DeadRooster.com

So, I’m wandering around the internet, checking out my blogroll, when I came across a post by my good friend, Don Lewis. Apparently, his heart is still filled with joy from a few months ago when I lovingly tagged him with a “meme.”

For those that don’t know, a “meme” is the blog version of a chain letter. Most bloggers, such as Don, absolutely love them and no matter how many times you tag them, can’t seem to get enough of them. I, on the other hand, am not too fond of them and try to avoid them as much as possible—actually, to be more precise: I hate them.

Anyway, I’m surfing along and see that I have been tagged by Don and I immediately say out loud, “A two-pronged barbeque fork, right in the eye!” I don’t know why I said those exact words; it doesn’t even make a whole lot of sense, except that it probably communicates, better than anything else I could come up with, my exact sentiments toward blog memes.

Since Don is such a good friend of mine, and since I did tag him with one once, I feel obligated to do this just one more time. I will NOT be passing it on though. I just refuse to promote these horrible things any more.

Here are the rules (which will apply to no one, since I am not passing this vile memerick on):

• Link the person(s) who tagged you
• Mention the rules on your blog
• Tell about 6 unspectacular quirks of yours
• Tag 6 following bloggers by linking them [*Note: I am not doing this]
• Leave a comment on each of the tagged bloggers’ blogs letting them know they’ve been tagged [*Note: since I’m not following the previous rule, it doesn’t make sense to follow this one either]

Here are six unspectacular quirks of mine:

1. I hate meme tags. I hate these things more than I hate Captain Trips.
2. I want to kill Don Lewis. I’ve always wanted to kill him, but now that he has tagged me, all systems go!
3. I believe meme tags are the work of the same infant-sacrificing, devil worshiping cult that invented Good & Plenty Candies.
4. I love fluffy kittens. There is almost nothing I’d rather do than play with kittens—except maybe kill Don Lewis.
5. I am mechanically inclined, but hate working on anything mechanical. I am about to replace the “Clutch Release Cylinder” on my truck. I am dreading it, but I am not going to pay an illiterate chimpanzee ten times the cost of the part to turn two bolts—and, probably do it wrong.
6. I don’t sleep. Haha! Sleep is for losers. I get maybe five-hours on a good night. Maybe.

Ok, maybe I went a little over-the-top with the “Kill Don” stuff. Actually, he is probably the funniest guy on the internet and all-of-you should pay a visit to his blog. Don was the first guy to acknowledge me as a humor blogger and did a nice little write-up when I was just starting out. That really meant a lot to me.

I’ve contemplated the idea of someday meeting him in person, but am terrified that I might literally die of laughter. I’m SERIOUS! Sometimes, even his short comments and message-board posts are so funny I need oxygen. So, you can imagine how funny his blog posts are.

His blog is called, It’s a Funny Thing. Give him a visit and tell him I said, “Hello.” He’ll probably know what it means… It means, hello, but maybe he’ll mistakenly read something sinister into it.

One of seven black widow spiders I found along the back fence of my house.

Black widow spider venom is fifteen-times as toxic as that of the prairie rattlesnake. This is why yesterday I was somewhat alarmed to find seven of them (black widows, not rattlesnakes) building a cobweb amusement park along the back fence of the Dead Rooster Mansion.

They are resistant to all non-flamethrower style insecticides, so the only way to get rid of them is to physically smash them with a proper black widow extermination device. My personal favorite is the handle of a TaylorMade r7 CGBmax 5-iron golf club. The correct method for using this high-tech instrument is to hold the club-head in your hand like a pistol grip while pointing the tip of the long handle a few inches from the offending creature, then smoosh.

You have to be quick though because black widows can sense danger and vanish quicker than Dick Cheney’s signature on a charity donation. They escape into knot-holes, under loose boards, or worst of all—and this is where I learned that wearing nothing but short pants and a t-shirt while trying to slay highly-poisonous black widow spiders with a golf club is not such a great idea—they can leap onto you.

I squished the first six spiders in heroic fashion and without a hitch, but the seventh one, obviously skilled at club-handle evasion tactics, unwittingly managed to become part of the meanest hoax ever foisted upon me.

I blinked and she disappeared. I can only believe it was an elaborate prank of nature when, at the exact moment the spider vanished, it was precisely the exact same moment in which an apple blossom drifted from a nearby tree and wriggled its way down the back of my t-shirt.

OK, as you can imagine, my reaction was elaborate. I could feel what I thought was a black widow spider—probably with newly sharpened fangs dripping with highly toxic super-venom—jump down the inside of my shirt!

I could feel its spindly legs; I could sense its anger; I could hear it breathing!

But fate was not satisfied with the intensity of this cruel practical joke. No, it had to do more; it needed a witness.

It turns out that while this nightmare was unfolding for me, my brother, David, had stopped by for one of his surprise visits. When he couldn’t find me in the house, he walked out into the backyard just in time to see me lurching around the lawn wielding a golf club as if I were trying to slay an invisible dragon.

Thinking I was goofing around, he said, (and I believe this is pretty close to the exact quote), “You look like you completely swallowed one of those poisonous frogs that, when you lick’em, cause you to hallucinate.”

“There’s a black widow down the back of my shirt!” I screamed.

After seeing the genuine look of terror on my face he decided that maybe he should try to help me.

Cautiously, he pulled back the collar of my t-shirt and took a look. After seeing the apple blossom, but without passing up an opportunity to further torture me, he said, “holy crap! There is one in there…and, it looks totally pissed, like it wants to bite you!”

The blood drained from my face.

David, who by this time could not contain himself, began laughing hysterically. “No, man, I’m just messing with you—it’s just a flower or something.”

I felt the golf club in my hand, gripped the handle tightly, and brought it up to the “swing” position.

David stopped laughing.

I never did kill that final spider, but I know the general area she’s hiding, so eventually she’s a goner. Right now I’m off to get some margarita mix…and, possibly a beekeepers outfit.

Photo credit: riptheskull

WEEKEND PLANS ABORTED. The plan was to take a few days off, mix up a pitcher of margaritas, relax on the back porch and finish reading Cluck: Murder Most Fowl. The trouble was that the temperature here in the beautiful wine country of southern California shot up to over eight-million-degrees–or, in the real world, about 102 F (39 C), and it was way too hot to sit out there and read. I think I even heard some grapes popping on the vines.

Anyway, I really needed to get this reading done because I had promised Eric Knapp, author of Cluck, that I’d get a review of his book posted this week. Lucky for me, the temperature is supposed to back-off to 86 F (30 C) today which should be just fine for reading in the shade. I am only about half-way through the book, but I should be able to finish it today and have the review posted by Thursday.

Over the weekend, while I was stuck inside watching cartoons and sipping margaritas, a thought occurred to me: after all the extra traffic from the CNN story, I wonder how many of the new visitors converted to RSS feed subscribers? I don’t really push the RSS feed subscriptions, but with all those extra visitors you would think at least some of them would do it.

Some of them did: Two of them.

I always wondered why my feedcount looked so anemic compared with other, similar blogs. I guess part of it can be chalked-up to the fact that I just haven’t been around for very long; but, it still seems like I should have more subscribers. So, I did a little research and discovered something very interesting that made me feel a lot better.

…and, I doubled my feedcount in 24 hours.

I’m not going to get too much into the inner workings of WordPress except to tell you that there are several RSS feeds hiding in there and if you use feedburner it just adds another one. What this means is that there are feed subscribers scattered all over your blog, some of which you probably don’t even know about, and the feedburner feedcount displayed on your blog is probably only a fraction of the actual number of subscribers you have.

If you operate a self-hosted WordPress blog there is an easy solution. Feedburner has acquired “Feedsmith,” a plugin originally developed by Steve Smith that takes your maverick RSS feed subscribers and converts them all to Feedburner subscribers.

Installation is a breeze, just download the plugin, unzip, pop it into your plugins folder, activate it, and then set it up with your feedburner RSS address in your WordPress dashboard.

DOWNLOAD FEEDSMITH FOR WORDPRESS

FEEDSMITH INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS

Remember, Feedburner updates their stats only once a day so you might have to wait as long as 48 hours to see the full results.

A few notes:

1) obviously if you are a blogspot blog this does you no good, however, it’s probably a safe bet that “blogger” blogs already convert all the RSS feeds (I would be a little surprised to find out that Google doesn’t incorporate this technology into their own blogging platform).

2) This is not yet available for WordPress.com blogs—hopefully they will get around to it at some point.

3) I got to thinking that some bloggers may want to keep some of the feeds separate. If that’s you, there is a hack I found by Abhijit Nadgouda that might do the trick.

4) When I first started this blog (January 1st, 2008) I didn’t immediately start out using Feedburner (I didn’t even know what Feedburner was at that point), so that may account for my unusually high gains–mileage may vary.

Note: If you want to help get Dead Rooster’s feedcount up to a respectable, display-worthy level, you can subscribe to my full RSS feed by clicking the orange RSS Subscription button at the top of the sidebar at right. You know you want to!