Summer Blogging Report (Part One)

I didn't blog at all this summer.

I'm sure many of you were relieved to be spared from the dose of cow genetics sullying your morning cup of Maximum Leader ranting.

My home computer was incapable of sustaining a connection the internet.


I didn't read Big Hominid all summer; his graphics-enriched lair would crash my puny computer every time. Since then I have tried to catch up with his summer posts, but the Poet Laureate seems to have moved away from the political posts I enjoy so much. Kev, man, when the Dear Leader rants, I need a BigHo smackdown of the pompadour!

I hate to confess it, but the first blog I checked every day (other than Naked Villainy, of course) was "Celibate in the City."

I was like an OCD housewife hankering for her "Guiding Light."

I soooooooo wanted this sweet woman to meet a nice guy. I kept checking in for updates on her Irish vacation. Unfortunately, she seems to have recently added "blogs" to the list of things that she is "not the kind of girl who..." list. Nonetheless, if you missed the soapy saga, click on over and scroll back through the archives.

Kilgore's site reliably incites my computosaurus obsoletus to suffer a Java error aneurysm, but clicking through the error messages was always worth it.

My favorites:

The reminiscence of working in a collection agency amused me to no end.

As someone who has been indoctrinated since birth with the Keiloresque virtue of keeping one's thoughts to one's self, I took sweet, sweet pleasure from:

Once I was talking off a debtor who owed over a thousand dollars for jewelry purchased on credit at 18 percent interest. She never made a single payment. "Quit calling me," she said. "I'm raising three kids and I don't have any money.""Well, where are you working?" I asked."I am on welfare," she said, in the same tone of voice that another might use to say I am the head of neurosurgical research at Johns Hopkins University."On welfare? Sounds to me like the government is raising your kids," I said.

I liked the essay on cooking to impress in the workplace. While I'm not the effeminate, gammy-handed little pastry chef that Kilgore is, I do understand his motivation. I like to share farm produce with neighbors, family, friends, baby-group members, churchmembers, and work colleagues. I eagerly await the kudos that follow and bask in the reflected glory of my tasty, juicy, beautiful, organic tomatoes. I have also taken to dragging houseguests into the pantry to show off the 93 cans of tomatoes Mrs. Smallholder put up* from one day's production.

* For those of you who do not hail from the Midwest, "putting up" is another phrase for preserving or canning food. I used it so I wouldn't have to use the same word twice in the same sentence.

Kilgore's skewering of The Da Vinci Code earned my applause. People at work kept gushing to me that, as a history teacher, I would just LOVE the darn book. So I borrow it. And hated it. I thought it was abominable paced, poorly written, and massively implausible. The unveiling of the secret villain made no sense whatsoever.

Read the about the roommate train wreck. As someone who was always blessed with good roommates, I'm somewhat fascinated by bad roommate stories. A little bit of me might even wish that I had had a bizarre roommate just for the story value. Maybe I should make something up about the Minister of Propaganda. I did once wake up in bed - naked - with the Foreign Minister, but the story of how I ended up at AA is another whole can of worms.

I think the villainous bloggers should all write their own version of this "brief summary of people I avoid at work."

Another great idea the Naked Villainy ought to steal (only be sure to call it, please, "research"): "Am I a man?" charts. Heh. I get to make Rob's matrix.

More to come...