web analytics

Is there a Facebook for grownups?

This is a bleg. Jesus, I hate the word “bleg.”

Anyhow, I’m one of those sad, feckless people who dropped out of college and couldn’t think of anything better to do than stay in my college town. It was as good as anywhere, really. Every once in a while, someone from the distant past will give me a call. It always goes like this:

Me: “I’m still in the same old place.”
Them: “I figured you would be.”

Mmm. Thanks. Well, now I won’t be. I’m moving! To someplace else! Ha hah!

I’ve been extraordinarily careful since back in those freewheeling days when everybody posted under real names. Now a Google search of my real name and all reasonable variations thereof turns up nuffink. So I need to file a sort of cyber business card somewhere. I don’t want to update it or network or anything, I just want people who know me to find a contact email when they search my name.

Is there something out there like that? Because the ‘social networking’ sites all seem to be populated with infants.

catshitrobot.jpg
Meanwhile, have you ever dreamed of teaching your cat to shit in a salad shooter? Sure, we all have. Well, now you can, with the Craptapulator! Yes, one look at this Byzantine torture device, and all kinds of crap will come flying out of your cat!

Gnus found this on Dan’s Blah Blah Blog. Charlotte shares with Dan’s cat the tendency to pee around rather than in the litterbox. In Charlotte’s case, it isn’t malicious. She’s just very, very stupid. I’ve watched her do it. She stands with all four feet planted surely in the litter, hangs her little pink bidness over the side and cuts loose. I don’t think she’d pee in the same zip code as this motorized gumball machine.

Comments


Comment from Dawn
Time: August 9, 2007, 5:47 pm

I use myspace. I signed up for it when my teenage foster daughter ran away so I could track down who her friends were. Myspace is getting older everyday because of all the parents trying to find out what their kids are doing.


Comment from Jessica
Time: August 9, 2007, 6:16 pm

claimID.com

Yopu can claim your web pages / blogs / etc – or not. But you can also just post your contact info. It’s not a social networking site per se, so it’s not like you have to talk to people there…. Here’s mine:

http://claimid.com/coollibrarian

I love it because I can keep track of all the places I play online.


Comment from Dawn
Time: August 9, 2007, 6:35 pm

Jessica REALLY is a cool librarian. I loved your FLICKR pages.


Comment from Stevo
Time: August 9, 2007, 6:48 pm

Does the Craptapulator spin around and give the cat an amusement park experience? Something that big should be more than a waste receptacle.

Social networking is the internet for the Springer crowd. So, yes, I wholeheartedly participate.


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: August 9, 2007, 7:01 pm

Hiya, Jess.

That’s kind of the opposite of what I want to do. I’ve built this huge firewall between blog me and real me, and all I want to do is toss a business card over it. I suppose if I *just* gave my RL contact details…

Say, I just ran a Google search on your name to see how high the claimid.com identity figured in the search. Your first and second hits are a lawyer and the third is a romance novelist. Huh. Neat.


Comment from jwpaine
Time: August 9, 2007, 8:10 pm

I’d suggest, eez, that you share your info with one or two trusted virtual buddies, and let them act as go-betweens should anyone come sniffing around, looking for you.

But why all the dullskuggery? Are you intimating that The Weasel Times & Stoat Intelligencer are going to disappear? Where will we stoats go to get intelligencer than we already are?


Comment from jwpaine
Time: August 9, 2007, 8:11 pm

“eez”? I, of course, meant to type “Weez.”


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: August 9, 2007, 8:20 pm

Good heavens, no. No skullduggery. Not abandoning my minions. I’m even thinking about attending the Acepalooza next month.

Just trying to figure out how to leave a message in a bottle for people I knew in the seventies and eighties.


Comment from Dawn
Time: August 9, 2007, 8:54 pm

ok. What does bleg mean? I looked it up and dictionary.com says it’s Danish for unpleasantly pale.

Urbandictionary says it’s begging for money on a blog.
Or this one’s funny…
bleg – Usually on fat people, where the leg is so fat and/or the butt is so small that there is no distinction between butt and leg.


Comment from Enas Yorl
Time: August 9, 2007, 9:17 pm

Bleg = blog + beg. Sometimes it’s for money but it’s just as often for information.


Comment from BONGO MIRROR
Time: August 10, 2007, 1:33 pm

I’ve built up a crappy and hole filled firewall between my blog and my real me. So, I think that you should treat my advice as completely useless. As such, I’m not giving it.

I will say that LiveJournal doesn’t suck the way some other places do. However, that doesn’t address this current issue.


Comment from jwpaine
Time: August 10, 2007, 2:05 pm

About the only advice I can think of is of a preemptive nature: Contact as many long-lost buddies as you can right now and get your email address in their hands. Then, you’ll be more likely to be findable should any of them get very drunk some evening and realize there is nothing more important than contacting people they haven’t seen or heard from for decades.

Write a comment

(as if I cared)

(yeah. I'm going to write)

(oooo! you have a website?)


Beware: more than one link in a comment is apt to earn you a trip to the spam filter, where you will remain -- cold, frightened and alone -- until I remember to clean the trap. But, hey, without Akismet, we'd be up to our asses in...well, ass porn, mostly.


<< carry me back to ol' virginny