Wednesday, February 06, 2008
Getting Testy - UPDATED WITH RESULTS
THIS IS NOT NOT-A-TEST. Results will be assessed in my own damn sweet time but I’ll share them with you because I’m trying to wreck the curve.
So, it’s 10 pm and I’m just finally settling down for a little “me” time for the first time in the day. All I want is a little mindless, or even positively anti-mindful, entertainment. Bright colors, flashing lights, short words and broad gestures. Bring it on back for me, American Gladiators! A little Titan and Hellga action will ease my troubled soul, I know it in my heart of spandex, steroidally-enlarged hearts.
OH. TiVo’s “now playing” list includes no episodes of this particular piece of televised drek. It’s mostly stuff for the younger generation. Sure, the colors are bright and the words are short but there is no foam quarterstaff action, no rapelling wall of death, no travellator. I’m not about to watch another Law and Order, I know that’s a path fraught with peril and immediate followup broadcasts. I’m itchy and antsy in my brainpan. Give me something calming. AND GIVE IT TO ME NOW.
Oh, I have the final installment of Ken Burns’ The War. That’s good television, right? I’ll just watch an hour of it.
You know what? An hour of documentary footage about discovering concentration camps and taking the island of Okinawa in a month-long firefight in hellish conditions is not an appropriate replacement for an hour of action-parody footage about ordinary people trying to evade or knock over grotesquely overdeveloped swimsuit models.
Signed,
Bad Night’s Sleep
test results will be posted when they become available. Cool yer jets, corporal!
*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#(I rather like this)*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#
OKAY, results are in, and they confirm my darkest fears. No, the Battle of Okinawa concluded about when Ken Burns said it did; no, American Gladiators is not based on a true story from my 8th grade gym class (not directly anyways); and no, it’s not about television at all. However, I was hoping it would be. It’s about RSS, and the feeding thereof.
I didn’t use to do much with the RSS feeds. I would just surf my blogroll links and see if I found anything new. Turns out, that was a crashing waste of time. Most people don’t update their blogs as rapidly as I get bored. I wound up re-visiting the same tired old posts way, way too often. So now I’m a Bloglines addict, with my little menagerie of RSS feeds residing quietly on my desktop so I can check every little while to see if there’s anything new under the sun.
I have occasionally noticed, in the meantime, that there’s some stuff on the Bloglines site I’m not really taking advantage of (of which I’m not really taking advantage, are you happy now) - their own blog, a clips service, things like that. I did notice earlier today, though, that there was an option, were I to click on any of my subscribed feeds, to see a list of “related feeds.” I checked some out and generally they’re other blogs that have something in common with the one where I started. Political blogs get politically related feeds; food blogs get foodie related feeds, and thus always to tyrants or something.
So, I wondered, what are my related feeds? Do I have any? How does Bloglines figure out what sites are the Chucklehut’s long lost cousins or misbegotten sub-siblings or otherwise partakers in some piece of my blogtastic DNA? I clicked on my own site’s feed (yes I keep a feed to myself and I know it’ll probably make me blind someday but in the meantime get off my back), navigated to “related feeds” and was profoundly disappointed. Yes, I do have “related feeds.” And no, I don’t think I have much family resemblance to them AT ALL.
There are 28 blogs, as of this writing, that are listed as my “related"s, though at least one of them is a duplicate (appearing twice). One is called “Cuteness Overload” - lots of photos of kids and little fuzzy animals. You gotta know, if you have spent any time here at all, that’s not really my main game. Another, “The Invent Blog,” is about patents - how to draw the schematics for your application, what kind of cross-hatching to use, like that. Okay, there’s some residual geeky interest there for me, but once again, very little overlap with my general content. That leaves about 25 non-duplicated blogs that Bloglines thinks “relate” to this site. What do they have in common?
I didn’t like what I found as the unifying thread. Just to make sure it wasn’t a fluke based on immediate prior content I tried a new post - this post, above the string of doodlemarks up there - to see if I had invited some weird quirk of bloglining that fooled some blogbot into thinking I was “one of them” - one of the blogs it seemed to think “related” to mine. I’d recently posted about Zach, then about taking the kids to Disneyland… okay, maybe I’m a little heavy lately on the kiddieschmaltz. So I tried a new post that didn’t even mention kids, to see if it impacted how they thought I “related” to the b-sphere at large.
The post about war documentaries and American Gladiators made no difference at all. The same “related” posts came right up, and now I will tell you my gruesome, shameful secret: this blog apparently most closely “relates” to other sites that deal primarily with babies, in vitro fertilization, miscarriages, and other challenges to the genitive function. “Celebrity Baby Blog.” “Thalia’s Fertility Journey.” “A Little Pregnant,” “Jenny From the Infertility Block,” “Inhospitable.” “Stirrup Queens and Sperm Palace Jesters“ - I kid you not. OH MY STAGGERING GOD. I’ve made none of this up. How did I wind up here?
I’m not linking through because I am truly not even interested. Does public discussion of cervical malfunction float your boat? Good for you - go on, do your blogging, your IVF, your blogging about your IVF… if that’s how you work out the issues that trouble your soul, I’m glad you live in a world where that form of exhibition therapy is available to you. But that’s not what this blog is about. It’s not even a subject I’ve written about on line. It beggars my imagination why they’d want to lump me in with these people and their public proclaiming of private problems. I try to keep it light and easy. THIS IS NOT AN IN VITRO FERTILIZATION BLOG.
Oh great, that’ll probably generate another 30 or 40 new related blogs about fallopian prolapse or vasectomy reversal or something. I think I’ll write to Bloglines tomorrow and ask what gives. They say you can’t pick your relatives, but I’d like to think that this would be an exception. Can’t you let me be “related” to some cynical diatribes about pushy bus riders, weird crap on the street, and funny typos? Hell, I’d take the libertarians and the circus folk. Just don’t make me hang out with the egg-implantation crowd. At least, not exclusively.
Have any of you checked your “related feeds?” Are they remotely related to what you usually write about?
oh screw it here are some cute kid pictures. I guess they’ve got me dead to rights.
