ever-growing list. He runs the Internet’s most popular quotations site. He doesn’t have time to muck around with my blog and I feel guilty when I ask him to. Wouldn’t it be better if I mucked around with it, even if I broke it?

So, we are working on converting this blog to WordPress. It’s a blogging software package that is suitable for my needs. It may take me a long time to get it looking like my old site. I don’t even know if I want it to look like my old site. Looking at the installed style sheet, it looks a lot cleaner than mine ever did. I might just be happy to stick with that.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes! Turn and face the strange. Ch-ch-changes! Don’t want to be a richer man Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes! Turn and face the strange. Ch-ch-changes! Just gonna have to be a different man. Time may change me, but I can’t change time. – David Bowie, Changes, The Best of Bowie

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Ah, the return of summer and people all over the country want to know one thing: why are there so many dragonflies in my yard? What does it mean? Is it an omen? What do they symbolize?

Relax, people. It’s summer. They’re bugs. Look at them. They’re kind of pretty. They aren’t here every day. Stop and notice them. Don’t search the web for them.

who caroline outkast roses girl -mars video �beyonce

I don’t know what this person was looking for, but I have a question about Caroline from the Outkast song Roses. I don’t care who the actress is who played her, which is all I can find out about her. I want to know who the real Caroline is. What’s the story behind that song, because that’s one bitter dude. He wants her to crash her car into a ditch, probably just because it rhymes with the word bitch. If given his wish, she’d probably crash into a semi hauling thousands of gallons of highly flammable gasoline and explode in a fiery flaming ball of toxic chemicals. It’s just that it’s so hard to find a rhyme for the word chemicals.

Why does he hate her so much? Is it just a case of unrequited love or did it turn sour? Does she have anything to do with Ms. Jackson? What’s the story? I want to see the Behind the Music on this song. At the very end of the video, they turn through pages of a yearbook and focus on the picture of one girl. Is she the real Caroline?

rice heating pad

I get so many hits from this phrase that I was going to write an entry about how to make your own rice heating pad. Then I looked online and there are tons of sites explaining just that. If that’s what people wanted, they would have stopped there instead of at my site talking about them. What’s attracting them to me?

i2workout work, i2workout

I never gave you an update. I love i2Workout. It works much better on my computer than it does when I burn myself a CD. I’ve hooked up the laptop to the treadmill so that I can see the workout as it is progressing. Sometimes my treadmill doesn’t hear the command and it doesn’t change the way it’s supposed to, but the voice command always tells me what it should be, so I can just change it myself on those rare occasions.

The guy who made the program refunded the money I paid for the software because he liked my review of it. That makes me feel a little guilty because I really just was talking about it because it was easy for me to use and I was just so happy to be able to make my own iFit workouts. Then again, I’m happy to have the software for free, so it’s a strange feeling of ambivalence.

blonde levi 501   Sorry. I still have no porn here. Keep looking. There’s a ton of it out there and you don’t even have to pay to see it, but you’ll find none of it here.

Here is the new blog. All the same entries are still here. Mike has expertly converted everything into WordPress and we worked on the style sheet last night. I have been looking at the screen and choosing the various categories (see them in the left column) for the last hour. I hope you like it. Ok, that’s a lie. I don’t care if you like it because I like it so damn much, but if you like it then that’s cool, too.

“I have to admit that I haven’t had the courage to read your weblog.”

“Courage?”

“Yes, it feels like I’m snooping into your life when I read it. I know you wouldn’t put it up there if you weren’t ok with people reading it, but it still feels like prying.”

I tried to tell her that it was perfectly ok to read my blog, but I could tell that it did little to ease her feelings. I didn’t know what else to say. I don’t really care if she reads it or not. She’s a great friend and she pretty much hears about all the things in my life without reading my blog. I don’t care, either way.

The idea of prying into someone’s life by reading their weblog is strange to me. I would think that people wouldn’t post things if they were uncomfortable with the world knowing about them. Then again, I’ve known people who have been upset when their spouses found their online journals, as if something like that is private.

It’s a strange feeling to read another person’s journal, but she’s right, it would be even stranger to read the journal of someone you know. To know what they truly think about shared events is a scary thing. None of my friends keep a blog, so I don’t know how it feels to be on the reading end of that sort of thing.

I love to read other people’s online journals. Sometimes, they entertain me far more than fiction. Real life is so messy and random in a way that fiction never is. It can be frustrating, too, because things drag out. Sometimes they never get resolved. Real life is funny that way or not-so-funny as the case may be.

All I can say is, go ahead and read to your heart’s content. You’re not snooping. Snooping is getting on my hard drive, hacking my password and reading my personal journals. Reading my blog is like having a one-sided conversation with me where I do all the talking. Even if you found me by accident, it’s ok. If you like what I have to say, please come back for more. If I didn’t want the world to know it, I wouldn’t write it here for the world to see.

I think that I have painstakingly fixed all the small problems that I was having with the conversion from our home-brew blog software over to WordPress. I write all of these entries in Word before I post them on the blog software, which isn’t a problem now, but when we used our old system, a lot of the old junk from Word was still there. It was causing problems, but I have systematically removed it all.

Now, please help me. If you see anything weird in my entries, will you please tell me? I know that everything from now on should be ok, but the older entries might have slipped past me. The fonts might be a little screwy. That’s ok, but if you see weird things with lots of strange punctuation then please email me. I’m no e. e. cummings. I don’t write strange poems with lots of parenthesis and carets.

Man, all my writing inspiration has been stripped out of me. I have spent all day just fixing these entries and it has killed all my writing instincts. I feel like I have nothing to say after deleting all the junk that Word put into my documents. Do I blame Microsoft for putting the junk there or myself for using Microsoft products?

This entry is written on MS Word. I guess you just can’t teach me.

As of midnight last night, Pick Me! had 102,376 hits. It was my goal to have 100,000 hits by the time my blog was one year old. It looks like I made it with a month to spare. I’m totally stoked!

This month I hit the goal of 100,000 hits. Now, my goal is 100,000 unique visitors before my two year anniversary. I’m at 22,412 right now, so tell all your friends about me. Link to me on your blog. Maybe I’ll even get Slash Dotted or Boing Boinged. That would be totally cool (except, of course, crashing the server. That’s double plus uncool.).

My readership is up to an average of 149 unique readers a day. I hit as high as 375 last month, which was strange. The day that I hit 375, I didn’t write anything particularly interesting or controversial. It was the fifth of August and I wrote about Recycled Buildings. It’s so strange what seems to attract people. I haven’t been able to track it.

who started the gallery stroll on pierpont avenue

I found the website for the Gallery Stroll, but it didn’t have any information on the history of the event. I emailed Laura Durham regarding this question and she was so nice to direct me to an article that she wrote about the Gallery Stroll: Twenty Years and Still Strolling. All the history about the event is right there for everyone to read. Apparently, it was a group of people who started the Gallery Stroll, not just one founder.

balancing on bosu

There are tons of sites out there wanting to tell you to buy a Bosu Ball, but few of them have given you exercises to do or even a realistic review of using one in a class at a gym. My entry is on page five of the Google search and I swear it’s the first one listed that comes from someone who ISN’T trying to sell you one. Don’t buy one. Go run around the block a few times. It’s cheaper and burns more calories.

patron saint of obesity

People all over the world are still wondering to whom they supplicate in the battle of the bulge. Since my entry about the patron saint of obesity, not much has changed. At The Catholic Community Forum someone actually asked who the patron saint of obesity would be. The person in charge recommended St. Thomas Aquinas because he was fat. Another one also recommended St. Thomas Aquinas. Sorry guys, I’m not going to ask a fat man to help me get thin and healthy. I’m still pinning my hopes on St. John Climacus.

amanda moncur, brad moncur, dee moncur

I don’t know any of these people. Sorry. Try finding them using Yahoo! People. I used them when I did my 15 year class reunion and they were pretty helpful. Good luck!

i2workout, create your own ifit workouts, treadmill workout ifit program download free

I know a lot of you are finding this program through me. I2Workout is a great program, but I honestly haven’t used it for over a month. I have been playing Dance Dance Revolution almost every day for my exercise. I still go to the gym to workout with weights and to take that Trekking class every Tuesday: once a week for 24 Hour Fitness and once a week for Xcel. That’s what I need to do to make those memberships pay off. Between those gym visits and my DDR obsession, I haven’t played with my treadmill or i2Workout for a long time. I should feel guilty, but I’m enjoying DDR too much.

biography of phillipe starck

I don’t have the biography of Philippe Starck, but his website does. It’s a convoluted and poorly programmed website that uses too much Flash, so I can’t link directly to the biography. First, choose English, then move your mouse to the left-hand part of the screen. It will say Starck, but once you move your mouse over it, it will change to a huge list of unorganized things about the designer. One of the things on the list (3/4 of the way down) is the word, “Biography.” If you click that, all you will see is a quote and a picture. You need to scroll down to find the “Next” button. Only then, will you find the beginning of the wordy biography of Philippe Starck. For a designer, his website is poorly designed. Peh…

I am taking a few days vacation from writing. I will be back Tuesday with a new chapter from Looking For Christ. Have a fun weekend. Get your face away from the television and the computer. Get outside and partake of the final days of summer. Be safe and enjoy yourself.

Today is the one year anniversary of this weblog! One year ago, I stopped hiding my writing on the hard drive and started publishing my thoughts to the world. My goal was to have 100,000 hits by this time. I made that on August 24th some time late in the evening. I don’t think I truly had the concept of what 100,000 hits in a year would be when I set that goal. The Quotes of the Day page gets over 60,000 hits a day, so I thought I was being conservative. Instead, I was grossly over estimating the growth of any non-celebrity blog site. I should have bothered to get famous before starting my blog. I made my goal, but I must admit that I sweated it out until I hit it.

I have been so grateful for this creative outlet. Being able to publish my writing daily has helped my creativity to soar. Instead of draining me, I feel like I have more ideas now than I did last year at this time. When I started this blog, I had so many stories about my past to tell and I still haven’t told all of them. When I started this blog, I had a small arsenal of fiction to post online and I still haven’t shown all of them. When I started this blog, I had so many ideas about life in general and I still haven’t written all of them. I still feel like I could type all day long.

Thank you. Every single one of you that read my site every day, THANK YOU! I know you’re there. I see the stats. I watch the referrers. I look at the sites that hit me the most. Thank you for reading my work and coming back regularly. Thank you for your comments. Thank you for your emails. Thank you for your support.

When Mike and I had our first anniversary, his Grandma Tippets gave us a package of toilet paper. She said the first anniversary is paper and handed it to us distractedly. If you’re thinking about an anniversary present for me, I just want you all to know that the best toilet paper in the world is Charmin Ultra.

I’ve seen a marked increase in unique visitors this month. It didn’t quite double, but it’s pretty close. Part of that (4.77%) are people from the DDR Forum checking out what I have to say, but most of the visitors (88.61%) come from direct request, meaning they’ve bookmarked me and are coming back or are typing my url in directly. That’s really cool. Thanks for coming back every day, folks. I really appreciate it.

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Who knew that there were so many different ways to say those words? So many variations of those same words have brought tons of people to my site with my entry about the Weight Watchers Core List. If you haven’t seen the comments that have shown up there, you might want to check out that entry again.

I really meant it when I said that there are no excuses. When you email telling me that you live too far away from a Weight Watchers place to go to the meetings, I’m going to send you to Weight Watchers Online. When you say you can’t afford it, we’re going to have a discussion about the simple things that you spend your money on every day that you can forego for Weight Watchers. That’s what commitment is about. It’s about doing whatever you have to do to get to your goal.

If you start throwing excuses at me, all it tells me is that you’re not ready to start this journey. If that’s the case, don’t bother. Enjoy yourself. Eat whatever you want without guilt. Give yourself permission to have whatever you want whenever you want it and stop beating yourself up about it. For some, that has also been the path to healthy eating. Read Margaret Cho’s blog entry about her road to sensible eating. Maybe the Fuck It Diet is your destiny.

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I guess late summer brings dragonflies into the lives of those who need to see them. Last year’s entry about Dragonflies has collected a number of visitors and a few comments that you might want to read. For every comment that says, “ur site sux,” I remind myself of the rare comments that come by that make me feel like I am here writing for a reason:

I am a very aggressive driver and am always speeding on the road. I had a fender bender last week while speeding out of my neiborhood. I was on my way to a weekend vacation and when I got to my destination I noticed a dead dragonfly on the front bumper. I knocked it off and forgot about it, but when I returned from my vacation, I noticed another one dead in basically the same spot. It was wierd so i looked it up. What i believe now according to your article is that speeding is a bad bad habit that I need to change or there is going to be some sad news. This may just be some strange belief, but i will take it as a sign. Thank you for your research.

Comment by Doretha — 9/21/2004 @ 10:45 pm

sabrina martin

Four people were looking for Sabrina Martin and found me talking smack. That was my fear. I worried that I had said something derogatory about Sabrina Martin. I write every day, so it’s really easy for me to forget what I have said. When I saw her name come up in the search strings, I worried that I had said something catty. Here’s what I said, “I wanted to be like Sabrina Martin in fifth grade. She wore really tight pants and the guys liked her a lot. I wanted to wear tennis shoes like hers so bad that I saved up the money to buy some. My mom was surprised that I would rather buy tennis shoes than Barbies and offered to buy them for me. They cost $9.95 at Gibson’s Discount Stores. They were blue and white.” So much for being catty.

I feel like I did a disservice to her. I know the blog entry wasn’t about her, but I didn’t really say enough about her for someone to really know what she was like. I feel like I should write a whole entry about her. She had this funny thing she could do with her eyes. They would move back and forth so quickly they looked like they were vibrating. She was funny as hell. I could always depend on her to crack me up. Her parents lived in the Academy Park neighborhood, just like Dylan. I could point at the house she used to live in today. It was a big, yellow split-level with a big M on the screen door.

Sophomore year, she was a cheerleader. Junior and Senior year, she was a Chate (drill team). She dated Kava Afu, the star football player that took Kearns to State. She hardly ever partied at Sceverenia’s house. It was very rare that I saw her there, even though she was so very popular that she was always invited. I guess she just preferred quiet time with Kava to the loud and potentially dangerous parties that Scev’s parties usually ended up being.

I saw her about five years ago when I was a real estate agent. At the time, she was married with five children. She had been a single mom for a long time and she seemed happy to be married. Later, I learned that she was divorced again. I hoped that she was happy.

Last time I saw her was about a year ago. She was on a blind date with her mechanic. He took her to Port O’Call. I don’t know whose idea it was, but she seemed to be having fun. She told me that I looked very thin and I was so grateful to her for being nice.

I wonder where she is now. She looked so healthy at Port O’Call that I suspected that single life might actually be better for her than married life. I touch her life so rarely now, that I truly feel that I couldn’t give a full account of her personality. Where are you, babe? I looked your name up in the phone book and there’s a Sabrina Martin in Kaysville. Is that you? I hope you’re happy and healthy. Sending good karma your way, if you believe in that sort of thing…

01-13-05 Laura Moncur to Michael Moncur

I looked on WordPress’s website for information about listing the archives in chronological order. This is the answer I found:

Coming in a bit late, but I was able to get ascending monthly archives in WP 1.2 by appending:

&order=ASC

…to the rewrite rules in .htaccess that call index.php with the archive parameters. With my particular permalink configuration, my new rewrite rule is:

RewriteRule ^([0-9]{4})/?([0-9]{1,2})?/?([0-9]{1,2})?/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?([0-9]+)?/?$ /index.php?year=$1&monthnum=$2&day=$3&name=$4&order=ASC&page=$5 [QSA]

Does that help any?

It doesn’t make any sense to me. Is this something that’s really hard to do or is it easy and I just need to learn it for myself?

Love, Laura 01-13-05 Michael Moncur to Laura Moncur

I can do it for you – remind me later. (It’s very easy, but I don’t think you have access to the file.)

Love you.

01-26-05 Michael Moncur to Laura Moncur

I finally got around to doing this. Check it out.

Right now the categories AND the monthly archives are in chrono order. Let me know if you want it otherwise. I think it makes the categories look bad except for Looking for Christ, but that’s just my opinion.

01-26-05 Laura Moncur to Michael

It looks great! Thanks so much! That’s exactly how I wanted it. If there is anyone who is obsessive and wants to read everything, this is how it should be set up, which makes me happy. Otherwise, the casual reader will never see those categories.

Thank you for doing this for me. I really appreciate it.

Just in case you’re reading this weblog on RSS, Mike completed a redesign of Pick Me! over the weekend. It looks lovely, yes?

The previous design was a three column layout that didn’t give me much room to post pictures. Plus, I was getting a little sick of the tiny lettering and other minor formatting problems that Pick Me! didn’t have compared to our other weblogs. Mike and I sat down and I pointed and grunted while he designed this great layout!

Check out my new Archives. Instead of listing EVERY SINGLE MONTH I’ve ever written posts, it lists the years that I have been writing. You can access a more detailed archives by clicking on any month. Mike did that! Excellent work!

I’m smiling now! Happy, happy! Joy, joy!

I know you’re there. I see the stats growing every day. Every once and a while, someone will post a comment, but mostly, you come, you read, you leave and I have no idea whether you got anything interesting out of your visit here.

I write this weblog for myself, but that doesn’t mean I’m not curious about you. Recently, Ward Jenkins had a Blurkers Rejoice entry on his blog and I thought it was a good idea:

• The Ward-O-Matic – Blurkers Rejoice!

Blurker (BLUR-kur): n. 1. One who reads many blogs but leaves no evidence of themselves such as comments behind; a silent observer of blogs. 2. One who reads many blogs but has no blog of their own; a blog-watcher or blog voyeur.

I’m interested in you, so please stop blurking just for today and leave me a comment telling me a little about you.

• Why do you visit my blog? For the writing and stories? The photography? For the links to weird stuff?

• Who are you? What profession are you in? Are you a boy or a girl? What do you do for fun?

• How did you find my blog? Link? Another blog? The Quotations Page? Starling Fitness? Doing a search on Google?

Just for today, leave me a comment and tell me just a little bit about yourself. I’m actually very curious about you because you come and read my words every day and I never know who you are.

My cute little weblog is now four years old today!

She can reach the light switches and open door knobs now. She feels so very independent, even though she’s just a little girl.

Happy birthday, Pick Me!

May you have many more!

I am totally stoked to announce that I’ve been chosen to speak at the Utah Open Source Conference this year.

• UTOSC 2009 | (Afford|Scal|Reli)Ability – Home

These are my presentations:

• UTOSC 2009 | Open Source Basics: What are you a bunch of hippies?
• UTOSC 2009 | Intermediate GIMP: Face Swapping
• UTOSC 2009 | Advanced GIMP: The Digital Diet

This is the first time I’ve done a presentation like this since my student teaching so many years ago, so I’m feeling pretty nervous and excited all at the same time. If you are in the Utah area on October 10th, please drop by the Utah Open Source Conference and give me a boost of morale. I’ll probably need it!