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).

Stuff I like:Zodiac

I have now seen the movie Zodiac four times. I saw it in the theater, I rented it twice from Netflix and I now own my own copy. It may very well be my favorite movie made this century so far.

People from Northern California of my age will certainly remember at least some of the events the movie is based upon. Some guy calling himself Zodiac took credit for multiple murders in Northern California starting in the late 1960s and continuing into the 1970s. He wrote letters to the local papers, most notably the San Francisco Chronicle, and the papers published his letters and the cryptograms he included. The murders he took credit for did not all have the same modus operandi and forensic science of the time is like the Stone Age compared to today, so even the best evidence the police had was circumstantial and the leads supplied by the public largely useless.

The movie has re-enactments of a few of the crimes Zodiac took credit for, but the bulk of the film is about the investigation, some from the point of view of the police and a lot from the point of view of Robert Graysmith, a political cartoonist for the Chronicle who became obsessed with the case, played in the film by Jake Gyllenhaal in one of the best performances of his career. The few gory scenes didn't bother me that much, and I usually have a very low tolerance for that kind of thing. It's the investigation that makes the movie fascinating. Again, being from Northern California, I already knew before I saw the movie that there was never an arrest or conviction for any of Zodiac's crimes, so each time a new name is brought forward as a suspect, you don't know how much credit to give the evidence the film brings forward.


Here is a picture from what may be the best scene in the film. Three detectives interview a worker at a refinery. From left to right, Elias Koteas plays Detective Mulanax from Vallejo, Anthony Edwards and Mark Ruffalo are the detective partners Bill Armstrong and David Toschi from San Francisco and John Carroll Lynch plays a "person of interest" named Arthur Leigh Allen. Of these actors, only Ruffalo can be considered a movie star. The rest of the guys are just working actors, but they are all pitch perfect, completely believable and wonderful at delivering the building suspense. I mean it as a compliment when I say that all of them are better at listening and reacting than they are at delivering lines, and they are perfectly competent at delivering lines.

The movie is played very low-key with the exception of Robert Downey, Jr. as the reporter Paul Avery, but his flourishes of flamboyance are completely in character. The cast is good up and down the line and the story is really about the victims of the investigation more than the victims of the murderer. It is directed by David Fincher, who also directed, Se7en, Panic Room, Fight Club and this year's Oscar nominated The Social Network. Those are all interesting movies in their own right, but if I was to introduce someone to Fincher's, I would absolutely start them out with Zodiac.

Matty Boy says check it out.

Stuff I like:Dreams for teens from long ago.

During the Bush Administration, the blogger formerly known as Princess Sparkle Pony gushed like a schoolgirl over the fashion choices of Condoleezza Rice, with the usually clear subtext of mocking her complete lack of success as a diplomat. When the administration changed, the blog lost steam and the Princess retired, much to the sadness of her many fans, but eventually returned, under a new nom de blog Peteykins (always a male, just pretending to be a schoolgirl, not unique on the Internets) and with a more personal and eclectic direction.

One of my favorite features of the new blog is Book Shelf, where Peteykins dusts off some odd piece of pop culture he saved and scans it for all his fans to see. His collection of the pop music fan magazine 16 Magazine is by no means complete, but each one is like a moment in time captured in amber. 16 was aimed at girl fans of music, but the dreamy guys featured in the photo spreads were sometimes actors, like David Selby and Christopher Pennock featured here, stars on the gothic horror soap opera Dark Shadows.

Teen girls getting all excited about vampires! Who knew?

As fellow Sparkle Pony commenter Lulu Maude wrote, the magazine would have been more accurately called 11 Magazine, and of course the genre is not completely gone. (Simple celebrity math: Justin Bieber = Donny Osmond + Time Machine.) For someone my age or even possibly younger, the nostalgic pull is terrific and when you click on the scans, they blow up to a large enough size to read the text or enjoy the pictures more completely.

I've written it before and will likely write it again. If you read my blog but do not read Princess Sparkle Pony, you are only cheating yourself.

'Cos it's Stuff I Like.

Stuff I like:Clare Dowling teaches you reggae.

Not everything on the You Tubes is cute cats, music downloaded without copyright and football players wiping boogers on teammate's uniforms.

There's also... wait a second, I'm sure there's something else.

Oh yeah! There's Clare Dowling teaching you how to play reggae guitar!



Young Clare comes from the reggae hotspot of Huddersfield, England. If you go to her You Tubes channel, you can also watch her busking on the winter streets, giving the beautiful and possibly sloshed young people a reason to dance in the streets.

I love how self-possessed and generous she is. Matty Boy says check it out.

For that which was lost has been returned to me.

I can smell again!

(This is a good thing.)

This latest cold/flu/whatever hit me much harder than anything has hit me for a while, and for the first time I can remember I could not smell a thing. Ammonia, vinegar, fried food, absolutely no sensation whatsoever. It's like watching a movie with sound off or switching from digital TV to an old black and white.

Very disconcerting.

I decided early on to get cold medicine that promised not to knock me out, but after going for days without the sense of smell and not having to teach until Monday, I decided this weekend to bring out the big guns and got some generic stuff with Sudafed in it.

That did the trick.

And to show my gratitude to the Powers That Be, which in this particular case is modern medical science, I am going to dedicate this week on Lotsa 'Splainin' 2 Do to Stuff I Like.

And so it is written and so it shall be done.

Not so random 1 for Trish Keenan 1968-2011

Trish Keenan, lead singer for the British synthpop band Broadcast, died from complications of pnuemonia earlier this month at the age of 42. I didn't listen to this band's music until I read the obituary, and now I realize that was my loss.

Here's Trish singing their song Come On Let's Go from the album The Noise Made By People.



Best wishes to the family and friends of Trish Keenan, from a fan.