Blogs are so varied. Some blogs I’ve come across include carefully crafted original graphics and pictures, and are written in a very polished manner. Some are more conversational. Others are spazzy. And then there are the incomprehensible ones that look like the bloggers type with their toes while watching “Cops” and eating Chinese take-out.

I’m probably somewhere in the middle. I don’t know anything about the technical aspects of good writing, and I don’t have the design skills to achieve high production values. But, I do care about not having my posts look like I barfed them out and didn’t bother to clean them up. So I write several posts simultaneously, well in advance of publishing them. I then re-read, re-phrase, re-arrange, re-write, correct, edit, and proofread each of them over several days.

To shed some light on my modus operandi, I thought I’d give everyone a peek at the completed and semi-completed posts that are in queue to be published over the next few weeks:

1. I Never Knew That Blogging Could Be So Fun
2. My Obsessive-Compulsive Tendencies. Hardy Har Har
3. 49 Great Blogs I’ve Recently Discovered
4. I’m Watching Much Less TV These Days. How Cool is That?
5. MyYahoo! Sucks for RSS Reading
6. Hooray For Me! I Have Blog Friends!
7. I Need an Intravenous Hookup So I Can Spend Less Time Eating and More Time Blogging
8. Bloglines.com : How Did I Ever Live Without It?
9. Major Milestone : 500 Subscriptions in My Personal Blogroll
10. My Boss Reprimanded Me for Falling Asleep at My Desk
11. I Need to Spend Less Time on The Computer
12. My Very Sweet Wife Got Very Angry With Me Today
13. Advice Please : I’m Thinking of Quitting Blogging
14. My First Bloggers Anonymous Meeting
15. Boss-Man Meeting Part Deux. Prognosis: B-A-D
16. Self-Affirmation : I’m A Good Person and I Have a Good Life
17. Holding On As Best I Can (By the Skin of My Teeth)
18. Open Letter To My Lovely Wife : I Love You More Than Blogging, Please Don’t Leave Me
19. My New Mantra : The Internet Does Not Rule My Life
20. Relapse : Time to Pause and Reflect
21. I Give Up : Goodbye Cruel Worjbwtm n

[Hello everyone. This is Pat, Jack's wife. We had a bit of a scare there, but Jack is doing OK now.

In his despair and anxiety, he passed out and cracked his head on the keyboard while writing this post. When he came to, he tried to slit his wrists. Thankfully he was unable to find an actual razor blade and didn't get very far with his electric shaver.

He also swallowed an entire bottle of pills. Luckily the only pills in our medicine cabinet were laxatives. It's causing unpleasant bouts of nitrogen-laden green diarrhea every half hour. So now some of his tighty whiteys are discarded stinky greeneys. But he'll live and that's what matters.

We have him on an Alprazolam drip and a strict diet of 7-UP and Saltine crackers.

He is still recovering in bed, but asked me to publish this post so as not to disappoint his blogging friends.

Please feel free to comment. Jack will respond if his colon is feeling better. And if he is unable to, I will respond to comments on his behalf.

Now if you'll please excuse me- Jack and his colon are out of commission, so I gotta go find me another bitch to pimp.]

tags :: jokes : humor : blogging : obsessions

Everywhere I go in the Blogosphere this week, I keep hearing about how yesterday, May 25, was Towel Day. Naturally I Googled it, and discovered that Towel Day is a tribute to Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

But given Towel Day’s surprisingly widespread support by bloggers of all stripes and not just sciphiles, they should have named it “Yet Another Excuse for Nerds to Invite More Ass Kickings by Meatheads Named Biff”. Or something like that. (talk like Christian Slater imitating Jack Nicholson in Heathers for the following…it’ll be funnier) Just kidding, bros! It’s all good! I got my own nerd flag right here!

Man, am I the world’s loserest nerd. I have never read Hitchhiker’s, nor any other Douglas Adams book. So please please nerds more nerdy than I, please don’t pelt me with slide rules! They hurt! And if you must, hurl some pocket protectors my way. They don’t hurt as much as slide rules, and I can always imprint a fuzzy Jesus silhouette on them and sell them to superstitious Catholic hackers on eBay.

Not to be outdone, here is where I out-nerd the nerds more nerdy than I. I Googled further and found another Hitchhiker’s nerdifact: the Babel Fish, which is a fish that translates any form of language for your comprehension when you stick it in your ear. A-ha! It all comes together! That’s why AltaVista named their web translation utility BabelFish!

So to get back into the good graces of the towel-wearing, Hitchhikers-reading crowd (which apparently includes a disturbingly large number of mommybloggers), I have translated some of my all-time favorite passages which I just wrote this very minute into French and then back into English, using the Babel Fish translator:

Original Sucky Masterpiece:
People who wear towels to work need to have their heads checked.
BabelFrench:
Peuplez qui les serviettes d’usage pour travailler le besoin d’avoir leurs têtes ont vérifié.
AngloBabel:
Populate which them towels of use to work the need to have their heads checked.

Original Sucky Masterpiece:
Not even I am a big enough nerd to wear a towel to work.
BabelFrench:
Non égal je suis un assez grand ballot pour porter une serviette pour travailler.
AngloBabel:
Nonequal I am a rather large bundle to carry a towel to work.

Original Sucky Masterpiece:
Have a happy Memorial Day weekend my blogging friends. Be careful with those towels near the grill, because one hundred fifty thread count steak tastes like shit.
BabelFrench:
Ayez un week-end heureux de jour commémoratif mes amis blogging. Faites attention avec ces serviettes près du gril, parce que cent biftecks de compte de cinquante fils goûtent comme la merde.
AngloBabel:
Have one happy weekend of commemorative day my friends blogging. Pay attention with these towels close to the grill, because hundred beefsteaks of account of fifty wire taste like the shit.

That last translated translation sounds a lot like the crazy Lebanese guy who’s always cursing at me when I walk by his cardboard box home: “What it is arue you to doing! You to stealing from me the things! The F#%K to you, and the F#$K to your the mother too!”

OK, enough fun for one day. I’d better go exercise now, since BabelFish says that I am a rather large bundle with nonequal.

tags :: jokes : humor : Hitchhiker’s Guide : Towel Day : Babel Fish

The other day, I emailed my friend Shont and said something like: “Hey! This blog thing is pretty fun! But, now that I have a few blog friends who read my posts, I feel some pressure to consistently write interesting things. It’s not as easy-going as when I first started blogging, when just friends and family would stop in to see how pathetic my Joke of the Week was.”

Shont fires back with: “The pressure of success.”

Hardly.

The number of blog friends I have is still smaller than my shoe size. So Shont, I’m afraid you will have to continue visiting SuckyBlog to help keep the readership hovering above zero.

But it did get me thinking. Maybe I was fishing for a compliment! My insecure, competitive, Type-A, unconscious psyche getting the best of me again! Dammit!

So, time to put my bloated ego back in its place. (I suspect it usually resides in my ass, given the required cubic footage). To accomplish this, I have listed all the non calorie burning activities (for me, there is no other kind) that I would rather do than read SuckyBlog:

1. Watch movies.
2. Watch basketball.
3. Read news magazines.
4. Read books.
5. Read blogs written by other people. Except for mommy blogs. OK I admit it- I usually get bored with some of the mommy blogs out there, except for the funny or raunchy ones. Because mommies shouldn’t be raunchy. But apparently all the ones who are like to blog.
6. Read about strange things on Wikipedia, like the 7 forms of lightsaber combat.
7. Defrag my hard drive, and watch the progress status bar. This process takes 47 minutes and 13 seconds. The progress bar moves 1.24 millimeters per minute on my 17-inch screen. I know this because I measured it with digital calipers. More fun than reading SuckyBlog.
8. Read the back of my toothpaste label. “Squeeze and flatten on brush as you go up.” I’ve got this one burned into my cornea because I read it every single time I forget to bring a magazine to the can. And I hit the can at least twice a day. So that’s how you apply toothpaste. Good to know.
9. Read my mattress tag. “DO NOT REMOVE UNDER PENALTY OF LAW”. *rip*. Please don’t arrest me. The voices in my head told me to do it. This is the only way I can make them stop.
10. Pick my nose, and flatten the extracted manna-from-nostril between my thumb and index finger (the toothpaste instructions have trained me to flatten everything squishy). Then give myself a little Rorschach test by admiring my newly-formed Poodlebooger.

Wait a minute. I write SuckyBlog. I don’t read it also. That would be narcissistic, and I can’t afford for my ego (or my ass) to grow any bigger. So scratch everything I just said, go do a Rorschach boogerblot test, and tell me what you see.

tags :: jokes : humor : blogging : mattress tag : Rorschach : booger

Some wise, experienced blogger who actually has readers said that posts should end with a question as a way of soliciting comments. Or, if you still don’t get comments, as a way of proving to yourself that you have no readers. Or friends. Just kidding. Or not.

So I thought: Why don’t I take it to the extreme? Why don’t I just write a whole ton of questions? If people are commenting more because you insert a question, shouldn’t they comment even more if if the whole thing were just a bunch of questions?

Are you sick of reading all these inane questions yet? Should I stop now? Or should I go on longer? How many sentences do you think I can continue to write in interrogative form? Am I spelling “interrogative” correctly? Hey, isn’t it funny that I posed the idea and implemented it all in the same paragraph, at the same time? And isn’t it even more clever that the post title itself is also a question? I planned in advance, get it? That’s awesome, isn’t it? No? You don’t think so? More like boring?

Well, I guess everyone’s got their opinion, don’t they? How about you let me opine on my blog, and you opine on your blog? O wait, I don’t want that, do I? Wasn’t the whole point for you to opine in my comments section?

Do I sound like an airhead yet? Or an insecure 20-something girl at an interview? You know the kind I’m talking about? The ones who end even a declarative sentence like it was a question?

Do you think I’m still on track with this? Or am I so far off topic that it’s just ridiculous? You think it’s ridiculous? Really? You shouldn’t call a guy ridiculous in his own blog, should you? Wouldn’t your mommy wash your mouth out with soap if she heard you say that?

You think I’m out of steam already on this? You don’t think I could go on for another 200 sentences? Will you stop reading if I actually do? How many people do you think managed to read this far? Nobody? Really? Not one person? But if you’re reading this sentence, that means you’ve read this far, doesn’t it? I should stop then, shouldn’t I? Wow, this is easier than I thought it’d be, thinking up so many questions.

Oh, darn. Broke my train of thought and stopped asking questions. You can stop reading now. Feel free to comment. Or ask a question.

tags :: jokes : humor : blogging : comments : questions

Jack’s Sucky Blog has moved from Blogger to this site.

Please visit this site from now on. All of the posts and comments from the old blog have also been ported over.

I pay money to host this new site. And stayed up all night configuring it. It’s much better and worth all the trouble. Really. Seriously. I mean it! No, no, no, I shouldn’t have just stayed on Blogger. And now I can’t because I just dropped a hundred non-refundable bucks to host it here. That’s like 100 orders of 6-piece Chicken McNuggets (if you buy them all on Thursdays).

Ok enough of this complaining to myself (what is the sound of one man complaining and nobody listening? If nobody heard it, did he complain at all?).

***Please also note that the RSS Feed has changed. You can find the new RSS link on the right sidebar of this new site.

***If you have me added to your blogroll, please change the link to point to this new web address.

Much thanks in advance.

Jack.

Its so rediculous how bad grammer and spelling rears it’s ugly head everywhere I turn. And all this self-publishing on the Internet makes it even worse. I hope that one day they will license and test people before they are allowed to post on the net.

Until that great day finally arrives, I abhor you to please get a copy of Strunk & White. It will be the best $10 you have ever spent, and a service to English-speaking and -reading people everywhere. Because if I hear you say “Where are you at?” one more time, I swear I will roll up my own copy into a stick and beat you with it.

While I’m ranting, this whole Carpool Tunnel Syndrome thing is totally overblown. Yes, employers should be more careful about repetitive driving. Maybe they should encourage their carpooling employees to take a different tunnel to work every day. Or, better yet, they should outfit company car dashboards with a whole panel of buttons and knobs that are each randomly assigned a new function each time the ignition starts, to limit the number of potentially harmful repetitive motions that occur while carpooling through a tunnel. Maybe their insurance premiums will benefit as a result. Who cares if the drivers can’t figure out how to turn on the wipers. It is, after all, a syndrome. Besides, they’re driving in a tunnel anyway, and their fellow carpool passengers can help them test all the buttons.

And what’s with all this controversy about Youth in Asia? There are youth everywhere. Deal with it. How do you think the human race continues its existence. Do Asians have less of a right to procreate? I can’t believe so many people are up in arms over Youth in Asia.

And if you are inclined to email me about this post to point out all of the misspellings, improper using of English, and grammatacal errors in my own blog, please save your bandwith. I am well aware of my own crass hipocrasy, and I really, really could care less what you think.

tags :: jokes : humor : grammar : spelling : English : expressions : tongue-in-cheek

at least that’s what the website tells me. (courtesy of shont miller)
on friendster you can have as many friends as you want. Unless you exceed 500. if you exceed 500 you will have to delete some friends if you want to add new friends. if you delete someone from your friendster list you cannot be friends with them any longer. If you didn’t add someone to your friendster list then they are really not your friend are they. if you want more than 500 friends then you should have a myspace page. but that’s for teenagers who have time to upload songs, movies, and more than a few pics. because on friendster you can only have 50 pics. the entire memory of your life must be comprised of approximately 4 dozen images and a blurb section that is 1000 words or less. college applicants should just submit their friendster page instead of writing an essay. it would be more concise.

tags :: friendship : humor : rants : jokes