What Makes Me Laugh

Well, folks, it has been a fun ride, but I think it’s time to hang up my blogging hat for a while. This is partly due to the fact that I lost my sense of humor somewhere during the Gulf oil spill, and I haven’t spotted it yet. It’s partly due to summer, which is short around here, and I need to soak up as much sun as possible before it leaves our hemisphere. But mostly … (insert drumroll here) … I’m working on the second draft of my novel and I’m so close to being done that I can taste it. All other writing is taking a back seat to this project, and you’ll hear more about it soon.

In the meantime, I’m going out to buy a real journal. I haven’t written in one since I started to blog and frankly, I miss it. You can tell yourself you’ll burn it afterward and write all kinds of stuff in a journal that you’d never put online. You can bore yourself silly writing about gardening and no one will even care. Maybe somewhere in there I’ll find my sense of humor again.

To those of you who have commented and supported my blog, I really thank you. It’s been fun to meet other bloggers, some of whom seem like real kindred spirits, and to share thoughts with friends and family. So, consider this your cyber hug. We’ll meet up again soon.

Right now I have nine spam comments on my blog just sitting here, waiting for me to delete them.

The thing about comments generated by spammers (people who don’t actually read your blog, but want others to click on a link from their comment to an advertisement for genital herpes medication – or some other stupid product)   is that they can be harder to sort out than spam e-mail.

For e-mail users, if you can’t recognize the fraud tempting you to buy herbal Viagra, or look at “photos of me”, or provide your bank account information because you won a Nigerian lottery you never entered, then your genetic code has suffered some Darwinian maladaptation.

Comment spam, however, is a different beast. For instance, here’s a frequent spam comment:

“Hey… This is the second time I have visited your blog and I really enjoy your work. Please keep us updated! Thanks!”

Well, how nice of this person. A complete stranger has visited my blog twice, and has said good things! I’m flattered.

Turns out, the person who commented (Ashley Madison) is probably not enjoying my blog. In fact, the description of her website is pretty terrifying:

“ The website called “Ashley Madison” can be a little deceiving and is not as obvious and upfront as most discreet affair sites like Lonelywivesaffairs.com. The Ashley Madison foundation has been using the name strategically to target mostly male audiences who wish to have an affair outside of marriage. Their motto reads: ‘Life is short, have an affair.’”

Life is short, have an affair? Now there is a quotable quote.

Here’s another spam comment:

“In truth, immediately i didn’t understand the essence. But after re-reading all at once became clear.”

In truth, this one is not so flattering. You really don’t want your readers to “not understand the essence” of your writing or have to re-read  your post to get it.

This guy, named “Crasty” is trying to sell generic Viagra. His site features a  photo of a guy in a business suit, leaning over another guy in a business suit, holding a pill in front of his face. Hmm…

I must admit, I fell for the following comment when I first started blogging because it seemed so personal:

“I’m so jealous of your blog! I can never get mine to function or look like yours. Good work though…Keep it up!”

Wow! Someone is jealous of me? Little old me? I didn’t even think it looked that good. How nice of her.

Yeah, it would have been really nice if she wasn’t trying to sell a get-rich-by-working-from-home scheme on her website.

Almost all of my spam is automatically filtered for me through Wordpress, but a few sneak by them into my e-mail, and my ego picks up for a few seconds when I read ones like, “Great article! When are you going to write more about this?”

And I think, “Soon very soon, as soon as I buy Cipro.”

Thanks to Adam Freetly at archGFX for writing a widget-friendly version of Depo Clean. Now I have my blogroll, comments section, and all sorts of treats back, plus a great new design. Boy, do I love the word free.

I hope you like the new theme at What Makes Me Laugh. It’s by Derek Powazek and it’s called DePo Skinny. I think it’s more stylish than my old theme, but I do miss my old header. And I’m missing a lot of other stuff too – like my blogroll, and other sidebar widgets. Plus, the footer is still incomplete, so please bear with me as I figure out how to widgetize this theme and work the kinks out. It may take a while.

One of the best parts about blogging has been discovering other writers and their unique voices. But it hasn’t been easy. I’ve really had to search. 

The reason why I’m writing this post is because even though we hear about how many millions of blogs there are in the blogosphere, it’s hard to actually find ones you enjoy on a consistent basis. So, I thought I would share my favorites in case others are looking for a few good blogs, and hope that readers will recommend some more in the comments section.  What I look for in a blog is either something consistently funny (which goes with the theme of my site) or a personal blog that is well-written, engaging, and includes some humor.

Catherine Sherman was my first good find. I found her blog through Wordpress.com which offers free hosting for bloggers. A lot of my friends use blogspot, and I kind of regret not going that route myself because it would have been simpler but I learned a lot purchasing my own domain name and it offers a lot more flexibility.

Anyway, Catherine is a Kansas blogger who wrote a post about Flight of the Conchords, a television show we both adore, and I immediately liked her writing style and the layout of her blog. It also turned out that Catherine had visited Australia and more specifically, Tasmania, this year so we had a lot to compare notes on after that.

From Catherine’s blogroll I found Kiwibloke, Planetjan, and Middleground. I’ve mentioned Kiwibloke several times in my posts about Flight of the Conchords because he also follows the show and chronicles all things New Zealand. Planetjan is written by a California teacher with a witty sense of humor and great research skills. She wrote an excellent series about narcissim and Narcissistic Personality Disorder that I greatly admired. I’ve been thinking about it a lot since because I’ve had a few close encounters with narcissists myself and it isn’t pretty. I’m just getting to know Middleground  but it’s written by a southern married mother of one with a dry sense of humor .

I recently added Montana For Real to my blogroll. This is written by a friend of my family’s who writes about life on a working Montana ranch. She does an excellent job of capturing the essence of modern day ranch life on a daily basis. She is also an aspiring fiction author, like me.

Barnes and Noble introduced me to Dooce through the audio series Meet the Writers. Heather Armstrong writes Dooce from Salt Lake City, a blog that started in 2001 and famously got her fired from her job. She just finished a memoir called, “It sucked and then I cried: How I had a baby, a breakdown, and a much needed margarita.” I’ve put it on my reading list. She also is witty and honest about parenthood. Can you sense a theme here in what I like?

The others on my blogroll, like 1000 Awesome Things or Indexed aren’t personal. They mostly chronicle life in a unique way, or make fun of things like passive aggressive notes, or apostrophe abuse. I check them out occasionally for a chuckle, but I like the personal blogs better.

Anyway, that’s all of my endorsements for this Saturday afternoon. I hope you can add a few more in the comments section. Now off to enjoy the good weather!