Alligator Mouth, Hummingbird Rump

The extremely bad comic strip Gil Thorp had a teen-age jock character call the guy threatening him for trying to date his ex-wife (don't bother trying to parse that, the strip is not worth it) as being "all bluster. Alligator mouth, humming bird rump." From the context where it's used, the phrase seems to mean someone is all talk. Equivalent to "all bark, no bite" or "all hat, no cattle."

The folks over at the College don't think that's the way a real teenager would talk, so I did a little google searching and came up with the following results:

Fun with Google®:

• "alligator mouth" and "hummingbird ass" - 632 hits including at least one rap song
• "alligator mouth" and "hummingbird butt" - 170 hits
• "alligator mouth" and "hummingbird rear end" - 42 hits
• "alligator mouth" and "hummingbird rump" - 0 hits

It seems no one, teen-ager or otherwise, talks like that. Obviously the writer is using a euphemism that does not naturally fit with that phrase. This is a great opportunity to experiment frack with Google. I am going to challenge the College to try to up that hit count by posting that phrase on other websites and check back in a week to see if this meme has taken root.

Check the current count.

If you want to play along at home, post on your website, or someone else's (as long as you play nice), the phrase "alligator mouth, hummingbird rump", preferably in a meaningful context. Just don't start any flame wars. Remember the key word is "rump" since "ass", "butt", and "rear end" are already well represented here. Link back to here, leave a comment and I will try to list the other places where it appears.

Also, I have added hummingbird rump as a technorati tag for whatever good that does.

BlogStorm!

Yesterday about 2 pm, after I posted, I got hit by about 36 visitors in one hour. All of the referring URL's came from the blogspot.com domain. I must have hit some sort of jackpot in the random site generator. Then just as quickly, the blogstorm went away. The sad part is that I got more hits and pageviews than when I actually went out and solicited them.

The phenomena puzzles me and I wonder what triggered it and how often I can expect it to occur. Most hits were just pass throughs, but a few lingered and read a little. I do a little random blog surfing and link through the keywords just to see what everybody else does and eventually I guess some people will come her through that. All are welcome to read and comment.

Update: Another blogstorm rolled through at 3 p.m. today (8/10/05) for about exactly and hour. About the same number of hits, fewer total page views. I guess this post wasn't as interesting.

New Template

For the 88 of you that have seen this site before, this is a brand new Blogger Template. The official name is Thisaway(Blue), but I prefer to call it Goodbye, Blue Monday. The orange on the old template began to bother me and the font was way to large in the post bodies.

I know, I should be designing my own stylesheet in CSS and that way it can look how I want it. Well, there's a reason to use templates and that is to keep things from looking too ugly too soon. I want to futz with this one a little bit and make the header text a little larger and not so blue.

AOL is often called the Internet on Training Wheels. Well, Blogger.com is blogging for newbies, and I'm OK with that now. Someday I'll be ready for WordPress and have my own domain. Kinda the Web version of the American Dream. Until then I'll rent and let the landlord take care of the yardwork.

I did manage to transfer the sidebar links intact and keep the Sitemeter going, so I'm not totally useless. As long as it can be done with Cut and Paste, I do all right.

Update: I did change the font sizes in the title. Looks great, if I do say so myself. I also had to shrink the comic in this post to 300 pixels wide to keep IE from FUBARing the block borders. Of course, Firefox handled it fine. Just click on the comic to get it to a legible size. Next is to edit the generic arrow in the title to look like a Vonnegut "assterix".

Vonnegut Links

Since the name of this website is a tribute to Kurt Vonnegut, I figured it should have some Vonnegut related material on it. In researching this post (read googling "Vonnegut"), one site complained that most Vonnegut pages are just lists of links to other sites with a list of links. I think that's true of most fan-based web pages no matter who the subject is.

This site is not now and never will be a Vonnegut fansite. Way back in the mid -90's when I first wanted to do a website, Vonnegut seemed to be a natural topic. I had read all his books as well as several books about him. I had great bibliographical information on him from researching first editions of his books. Then I found a web page by Chris Huber that was on a Duke University web site and all the wind went out of my sails. His site did everything I had hoped to do and more, so I abandoned the hope of ever becoming the web's foremost authority on Kurt Vonnegut (the web was a lot smaller back then).

I recently stumbled upon a link to that duke.edu site that was dead and felt a little loss. Lo and behold, the author of the site had moved it to a new domain and had continued to update it. The Vonnegut Web is really the premiere site for anything Vonnegut. It's got biography, bibliography, chronology, and the most up to date FAQ. Most KV FAQ's on web stop at 1996 when George Cooley quit maintaining it. It's nice to see Huber carrying the torch.

I added a few other links to the sidebar link list that merit attention. It would be pretty negligent not to include his Official Web Site even if it mostly justs hawks his silkscreen designs. I love the "assterix" in the URL line. Great minds think alike. I'll continue to add some more links as I find unique sites that add to the knowledge base, but anyone can do a search and pull up all sorts of minor sites if they care to.

I also found a link to an essay KV had written recently called Cold Turkey. It's good to see he hasn't lost any of his vigor in his old age. He also has a book coming out this fall that collects his "post-retirement" writing titled A Man Without A Country *. I'm afraid it will be a little like the endless repackaging of greatest hits rock groups like The Who do with their fans. Still, recycled Vonnegut is better than most other writers.

* The book link is to Amazon, but I am not an affiliate and won't get any money from you if you buy it from them. I would prefer you buy it from an independent bookstore like Atomic Books, but I can definitely understand if you only have big box retailers in your area.

Stupid Blogger Tricks

On Thursday of last week, I pulled a stunt over at Comics Curmudgeon to goose my site visits to see if anyone would bite. I am glad to say it worked like a charm. According to Sitemeter, I had 14 visitors on Thursday and 36 visitors on Friday. It has since died down to the normal one or two a day.

I guess I shouldn't brag about how unpopular this site is, but I am still on a major learning curve about how and what to blog. I will refrain from crying wolf until there is more truly interesting content.

I did receive my very first comment ever and it was from none other than Francesco Marciuliano, who is the writer of the comic strip Sally Forth. Unfortunately it was to correct an accusation I had made in the comments on his blog, Drink at Work. (See the whole debacle here.) I apologize profusely for writing something without checking the facts, but if everybody did that, the internet would be a much duller place. In penance, I have added Drink at Work to my bloglist.

I have also added The Mobtown Shank to the bloglist because Benn Ray is a wonderful community service in the name of a locally owned off-beat bookstore in Hampden called Atomic Books. I get the Mobtown Shank by e-mail and live vicariously through the really bizarre hipsters that populate his world.

What Makes A Good Blog?

There are a lot of blogs out there and they fall into about three catagories. There are the professional for-profit sites like Wonkette and Defamer. These sites are self-supporting off of add revenue and the blogger's primary income is from the blog.

Then there are the serious hobbiest sites. I think most political blogs (which get all the press) fall into this category. Josh and Drink at Work and most webcomic sites also fall into this niche. They run ads and sell merch, but most of that has to be eaten up in overhead.

Then there are the novelty and vanity sites. I definitely find into this category. I have been on the "web" since the first Windows version of Prodigy. I've seen a lot of internet fads come and go.

Blogs and their related message forums are pretty much straight line descendants of local dial-up bulletin boards I was surfing in the mid '90's. These hobbiest boards had fiercely devoted memberships and often were strongly influenced by the personality of the board operator.

So with a dreadful signal to noise ratio in the blog world, what makes a blog popular? I think there are three elements: clever, crisp writing; relentlessly narrow focus; and frequent updating and posting.

People decry the loss of literacy the internet is mid-wifing, and you definitely could get that impression if you spent any time at all in an AOL chat room or browsing gaming forums. The good blogs though have a terse snarky style that makes paragons of tight writing like Entertainment Weekly or People look like Thomas Pynchon. If you can't get your point across in three paragraphs, you have lost the random surfer. And if you don't have something fresh to say, no one is going to bookmark you and come back.

This post is probably too long already by those standards. I will definitely come back to this topic. So bookmark this page and come back in a few days.

Gollum With Glasses

At joshreads.com I recently changed my signature line to:

yellojkt (imagine Gollum in glasses)

which refers to a recent Foxtrot strip where Jason, the boy genius geek finds out that his Worlds of Warcraft partner is actually the girl next door. These two have a long history of mutual antagonism which obviously means they are meant for each other. The Gollum reference is hilarious in context, because any girl that can name check Tolkien is the perfect match for Jason who just won't owe up to his own attraction to her.

I find Jason to be very funny since he represents an archetype I am way too familar with, both in my youth, and now as the parent of a technically oriented child (PC euphemism for nerd).

In a blatant ruse to up my page views, I challenged the Comics Curmudgeon Community to find an online photo of me. If you found this page, and that shouldn't be hard since it is linked from my CCC profile, a picture would be just around the corner. It was taken on a tour boat in Halong Bay, Vietnam on my recent "secret mission."

Hospital Ordeal Over

My son is home from the hospital after nearly two weeks for an appendectomy and the resulting complications. During that time, I spent about every waking minute either at the hospital or at work. The Medical Industrial Complex is a strange sub-culture that defies explanation. I'm jsut glad it is over with for now.

One of the first things he did was post to HIS blog on Xanga. This blogger site seems unduly populated with graphic intensive teenager blogs that all cross link to each other in a garish melange with video, music and blinking lights. Some of these are nearly unreadable both content-wise and sheer sensory overload. To each their own.