That other blog

“meep”

Just before Christmas 2008, we updated this blog from WordPress 2.1 to WordPress 2.7.  One consequence was the insertion of nearly a dozen ” Â ” characters into each of the existing posts on our site.

We thought we’d cleaned them all out, but it came to our attention last night that we had missed quite a few. Hopefully they are all gone now.

Another music quotation for you all to mull over: “I don’t want the world, I just want your half.” (Ana Ng by They Might Be Giants)

Overheard at today’s game 3 of the best-2-out-of-3 Hockey Championship game between the Penguin Division Flyers and Rangers… (it should noted the Penguin Division athletes are age 7 – 9)

[Rangers player to coach] – Who are we playing today?

[mother of a Rangers player to her son] – Run fast like when a girl tries to kiss you!

[mother of a Flyers player to Flyers team] – Pay attention, you Dou***bags, and play some defense!

[coach of Rangers to his child who is on the team and was hanging upside down in the goal during a team meeting] – Stop being a monkey and pay attention.

[mother of Flyers player to her son] – Play like you did last game and ignore everything I say.

There were other comments, which I’m forgetting at the moment.  We thought it’d be tough to find one that topped the comment made by one of the coaches of the Coyotes after a Coyote player was called for a penalty – “Next time hit him harder.”  (That got the coach a 5  minute penalty of his own). However, Flyers mom, we think you might’ve won the prize.  Especially given that you regularly made comments like that during the season.

Oh the joys of being a youth sports parent.

Those of you who are legitimate vistors to the site, may want to skip reading this entry: it is directed at a select group of scum affectionally known as “spammers.”  If this label does not apply to you, then you may as well wait for our next update.

To the rest of you, we appreciate the fact that we get approximately 20 comments per day submitted for consideration to be posted on the site – it’d be nice if they weren’t ALL SPAM. As of 6:17 PM, we have 1316 comments flagged as spam, and more than 900 others which we’ve deleted in lieu of blacklisting.

Things we would never endorse, never allow to be posted on the site, and quite frankly things/links we don’t even feel comfortable saying out loud or retyping here. (You get the point what they’re all about.)

And how many “true” comments do we have? … um… let’s see… in the last month or so… hmm, um…  ZERO.

Actually, that’s a misleading statetment. We get plenty of feedback from other sources (email, forums, tweets, in person, etc.,) and that’s wasn’t our main the point. Our issue is with the relentless stream of annoying, obscene comments sitting in our que.

Someone, somewhere must be allowing comments like that to get through – for the spammers to keep trying.  We just don’t get it. Our guess is people are lazy and either have all comments allowed to pass through or blindly click “accept.”

Ugh.  Ugh and a half, we say.

We’re not interested in your *bleep* *bleep*s and your *bleep* *bleep*s with *bleep*ing *bleeps*, you filthy spammers, and throwing in a compliment such as “nice site” or “great information” isn’t effective at winning us over.

To the rest of you, thank you for visiting the site.

Feh.

We simply don’t know what to say about this… except that it scares us.

While most of the surface world was still basking in the happy hopeful glow generated by Tuesday’s inauguration of President Obama, another equally important transfer of power took place 45 miles off the coast of Hawaii: Aquaman was crowned King of Atlantis.

Aquaman Takes the Oath of Office

Aquaman’s coronation came after nearly a year of hard campaigning against rival Black Manta. Despite critics’ claims that the election was an unnecessary exercise, given Aquaman’s royal lineage and Black Manta’s past crimes against the kingdom, the mer-people of Atlantis turned out in record numbers to cast their vote this past November. Aquaman’s message of change and improved relations with the surface world resonated with the younger Atlanteans, and he took the popular vote by a 17 point margin.

After the Justice League had originally thrown their support behind Superman in the Atlantean primaries, some wondered if members of the League would make the trip for the inauguration;as you can see from the photo above, it appears all the fences have been mended. Notably absent, however, were his opponent, Black Manta, and Aquaman’s estranged cousin, Prince Namor – the Sub-Mariner.

Political forecasters are expecting Aquaman’s first hundred days to be eventful. He will be forced to make difficult choices with regard to Atlantean support of the Green Lantern Corps in their extended conflict with the Yellow Lanterns. Relations between Atlantis and Oa have been strained since footage was leaked of Earth GL Guy Gardiner taunting Sinestro while the latter was awaiting trial on Oa. Aquaman’s appointment of John Stewart as honorary abassador to Oa is being interpreted as a sign of continued support of the corps in their conflict; however, Aquaman will be pressured to live up to his promise of setting a “timetable for withdrawing Atlantean troops from space.” Support for the war among Atlanteans has waned considerably as the economic collapse of the surface world began to reach the undersea kingdom.

Aqualad, speaking on behalf of the newly crowned sea king, had this to say:

Aquaman knows the people of Atlantis are looking to him to firm up the Atlantean economy. It’s one of his top priorities, and he intends to introduce an innovative stimulus package at the next meeting of the High Council of Elders.

Another pressing issue Aquaman wil have to address is the surface world’s discovery of methane on Mars. Atlantis has long served as a “safe zone” for the Martian people. The mishandling of waste material by the Martian community and the resulting methane cloud on the red planet have raised concerns about the risks harboring Martians on Atlantis. A recent poll revealed “maintaining Atlantis’ undetectability by the surface world” to be the number one concern among Atlanteans age 130 – 400. Some pundits are questioning whether the increased flow of Martian traffic into and out of Atlantis puts that at risk.

Aquaman is scheduled to appear on Larry King Live next Tuesday to participate in a round table with Al Gore, Jesse Jackson, and Sting. He will meet with new US President Barak Obama, on Wednesday, and he is schedulated to tape an episode of William Shatner’s “Raw Nerve” for A&E later in the week. No air date is currently scheduled.

We wish Aquaman well as he begins his reign as ruler of the seven seas.

Interesting.

Woopra indicates that we had a visitor to the site today who got here by searching “reaction to aloe toilet paper” on Google.

Even more inriguing is the fact that they only spent 1 second on the site. Apparently they had one of those “whoa, this is not at all what I was looking for” moments and fled. Did they even have to click on the link to figure that out? Couldn’t they glean enough from the link title and short description on Google?

We apologize for not providing more meaningful toilet paper-related content. However, looking back at our mission statement and such, we find we made no promise to do so.

Our guess is that Google grabbed references to aloe toilet paper from Scott Copperman’s contribution about  things you don’t see advertisements for but buy all the time. We wish this stranger from… Verwoerdburg, South Africa (we kid you not), would have stayed and explored the site a bit more. But, we suspect that our visitor was dealing with some serious issues and considerable discomfort stemming from a reaction to aloe toilet paper that needed immediate attention. Poking around our site, understandably, could wait.

Well, our South African friend, we hope that you have found relief online from a more appropriate source. On the off chance that you return to us one day by means of a follow up search (or if you, kind reader, are some other person who arrived at That Other Page by means of a similar misguided search referral about “battery chargers,” “hockey cards,” or some other conglomeration of words we’ve used in a post) – please do take some time to explore the archives of our blog.

There are many good pages with clever content and good links buried within.

Now that we’ve formally typed that phrase “reaction to aloe toilet paper” several times, we should probably expect more visitors seeking relief for their irritated bottoms. Perhaps we should put a disclaimer in the header?

Unbelievable. Somehow, despite a season of frustrations, the San Diego Chargers are now basically “in the playoffs.”

Technically, they have to win vs. Denver on Sunday night to win the AFC West and win a playoff spot, but Sunday’s game is essentially a play-in game: “win or go home,” as they say.

Even better, we are thrilled to see the game moved to 8:15 on Sunday night.

We’ll be watching, and rooting on the “San Diego Super Chargers.” You should be too.

While in the Zune marketplace we found that Kids Corner, the WXPN show that contributor Scott Copperman used to intern for, is still going strong and has its own podcast.

What might’ve been….