Dear WordPress…

I am sorry about my little spam joke. I will never do it again.

In my defense, it wasn’t a real spam. It didn’t get mailed to millions of people. I wasn’t really selling any pills that would give people ‘happy pants’. It was just a comment made to look a little like spam. I think they call that ‘satire’… or ‘parody’… or maybe sarcasm… or irony…

I call it humor. But if it makes you angry, I once again humbly apologize, and I will never do it again. I will, no doubt, do other stupid stuff. But I will try to keep my shenanigans from getting out of hand. And I will not involve other people. Because that was unfair.

To all of you out there who tried to help my while I was fighting to keep my blog from being shut down, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Not being able to blog for three or four days made me realize how much you all mean to me.

Next time I have a stupid idea like this, tell me to knock it off.

It’s Sunday… and I’m bored…

Sundays are always slow in the blog world. So if you are one of the few people who are hanging around with nothing better to do, I am going to give you a few ideas for fun ways to pass the time.

Here is a little trick I invented. I call it; ‘Spamalot’.

What you do is type up a little paragraph that sounds like one of those spam messages we all get. If that sounds like too much trouble, I will even make one up for you… hold on a sec…

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Thanks you much for the fine article of wich much information I have been needing is inside of. I will be sure to pay much visits and atention to all future articles of such good information. Keep up with the good hard work. And speaking of hard, I have for selling some magic pills that will make you like a tree in your soft areas. Only fifty glabotniks for a bottle that will give you much happy pants for a long time.

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If you think you can type a funnier one, by all means, please do so. Now all you have to do is highlight your paragraph, or the one I thoughtfully provided, and then copy it.

Now go to one of the WordPress topic wall things… you know, you go to the reader button and pick a topic you are interested in. If you pick humor, people will know you are being silly. So don’t do that. Pick a topic like ‘science’ or ‘politics’. Or health. Health would be really funny.

Now that you are armed with your fake spam comment, just go down the topic wall and open every single post. Don’t pick the ones that sound interesting. This is all about volume. Now go down to the bottom of each post and in the comment box, you just paste your little spam bomb.

Do it!!!

I am going to go to the humor wall and maybe a few other walls in just a bit and paste in mine. If we all do this together, we will see each other’s work popping up. The more of us that do it, the funnier it will be.

Don’t let me down, people. This will be epic. WordPress might even get wind of what we are up to and give us some kind of creativity award. Or shut down all of our blogs. But what is life without a few risks?

And as long as you are at it, you might as well paste it into all the blogs you follow. At the very least it will help you figure out who has a sense of humor. I look forward to reading all of your fake spam. Make me proud.

Go forth, my minions of evil, and spread the word.

I will be back later with more fun ideas for passing time on a slow Sunday.

Time traveling again…

Here is another of those very first posts I did during those glorious early days, as I struggled to find my stride and figure out what I was doing… and why I was doing it…

And I threw in some old family photos.

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Being all art-side-of-the-brain is not a handicap when you are a child. Children are expected to spend a lot of time with crayons, and no one really gets upset when you color outside the lines…

That is me on the left. The small one, I mean, being held by my Mother. No, I had not just finished a meal, I just drooled a lot. I also cried a lot according to my mom, (and neighbors who lived half way up the street have verified this fact). I only weighed like four and a half pounds at birth. I was so skinny, nurses tossed a coin to see who had to give me my shots. Not bad, considering I am now six feet four inches tall and weigh 230 pounds. Next to me is my older brother Jack…hey, Jack…I would tease him about the jacket, but my family believed in hand-me-downs, so odds are I was wearing that coat not much later. And there are my parents, June and Howard. Oh, if they only knew what was in store for them, they would be sticking their tongues out also.

Fast forward to a few years later. There are the four Browne boys. That is me with no shirt. I must be 8 or 9 years old. Is it just me, or do I look like I had six-pack abs? Awesome!  I am either keeping my youngest brother Sid safe, or getting ready to push him off. You never could tell with those Browne boys. There is Jack in the back, and Henry looks to be spending some quality time with the camel…or he has just passed out from pure exhaustion…Judging by my haircut, this must have been when mom was still cutting our hair. The camel looks a little concerned, and that goes to show the wisdom of the wise ship of the desert.

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I don’t know what to think about this…

I got one kid through college. Now I have another kid getting ready to start high school. That is stressful enough. But there is one added complication. Mollie has always been a healthy, active kid. She has done dancing, soccer, softball, and now volleyball. And for just a couple of years now, she has done cheerleading.

Now don’t get me wrong. I am not against cheerleaders. No guy in the world is against cheerleaders. There is no event in the world that wouldn’t be made better by cute girls in short skirts jumping up and down and getting the crowd all worked up. More people would watch C-Span coverage of the House and Senate if there were cheerleaders. We can add them to Thanksgiving dinner, as far as I am concerned.

But I have mixed feelings about cheerleading in general. I can see how it made sense back in the days before girls were allowed to play sports. But why would anyone want to stand on the sidelines and cheer when they could be on the field getting cheered for? And I am not quite sure why the women’s movement and the feminists aren’t more outraged by cheerleading. Why is a beauty pageant so terrible for women but cheerleading is just fine? I feel like I am missing something here.

I am not condemning cheerleading as a whole. But did you know that cheerleaders actually get injured more often than the players of all the sports they cheer for? And why do the skirts have to be so short? And the leg kicks so high. I know this makes me a hypocrite, but I just like it better when it isn’t my 14-year-old daughter doing it.

Cheerleading is also highly competitive and it can be sort of brutal. The kids aren’t always nice to each other. And the moms can get a little crazy too. So when Mollie decided to try out for the high school cheerleading squad, I sort of just hoped that the girls who had been doing it for longer would get picked, and this whole thing would just blow over.

But Mollie is the only girl coming into the school that got a call back. And she is so excited. And I want to be a supportive dad. So what should I do? There are so many things she could spend her time doing. So many clubs and activities. Things like music and sports that could stay with her for a lifetime. Cheerleading isn’t really like that. You can play an instrument until you are ninety. But what can you do with cheerleading after college?

I don’t want to stand in the way of this. It is important to her. I just can’t help but feel that there are other things that would be better choices.

Any thoughts on the subject?

I am a blogger…

I suddenly realize that when I say those words, I say them with a sense of pride, a tinge of wonder. I say them with a tone that I might use if I could announce to someone that I was a ninja. Or a rock star. I can see how some people might think that this is all just a huge waste of time and effort. But I find immense value in doing this. I feel like I am connecting with people. And I love that there are people out there who find me amusing or maybe even just a little bit clever every now and then.

But most of all, it is so awesome to not just have all these crazy thoughts and ideas bouncing around inside my skull.

Thank you.

Another of the first posts I ever did…

I am enjoying revisiting these very first posts. It is fun to go back and see where it all began. I had nothing but a vague idea that I wanted to share my life with a bunch of people I hadn’t even met yet. No one was reading these posts. And I had no idea what the heck I was doing. But they are still funny. It is a little like pulling out the family photo album and looking at pictures of yourself when you were a little kid.

This one was called; Help, I need somebody.

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So of course I would like this blog to succeed. Hell, I want it to go viral like the Black Death did. I want it to get hit like Normandy got hit by the Allies. I want to be big, like I was before I started eating better and getting a little exercise, but in a good way.

But to beat the odds, I need to beat this soulless contraption in front of me. This box that somehow connects with the entire world while sitting quietly on top of this desk.

To achieve anything, I need feedback… And that, I’m afraid, is where you come in. It has to be a team effort. I realize that I am asking quite a sacrifice from you. I understand that what I am asking requires you to sit in front of your magic box, (or a smart phone at your local Starbucks) and read words, and look at pictures and perhaps even to remember things!

I feel you pulling away…But wait, I plead, think of the possible rewards for putting your precious minutes to use in this fashion… OK, there really aren’t any, unless you count laughter, and you really should count laughter. And making a friend happy…

This rectangular window into my soul is going to be a multimedia adventure. As my life scrolls upward before you, I will use this computer, this binary beast of cold logic, to graffiti the walls of the universe with one narrow stripe of my essence. A ticker-tape message going out to a cold, inhospitable, lonely future. A flickering movie reel projecting my art into a vast, dark space, where the screen is beyond my sight and the audience, if there is one, is beyond my reach.

In short, I have no way to gauge your enthusiasm for this project. I can only assume it is far below mine, and I can accept that. No one was clambering for me to do this project, as far as I know. My one glimmer of light in this dismal, dim forest of uncertainty comes, ironically, from the screen of the computer, as we glare at each other in mutual frustration. And there in the gloom is the small button called ‘site stats’. So far, 69 people have found this site. This must be an omen. Or else I have already been here 69 times to look at the site stats…oh, Lord, I hope that isn’t what that means…

So as I wrestle with my digital demons and attempt to exercise my inner turmoil, please, oh please, make comments or give suggestions. Tell your friends to check out the blog. I may never get a million hits, but each hit is a step to somewhere. I may never get to be a published writer, or a rock star, or have any of my art hung in the Louvre, but if anybody sticks with me and reads my story as it hoists its way into the heavens, I will still consider it a victory.

Thank you, one and all…

I got an idea…

They are shutting down the San Onofre nuclear power plant because it is unsafe. Well, that might be a good thing. If it is unsafe now, imagine how unsafe it would be after an earth quake and a tsunami. And it is right on the coast… in the middle of a seismically active fault zone.

But that got me thinking. What can we do with a big empty building that looks like a pair of giant cement boobs and is leaking radioactive sludge?

Turn it into the Dick Cheney vice presidential library, of course.