A moment of sincere gratitude

As we celebrate Thanksgiving in America today, I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge all of you who visit this little corner of the internet. Whether you're a regular visitor or whether you've merely come across my post about a big corn dog in a search, I really appreciate the time you've spent here.

For that I am truly thankful.

Happy Thanksgiving (or just happy Thursday to the rest of the world).

The kids may be alright but no so much for the blogs

Years ago, when the blahg here first started, I had a reasonably robust readership of people with whom I was personally acquainted; that is, people I knew, had met face-to-face, considered friends in the conventional sense before there was any online means of connection.

Of course, in those days several of those people had blogs of their own, so they spent some time in the blogosphere as well, and having a "community" of sorts was more easily achieved.

This was before many of them had children.

Playing it safe

Shows like Ice Road Truckers or Deadliest Catch and others of that ilk do not make me fancy that I, sitting on the sofa watching*, could engage in such dangerous professions. They make me appreciate my humble desk job—which would not make for an entertaining reality show no matter how much they manipulated the footage—all the more.

You'll notice that when I write, I never touch on the nuts and bolts of the activities involved with how I make a living. That is no coincidence.

(Heck, it's only by stretching and a tongue-in-cheek tone** that the thoughts I have when I'm not working can prove remotely worthy of being written down—and that's a matter of dubious justification, even under the best of circumstances.)

I take some solace in believing I know what level of attention the rest of the world should pay to me, and not demanding any.

But if you read this, I do appreciate the time you devoted to li'l ol' me. Seriously.

~


* I've only ever actually seen the commercials, but I like to think I got the gist of the shows from those. That's enough, right?

** Not that this post has much of that tone, but many of the other posts do. Well, I like to think they do, but... This isn't helping, is it? 

Okay, maybe you can call me blogger

Last week I balked at the term "blogger," due in part to it being a title based on the format. That, to be fair, could be semi-hypocritical in light of how "columnist" is an accepted title which clearly stems from the format (where the writing appears on a page in a column). Admittedly, columnist could be as vague, but in my opinion it is relatively definite (oxymoron intended) in the way it connotes someone writing with a perspective (bias) on a regular topic, and where it is presented in a specific format (to distinguish it from the at least ostensibly unbiased journalism that appears elsewhere.

Which, when it comes down to it, is one possible definition of what a blogger is. As less columns are published on paper in magazines and newspapers, "columnist" does fade as applicable. Perhaps "blogger" should be the officially recognized replacement term for when those erstwhile column content is posted online.

Don't call me blogger either

One of the blogs I read from time to time, I Will Dare (the personal one from the woman who started the Paul Westerberg fan site), had a post last week titled "Don't Call Me Blogger" where, as that title suggests, she refuted accepting that moniker for what she did. She began by admitting her original reluctance stemmed from her aspirations to be a "serious" writer and her belief (back many years ago) that no serious writer would blog. Obviously that's not the case, especially these days, but what now precludes her from perceiving herself as part of that is how the "blog" is done as a marketing tool; it's done to promote something the blogger had to sell (be it an object or a service or what-have-you), and as she was not shilling anything it was not apropos. (My summary doesn't do it justice; you should read it yourself.)

Both of which are fair points, I'd say, provided we could all agree that there's a singular definition of what a "blog" is (and, correspondingly, what a "blogger" is).

About the only aspects of a blog about which we could get some agreement is that it's a website (or part of a website) with material posted by date; a "blogger" is one who contributes content thereto. Beyond that, there's undoubtedly a fair amount of personal association the individual brings to the table.

Post #1000 Extravaganza. Or Not.

This is the thousandth post here on the blahg (and after only six and a half years), and thus I am faced with the challenge of deciding what to do about that.

On the surface, it seems noteworthy because one-thousand seems like a number worthy of commemoration, but other than being the point where whole numbers change from three digits to four what is particularly special about it? Ultimately that aspect holds no intrinsic value save what we have been convinced to imbue upon it. If one is impressed, is not nine-hundred ninety-nine not also pretty darned impressive? (If someone handed you a check for $999 would you rip it up because it wasn't $1000?)

I'd thought of making a big deal out of the post where the number corresponded with the highest prime number that's still under one-thousand (nine-hundred ninety-seven), but I didn't remember to pay attention and the opportunity to do so obviously has now passed. Not that a prime number is any less arbitrary, but it would have appealed to any nascent math nerd fan base I may inadvertently be developing for the site.

Nonetheless, I have devoted sufficient attention at this point to realize that #1000 is here, stepping into the batter's box (so to speak), and thus if I find myself inclined to make a big deal of it, I need to make that decision. Even as dismissive as I was above about it holding significance, as evidenced by the fact that I'm writing about it now there's no denying that I've been brainwashed convinced of it being potentially noteworthy. The proverbial cow has escaped the barn; closing the door is pointless.

Reason #949 why having a blog is awesome

Checking the site metering I have set to monitor the visitors to this corner of the Web I can see not only when some browser connects and from what part of the world but sometimes even how they were referred here. That can include the specific search terms that were entered for which a post of mine came up in the results. And no matter how much I think I know about the 'net-using world this information enlarges my insight into that in ways that I could not have imagined.

A few days ago someone in one of those rectangular states in the middle of our fine nation typed the following into Google: "hot vibrator songs". And apparently that led them to this post of mine (presumably because one of the songs I included in my list of the 225 I theoretically couldn't live without was the Vibrators cover of Motorhead's "Vibrator"--but that did not even crack the top 50). I say "apparently" because I couldn't find it when I explored the specific results pool (after clicking through 19 pages' worth--I won't include a link here because, well, you can probably guess what shows up in that sort of search), but maybe if I dug deeper I would have come across it.

Now, if you think that I was shocked that someone in the Midwest would be looking for vibrator songs you would be wrong.

What's amazing is that the person thought he/she needed to include "hot" in with those other two terms. Would anyone want a cold vibrator song? Is that even conceivable?

I contend it is not.

Also, clearly people who would search for such things have a lot of time on their hands if they can go through enough results to find my humble (and undoubtedly disappointing from their perspective) page. But that isn't any sort of revelation.

Thanks for dropping by, regardless of what brought you here.

Who cares?

Over the years of having a blahg I've only garnered a few people (whom I didn't already know) who continue to follow it. Of course, theirs are a few of the sites I follow myself, so that reciprocity is not entirely surprising. There was something to the tone and style they used that suggested we had some modicum of similarity in our outlook on the world.

While a diversity of personalities and beliefs ultimately is what makes life interesting, in those with whom we choose to surround ourselves (literally or figuratively) we do prefer some significant commonality. That's not any sort of revelation.

Of course, even amongst what appear to be similar people there are differences, and thus a big part of what allows the perception of similarity is being vague, at least regarding topics about which people will feel passionately. One might say that seems duplicitous; I say it's avoiding the unnecessary alienation of others.

Now, it's tricky for me to find others who are that similar, as generally the main topic about which I'm passionate is not being terribly passionate about topics. That, however, can be alienating to those who are passionate about topics, so it's a fine line to be walked (so to speak) when composing these meandering posts of mine.

I do think that the majority of people are fairly indifferent about a lot of things, and that the minority who are passionate are who get the attention, whether they represent that majority in any way or not.

However, I'm not passionately of that belief.

What do I know? Apparently it's big corn dogs

Something I learned from keeping tabs on who visits my little corner of the internet: I am a citeable reference.

~

Every so often I glance at the details provided by what sitemeter tracks about the instances of someone connecting their browser to this site.  That can show the location of the ISP, the time and length of the visit, and occasionally include the URL that directed the visitor here.

From looking at this data even informally over the years it is obvious that one post of mine gets the most hits from web searches. It was true a year and a half ago, and it's still true now. That post? This one from July of 2007, wherein I described a trip my wife (when she was still merely my girlfriend) and I took to the Orange County Fair and encountered... the world's largest corn dog. (At least that's what the sign said.)

There's photos and everything.


However, if you read it, it's not an attempt to document that behemoth batter-dipped frankfurter; it's a tongue-in-cheek tale of how we imprudently attempted to tackle eating at the end of the day, and how we failed.

Still, as evidenced by its popularity since then, there's a lot more people out there who are interested in deep-fried cornmeal and meat on a stick than I would have ever realized otherwise.

~

Which brings us to this past Monday, when someone was referred to that very post by a site called ChaCha. I'd never heard of that before, but apparently it's a place where one can ask questions and have "real people" (as opposed to fake people?) answer them. (Presumably for when they are feeling too lazy to just run the search themselves.)

The question asked? You guessed it: "How big is the world's largest corn dog?"

Here's what that page looks like, at least as of the time I write this:

Now let's zoom in a bit on that footnote (of sorts) at the bottom, at the "Source" used for that answer:

That's right. The person answering cited my post as proof of how big that corn dog is. Even though the "approximately 18 inches" I mentioned was merely a length that seemed about right when I thought back upon the event a week and a half later.

Little did I realize at the time I was chronicling that magnificent weiner for historical purposes.

So, until the rest of the world comes to its senses (or discovers this post), it would appear I am the world's foremost authority on the world's largest corn dog.

You're welcome.

Incongruous, not ironic

In Tuesday's post I used the term "incongruity" to describe the situation wherein one who is not an athlete was judging those who were.

One might argue that the relationship there is more one of inappropriateness than incongruity, and that certainly would be a fair argument. I suspect that in common contemporary vernacular many may have used "irony" in those circumstances, indicating they perceived it as ironic for one who could not even come close to doing the something he's watching, who could not even in the most liberal use of the term be considered an avid fan of the something he was watching, to be drawing conclusions about the nuanced superiority of one spectacular performance over another spectacular performance.

Allow me to point out that I did not choose the term "irony." I did not mean to suggest I thought that scenario was held elements of sarcasm or was opposite of my meaning, nor that it was a scenario I had specifically sought to avoid and ended up in nonetheless.

I tend to be an "irony" traditionalist. But hey, that's just me.

"Incongruity," however, appears to be a word I'll jam in any old place when I'm trying to eschew (let's call it) non-traditional use of "irony," whether the one part of the situation at hand genuinely does not follow from the other or not. The only way "incongruity" will become as… loosely… applied as "irony" has come to be is if someone starts doing that.

If it catches on, allow history to show this was its point of origin.

(I'm getting older; I need to start a legacy of some kind.)

~

The real question: Was there any context where "irony" would be appropriate for that part above?


Discuss.

A rose by any other term of reference (other end of the tunnel)

As something of a follow-up to this post, I have another announcement:
I will no longer be alluding to "my fiancée" in these posts.

If appropriate, I will be making reference "my wife" if post mentions the woman I love.

Which is much easier to type, as it doesn't require that silly accent mark. And to speak it aloud, it's only one syllable rather than three.

(That's not the reason I married her, but it is a bit of a nice side benefit.)


Again, just alerting my intrepid readers of this alteration of future phraseology, so there's little confusion. Thank you.

Makin' it

The new phone book is here! The new phone book is here!...
I'm somebody now! Millions of people look at this book every day!
This is the kind of spontaneous publicity--your name in print--that makes people!
I'm in print! Things are going to start happening to me now.
- The Jerk

About a month and a half ago, on the useless photo site I mentioned how some of my Urban Light photos I'd submitted to a LACMA contest were finalists.

I now can announce that one of my photos was chosen as the winner of the contest (out of over a thousand entries), and is used as the cover for an online exhibit and book, Celebrating Urban Light. (Click those links to see the exhibit and/or order the book.)

The announcement on the LACMA art blog can be read here.

Oh, and there's an article on the LA Times Culture Monster blog for which I was interviewed. That can be read here. (That same article also appeared in the Times' print edition--Calendar section, page E3, in case you happen to have that around.)

The winning shot (and below, the way it looked on the page of the paper):

Visited

Hello, visitor to my humble site. Thank you for dropping by.

More than likely, you searched on the term "world's largest corndog" and had this post of mine from last July come up (second in the list). I say that based on analyzing my site meter over the past year, which shows that the term searched for most often which results in bringing visitors to my site is "world's largest corn dog"*. Statistically speaking, that post is my bread-and-butter (or, rather, my cornmeal-wrapped frankfurter and butter).

So, you'll notice that I have changed the title bar above to cater to my most likely visitor.

Never let it be said I don't give the people what they want.


* Interestingly, searching for "world's largest corn dog" (with "corn" and "dog" separated) causes my post to drop to the 12th listed (even though in the post I use the term "corn dog"--with the space--and not "corndog"; clearly there really is no rhyme or reason to Google). That means you had to scroll to the second page worth of results to find it. Thanks for clicking that far.

~

Speaking of bringing people to my site:

I also discovered by checking the site meter details of what sites referred visits to the blahg, I see that my recent post on serving jury duty got spotlighted on a site called Jury Experiences ("What really happens on juries").

I have no idea how they found me, nor did I get any indication from them that they were referencing my post, but such is the glory of the internet: Through no effort on my part, I inadvertently appealed to a very specific audience, who was able to locate me.

I'm not sure any visitors from that site are likely to come back, because that site seems to feature more items that put down jury duty, and my post made it seem not so bad, so it wasn't quite giving those people what they want.

Of course, as far as I can tell, the only way to know what the people want is to do whatever I was going to do and then discover after the fact that some people liked it. Or at least were willing to click on a link and take a quick glance.

So, in short, I really have no idea what people want. But on occasion I stumble upon it without intending to do so.

Which is perhaps how the creator of the world's largest corn dog came to invent that battered item that is so popular at state fairs (and of great interest in searches).

More FUQs

(Frequently Unasked Questions, started back with this post):

FUQ #7: Why it the site called "uselessdoug" dot com?

It's a tribute to my deep and abiding belief in conservation: it connotes I am the Doug who encourages using less.


FUQ #8: Seriously. Why it the site called "uselessdoug" dot com?

If you insist.

Honestly, I did not choose the name; my fiancée (back when the term of reference for her was girlfriend) set up the site as a surprise gift for our first anniversary (the first anniversary of our first date, that is). And no, what I got her was nowhere near that awesome. Or awesome at all.

Let's move on.

I presume she adopted that from my email address, which has been uselessdoug since I first started it up, back in the late '90s.

So this has turned into a question about my email moniker.

I will assume that the "doug" portion is self-explanatory enough. That's merely what people call me, being a shortened version of my given first name. It seemed prudent to have some indication of who I was in the email, without being obvious.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Let's move on.

With the name portion parsed out, that leaves us useless. Err, "useless."

In the latter years of my time attending university, I got involved with the student-run weekly newspaper (as opposed to the daily journalism department-run paper) and in my second semester with them I started a roughly bi-weekly piece. What would happen is that the editor needed something in by Friday, so Thursday evening I would drag out whatever thought I could ramble on about for several hundred words, generally throwing in an allusion to the Simpsons whenever possible. (So, to some extent, it was blogging before there were blogs.) That I called "Another Useless Column."*

Was that ironic? Yes and no.

Clearly I was not accomplishing much of anything with it. It was not serving a purpose; it was not, by conventional journalistic standard, useful. So it was vaguely accurate.

It also was intended to invoke "useless" in the sense that Oscar Wilde used it in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray. Which basically suggests that art is not utilitarian, and that is exists for its own sake, closing with the line "All art is quite useless."

What I did definitely existed only for its own sake, and therefore part of me fancied that it approximated art. That, of course, was very much a matter of interpretation, but there was little arguing that it was anything other than useless.

And there was the self-deprecating aspect that also tied the two sides together nicely.

Thus it was both keeping humble perspective on what I do while at the same time touting it. Which is about as close to describing my personality as is ever likely to occur.

And which is more than you needed to know, but now you know it.

Undoubtedly, you could have used less of this.

~

* Those columns are chronicled on the site here.

Thanks for coming

Every so often I check who has stopped by my humble little spot on the web by looking at the details of visits according to SiteMeter. And while what it tells me includes nothing about the person, it does tell me the page visited, the time of the visit, the browser used, and the city and country of the ISP.

(It's kind of a benevolent Big Brother situation.)

So I discovered that yesterday at 3:30 pm I got a visit where a Google image search directed the visitor to this post from last year.

It's a picture of an amazing Simpsons cake my fiancee got for my birthday years ago; the post I titled "Best. Cake. Ever." (a play on one of Comic Book Guy's lines).

Not only did the person come to the site, but he or she stayed for over three minutes (an eternity in internet chronology), looking at three other pages. (According to the data, most visitors who find a post of mine through a search tend to view only the page in question, so this is quite impressive to me.)

And from where did this visit originate? Georgia.

Specifically, the city of Tbilisi.

Yes, that's the capital of the republic of Georgia. You know, the country where Russian tanks are still on periphery of the capital.

I'm not sure whether this is a subtle indication that the cease-fire was, at least yesterday, allowing Georgians some free time, or whether it's just that the power of the Simpsons cake trumps even fears about invading Russians. Would that really make it the best cake ever?

~

To be clear: I don't mean to make light of the unresolved military situation with the tone above; I very much mean to make light of myself.

I'm not changing the tagline on the site to "Giving comfort in a time of crisis" or anything, but if there's even the slightest possibility that even just this once a post provided a moment of needed distraction for someone in this world, it certainly makes my humble efforts seem worthwhile.

~

In an interesting coincidence, I also got a visit yesterday from Georgia, U.S.A.

And we're back

Apologies to any readers who attempted to access the site through Internet Explorer earlier and got a error. That appears to have been due to an issue with code for the SiteMeter counter, which has been removed until that gets resolved.

I see a note on the SiteMeter blog that indicates they're migrating to a new platform, which I suspect may be part of all of the problem. (Just a theory on my part, however.)

In the meantime I'll have no way of knowing whether anyone's visiting, so I'm assuming my numbers are way up. However, if you get the chance, please leave a comment (by clicking the Comments link below any post) so I'll not feel completely deluded.

Mostly deluded, just not completely.

Thanks. We now return to your regularly scheduled internet...

Diversions

Hi.

When I'm not making mildly sardonic remarks and deconstructing unimportant things, I sometimes take pictures of nice things, such as the flowers featured in the accompanying photo:


Every so often I post some of them on the useless photo site.

Is it humanizing? Is it a waste of bandwidth? That's for you to decide. Click on over and have a look.

Okay, let me sweeten the deal: If you happen to know the name of this kind of flower, please note that in a comment, and if you happen to be right, or at least sound right, I will devote a post to your amazing intellect, which will be seen by somewhere between 2 to 14 people per day. Really.

I woke up in a SoHo doorway...

The blahg here really is the fine art of writing about myself without revealing much about myself.

Someone who knew me only from reading the posts would know, for example, that I work in downtown L.A. (as I have alluded to that) but not specifically where I work, nor what I do. There would be the correct presumption that I work in an office, but that (in and of itself) reveals little; thousands of people work in the same building I do, and that's merely one of many such buildings in the downtown area, so such information doesn't offer much in narrowing down anything about me.

One might consider this merely prudent online behavior on my part, limiting the liability of the less-than-scrupulous individuals who may be scouring the 'net for something to exploit. I suppose it suffices in that regard.

However, I think it can be explained more simply: Such details are not that interesting.

It's not so much freedom of anonymity (the site is something people who knew me before the blahg are aware of and may occasionally visit); it's camouflaging some of the abjectly dull aspects of my life by omitting details.

Creates intrigue, don't you think?

~

No, neither do I.

In my face

Last weekend I opened a Facebook account.

(Don't judge me.)

This is my first foray into the world of online social networking. I barely heard about Friendster back in its heyday. I avoided MySpace because it seemed like too much of a fad to take seriously (and this is all before it was revealed as a haven for pedophiles). Heck, for a day last year the subtitle on the blahg here I put "Doug still has no MySpace page," as though that were something to be proud of.

It wasn't so much that I held active disdain for these sites; I merely felt as though I didn't fit in with what I perceived them to be. They struck me as a way to squander a lot of time on the computer, and I was already quite handy at squandering time (both with and without the computer); I had no need for help in that area.

So, why have I now drunk the proverbial Kool-Aid?

I have no good reason, so let's move on.

With only a few days worth of experience on the site, I lack sufficient time to make any judgments about it. (I am not being sarcastic. Yeesh.) However, there is something on which I must comment regarding Facebook.

When one joins, one's contacts are searched and people with email addresses found in one's contacts who have Facebook accounts get solicitations to become one's "friend." That is the term that is used: friend. When the person receiving the solicitation accepts, a notation on one's page is added to indicate this.

"Doug is now friends with [name of person]."

This is visible to anyone who had already been added as a "friend," so others can see this.

And while I don't mind, per se, that others I know see that I have added a "friend," I cannot help but have this thought each time I see that notation: If now we're friends, what were we before? I've known this person for years, but only now is it official that we're "friends"?

My fiancée is listed as being "in a relationship" with me, and vice versa. Five years together and an engagement ring on her finger are all good and well, but because it says so on my profile page, it's somehow more legitimate? It has been consecrated by the web gods or something.

I'm sure it will get easier. At least, as soon as zombies stop biting me.

Blasted

From the patting-myself-on-the-back department:

Last month I mentioned how I one of my photos was being considered for inclusion on Schmap interactive map.

Today I got confirmation that my photo was accepted, and is one of the shots of Wells Fargo Center featured in their brief review.

I think this is a level of fame I can handle.