Alien McBurgers

Light posting this weekend as I try to put together a book proposal...but I had to post this. As I was using my nice digital camera to capture higher-quality bar napkin cartoons, I discovered that the camera itself had a card in it full of pictures from my trip across country. Well---not from my trip, exactly, but from the one part of the trip that included Roswell, New Mexico during the Roswell UFO Festival. As you'd expect, everything in Roswell is a little bit infected by UFOs. So this here is a picture of what the McDonald's in Roswell looks like.


...And here's the street nearby, to show what ALL the streetlamps look like.

Handy Reminder

In the subway, at the 7th Avenue/8th Avenue junction of Grand Central Station and Times Square Station. Much more literal than anything I was raised believing.

Slightly Hysterical Sign

Near 5th Avenue and President Street in Brooklyn.

A Special Christmas Killing

There’s an article on Netscape right now—posted, presumably, as part of some self-evident-content clause they share with Cosmopolitan and the USA Today graph department—that says, “Getting Enough Sleep Can Reduce Holiday Stress.” The message could not be clearer and I absolutely agree. So why am I awake at 5 in the morning while Gunga Din plays on the TV behind me? The simplest answer may be that I didn’t drink enough to dull my catlike reflexes and ninja training.

See, I spent Christmas at the home of Sherry Weaver, the lovely hippyish Brooklynite who runs Speakeasy Storytelling, which was my first experience with the city’s storytelling scene some five months ago. She has a great house, puts on a lovely spread, and I spent the evening talking to my friends from the storytelling community—including Cyndi, a self-described “bar wench” who told me about the Speakeasy series in the first place, so you can just imagine the closure, and Mike Daisey, who had just told, back on Thursday, at the last Speakeasy, the best story I’ve ever seen performed, and which represents the new high bar in my own attempt to master the art. I met some of Sherry’s friends, too, and spent most of the evening chatting up a lovely woman named Esther, who represents one of the things I like about parties: I find if I ask around enough, I’ll eventually meet someone who has a job that I never even realized existed. Esther, for example, operates a website for a medical charity that helps people in developing countries get glasses and eye care. (This, by the way, is what Sherry’s friends are like: I also talked to a woman who teaches women’s studies at Pace, a poet who actually doesn’t teach anywhere, and a street performer type who regaled us all with Leonard Nimoy’s “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins,” then revealed he’s writing a book about Will Eisner. Nice people all. The kinds of people first-generation hippies know.)

There was excitement, too—an older gentleman felt dizzy and shaky, and someone called the NYFD, who showed up promptly, flashing ambulance and all, and after taking a few readings, slipped an oxygen mask over the man’s head and spirited him away to what I presume was medical safety. What I mostly remember, however, is going for more Dewar’s White Label and overhearing three different women in three separate conversations, and every one of the women was talking about how sexy it was to have cute firemen at a party. So if you’re in New York, and there are women at your party, and it’s getting a little slow, there’s your ticket: arson.

Anyway, I took the subway home from Brooklyn to Washington Heights in a vast 80-minute L, came home, and went directly to sleep. I wasn’t sleeping very well—in and out; that happens sometimes—so I did what I usually do when that happens: turn the TV on to Turner Classic Movies, with the volume slightly low. Usually that soothes me and I’m able to pitch into slumber.

Then, along about four, I felt something moving against my naked shoulder. With the instincts of a fantasy-novel barbarian, I sprang from the bed just in time to see a dark figure of some sort skitter into the corner between my bed and the wall. An insect, surely—but what kind? A spider? A generic flying bug? (I sleep next to a window that is frequently cracked open just a tad, so things can get in by accident.) I flipped on the light and discovered the answer: it was a New York City cockroach. My first encounter with one since I moved here ten months ago.

I didn’t panic. If anything, I was a little disappointed. After six years in Tallahassee, Florida, where cockroaches are so large they constitute an entire demographic, this New York type was impressive—about the length of a pen cap, including the pointy thing that hooks onto your shirt pocket—but it was no Florida roach. In Florida, cockroaches are not only huge, but they’re sneaky and fast: furtive, scheming, surprisingly tricky, and impossible to catch in the open unless you have some combination of sprays, at least one good phone book, and the patience of a tableside dog. Also, some of them fly. It takes you to a very primal place.

This guy wasn’t even trying. After darting under a pile of papers (I’d just been cleaning, so I had a few piles of papers on the floor), I banged on the pile in hopes of scaring it out. No good...but then I discovered I could actually hear it walking. The dumb sonofabitch was actually lumbering! I could track it by sound! It had moved under my desk and was crawling along at an unhurried lope. And then, as I watched, it actually emerged into view, crawling over a plastic bag with the slow stagger of a smoker on a hike. Like any veteran roach-hunter, I had already picked up the heaviest-but-smallest book I own—Michael Jackson’s Guide to Single Malt Scotch—and when this fellow got off the bag and hit my open floor, I actually loomed over it calmly, taking careful aim, and smashed it instantly, without using up more than two ergs of actual exertion. (Note: you need a small book because after killing roaches a few times you begin to notice that large books often catch on a corner somewhere and leave the roach room to escape the full brunt. So the key is density, not surface area.)

But still, there’s something inherently superstitious about the killing of such a large bug—even one as lazy as this guy—and I have never been able to pick up any roach right away. (If it’s in my house, I’ll leave it till the morning so the sunlight can burn away the roach-cooties). And it’s also very very hard to go back to bed an hour after you’ve been crawled on in your sleep, even though it’s the perfectly logical thing to do. (After all, my brain has been telling me, since you’ve only seen one roach in ten months, the odds against your facing two tonight must be quite minuscule!)

This is also why I’m convinced my real problem is that I just didn’t drink enough. If I’d been thoroughly blitzed, I might not even have noticed the roach in the first place. When I was in New Orleans, after a terrific night with my new friend Madisun, being in a similar state of mind at a youth hostel didn’t protect me from seeing a roach, but it did allow me to get back to sleep after it wandered far enough away. (Thanks to Madisun for sharing the flights of vodka!)

Anyway, I’m up and it looks like it’s time now for me to get to work. Thanks for listening. Special thanks goes to my friend Susie, who inspired me to tidy my room, which resulted in my place having more open floor than usual and make killing the bastard that much simpler. Thank heaven for all my life’s good influences! It’s a Festivus miracle.

Bar Napkin Cartoon 19

Part four of a four-part, last-minute series of Christmas cartoons. Happy Holidays!

Bar Napkin Cartoon 18

Part three of a four-part, last-minute series of Christmas cartoons.

Bar Napkin Cartoon 17

Part two of a four-part, last-minute series of Christmas cartoons.

Bar Napkin Cartoon 16

Part one of a four-part, last-minute series of Christmas cartoons---shot, this time, with an actual digital camera I bought years ago and am generally afraid to use. But look at that clarity!

Infocom Games For Sale on the Street

75th and Broadway, on the street. Sorry this isn't clearer---I have to remember to NEVER use my camera phone's pixelating zoom function---but I was stunned to see not one, not two, but SEVEN old-fashioned text-adventure games from the perfecter of the form, Infocom. The pile, if you can make it out, includes Planetfall, Ballyhoo, Deadline, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Suspect and Moonmist. But even if you bought them, how would you even play them? Does anyone actually have a floppy-disk drive anymore? Weird.

A Newspaper in Need of a Style Sheet

Seen in a machine outside the 184th Street A Station. I keep reading it as "no-one," and it's giving me a headache. What's up, editorial department? Tough squeezes like this are why the octothorp (#) was invented!

Help For When You Sleep

A tip I just learned before I woke up: if you're ever having a nightmare or even just a fairly unpleasant dream (example: you have to write a long essay in no time at all to compete for some national scholarship), it often helps to take a mental step back and examine the situation for any faulty premises (example: Wait! I'm not in school anymore! I don't have to do anyhing!). It saves both time and stress.

P.S. Light posting because I'm putting together a nonfiction book proposal. Wish me luck!

Christians and Mitt Romney

Now that McCain has put all his weight behind this baffling "Last Big Push" strategy---what could it possibly accomplish except more lost lives, an uncertain small-territory victory, and a delay to a more realistic engagement?---I think McCain has lost. Even if he wins the nomination somehow (Lord knows he's got the machine) I know a lot of conservatives who HATE him because he's been a symbol of compromise, and because a good number of Democrats are okay with him for the same reason, as the lesser of two evils. But now that McCain has spent the last year or so sucking up to the extremists in his own party, and---get this---trying to out-hawk Bush in pursuit of the least-popular war I hope to ever see, McCain, by getting his name attached to the "surge" idea, shows himself all at once to be a.) more conservative than even moderates are comfortable with, b.) bad at military ideas, and c.) an untrustworthy weasel no matter which side you're on . . . well, I just don't see how he can win a Presidential election against even a nominally competent anti-Bush.

So my money's on Mitt Romney as the Republican candidate. The only major problem he has is that he's a Mormon, and I've seen lots of posts all over the web about Romney's "Mormon problem" and how it's apt to scare away evangelical Christians in the Religious Right.

My two cents: most of the articles seem to be written by people who don't actually know any evangelicals. But I was there (and I was an evangelical) when solidly Religious-Right Arizona elected Evan Meacham, Mormon used-car salesman, for governor back in...was it 1986? If you vaguely remember the news from that time, he turned out to be an utter embarrassment and a PR disaster. Just one example: Once out in public he saw a black child and said, "What a cute little pickaninny!" leading to rueful bumper stickers that said, "Boy, Did We Ever Pick A Ninny!" And this was only one of many highlights, starting with his cancellation of the new Martin Luther King holiday.

But here's the thing: when I went to church at that time, no one actually talked about Meacham's Mormonism; they talked about his politics. And he got traction among evangelicals precisely because evangelicals basically care about two issues: abortion and homosexuality. And as long as Mitt, or any other Mormon, has the same faith-related (i.e., unflagging and unchanging) support for those two issues, Mitt can count on their votes. (At least in a narrow field with no honest evangelicals running.) Do evangelicals think Mormonism is a Satan-inspired cult? You bet. But as long as he votes the right way AND does it for a similar reason (i.e., religion), he's actually a very appealing candidate. Evangelicals will be praying for him to change his religion, and they'll send him a lot of tracts, but they'll love him for his voting record. Expect him to poll better than the professionals expect.

P.S. I only venture into politics about once a week, so let me take this opportunity to thank Eric Berlin. In comments on my last post, about Obama dressing like a terrorist, I challenged him to show me anyone on the right to call out this silliness. Sure enough, a post on the Corner did just that, and I would be remiss if I didn't mention it. So thanks, Eric, for restoring my faith in people all over, and thanks for introducing me to The Corner, which I should have been reading a long time ago. I will add, however, that references to "Barack Hussein Obama" are visible everywhere in the conservative blogosphere except The Corner, and it creeps me out.

I play Scrabble online via WordBiz. This much many of you know. What most of you don't know is that I'm slowly climbing to the point of having a 1400 rating. And also, that among the options I have in my settings, I have "Always show tiles in alphabetical order."

This matters because two nights ago, while shooting for the big 1400, I instead got my ass handed to me by someone named "legochamp." And in the very last draw of the game, the computer seemed to be reading my mind. Check out my rack at the top of the screen.

It's moments like this that camera phones are made for.

P.S. In my final play, I hooked TOILS onto BAY, for 15 lousy points. I wonder now if it wouldn't have been smarter to play OS, forming OKA and PAVEMENTS, for something like 24. Probably not (because then legochamp would have scored points, probably gone out, and cost me 6), but it's certainly a more interesting play.

Bar Napkin Cartoon 15

Despondent Otterness Sculpture

Obviously this is at the 14th Street A station, which is filled with Dan Otterness's fun cartoony little sculptures. But this is the first time I've seen one enhanced by an outside participant, who added the beer can and the rope. The next time I went by, the props were gone.

By the way, I was up bizarrely late last night, in a bizarre mixture of panic over back pain and just plain intractable insomnia. I'm just about to head into work, where it looks like I'll be working very late to make up the time. Thanks to West-Coast friends Charles and Jason for talking me down. I'll center a word search in y'allses' honor.

Every Time You Go Tieless, The Terrorists Win

The professional right wing must be terrified of Barack Obama. First they began pointing out that his middle name is "Hussein," and now there's this utter idiocy. I swear to god, we need a new Godwin's Law that says, "If you compare your opponent to al-Qaeda, you get your mike cut off."

And yet---every time they do these obviously crazy and deesperate smears against a guy who's widely loved, aren't they really hurting themselves? Bush's approval rating is 30% and almost guaranteed to slide lower when people realize he's ignoring the Iraq Study Group---the last figleaf he had---and continuing our present course. (Tony Snow has done nothing all week except downplay the report's importance.) Approval for the Iraq war is 21% and also liable to plummet. So when the Republican Noise Machine tries to say "Barack Obama dresses like at least one known terrorist and has a scary Middle Eastern name!" I have a feeling they're just making themselves look very out of touch. That shit worked on Kerry---you could look at him and think, "God, he's uncomfortable. Is he hiding something?" But two years ahead of time, the Republican chattering class seems to be literally running this Presidential campaign (and the preemptive strikes against Dem opponents) as if The War on Terror = Iraq is still a winning sales pitch. It's idiotic, Colonial-era slander and innuendo, and I hope they fry for it.

And Now a Meme-Related Quiz

Speaking of memes, there's a thing going around where you can put virtual objects in your friends' Christmas stockings. Perhaps you've seen it: It's just a stocking with your friend's name on it that says, "Leave me stuff!" And you can literally leave ANYTHING that's 30 characters or less, type it in, and it gets left as a message in the stocking of record.

The most interesting thing about it for me, though, is that you can also click on a tab that sends you to "The 40 Most Popular Gifts." The top gifts are sort of what you'd expect: a pony, chocolate, a kitten, the inevitable coal, etc. But in the midst of all this relatively generic merriment, and in spite of the fact that you can write anything you want, exactly one celebrity also makes this Top-40 list. Can you guess who it is? Check it out here.

(Tip: As of this writing, he's #24.)

Warning Sign

I was obliged to post this on the bathroom door at work a few days ago. Humorless managerial types made me take it down, but I have recreated it here at home in order to share its wise message.

Breaking Down The Meme

I don't usually like memes. They're like Mad Libs---a good one's entertaining, but if it's not very well designed, you'll get a lot of boring responses. And a LOT of memes are terrible that way. For example, there was one going around recently where you wrote the first line of the first post of your blog every month for the past year. It generally resulted in a lot of very dull first lines that did no justice to the actual people who write amusing blogs but who start each post with the equivalent of a throat-clearing.

But this "funny-name" one came around again, and as I read through it, I realized that I fuck up practically every one of them. It's a textbook example of a good idea that had bad execution. So I thought I'd go through them and see if I couldn't improve it a little:

*******************

THE FAKE NAME MEME (WITH DAVE'S IMPROVEMENTS)

1.YOUR SPY NAME

ALLEGED PROCESS: middle name + current street name

MY ANSWER: Ellis 185th.

COMMENTARY: This is awful. A spy name should have a certain novelistic feel, along with a dash of exoticism, and street names (as you'll see) are playing with fire.

SUGGESTED FIX: first name of writer of novel closest to where you are sitting (or author in general if you own no novels) + the first and/or highest-up proper noun visible in the title of a book on your bookshelf. (If you have many bookshelves, choose your favorite. Let me stress again that the proper noun must be in the title; it cannot be an author's name)

MY NEW ANSWER: Tony October


2. YOUR MOVIE STAR NAME

ALLEGED PROCESS: grandfather/grandmother on your mom's side + your favorite candy

MY ANSWER: Ellis Snickers

COMMENTARY: The idea of using an old-fashioned first name is very good, but the candy ending is utter crap. What the hell was its inventor thinking? Does ANYONE in Hollywood have a name that's a candy? Joey Licorice? Susan Twix? Michael Nonpareils? What idiocy.

SUGGESTED FIX: grandfather/grandmother on either side + a last name you've always wished you had, or have thought of changing your name to (marriage proposals count). Also, call it your GOLDEN-AGE Movie Star Name.

MY NEW ANSWER: Ellis Reed


3. YOUR RAP NAME

ALLEGED PROCESS: first initial of first name + first four letters of your last name, separated by a hyphen.

My Answer: D-Dick

COMMENTARY/SUGGESTED FIX: Not much to change here, except that obviously, this should be the first syllable of your last name, or--if your name is already one syllable, cut it off at the first vowel. Note also that this "rap name" should probably be called YOUR NAME IN THE TABLOIDS.

My New Answer: D-Dick. Still. It's a classic.


4. YOUR SOAP OPERA NAME

ALLEGED PROCESS: middle name + city where you were born

MY ANSWER: Ellis Iowa City

COMMENTARY: The suckiness speaks for itself; not many people are realistically names for cities, even in the rarefied world of soap operas. Plus, how many times in a single meme do you want to read your friend's middle name?

SUGGESTED FIX: The first one-word proper noun found in a geographical gazetteer after your father or mother's middle name + the county you were born in.

MY NEW ANSWER: Rochdale Johnson (I used Merriam-Webster's 10th Collegiate Dictionary Gazetteer, starting with the name "Robert.")


5. YOUR STAR WARS NAME

ALLEGED PROCESS: first 3 letters of your last name, last 3 letters of mother's maiden name, first 3 letters of your pet's name.

MY ANSWER: DiccouIdon'thaveapet.

COMMENTARY: You can't rely on people to have pets, of course, and the "three letters" cuts off at all sorts of non-Star Wars sounding phonemes. It misses the actual truth, which is that almost all Star wars names are between 3 and 5 syllables, and Lucas has a real fondness for ending names in vowels.

SUGGESTED FIX: So how about this: second syllable of your last name (if your name is only one syllable long, go with "O-") + first syllable of mother's maiden name, [space], first syllable or two (your choice) from the city you were born in, the first consonant from your father's first name, and then an A, I, O, or U---whichever letter is closest to the first letter of your last name.)

MY NEW NAME: Kercor Ioba

(Note: my father's first name is William, but he goes by Bill, so I went with that to avoid Iowa.)



6. YOUR ACTION HERO NAME

ALLEGED PROCESS: first name of a main character in the last movie you watched + last food you ate

MY NAME: Mi Gardenburger

COMMENTARY: The idiotic food meme pops up again. That's ridiculous: the only way to make yourself sound like an action hero is if you had just eaten steel, stone or hardtack. (And by the way, the last film I saw was National Velvet, where Mickey Rooney stars as a character named Mi. Pronounced with a long I, and apparently short for "Michael." How lazy do you have to be to make "Mike" even shorter?)

SUGGESTED FIX: coolest nickname you have had (or called someone by) + last name of your all-time favorite teacher. Add "Mc" if it feels right.

MY NEW NAME: Einstein Carr. (Alternate: Mr. Peabody Winegartner.) (Worst Alternate: Squishy-Pants McOberman)


7. PORN STAR NAME

Alleged process: first pet's name + the street you grew up on

MY NAME: Punky Magnolia.

COMMENTARY: Not a porn star anyone would want to see. You can practically smell the clown makeup. Again, the street meme lets us down, because I narrowly avoided having the last name "28th." The results should sound like a porn name, even if it's a bad one. Still, the idea of a pet's name for once, isn't too bad. But you need more options, just in case you had no pets at all or one with a lousy name.

SUGGESTED FIX:
For women: pet name or name of doll/toy you had as a child (don't forget My Little Pony!) + the first verb or adjective in the title of whatever movie is currently playing on either Lifetime, Oxygen, or We. (If you don't have cable, you can look it up online.)

For men: the last hard object you purchased (books don't count), or what the object is made of (or, if you're desperate, what it does or is used for) + the present tense form of the first double-entendre word visible on one of the the spines in your DVD collection.

In either case, put the names in whichever order sounds best.

MY NEW NAME: Snatch Chocolate (if I were a woman, my new porn name would be Cloudy Christmas.) Thank you, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I'd forgotten I even owned it.

*******************

See? Was that so hard? Well, yes, I guess it was. But that's what it takes if you want professional results, dammit!

AFTERNOTE: It has occurred to me that #7's idea for women is flawed as a meme, since the point is often to find things out about the responder, and "whatever's playing on Lifetime" isn't really personal information. So how about this: starting with your first or middle name, scroll down in the dictionary until you find the first uncapitalized word that is also a name. Use that. By this process, my female porn name becomes Cloudy Dawn. Still good!

Dogs and Goats! Riding Each Other!

While I was skimming through the New International Second several months ago in search of weird words to write poems about, I ran across the following phrase, which was new to me:

ride the goat. To be initiated into a secret society; --from the idea that a goat is sometimes used in the proceedings.

I couldn't come up with a poem about it, but the phrase stayed in my head for obvious and disturbing reasons.

Today, under similarly random circumstances, I wound up reading about Mr. Cassius Coolidge, the artist who created the original "dogs playing poker" series back in the 1870s-1880s. And I found THIS picture:


It's called "Riding the Goat." Dear god. I can already feel the nightmares brewing.

P.S. If you can't see the picture on your browser, here's the link to DogsPlayingPoker.org. Click on Gallery, then on Cassius Coolidge. Try not to look directly at the screen.

*The* Google Entry

I was goofing around at lunch and made this discovery: You know who's either REALLY widely linked or just really smart at marketing themselves? The folks at the top of the list when you Google "the."

The full story: In solving a puzzle, I ran across the word "pend," and it struck me that I'm not actually convinced that "pend" is a word anyone ever uses. "Pending," sure. And things depend, and we append stuff, and doom is often impending, and folks wear pendants. But I don't think I've ever seen the word "pend" used as a word all by itself, without other letters attached, and I can't even imagine how you could. ("I wonder if this is one of those election results that will pend.")

So I Googled "pend," and discovered that I seem to be right. Far and away the most common usage is for some city or region called "Pend Oreille." Didn't see a single pend-meaning-to-await-judgment anywhere. There should be a note next to it: "Actually, this word is never used except in 'pending' form."

And then, while I was thinking about commonly used words, I Googled "the." Imagine my surprise!

By the way, when you Google "teh," the first link is to a Wikipedia article about "teh", and how it is used as a joke in leetspeak.

North Korean Migraine Inducer

See, it's stuff like this that makes me long for a President who doesn't think "negotiation" is synonymous with "weakness." Jesus fucking Christ.

Speaking of Dave Quizzes...

I just wrote my very first quiz at OKCupid during lunch. It's called The "What Sort Of Fool Do You Take Me For?" Quiz, and it tracks why you think I do some of the stupid things I've done. It not only has some great stories, but some amusingly implausible rationales. Check it out!

http://www.okcupid.com/tests/take?testid=11588746910416530488

Another Dave Fun Quiz (Of Sorts)!

I just read this listing on OkCupid.com, and it was a fun challenge to try to parse the intention behind the grammar. And it gave me an idea for another Dave Fun Quiz: From the sentence structure and use of idoms and cognates, can you figure out what country this woman is from? Read and wonder:

*********************

The cheerful and clever girl. I like to do all cheerful. And very much I love when the man grants all my desires! I would like to become the happiest girl on light. Also I know that for this purpose is necessary to me good the man! I think that I shall find him! Also I hope that it will be already very fast!!! Recently I have left the guy. Now I would not want that my favourite person was young. I think that his this understanding most important in the man. And young men sometimes I do not understand that do! I would want that mine the man was clever and understanding. I hope that he we can make me princess.

**********************

I say this is a quiz "of sorts" because I don't actually know the answer myself. But surely someone out there does! And isn't it fun just to speculate? (For example: I think that, from the way that verbs and adjectives cluster before the nouns, we can rule out a Romance language.)

Holy Horse Hockey!

Maybe it's because I was never a prepubescent girl, but I saw this book title at my local Barnes & Noble and couldn't imagine how anyone at the publishing house had a meeting about it while keeping a straight face. While you're at it, check out the back, where they attempt to explain what the hell they're talking about:

And here I thought Mr. Ed was just a regular old non-divine animal flapping his lips at some stunt peanut butter. I might have thought differently if I'd actually seen him in divine action "practicing intricate dressage moves." Serves me right for not having eyes of faith.

Classic Movie News For Sunday

I'm off to brunch with my recently-CAT-scanned friend Ryan, but Turner Classic Movies is playing right now, and I had to state two things:

1.) I've just seen Libeled Lady (1936) with William Powell, Myrna Loy, Spencer Tracy and Jean Harlow! It's still early to tell, but it may have suddenly vaulted into place as my all-time favorite screwball comedy. Like The Philadelphia Story, but faster paced and a little more broad.

2.) One of my all-time favorite films, The Devil And Miss Jones, with Charles Coburn and Jean Arthur, is playing on Turner Classic Movies today at 4:15! This movie is NOT YET AVAILABLE ON DVD, so this is your chance! Trust me---it's wonderful.

Okay. Brunch waits...

If You Have a Blog, You Can Help Science!

A scientist is trying to track the speed with which memes travel in the blogosphere. If you've got a blog and want to help out, go here, link to the post, and ping Technorati. I can't wait to see the results!