DeadRooster.com

Smiling moon blacked-out by clouds,
Your gentle beams choked by rain,
No amount of conjuring will bring you back now,
On fragile wings I fall to the mud and cry.

–The Wayward Rooster

Welcome to my last blog post EVER…

…for the year 2008.

Haha! Made you worry there for a minute, didn’t I?

No, we are having WAY too much fun to stop doing this now! Reach for the stars, reader!–you’re being held hostage for at least another year.

It’s going to be difficult to say good-bye to 2008; so many amazing things happened to me. It will be remembered as one of the most interesting years of my life:

• I did battle with a surprisingly crafty black widow spider
• I wrote a blog post funny enough to induce leaky bladders in at least four people
• I proposed to several women and they all said YES
• I wrote a blog post that got more than 50,000 hits and is still climbing
• I was recognized as number 1 in a list of 100 Incredibly Hot Men
• I was on camera during a nationally televised TV show
• I worked behind the scenes on a nationally televised commercial
• My blog was featured on CNN
• I GOT PAID to go to Hawaii for 12 days and work on a movie (post pending)

This blog has been more successful than I ever imagined. It’s hard not to get a swelled head over it. I already mentioned that it was featured on CNN, but it is also highly ranked in the humor section of BlogCatalog and has even made their front page list of most popular blogs a few times.

Not everything has been wonderful regarding my blogging experience though; I recently got up at 3:00 am and sent off a quick, but well-intentioned email to someone I consider one of the most knowledgeable and helpful bloggers on the internet; someone I’ve gotten along with well over the past year. Well, the email—due to some sleepy writing on my part—was misconstrued to suggest that I assumed this blogger was “coming on to me.” (For real!)

At least I didn’t give the impression (I hope) that I was coming on to them; or our friendship, I’m sure, would be OVER.

We both laughed about it after we ironed everything out, but there were some real moments of high-intensity embarrassment going on I can tell you!

It was courageously suggested by the other party that I write a humorous blog post about the incident (keeping the other party anonymous, of course), but, even though I have no problem writing about my own embarrassing escapades, I don’t feel comfortable writing stories when someone else is the chief Knucklehead (yes, you were!) LOL. So, I’m going to leave it at that (but, notice how I’m letting my readers imaginations run wild as to whether I’m referring to a man or a woman…hehe!).

One of the best things about 2008 is that I met lot of really great people—mostly fellow bloggers that gave me some great advice and a lot of laughs. These are the people listed in my blogroll. Every one of them I consider a friend and, believe me, if you are listed in my blogroll you should feel special; I don’t list just anyone in there, you know.

I was going to list a few of the bloggers that really stood out, but then I’d forget someone and hurt their feelings, so I’ve decided to start doing blog reviews in 2009 and take them on one at a time.

OK, I’ve spewed enough for one year. Thanks 2008, you were great!

My friend Karen at A Strange Life Revisited recently wrote a post in which she admitted to waking up with Grandpa Munster hair. I got after her for not sharing a photo of the incident with her readers. To me, this is instant blog material. But, I have to step back and realize that not everyone shares my total lack of shame.

I am not shy AT ALL and don’t mind looking like a dufus.  So, when I rolled out of bed this morning and noticed my image in the mirror, I knew I had to capture it on film.

Unfortunately, the photo is not as funny as I thought it would be. What WOULD have been funny is if I had set up a secondary video camera to film my frustration at trying to get a photo with my image centered. I must have taken 50 shots and in each succeeding photo my charming smile melted more and more into the grimace you see in the picture.

What’s worse, is that THIS CAMERA HAS A SETTING FOR TAKING YOUR OWN PICTURE! I’ve used it many times and it has never failed. It automatically waits until your face is centered in the frame before it clicks. I didn’t even need to use a mirror! But, at 4:30 a.m. who thinks of these things.

IN OTHER NEWS

I am still sifting through my Hawaii photos–turns out I took over 400 of them. I want to use some of the best to illustrate my adventures, so stay tuned for that.

I upgraded to WordPress 2.7 this morning and I am totally lost. After reading about some of the features, I was seriously worried it would blow-up my blog. I was sure there would be a conflict in the comment system since I use a few plugins there. But, so far, so good.

I am doing a little experiment to raise my pagerank (currently at 4). I think I can raise my pagerank, legitimately, without gaming the system, without adding any siginificant backlinks or changing my blog in any major way. Let’s see if it works; if it does, I’ll clue you in on the secret.

Good news everyone! The December 2008 issue of Antithesis Celebrity Magazine is due out any day now and I just found out I made the front cover! I knew I was going to be featured in the magazine’s list of Incredibly Hot Men, but when I saw what the front cover was going to look like I just about fell out of my chair! I can hardly wait until I can walk into a Barnes & Noble bookstore, pull a copy off the newsstand, and then run through the store screaming, “Look everybody! It’s me! It’s me!

I don’t know what they’re going to say about me in Antithesis, but here is a local magazine article from this month’s Wine Country Metropolitan:

Antithesis Celebrity Magazine’s Top 100 Incredibly Hot Men—Dead Rooster Author William McCamment Takes Top Honors

LA CRESTA CALIFORNIA—If you had any doubt that women around the world are gravitating toward older men these days, just check out Antithesis Celebrity Magazine’s Top 100 Incredibly Hot Men. Rounding out the top ten this year are no less than six gentlemen with at least 40 candles on their next birthday cake. The top honor this year goes to 48 year-old blogger, William McCamment, who authors the increasingly popular Dead Rooster blog.

William, who is single and lives alone in Southern California, was accidentally discovered by Icelandic supermodel, Hjördís (who, in case you’re unfamiliar with this striking 23-year-old blonde, pronounces her name, Yerdis), when she literally ran into him as he was coming out of a Beverly Hills antique shop carrying two 16th century ceramic chickens.

“I didn’t see him until it was too late,” said Hjördís. “I bumped into him so hard that one of the chickens flew out of his arms and onto the street where it shattered into a million pieces. I felt so bad but there was nothing I could do. There was no way to replace it—it’s not like they sell 400-year-old ceramic chickens on every street corner!”

Profusely apologizing, she noticed that the guy she ran into was extremely good-looking. “I almost couldn’t believe it,” she said. “Here was this guy that just lost a very expensive chicken—because of me—and all I could do is blush and think about how incredibly handsome he was.”

After some awkward apologies and high-pitched, girlish crying over the loss of the chicken (mostly from William), the two got into Hjördís’ rare 2006 Aston Martin DBS and sped off for a quaint dinner at Malibu’s exclusive Mountebank restaurant. During the meal, Hjördís confessed she thought he was handsome and suggested he be included in the running for Antithesis Celebrity Magazine’s Top 100 Incredibly Hot Men.

William, shocked at the suggestion of a (then) 46-year-old Rare Book Dealer making the list and thinking nothing would ever come of it, agreed to let her submit his bio. Sixteen months later he sits atop AM’s Incredibly Hot Men list ahead of such hotties as # 2 Johnny Depp; #3 George Clooney; # 4 Matt Damon; and #5 Orlando Bloom.

“What’s interesting,” said Antithesis publisher, Katrina Random, “is that largely unknown fellas like William are beginning to crack the top ten, whereas better known heartthrobs like Brad Pitt barely make the list at all.” Pitt came in at number ninety-nine. It’s the first time in Antithesis’ history he didn’t make the top five.

END OF ARTICLE

DEAR DEAD ROOSTER READERS: The above article is, of course, fake. There is no Antithesis Celebrity Magazine; no list of the Top 100 Incredibly Hot Men; and most disappointing, especially for me, there’s no smitten Icelandic supermodel named Hjördís.

The idea for this prankish post was prompted by the recent alignment of three random strokes of fate:

The first was that my good friend, Joe, at Crotchety Old Man Yells at Cars wrote a post about how all these young, beautiful women keep flocking to Hugh Hefner’s bedroom even though he’s an old, desiccating Crypt Keeper–to which I responded in a comment, “It’s the fame. Before I became an international superstar blogger, I hardly ever had swarms of 19-year-old hotties drenching me with their love…” Haha! Uh…yeah…

The second was my recent discovery of an online photo manipulation tool called PhotoFunia that, when you upload your picture, it places it realistically into a photo with celebrities and/or interesting scenes (the photos in this post aside from the magazine cover were created with that tool—the magazine cover was done by me and Photoshop). Go play with it, you’ll love it. And, they have a full 74 photos to choose from!

The third and final stroke was that my monopoly on the search phrase “Incredibly Hot Men” has faded and I miss winning bar-bets with people that don’t believe it when I tell them my picture will come up if they type it into a search engine.

So, I tried to work a little SEO magic into this post hoping it brings it back up. We’ll see.

Thanks for playing along.