Pin a rose on my nose
When I designed publications for a living, every year there’d be a whole crop of flyers for contests like the Technical Publication Badge of Excellence Awards and the House Organ Annual Seal of Approval and Magazines That Aren’t Entirely Awful Dot Com. Deal was, you paid a small fee for each publication submitted and I don’t know how bad you had to suck not to get Honorable Mention at least, but I’m guessing it didn’t happen. It was a racket, pure and simple.
The result was a certificate or a little pyramidal slab of lucite or some shit to put in the lobby. Lookit! Valve and Stopper Report got an Excellence in Techdoc Sixth Place from the New England Review of Training Manuals! This company rocks!
Wait, I thought of a better one. In High School, I won a city-wide poster design competition. “Stop pollution” was my theme, I think. I had lunch with the mayor and everything. The city was Nashville, so…you can imagine. He presented me with my…trophy. I shit you not, it was a bowling trophy, with a Winged Victory and everything. It’s in the basement somewhere. I kept it because it was the most tragically tacky blow that had yet struck my young life.
In that spirit, mesablue has very kindly nominated me for a Blogger’s Choice Award in the category of design. Combining my vote with his, I have now zoomed up to Page 18 in the listings. I thought about adding myself to other categories. Freakiest Blogger. Hottest Mommy Blogger. Best Weasel in a Supporting Role. But, I figured, the people have spoken. Person has spoken. Whatever.
He also nominated himself for Most Obnoxious Blogger [this is the title he apparently covets. No, really. He said so], Best Political Blog and Worst Blog of All Time.
Don’t let the heartbreak of self-nomination happen to you. Let me know if you’d like to be nominated for anything, and I’ll gladly take on that karmic burden for you. I actually read all you doofuses. Doofices. Doofi. Stupid people. The site has an irritating registration requirement, so I’m not encouraging anyone to sign up and vote, but we could probably form a pretty nifty voting cabal and push each other to the fifth or sixth page of listings.
Dammit. I just revealed my master plan on the front page of my blog.
See, this is probably why the Joos keep rejecting my membership application.
April 17, 2007 — 5:48 pm
Comments: 20
Rhymes with “penis”
Today is Enas Yorl‘s birthday. After being rude to Pupster for his birthday yesterday, I couldn’t let the occasion pass without mortally insulting Enas in some way.
Every time I see “Enas” I think “rhymes with ‘penis'” — I don’t know if it does, I just think that. I looked it up once. Enas Yorl is a character in the Thieves’ World Series, which is a fantasy anthology written by multiple authors. I missed it somehow. It must’ve happened during my Illiterate Phase.
So it is pretty remarkable that all but one link on the first page of Google hits for “Enas Yorl” — including the top one — are for the blogger, not the book. More popular than the original!
Happy birthday! God, I feel like Miss Nancy on Romper Room.
— 12:07 pm
Comments: 22
Five thousand rabbits block Hungarian highway
Truck accident. They were headed to the abattoir. Five hundred were killed on the spot. Four thousand four hundred were rounded up on the scene, and another one hundred were given the gift of sweet, sweet freedom. But, being bunnies, they will undoubtedly wander onto the highway in the next few days and meet Rabbitgod.
What’s interesting about this is the place I found it: a Basque newspaper, a thousand miles away. Reinforcing my belief that newspapers all over the world employ someone whose main job it is to comb the wires for weird-ass stories from faraway places. If you want to know something bizarre about a nation, cruise newspapers halfway around the world. Bunnies on the highway is a relatively benign example; most of them are of the “Oh Those Silly People from Fillintheblankistan!” variety.
Americans who read the foreign press are all too familiar with this. When I’m in the UK, I don’t even recognize the America they describe. The Brits’ imaginary US of A is, like, fifty percent inbred Bible-thumping retards and fifty percent pornographers. I get the impression people from India aren’t too pleased with Western news reportage, either; all those stories from remote Indian villages about inappropriate people being reincarnated as inappropriate animals and genital-stealing monkeys and so on.
Now clearly I…me…S. Weasel, proprietor of this blog, cruise foreign newspapers looking for mischief. But I am a mere clown. I clown for you, my seven imaginary friends. I don’t claim to be a journalist. Not sober, anyhow. Assuming anyone sober could claim to be a journalist.
Don’t news organizations have an obligation to give us an accurate picture of the world? Aren’t they always banging on about how important they are in that respect? If they feed us a steady diet of stories about the world that are, strictly speaking, true but not at all representative, isn’t that an especially pernicious kind of lie?
— 6:45 am
Comments: 6