Ending one hobby and starting another.

 Those of you who read the gossip blog know that I pulled the plug on it last Thursday. I learned a lot about the gossip rags in two years, but almost all of it is useless information.  Too much reality TV, too many stories with a single source (some of those sources vindictive, others batshit crazy, like the woman who claimed Justin Bieber impregnated her), too many flat out lies, not enough stuff to keep me interested.

As good as Kim Kardashian looks in a bikini - and I honestly think this shot is as iconic as Ursula Andress in Doctor No or Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C. - she's just not worth the trouble, as many professional athletes have figured out before I did at a much higher price.

 So with a lot of extra time on my hands, I've started a new hobby and a blog to follow it called Geometric Decorations.  I bought a bunch of plastic pieces in simple geometric shapes and I am painting them and connecting them, either with two sided tape or with glue.  The first set of objects I am either giving to friends and family as gifts or keeping them for my own reference.

This first one is an ornament, taped and then painted.

 Here is the opposite side, which I painted with different colors.

 The hard plastic pieces I bought don't take well to super glue, so I have to use two sided tape to connect them.  I also have soft plastic pieces I used to make my tessellation artwork, and they take to super glue like nobody's business.  This piece was painted with acrylic then glued together.  It's sturdy enough to be handled and the acrylic and glue are very easy to work with, especially compared to spray paint and two sided tape.

 Here is yet another soft plastic piece, yet again with a rainbow motif.

Because the hard plastic was so fussy, I glued them back to back before taping.  The soft plastic glues so easily, I did this experiment to see if single thickness gluing would work, and it worked remarkably well.  Mathy folks might recognize this as a second iteration Sierpinski's gasket.

I'm going to put all the work up on the Geometric Decorations blog as it becomes ready. I'll likely give it a plug here every once in a while in hopes of starting some traffic over there.

So far, I'm having lots of fun, which I believe is the point of having a hobby in the first place.

What little I know about the supermarket rags.

I've been writing The Other Blog for a year and a half now. My idea was that everybody goes to the supermarket, men and women, young and old, rich, poor and in between, and we all see these things, even if we don't buy them. Like the air we breathe, we barely give it a second thought. I decided to publish all the tabloid headlines dealing with celebrities on a blog, which means I could use labels to keep track of information. Here are some things I've learned that hadn't occurred to me before I started this silly experiment.

1. I am not the target market. I kinda knew this already, since I haven't bought one of these things in a very long time. But after eighty weeks of data, I know now I'm not the target market because I am not a woman.

Even though the reality of supermarkets is that everybody uses them to some extent, the business model of the ten magazines at the checkout stands is that women are the people they want to attract. It's old fashioned, but so is their message. Most of the stories are about female celebrities, well over 60%. They may be rich and lovely and (for the most part) young, but do they have real success? In nearly all the magazines, real success is defined as a loving husband and adorable babies.

2. Celebrities screwing up big time are not the main focus. In the past eighteen months, the biggest hot messes in show business have been Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan. Charlie has about twenty weeks when he was on the covers in that time, and Lindsay has about the same. The really popular celebrities, Sandra Bullock, Jennifer Aniston, BrAngelina (which is really Angelina Jolie first and Brad Pitt second) and Kim Kardashian, average at least one cover story a week. Their stories are about love, marriage and babies, or in most cases, the lack of same.

Angelina Jolie is really the most popular celebrity when you count her solo stories and her stories as part of the World's Most Famous Couple. Most of the stories paint her as the villainess, though not all, and it galls the tabloid press that she has more of the ingredients of a happy life than do the "good girls" Bullock and Aniston, who have both had bad luck with men.

3. Not all supermarket rags are created equal. There is a big split in The Only Ten Magazines That Matter, as I like to call them. Five are owned by American Media Inc (AMI), and in general, these five are more mean spirited than the others. The most vicious, the ones I call the Three Wicked Step Sisters, are printed in tabloid form on newsprint, the National Enquirer, the Globe and the low rent National Examiner. I introduced them in order of importance. Stories first broken in one might be followed up weeks later in another. If there is going to be a prediction of a celebrity death, these three do way more than 90% of those predictions. (They also suck at those predictions, though sometimes they get lucky, as they did with Michael Jackson a few years ago, Gary Coleman last year and Peter Falk this year. Falk was on the cover in a "Brave Last Days" last month for the first time and died the next week.)

AMI also publishes the Sun, a goofy rag that can't stop predicting the end of the world, no matter how many times they get it wrong. The Sun is two silly mags in one, including the Weekly World News, the great old black and white tabloid that gave us the Bat Boy who was found in a cave back in the 1980s.

The fifth magazine in their kennel is the Star, which is not quite as mean as the others, but does go in for exposes of celebrities more than the other five mags on the stand, People, OK!, Us Weekly, Weekly Life & Style and In Touch.

4. If you can't beat up celebrities, who can you beat up? Most of the five magazines not in the AMI kennel try to get access to celebrities, exclusive interviews and the like, so they don't always hit that hard with stories about movie stars and singers. Even the jackals of AMI are a little wary, especially now that Katie Holmes got a front page apology and some undisclosed bundle of cash from Star who had a headline saying she was a drug addict.

Instead, the gods of 21st Century Celebrity created reality television. The makers of these shows want the publicity, so they are more than happy to see the nobodies they plucked off the street ripped to shreds in the supermarket checkout rags week after week. The favorite shows are the permutations of Kardashians on E!, followed by former Hugh Hefner paramour Kendra Wilkinson on the same channel, then MTV's Teen Mom, Bravo's Real Housewives franchise and ABC's The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. (Dancing With The Stars is also a big favorite, but the people on that show are actually famous for something else usually, and the dancers have a marketable talent even if the show goes away, so I'm not counting them as useless.)

There are about a jillion reality TV shows. These are the tabloid favorites because they are about the pillars of female happiness: love, marriage and babies, hopefully in that order chronologically.

5. You want sports? Tune into ESPN. There have been a lot of sports scandals in the past two years, but only one has been a big story in the supermarket rags: Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren. It is interesting to them because of love, marriage and babies, and it also helps that as a golfer, Tiger is not a regional star but a national star. No matter how much of a mess Ben Roethlisberger makes of his life, to take just one example, it might sell magazines in Pittsburgh but probably not in Seattle or Mobile.

6. The Brits will not save the business. The British public eat up tabloid stories, both in dailies like the late unlamented News of the World and in weeklies like OK! and Hello. Circulations of five million copies can be sold in a country with only sixty million people. The American tabloids would kill to have that kind of success.

The thing is, American tabloids used to get much better numbers than they do now, but in the 1980s, the public lost the taste for these things in a serious way and the trend has been slowly downhill ever since. The turning point was the lawsuit brought against the Enquirer by Carol Burnett. They printed that she was drunk in public and she sued the socks off of them. Soon after, the Enquirer was no longer the ruler of the roost and the more positive People magazine, which is published by Time-Life and has a higher standard of journalistic integrity, became the number one seller, a position it holds to this day. Several publications have tried bringing in British editors, hoping they will be able to work the same kind of magic on this side of the Atlantic, but so far there have been no miracle cures.

I plan to keep doing the Other Blog for as long as it is fun and as long as people are reading it. About a half million hits were logged from January 2010 through June 2011, and it's possible there could be another half million in the next twelve months. I've been surprised at what I've learned reading the tabloid headlines over the past eighteen months, and who knows that I won't learn more in the months and years ahead.

As my father is fond of saying, you learn something new every day if you are not careful.

A little horn tooting is in order.

Two things happened in June that bear mentioning.

This blog, now four and a quarter years old, reached the 500,000 hit plateau. Thanks to all my readers for sticking with me for whatever silly nonsense pops into my head.

The other blog, which has only existed a year and a half, has also reached the 500,000 hit mark. As you might expect, it's growing very fast. Since the end of June last year, about 200,000 hits have been registered at Lotsa 'Splainin' 2 Do, while over 470,000 visits have been marked at It's News 2 Them™.

As of midnight on June 30, this blog has had about 508,000 hits, while the other blog is just over 507,000. By Saturday, possibly even late Friday, this blog will be surpassed, an event I knew would happen eventually. If there is some small consolation, people who visit here tend to stay a slightly longer time and more people comment here, though I do not have a squadron of loyal commenters the way my blog hero/heroine Princess Sparkle Pony does. Peteykins' terrific slice of the Interwebs will soon have its two millionth visitor, and there are few places on the web more deserving of loyalty in my never humble opinion.

Anyone who reads my stuff knows how I love numbers, so I couldn't let these milestones pass unnoticed. I expect the next milestone will be the millionth visitor over at the gossip blog, which if things stay as they are going now could be about a year away.

UPDATE: 1 July 2011 at 2:00 p.m. Pacific Time.
It's News 2 Them™: 508,200
Lotsa 'Splainin' 2 Do: 508,199
Game over, man.

Google changing gears. Bad for Matty Boy?

According to a story on the Huffington Post, Google is changing their search engine to favor sites that produce original content and downgrade "low quality sites" that do not.

I haven't seen the nuts and bolts of their new method, but that should mean they would favor this site and show less interest in The Other Blog, where I take the headlines from the supermarket gossip rags every week and publish them in a easy to find place that cross references stuff. It's not completely without original content. Sometimes I make jokes I call Extra Bonus Mocking, where I add an allegedly clever quip to the story.

As it stands right now, four people show up at the Other Blog for every one who shows up here. The only consolation I have for this blog is that people who show up here stay a little longer on average, 38 seconds compared to 24 seconds. In any case, we will see if my silly tabloid blog is an example of the sort of thing The Google frowns upon over the next few weeks, and if this "high quality/low quality" split is really targeted at bloggers or not.

Leaving the professional ranks under a cloud of scandal!

There are no longer ads over on the Other Blog.

You know when I asked folks to go click on ads? Google frowns on that so they suspended my account.

I'm still going to report on the tabloids, but I am going to have to figure out some other way to become fabulously wealthy now that my steady stream of $100 a month from my silly, tacky blog has dried up.

The struggle continues.

Spending money to make money.Well, other people's money anyway.

The story so far.

I have another blog. It's about the supermarket tabloid headlines each week. I've been posting there since around New Years of 2010.

I decided to "monetize" the Other Blog, which means ads. Ads are tacky, the blog is tacky, perfect fit.

The blog grew slowly and steadily until mid November, when it done blowed up. Since then, about 2,000 people a day show up, steadily and consistently. That means three to four times the traffic this blog gets. That also means the ads are starting to pay off.

Yay, free enterprise!



So last week, Google sends me a promotion. Why don't I advertise my blog on other blogs? They gave me a promotional card worth $100 American so ads for my tacky blog can show up on other tacky blogs.

This is what business people call "synergy".

So I'm going to spend $100 American of Google's money to see how this whole "spend money to make money" thing works. After all, the blog is making about $100 a month, which certainly is not paying the rent or supporting me in style to which I want to be accustomed.

Translating this into language Charlie Sheen can understand, this is not hookers and blow money.

One thing I worry about is that AdWords only lets you put in one word at a time for searches. So if I want to advertise on blogs that mention plastic surgery, I have to have the AdWords "plastic" and "surgery" separately. Likewise "reality" and "TV".

We'll see how well this works. When the first $100 American is gone, I will report back.

Stuff I like:People admitting they have a problem.

Dana Milbank writes for the Washington Post. He's not my favorite writer there. I like Eugene Robinson more. But still, he did something this week that makes sense.

There's this woman on the national scene. She was a vice-presidential candidate and her ticket got beat like a red-headed stepchild. She was governor of a very sparsely populated state for a while, but she quit that job because some folks waved a lot of money in her face.

I think we know who I'm referring to, right?

Well, Mr. Milbank admits he is tired of hearing about her and realizes he is part of the problem. He has promised that he will not mention her in his column or on his blog for the month of February. Ross Douthat, a conservative writer at the New York Times, is also tired of her, but annoyed more in the fact the press treats her like the only important conservative voice, which she most certainly is not. So according to Milbank, Douthat will join him in the month long pledge.

I'm making the pledge here on this blog. On The Other Blog, I admit I'm powerless to choose what I write about, since I promise to report on the headlines on the covers of the supermarket gossip rags, and currently the National Enquirer and some of its sister publications in the AMI kennel are going after the half term governor and her husband, who according to Enquirer has a hooker problem.

This could work. If people stopped treating her tweets and Facebook posts like they were national news, they wouldn't be national news. I also promise not to comment on any posts about her in February on political websites like the Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo. It is a mighty temptation, but I can take strength in the fact that February is the shortest month of the year.

Blogging comrades, please consider this moratorium yourself. Case in point: that Plumber fellow. You know the one I'm talking about. It took months and months for the media to finally figure out he didn't amount to a hill of beans, but now he is back to being a private citizen to whom the press pays no mind, like Condoleezza Rice or Larry Craig or Lisa Kudrow.

I know you can do this, comrades. As we know, the first step is admitting you have a problem.

p.s. If you have the time, go on over to The Other Blog and click on some ads. There's only one day left in the month and I'm close to going over $100, but I need a strong day tomorrow (Monday).

Stand aside, everyone!This looks like a job for...a professional blogger!

The story so far: One year ago, I got the idea for The Other Blog. It's all about the stories on the covers of the supermarket checkout magazines.

I decided to put ads on the new blog. It's kind of tacky, but the blog is tacky, so it felt like a perfect fit.

Hundreds of people go to the blog, Google puts a few pennies in my account.

Somebody clicks on an ad, Google puts a couple quarters in my account.

The money piles up in the account until the total is more than a hundred bucks at the end of a month, and the next month Google cuts a check for that amount and process starts again.

At the end of November, the account was over one hundred simoleans for the first time.

Yesterday, the first check came.

I have never been so happy to see $148.03 in my entire adult life.

Being all mathy and stuff, I could figure how many hours I sat in front of my computer writing the recaps, how much time I spend each week going to DeLauer's newstand in downtown Oakland to read all the covers in one convenient place each Thursday morning, searching the web to find pictures of the celebrities mentioned, etc. Counting it all up, taking 11 months to make $148.03 is WAY less than minimum wage.

And I'm talking minimum wage in Ghana.

But the goofy smile I had on my face all of yesterday tells a different story. This check feels like free money. This was like my first Christmas bonus at Atari. Just like this blog, I would be writing the Other Blog regardless of whether I got paid or not.


And the news gets better.

When I say the blog made $148.03 in eleven months, it actually made about $85 in ten months and a little over $60 in November alone. In the middle of last month, viewership over at It's News 2 Them™ done blowed up and it has stayed blowed up for about six weeks now. I have no idea what the future will bring, but the "new normal" is between 1,000 to 1,500 people showing up at the blog every day. If that keeps up, that means about a half a million visitors a year.

The mind boggles.

What this means in terms of Money, Money, Money, Milk and Honey is that while it took eleven months to make my first $100 as a professional blogger, it will take only one month to make my second $100.

In conclusion, I'm a blogger, I'm getting paid to blog and I feel so good about it, I've been giggling for next to no reason for about 24 hours now.

From what I've heard, this is much better than working for Arianna Huffington on several different levels.

You know me and numbers.(If you don't know, I'm crazy about them.)

I have written about my other blog It's News 2 Them™ many times. For those new to this blog and that one, I get the cover stories from all ten American supermarket gossip rags every week, (People, Us Weekly, Weekly Life & Style, In Touch, OK!, National Enquirer, National Examiner, Globe, Star and the Sun) and print them on my blog. When I started, I made a rule that I wouldn't open up the magazines, just read the headlines, but I have since found that almost all of them have online editions, so I can find out more than just the headlines if need be. You might think this frivolous and I won't disagree with you. But it does provide a service that is hard to find anywhere else. Because of labels, you can look at all the stories featuring Scott Disick and Kourtney Kardashian (pictured here on the left) printed this year or see how reliable OK! magazine is . (Hint: not very.)

Frivolous or not, the website is popular. Back in March after barely three month of posts, I could expect about 1,000 hits a week, 2,000 if I was lucky. In September, that jumped up nearly overnight to 3,000 to 4,000 hits a week, which put it at close to a par with this website, which has been around for about three and a half years. Three weeks ago, the average hits per week went to 10,000 and it's stayed there so far, much to my surprise and delight. The other blog passed the 100,000 click milestone this Tuesday in less than 48 weeks online. It took this blog 86 weeks to get to the same level.


I do not expect fame and fortune to follow, but a little notoriety and a small amount of cash wouldn't hurt. As you may know, I decided to put ads on the other blog through a service Google runs, and I get paid through a formula I don't completely understand involving page views and clicks on ads. There is a website called PopEater.com which advertises on my site, and I think it's a great fit. They are a good online gossip source and it isn't just carrying coals to Newcastle. Supermarket rags tend to skew older and less urban than online gossip. For example, when Kanye West acted like a jackass and interrupted Taylor Swift's award ceremony, the online gossip mavens decided to follow Kanye, while the supermarket press followed Taylor, who is considered a country act.

In any case, if you go to the Other Blog and you see an ad that is even a little interesting, please click on it. With the big increase in viewers, I'm also starting to see an increase in ad revenue. I made about $85 from January to October. In November alone, ad revenue has climbed to about $50. If this keeps up, or who knows maybe even improves, I could be looking at an extra $600 a year or more. Not exactly flying to Rio money, but it could be the difference between having health insurance for half a year at a time or all year long.

The done blowed up function

My other blog It's News 2 Them™ saw a very dramatic increase in viewership this week, with the biggest day this week being yesterday, when there were 5,000 separate page hits. That is a stunning number. Before this, neither this blog or the gossip blog had made it to 5,000 hits in a week.

As I have written before, I expect the other blog will eventually surpass the numbers from this blog, even when counting in the nearly three year head start Lotsa 'Splainin' 2 Do has. But 5,000 hits a day translates to 1.8 million hits a year! Those are numbers for the really big boys.

This blog still has a lot more regular readers than the gossip blog, but that should change over time as well. This blog is just me yapping about whatever passes through my brain each day. The other blog is about the foibles of celebrities.

One of those premises has a large built in market. I'll let you guess which one.



I don't believe this upward pattern is permanent yet, largely because it is currently so dependent on a single Google search. Way back in May, I reported on a tabloid headline that said Loretta Lynn was living in a bus. The story is probably true. Miss Loretta Lynn is a country superstar, the biggest living legend there is. Country music fans revere their enduring stars. She's on tour a hell of a lot, and that means she probably lives in her tour bus, which I have heard is really big and very luxurious. A whole passel of people are doing searches for "Loretta Lynn living on bus" and my site is up near the top.

There is a second Google search that is adding a noticeable amount of traffic as well. For the very first time this year, one of the supermarket rags mentioned Miley Cyrus and blamed her for her parents' divorce. Miley is already a big favorite on the Internet gossip sites, but the checkout stand gossip sheets have an older demographic, and out of control young bimbos pretty much have to get arrested or rushed to the hospital for the tabloids to care.

In conclusion, let me state the official position of It's News 2 Them™ on both these topics.

1. Don't say bad things about Miss Loretta Lynn.

2. Somebody needs to give Miley Cyrus a three year timeout. That girl's crazy.

You learn something new every day, if you aren't careful. Yet again.

My other blog, It's News 2 Them™, is now essentially equal to this blog in terms of daily hits, reaching that level of Internet popularity in 10 months while this blog has taken 42 months to get to the same place.

They grow up so fast.

Because the Other Blog is tacky, I decided to put ads on it, and those ads are working pretty well. If things go as expected, some time this month I will have made my first $100 in ad revenue, which means Google will send me my first check.

Yes, I am netting $10 a month. Soon I will have my feet up, watching a big screen TV and eating bon-bons as the free money just rolls in.

I bring up The Other Blog and the ads because I clicked on one last night for a book entitled The Deeds of My Fathers by Paul David Pope. Pope's grandfather Generoso was an Italian immigrant who started with nothing and formed an empire in the building trades in New York, as well as an influential Italian-American newspaper. Pope's father Gene was his father's favorite son, but his family forced him out of the inheritance and he was left with next to nothing, except the good graces of his godfather, mobster Frank Costello.

Really, Frank Costello was this guy's godfather.

The Pope family is not mob, but they are mob adjacent. It's hard to get anywhere in the cement business in New York without connections to guys with broken noses. Young Gene buys the New York Enquirer and turns it into the National Enquirer. The blurb to the book makes him sound like the Boss From Hell, and the story of how the newspaper got into every supermarket in the country sounds like it includes some mob adjacency, but it definitely counts as an American success story. The author of the book worked at the newspaper until it was bought out in 1988.

It does not make me think more of The National Enquirer or the company that now owns it, American Media Inc. Readers of the Other Blog will know I refer to "the AMI kennel". Still, it helps explain why the Enquirer and its related rags are as seedy as they are.


By contrast, my family is not mob adjacent. I have no godfather with a colorful background, and we have no connections to the construction industry. My father, pictured here, is still alive and in good health, and he has always been generous with his son in the dispensing of words of wisdom.

For example, to the best of my knowledge, the Gosh Darned Pater Familias is the originator of the phrase used in the title of this post, a gem that bears repeating.

"You learn something new every day, if you aren't careful."

Truer words were never spoken.

Are we ignoring the superficial?

Some traits are all a matter of perception. A person might be considered cheap, while others call her frugal. Another is perceived as mean, but well-wishers call him no-nonsense and tough-minded.

With some traits, the best defense is a good offense. If called a racist, a counter-charge of political correctness might soften the blow. If a public person is called stupid, why not call the accusers elitists?

But what can you do if you are called superficial? If still in high school, the counter-move would be to say, "Well, you're not one of the cool kids and nobody likes you!"

If past the age of consent, your options shrink significantly.

Superficiality has gotten a bum rap. My first blog hero was (and still is) Peteykins, the artist formerly known as Princess Sparkle Pony. He looked at politics and diplomacy through the lens of hairdos, dresses, shoes and accessories. Sometimes it was tongue in cheek and sometimes there was more to it. While the official birth legend of The Other Blog is that I awoke from a nap on my birthday with the concept fully formed, I would never have thought about writing about something so superficial had I not first seen a master do it so well.

Consider the two main statewide races in California. There are a lot of similarities. The Democrats have two career politicians on the ticket, the Republicans have two political novices from the world of business. The differences at the big level are that Jerry Brown is much more of a retread than Barbara Boxer, and Meg Whitman can point to a business record of success, while Carly Fiorina has a lot of baggage about driving companies into the ground and sending high paying jobs overseas.

Both Brown and Boxer are leading in their races, but Brown has been comfortably ahead for about a month while Fiorina is keeping it much closer.

What are we missing? Why is Fiorina a better candidate than Whitman? Let's take a closer look at the superficial.

Meg Whitman looks like hell, and it is within her power to do much better. She's a billionaire, for Lenny's sake! She can't find a hairstylist that can give her hair some body, some highlights, a more flattering cut? I'm not saying go crazy with the plastic surgery like she's some Hollywood wife, but straight white teeth would go over a lot better than crooked yellow teeth.

Fiorina was treated for breast cancer and was bald less than a year ago. Her hair came back in salt-and-pepper and she's making it work. High marks for her stylist and high marks for her dental hygienist.

Moving away from the superficial, I deeply hate the political positions both these women take. Should the polls be correct and both of them taken a beating a week from Tuesday, I'll be happier Meg and Carly lost than I will be that Jerry and Babs won. But if there is a reason why one of these women has a slim hope and the other almost none, the superficial goes a long way to explain the difference.

I have seen the future!

Way back in mid April, my baby blog It's News 2 Them had a single day when viewership surpassed this blog's viewership. While some people visited the front page, a lot of people came looking for news while googling "Paula Deen Divorce".

It was one of those lying headlines the tabloids love so much. Paula and her latest husband's adult daughter didn't get along, but that's been sorted out.

This week for the first time, the viewership for the entire week at the baby blog will surpass the viewership here. The viewership is doing about as well as it ever has, but the other blog just done blowed up.

What did people want?

Glad you asked, hypothetical question asker.

Or maybe I'm not glad you asked. People wanted pictures of Mariah Carey's very fat butt.

I like odd stuff, so I'm not in a position to judge.

Okay, I lied. I may not be in a position, but I judge anyway.

Yeesh.

But that was earlier in the week. Now people are flocking to the other blog for pictures of Cybill Shepherd when she was young and oh so supa foine.

Yes, I judge, and this I judge to be understandable.

I have seen the future, and the day will come when The Other Blog will be The Big Blog and this will only be My First Blog.

You learn something new every day, if you aren't careful.

I can't say I learn much doing the research for the other blog, It's News 2 Them, since I don't believe most of what I read. When a good chunk of the stories in the supermarket rags are denied by all parties involved, I don't have the resources to find out who is telling the truth and who is just making stuff up.

But the usually unreliable Globe told a story this week, and it had several facts I was not aware of, as well as several I already did know. Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine were sisters, and both were Oscar winners. Their feud back in the day was well documented.

That's the stuff I knew.

Did you know both of them are still alive? Yes, Olivia just turned 94 and Joan is 92 and THEY STILL HATE EACH OTHER'S GUTS!

I checked all this stuff. Still alive and the feud is still on as of two years ago, reported by an honest to Lenny real newspaper in the U.K., the Independent.


While it doesn't show all the maturity in the world, you have to give them points for perseverance.

Correcting a misconception.

Blog buddy Karen Zipdrive is the dearest friend of my Other Blog. Today, she speculated that I have a crush on an actress that was on a TV show I hated from the 1990's. I won't even name her, though she is mentioned nearly every week in the tabloids. She is very pretty, but she means nothing to me.

Let me repeat. Nothing.

Who am I mad for? I've made no secret of it.


I am mad for Indira Varma. Anyone who has read my blog for any period of time knows this.

My very first blog post, I had nothing to say. I posted a picture of Indira Varma.

Should the day arrive when I stand in front of her, if she should smile, or even grin, and snap her fingers, I would be on my knees.

I'm old. My knees are crap. That doesn't matter.

I'm mad, I tell you. MAD! MAD!!!!!



Then there's Melissa Theuriau.

And her golden eyes.

I know words. I bet I know... like a hundred. Maybe two hundred.

I look in a picture of her eyes... no words.

I know words in French.

Je n'ai pas des paroles.

Je ne sais rien.

I LOOKED IN A PICTURE OF HER EYES!

I'M LOST!

J'AI BESOIN DE L'AIDE!

She's... purdy.


Julie Newmar.

Words. Wuuuuuuuuuurds.

Carpet.

Rug.

T-t-t-towel.

Liiiiip... lipstick!

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm... lipstick.

Feet.

Arms.

Akimbo.

Okay, the vocabulary's coming back.

I hope I have made myself clear. That's the list. That's my team on the court, as Gene Hackman said in Hoosiers. If the list jumps up to four, I'll certainly let you know.

Gittin' Paid (a little) and Not Gittin' Paid (a lot)

My summer session is now over and my hefty paycheck that is supposed to last me three months will be in my hot little hands tomorrow. The district was paying for office hours during the Fall and Spring semesters, but it doesn't pay for them during the Summer session, so as usual, I was working several hours for free this term. Because of budget cuts, there's talk that part-timers will not be paid for office even during the regular terms this next academic year.

You might recall me whinin' during the recent Week O' Whinin about not gittin' paid the so-called parity pay. That is a completely separate act of theft by my major employer against some of its most vulnerable employees, while the upper management gets by on pay in the low six figures. That situation may get resolved in favor of all the part-timers some time in the hopefully not-t00-distant future, but lawyers are involved, so it's anybody's guess how it will be decided or when.

As of this writing, the Peralta Community College District has ripped me off in the past four weeks to an amount in the low four figures, with promise of more theft to come this Fall.

Not good.


So what is good? Gittin' paid for blogging!

Matty Boy FTW, as the young people say!

Over at The Other Blog back in late February, I reported on Us Weekly's story about reality TV star Kristin Cavallari possibly going to drug rehab. Just this week, someone saw this post and decided it would be a great place to put a link to the website of their very nice rehab center in Southern California. They thought it was such a good idea, they even agreed to pay me for the link! Yes, someone is giving Matty Boy a check in the high two figures for a link on his blog!

Things are looking up!

Of course, this means I may never get a chance to blog for my country in the Olympics now that I've turned pro, but

1. I don't recall that anyone asked me and
   
2. the rules for Olympic status have become more lax since Avery Brundage died, so even that minor downside may be avoided.

To re-iterate, if you have a drug dependency problem AND you are in the Palm Springs area AND you have several nickels to rub together, choosing this rehab center looks like a very good option. I don't know if this even remotely describes any of my readers, but if it does, go ahead and click though the link.

And I'm not just sayin' that 'cos I'm gittin' PAID.

That would be wrong.