DeadRooster.com

Legally Sane Blogging



Month: August, 2008

Think Like a Cat: The Meow Mix Game Show

28 August, 2008 (00:01) | Cats | By: William McCamment


Photo credit: randombit

I would be a much more prolific blogger if I didn’t own cats. Of course, a catless world would be nearly impossible for me since I have always had a cat and wouldn’t know how to function without one. But, these cats are absolutely brutal on me in the morning.

I wake up early, usually about 4:00 am, put on the coffee and let the cats in from the garage before they knock the door down. I sit down at the computer and begin to type. My calico cat “Cookie” jumps up on my lap, fixes her claws into my leg, purrs and drools. After a few minutes she realizes I’m typing which is her queue to attack my fingers. I stop typing because it is just impossible. I watch her type for a few minutes while I’m waiting for the coffee.

I check to see what she has written and, although it is substantial, it is not good enough to add to my blog.

Around 4:15 the coffee is done, so I push Cookie off my lap and pour a cup.

I sit back down at the computer and begin to type. My big fat orange cat, Punky, starts sharpening his claws on the fancy area rug, “Punk! Knock that off!” I yell. He howls back at me in disrespect then demands to be let outside. I jump up and let him out right away because at least now one of them will be out of my hair.

Again, I start typing. Cookie wants out. This is great news because she is the worst when it comes to working my nerves. I let her out and Punky runs back in. Now, I know if I pick him up and throw him out Cookie will run back in and everything will become much worse, so I just let Punky run-off into the dark part of the house and try to forget about him.

It is now about 5:00 am and nothing has been written.

Cookie wants back in. I can’t just leave her out because then she will start climbing the screens to get my attention. So, I let her in.

Now the fun begins.

The cats start chasing each other through the house at top speed—periodically stopping to hunch-up in a “Halloween Cat” pose at each other. Pretty soon it gets so bad with them scrambling all over the furniture that I’m forced to chase after them with a squirt-gun and blast them into submission.

Another hour slips by and the inspiration to write has taken a detour. Even though my favorite time to write is first thing in the morning, I usually wind-up postponing it until after breakfast. At least, by this time, the cats have settled down.

Going through all this every morning makes me wonder what kinds of illegal drugs you’d have to abuse in order to come up with the new game show set to air on GSN November 15th called, Think Like a Cat: The Meow Mix Game Show.

The show—which I swear on Dave Barry’s grave I am not making up—will highlight humans and cats competing for a chance to win $1 million dollars and $100,000 for their favorite cat-related charity. The show will also feature—get this—interactive challenges in which “cats and humans must work together to succeed.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m going to watch this just for the gore. Can you imagine trying to “work together” with your cat on stage when the live audience erupts into applause? If your cat is anything like mine, this will instantly transform it into a highly-effective runaway buzz-saw.

Hey! I just got a great idea for a drinking game: every time the host (Chuck Woolery) runs away screaming, “Not in the face!” you have to do a shot of tequila.

Silence The Rooster Ad Campaign Crowing Success

25 August, 2008 (10:57) | SEO, blogging | By: William McCamment


Photo credit: NeonMan

The recent Silence The Rooster ad campaign to promote the popular sleep aid, AmbienCR, has proved to be a wild success—not necessarily for the company selling the drug—but for completely unrelated humor-oriented blogs such as the one you are reading right now.

See, bloggers, such as myself, will latch on to nearly anything that might bring extra exposure without actually having to do any real work. Because, let’s face it, writing interesting content is hard. So, when a dim-witted ad campaign comes along featuring an obnoxious rooster, I’m all over it.

To give you an idea of how effective this “easy exposure” technique can be, let me show you the noticeable jump in traffic I received after writing a simple related article:

DeadRooster.com’s average daily traffic before ad campaign: 1

DeadRooster.com’s average daily traffic after ad campaign: 265,789

Ha! OK, I was only kidding. Dead Rooster’s average daily traffic before the ad campaign was around 1,000 visitors per day and after taking advantage of the Silence The Rooster ad running on TV’s across America (The ad does not run outside the US), I’ve pulled in about 5,500 extra visitors per day for the past three days. That’s more than a 600% increase!

Of course, after the ad stops running and people lose interest, I will once again be forced to write something interesting in order to inspire traffic; a welcome concept, I’m sure, to my regular readers.

So, this will be the last crappy post for a while—from now on, it’s back to the chain-fighting Elvis impersonators and cream-corn-filled llamas you’ve come to expect here at Dead Rooster.

Note: After I get back into the humor grove for a while, and you’ve forgiven me for pimping my blog out to the easy search-engine keyword grab, I will explain how I was able to steal the top spot on the front page of several search engines for the most popular key phrase at the time. It was pure genius. LOL

By the way, I know it’s Silence “Your” Rooster and not Silence “The” Rooster, but there’s a lot of traffic I’m missing out on…

How to Silence Your Rooster with Dynamite

21 August, 2008 (19:19) | Weird Stuff | By: William McCamment

Update: I realize a lot of you are searching for the hilarious Silence Your Rooster video clips. Here’s a link to the official site. I’ve set it up to open a new window so that, while you’re waiting for it to load (it takes forever) you can either finish this post or enjoy some of my more popular entries.

Today I started getting a lot of unusual traffic from search engines. What’s interesting about that is that I am getting a lot of it from people searching for ads involving the sleep-aid, Ambien.

Apparently, the Ambien people are running some wacky ads featuring a mixed-up rooster that not only crows in the middle of the night, but also shoots hoops, plays the drums, sets off car alarms, and runs the vacuum. The ad campaigns are titled: Silence Your Rooster.

At the time I write this, the phrase, “Silence Your Rooster” is the 6th most searched phrase on Google and I’m getting gobs of residual rooster-related traffic. Unfortunately, when people reach Dead Rooster looking for these ads, they are instead treated with llamas filled with cream corn and Elvis on Elvis chain-fights.

Sorry about that you guys. :)

Ambien has set up a pretty impressive, albeit very slow, web site with all the ad videos, news about AmbienCR and a pretty lame game in which you try to silence the rooster by throwing pillows at it.

What I suggest to anyone actually wanting to get some sleep, is to visit Silence Your Rooster and try and stay awake long enough for the extremely slow web site to load. I’m sure it’s due to the high-traffic and massive load on the server but, at least for today, there’s your sleeping pill.