Fifteen months ago, in an attempt to reward those individuals displaying the taste and distinction to comment upon this site, I converted the Ominous Comma to a Dofollow blog.

Simply put, this means that every comment upon this site would add a small but cumulative addition to the originating site’s google ranking, allowing them to leverage their site’s visibility in the search results one comment a time.

Sadly, all this had done is inspire a host of nearly-random comments from people running real estate and merchandising pages, which would be alright had the remarks in question not revealed that these individuals were not really reading the stories and basically had no idea what the rest of us were talking about.

Well, no more. I’m done bribing people to spam me. With some twenty three thousand spam comments so far, I really don’t need any help in that regard.

So I’m pulling the plug. More precisely, I’m pulling the plugin that allowed my precious google juice to shower my commenters with clout, which now that I’ve typed that out loud, makes me wonder why anyone would ever put up this that sort of thing. You people are some kind of twisted.

Anyway, for my dear friends who come here to make meaningful contributions to our ongoing conversation, all this will mean to you is that there will be fewer virtual three-years-olds pulling at our pant legs, or possibly kilts, to interrupt us in order to proudly state the obvious.

“Doctor Toboggans’ mustache fake you say? Good heavens! Wherever did you get that idea?…Clue-Mart?”

Alright, the rant is over. As well as the handout of page rank.

See you again soon.

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This post is garnering countless comments at humor-blogs.com

Welcome back to the unending torment that is Blogging Week. Today’s meme is a barrage of banality I like to call Thursday Thirty-Seven, which weighs in with nearly three times the tedious trivia of its mundane cousin, Thursday Thirteen.

For those seeking to replicate this decent into the cheesy depths of meme-hood, the thing to keep in mind about a good Thursday Thirty-Seven is that it is not bound by the constraints of accuracy and accountability that limit lesser lists. In fact, entertainment value rates far higher than literal truth. So if you have stockpiled a sufficient supply of caffeine and are properly belted in, let’s get started:

1. I have brought forth three offspring upon the earth. (The Hot Comma Momma did most of the work, but until she gets her own list or they do something really bad, I’m taking credit.)
2. I am proud to say that I still have possession of my appendix.
3. I once jumped off a pier into the Pacific ocean to impress a girl.
4. I myself was quite unimpressed to discover the water was only four feet deep at the time.
5. I have relaxed on the white sands beaches of Aruba.
6. I have discovered that the other 99% of that happy island is comprised of jagged rocks, cacti, and sweat.
7. I once jumped out of a helicopter into Lake Tahoe
8. Soon after, I received the mother of all brain-freezes from the year-round arctic water temperatures.
9. I am frequently recognized for my mugging preparedness.
10. I was once a foster parent.
11. I was once a child.
12. I was once above these kinds of lists.
13. I once received a medal from the government of Kuwait as their way of saying, “Goodbye and thanks for all the oil.”

    

14. I am pro-Nebraska
15. I once found it necessary to use a four-seat outhouse. It was already at ¾ occupancy at the time.
16. I have crossed glaciers on Mt. Hood
17. I’m in a band.
18. My wife is my groupie.
19. I’ve never been to Boston in the fall.
20. I am allergic to cats and consider them all to be lazy wastes of carbon.
21. Although I don’t usually mention it, my kids often crack me up.
22. I met my wife, the Hot Comma Momma, in high school.
23. It took her quite a while to be smitten by my charms.
24. Actually, she hated me.
25. But I won in the end, which has been the ongoing theme of our relationship.
26. By certain, quite low standards, I am a professional actor and voice actor (Shameless plug warning.)
27. I once received the following statement in a performance review: “Brent is a good marine, but he thinks too much.”
28. I once turned down a promotion because I didn’t want to cut my hair.

    

29. I was born at a young age.
30. I often laugh at my own jokes.
31. This trait frequently disturbs my children.
32. Although a lot of people talk to themselves from time to time, I am the only one I know to get written correspondence from myself.
33. I once moved completely across the country to attend music school.
34. Once there, I discovered I was a painfully average musician.
35. I also found out I was a fairly decent writer.
36. I have a history test tonight.
37. I really need to study.

So there you have it, Thursday Thirty-Seven. Can you guess which ones are true? Comment boxes are standing by.

In the meantime hurry back tomorrow for the last installment of blogging week, Frumpy Friday.

And to generally annoy all those involved, let me tag the following entities with this overflowing meme:

• Count von Count of Sesame Street fame for teaching me how to count this high.
• Arubagirl for this gruesome picture of fiendish flora.

This post is ensuring my own personal walk of shame over at humor-blogs.com

The next in our series of poor excuses for blogging is What’s Up With Me Wednesday.

The key to this spicy new meme is to find a fairly boring story, and pack it chock full of nicknames and acronyms without any sort of key or context in which to decipher them, or any reason why it would interest anyone outside your immediate family.

Stories about kids or pets work well for this purpose, children of pets are excellent. Adult Children of Exotic Forms of Marine Life is a support group that meets downstairs, but always has really good coffee.

For example:

Today was a crazy day!!! Big-G dropped off Lil-X, literally!! He dropped him right into the inflatable wading pool we keep in the living room for impromptu matches of oatmeal wrestling. It was filled with grits today because we were out of oatmeal thanks to SnuggleBum’s school project, Stonehenge in Ground Grains. Anyway, I was watching the Oprah special on Broadcast Lobotomies, can you believe that some shows actually make you stupider? I called FooBoo and Sassy to see what they thought, but they had stopped thinking for the day. Then I found this website with some really funny cats. I never realized that cats had such bad spelling. Talk about LUUSMNC.¹ They were too much. Then I heard deep gurgling noises from the wresting pool where Midsized-J had eaten every last bit of the grits, even without butter, and found him filling his little diapers with it as fast as his stinky little pooper could poo. Anyway the ambulance arrived even before I called, making its usually six o’clock run to our house. Then–

Sorry, I couldn’t take anymore.

The real secret to a truly successful What’s Up With Me Wednesday is not interesting content, or the coherence of the telling but rather the sheer number of uninterrupted words on the screen. Don’t let white space slow your flow, people need to know you mean business by the way your words cover the screen like ants on a the remains of a detonated watermelon.

Show no mercy.

And no biographical post would be complete without lots of family pictures. The blurrier the better.

This is me in a crowd of people you don’t know.

This is me in a crowd of people I don’t know.

This is me being burned in effigy by a crowd of angry oatmeal wrestlers.

To spread the boisterous joy that knowledge of me inspires throughout the webosphere, I am hereby tagging the following non-me aware individuals:

• Narcissus-X, a blog completely and thoroughly about itself.
• MattressPolice, a blog that that has so far failed to be about me but I haven’t given up on.
• DangerCouch, a blog that although is about me, is suffering from poor ratings.

Thank you for your continued participation in Blogging Week. Tomorrow: Thursday Thirty-Seven.

This post is milling about with the herd of the tragically not-about-me blogs over at humor-blogs.com.

Today we continue the Blogging Week festivities with a meme I have dubbed Tactless Tuesday.

On this most glorious of days, I dispense with the small portion of charm and grace that usually infuses my writing, and strike the nail squarely on the non-pointy side of unsuspecting topics, caught by surprise at being so directly addressed.

And the topic are:

SUVs as status symbols. Unless you have a business or a family of mormon proportions, you probably don’t require four tons of automobile to get your groceries home from the store. Safety? Unless the manufacturer equipped airbags can actually float the vehicle across rivers of formerly solid arctic real estate, I don’t think you’re doing anyone any favors here.

Chrome badges declaring the size of your wheel rims posted on the sides of your vehicle. You are really not going to score any points with this little reminder of how you spent more money on your wheels than on your education. Life is depressing enough already.

Okay, status symbols altogether. If you really need to buy something to define who you are, then stuff is not your problem.

Mini Storage. If you have so much unused crap that it need its own house, then perhaps you have attachment issues. Do yourself a favor: drag your stuff to Goodwill and let it be redistributed to others people’s houses in the great currents of crap circulation. If you really miss it you can buy it again.

Plus a seasonal bonus:

The Constant-Inflation Halloween Yard Thingy. Anything this tacky should not require a constant supply of electricity. In an era of wireless networks and genetic engineering, a visual assault of this nature should be able to power the entire neighborhood under its own hideousness.

Okay, it’s not that hideous, it’s actually kind of cool. But it still offends me on general principle.

To further spread the infection, I am tagging:

Steve Pavlina to see if he can devise a Law of Non-Attraction to deflect this mighty meme.

Henry M. Paulson at the Department of the Treasury just because I want to make sure he doesn’t get lonely over there with all my money.

And Mattress Police because Diesel really gets a kick out of these things.

Be sure to come back tomorrow for What’s Up With Me Wednesday.

Thank you for flying Ominous Comma. Have a nice day.

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This blog is being excommunicated by the righteously indignant souls at humor-blogs.com

Welcome to Blogging Week, my first ever attempt at “typical,” and by that I mean meme-infested, blogging.

For those of you who may be mercifully ignorant of what passes for content on this site, my usual response to memes is similar to my response to venomous insects occasionally found crawling across my floor: bludgeon them with whatever is handy, wipe up the residue with the closest paper product and burn the whole mess as a lesson to any others who may be planning a similar attack.

However in the newfound liberation of Blogging Week, I am gleefully cultivating some truly wretched memes of my own.

For example, today is Marauding Monday.

In a time-honored tradition dating back to the early hours of this morning, Marauding Monday is characterized by a joyfully vindictiveness in which a bold blogger, not unlike myself, is encouraged to stalk and prey upon a completely unprepared bystander in the name of community entertainment.

Today’s victim is none other than Wanton Government Regulation.

It is no secret that governing bodies are like black holes, which if left to their own devices will suck all untended powers into themselves, forming a tightly bundled mass of irresistible authority.

What is less well known, is that this is precisely what is happening in Nepal.

In a fit of blatant persecution, the Nepalese government* has announced that it is actively attempting to curtail the inalienable climbing rights of the Unclothed Everest Ascenders Community.

It seems that certain narrow-mined Nepalese officials take a dim view of naked climbers.**

Personally, I am shocked and appalled at this remorseless abuse of governmental power. This is exactly the kind of oppressive interference that keeps Nepal in 83^rd place as a world economy.

It is every climbers God-given right*** to summit the mountain in the same state he or she entered the world: butt naked, quivering, and out of breath.

No government for the people, by the people, or even somewhere around the people has the authority to deprive these poor hikers of their right to free epidermal expression.

Besides, the Nepalese government should realize that this is a self-correcting problem. As the offending parties proceed to frostbite themselves out of the gene pool, the entire human population will grow statistically smarter as a result of their actions.

And remember this, if you set a dress code for Everest, then it’s only a matter of time until you’re fitting a splash guard on Niagara Falls or installing handrails on the Marianas Trench.

Regulation escalation is an ugly, ugly thing.

There you have it, the first ever Marauding Monday

Now, to properly propagate this drain on the collective internet IQ, I am tagging:

The official Sledge Hammer MySpace site because that show:

1. Freaking rocks
2. Inspires me to maraud.

Dave Barry who deserves precisely this sort of spam.

And Grundir the Implacable who secretly longs for some juicy new memes.

Come back tomorrow for the next installment of Blogging Week: Tactless Tuesday

———

*If you can say “Nepalese” eight times in rapid succession, then you can do a fairly convincing rendition of Heart’s classic rock hit Barracuda.

**Between the blizzards, long nights, and oxygen deprivation, a dim view is about all you get of anyone on the mountain.****

***Atheist climber of course have a slowly evolving right, that may be ready for use in a few million years.

****No, I’ve never been to Mt Everest, but there was a very educational IMAX film on the subject not long ago.*****

*****No, I didn’t actually see the movie either, but there were some lovely commercials about it.******

******Just forget about it. I’m sorry I even brought it up.

—–

This post can be found nakedly scaling the heights at humor-blog.com

News Lite:
98% Less Factual Information Than Regular News

Mountain View, CA – In a surprise announcement internet powerhouse Google today revealed that it had acquired the western European country of Luxembourg.

According to European sources, Luxembourgians are enthusiastic about the buyout hoping that Google will bring its highly touted financial and connectivity resources to the aid of the landlocked nation. Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker was quoted as saying, “If we must be enveloped by larger powers, at least we can now chose those powers.”

Google gave no indication of what possible use the search engine giant could have for a small country, but speculators have begun to fear a software industry land-grab as hours later Microsoft announced that it was in the process of acquiring the African nation of Lesotho.

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This report brought to you by:

The Amalgamated Assembly of Stammering Stockbrokers
“It’s not just a job, it’s torture.”

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Previous story: Steam Cleaner Charged With Brainwashing

News Lite:
98% Less Factual Information Than Regular News

Chicago- Small business owner, Harold Smocking, was arrested today on charges of criminal brainwashing. His company, Esteem Cleaners, which provides an innovative combination of personal development and pressure washing, has up until now boasted an impressive track record of profitability and really clean sidewalks.

Witnesses say that Smocking used the boredom and mind numbing noise of his pressure washer to lull victims into a hypnotic state, leaving them vulnerable to his suggestions, which focused mainly on large tips and irrational behavior. Clients’ personal development goals are alleged to have been overridden by Smocking in favor of more entertaining hypnotic suggestions, like profuse public flatulence and singing “I’m a Little Teapot Short and Stout” in crowded bus stations. Smocking is being held without bail with trial set for this sometime this decade.

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This report brought to you by:

The law offices of Avarice and DeCeit,
“Specializing in minor injuries and major settlements, at Avarice and DeCeit you’re not just a number, you’re a number with a lot of zeros behind it.”

-

Next story: Google Acquires Luxembourg
Previous Story: Maslov’s Pyramid Revised

News Lite:
98% Less Factual Information Than Regular News

Key West - The Institute of Cognitive Institutions today announce that longtime psychological model Maslow’s Pyramid has been revised by the Institute’s board of review, replacing self actualization with chocolate as humanity‘s greatest need.

Created by Abraham Maslow, the pyramid describes the progressive nature of human motivations, starting with basic needs like food and safety near the bottom and moving to progressively higher needs as each one is met. In the original model, self-esteem needs were followed by self-actualization which included accepting individual weaknesses, being unafraid of failure and transcending selfish interests.

“Chocolate was a better fit,” said Institute Director George T. Rutabaga, “self-actualization was just too difficult for most people, so we chose something easier, to help individuals achieve a sense of accomplishment in their personal development.”
Rutabaga describes chocolate as having what psychologists refer to a “pull-up effect” on the other needs. “Hungry? Eat chocolate. Insecure? More chocolate. Unloved? Low self esteem? Chocolate, more chocolate and suddenly you are at the top of the pyramid. This is truly a breakthrough in psychology. ”

Although many psychologists oppose the move, citing psychoanalysis as humanity’s greatest need, recent studies seem to support the ICI decision, linking chocolate intolerance with aggression, warfare and political aspirations.

This report brought to you by:

The Association of Schizophrenic Legislators
“Providing our own majority since 1995.”

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Next story: Steam Cleaner Charged With Brainwashing
Previous Story: Pharmaceutical Companies Send Troop Surge to Secure Border

News Lite:
98% Less Factual Information Than Regular News

Niagara Falls- The final contingent of private security contractors reported for duty today in Niagara Falls, joining nearly 50,000 troops already deployed along the Canadian-American border. Funded by an alliance of major drug manufacturers, the troops have formed a blockade, effectively sealing off Canada from the American population. John Doughfus, a spokesmen for pharmaceutical giant JonesSmithPixelMilesCough went on record saying, “We’re not just some multi-billion dollar corporation, we are also a legal citizen of this country, and we are concerned about the security of our borders. Don’t think of this as a business move, think of it instead as a international neighborhood watch, keeping our country safe from harm.”

Although no clarification was offered to explain what harm might threaten the security of the northern border, drug troops have so far confiscated several million dollars worth of inexpensive Canadian prescription medicines, terming them “threats to National Economic Security.” In response to questions of operational timelines and the eventual withdrawal of troops, Doughfus said, “It is far too early to talk about retreat. We are here to protect the American people and we will not leave until the threat is eliminated. To pull out now would send the wrong message to the insurgent forces of competition targeting the fragile American economy.”

This report is brought to you by:

The Institute for Public Privacy
“Guarding widely known secrets for longer than we are at liberty to discuss.”

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Next story: Maslov’s Pyramid Revised
Previous Story: Driver Ordered To Attend Arrow Literacy Course