Horror fans & Halloween lovers: Check out this instrumental track that I recorded a couple of years ago using Cakewalk Sonar and my Roland HPD-15 Handsonic percussion instrument. It’s simple, scary and was lots of fun to create!
A Praying Mantis on My Ass
Yesterday I saw a beautiful praying mantis on my patio. This morning I came outside and sat in my wicker chair to smoke a cigarette as I do most mornings. Sitting there, I realized that I never looked before I sat and remembered the praying mantis of yesterday. I quickly stood up and looked but saw nothing on the chair. I sighed a sigh of relief. But then I thought, “what if it was there, I sat on it and now it’s stuck to my ass where I can’t see it.” I didn’t and it wasn’t as proven in the photos I took of the praying mantis later in the day (see below), but the incident DID inspire the following stupid poem.
This is my praying mantis poem:
This morning I had a praying mantis on my ass.
I didn’t notice it myself, someone told me it was there.
I must have sat upon it as it perched upon my chair.
I removed my jeans and gently scraped its body onto some paper, brown
As I buried the dead insect, I vowed to always look before sitting my ass down.
I Am Never Eating Processed Chicken Again
I just learned something new and totally disgusting today on Twitter. @TheAdriRam, posted a link to an article showing this grotesque pink ooze that looks like bubble gum or something worse being poured into a cardboard box. The accompanying article explained that this grotesque pink ooze is actually “mechanically separated chicken” which is used in all sorts of processed chicken products like nuggets, patties, etc. Ewww, gross!
I tweeted @TheAdriRam and asked him if this was, perhaps, a joke and not a fact. He replied regretfully informing me that it was in fact true. Yuck! I will never eat processed chicken again. Check out the picture and article yourself and let me know what you think.
Explosions in The Sky – A Song for Our Fathers Video
I started listening to Explosions in The Sky after being turned on to 65daysofstatic a few years ago. I absolutely love this song! I could and do listen to this over and over again. The video is pretty cool too. Check it out and tell me what you think.
65DaysofStatic – Don’t Go Down to Sorrow Video
If you’ve never heard or heard of 65daysofstatic, then watch and listen to this video. I saw them in concert a couple of years ago in Philly when they opened for The Cure. They are fantastic and have opened me up to a whole new genre of music (Post Rock) which I now listen to a lot.
Affiliate Marketing is Not For Me
When I first started out in the wonderful world of blogging a little over a year ago, I had two things that I wanted to accomplish. First, I wanted to have a web presence where I could share my interests, thoughts, etc. with others. Second, I wanted to see if I could make a little money. Let me tell you now, that in MY experience, these two things were mutually exclusive.
After having read up on affiliate marketing, SEO, search engine ratings, etc., and then staring at my empty website, I realized that if I was going to attract enough people to my website, I was going to have to get some content – and fast. So I began scouring the Internet for topics that I was interested in and then I would copy and paste to posts on my website (always giving credit to the original author). Before long, my website was filled with interesting content, but none of it written by myself, and all of it available in dozens of other places on the Web. I also began placing feeds into my site from other sites in order to provide even more content. After that, I placed ads on Craigslist in order to attract people to my content (all legitimate and honest ads, mind you). Soon, I was making some money with affiliate advertising. I was not, however, giving anything at all to the World Wide community that I had hoped to interact with in a meaningful way.
I began spending all of my time checking my earnings, updating my themes to improve the appearance of my sites, getting frustrated with my web hosting provider for the often slow-loading times of my sites, getting upset with Google Adsense for occasional low payouts per click, and fighting with Craigslist’s frustrating arbitrary account policies. Meanwhile I gave no time or effort to creating useful, unique and personal content.
I’m finished with all of that now. I have decided to cancel my web hosting, give up my domains, and I have moved over to WordPress.Com’s free and ads-free blog hosting. I am now going to start concentrating on my writing and, hopefully, produce some unique content that others will find interesting and useful.
So…welcome to my new ads-free blog! I hope you will enjoy it – if you do, please bookmark this site and come back often!
Naked On A Strange Planet 