Hannelie Dargie comes to dinner...

Had the pleasure of meeting up with one of my long time blogging friends.

The phone decided not to use its flash, I think the soft focus flatters me.

Still alive. Sort of. Kind of.

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Blogging enthusiasm has been at an all time low of late.

Originally this blog was started as a core family blog but few, if any, family seem to read it. One maybe. Around it were three other blogs covering sex, religion and politics. This meant I could rant and rave 'off broadway' and not startle the gentler members of my reading family. The religion and sex blogs still exist but I am not planning any posts. I think I have said all I want to on those subjects.

The active blogs are listed in the side bar on the right. A chemistry one that will get spasmodic posts, as required, and I am keeping the original political blog as there is too much disinformation out there not to point at it in amazement or dismay from time to time.

Through all of this my alter ego, Mr Newbery, has continued to write his rhyming slant on the world.

The blog no longer automatically posts to Facebook but I will manually add links as it seems appropriate.
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Is it Spring? Really?

What to do?

If this post is too long, people wont read it.

If I split it into multiple posts, people will only read the last post.

Perhaps headings will help. Here are the topics I will cover:

Blogging
A Curate's Egg
Sex
Religion
Politics
J Cosmo Newbery


Blogging
Blogging is an odd past-time, largely driven by reciprocity. If another blogger visits, you feel compelled to visit them. It can become a chore. People can become miffed if you don't visit. Comments become perfunctory and pointless.

I lost count of the number of people 'squirted milk out their nose all over their computer screen'. Give me a break, people. You know you didn't. I know you didn't.

Blogs need a button where visitors can 'clock in' - "I came, I read, I nodded sagely but couldn't think of anything relevant to say so I left again. Keep up the good work".

A Curate's Egg
So why blog? I know some of the extended family read it but, not having blogs and not driven by the power of reciprocity, they never comment. But I know they visit. So, for them, it is a family update of sorts. One way but there, none the less. Sometimes it is useful to have on-line access to family stuff to show folks at work or elsewhere. That seems to be the only purpose of the A Curate's Egg blog.

My other blogs grew out of the thought that, if I try to cover everything in one blog, some folk my not like it. The popular wisdom is that you should avoid sex, religion and politics in polite company. The Curate is the front lounge room, the Curate is tea and sponge cakes.

Sex
This blog is just an assembly of nice photos, weird photos, strange contraptions and low grade erotica. As a few folk at work are finding me on-line, I will be cutting this blog adrift - there will be no links to it from here and it will not show up on my profile.

Religion
I am an atheist. This blog was largely for exploring the strange and largely foreign world of religion. I'm over that now. I may post occasionally. It, too, shall not be linked from here.

Politics
I lament the way the world is going and will continue to say so here. No-one reads it but I feel better having said it. Cheap therapy.

J Cosmo Newbery
An increasing number of people now know that I fathered all of J Cosmo Newbery's children. And vice versa. I created J Cosmo Newbery in the late 80's, when I was writing letters to companies during the evening and possibly initiating prosecutions against them during the day. Not a good combination, career-wise, so an alias was created.

J Cosmo Newbery has been my poetry outlet for the last few years. I sort of want to cut him free now. I will keep him as a character and will link to him from here but will not be putting in a reverse link from him to here. We may still comment on each other's blogs. Mr Newbery is more a Facebook person than I am, too. But neither of us Twitter.

That's it.

Sorry about the milk on your screen.

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Sorry!

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(Click to enlarge)

From The Bureau of Communication

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The Big M

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One thousandth post at The Curates Egg. (1642nd at the combine five blogs ).

When you look at the labels you realise how diverse the posts have been:

administration advertisements appliances AQ art Attic Australia awards backs beauty bigotry birds blogging bloopers books brain bureaucracy bush bushfires caffeine cancer candles cars Cartoon cats challenge chemicls chemistry christmas climate cold reading communication computer conmen consumption contraptions counselling cricket culture curate curiosity cute Cynicism Dad death death penalty deception diets divorce dogs drugs dumb inventions email energy english language environment errors of judgement excess fame family farewell fate fathers flowers food fraud friends future gadgets gambling garden genetics God Google Greetings gripes guests Guns halloween happiness health history hobbies Holidays homebrew honours Hooks hope house humbug humorous humour hybrid icons illusion insects internet intolerance Irish JCN jehovah Jokes kindness kumquats labels language Law Lee letters letters to editors letters to organisations Leunig life logic loves luck machines Margaret marriage Martin maths meat media medicine meme memories memory men mental health mind Mind Hack misc money moral issues movies Mum Murphy's Law mysteries nature nerdy news Nigerians nongs Obama oddball opportunity painting Pancakes parenting people pests philosophy photo physics pleasure poetry Political Correctness politics poll poppies positive possums probability psychic psychology puzzle puzzles quackery Quotes race rain relationships religion research resolutions Richard Roni safety scams science seasons sharks shopping Simon smoking society soy space spam spider sport statistics stress study stuff stupidity success suffering supernatural tags technology television thanksgiving thinking tradition trauma Travel trivia trout UFO Urban myths US vegetables war water weather wedding wildlife wine wisdom wishes work

And that's with the other blogs mopping up most of the sex, religion and politics.

It's been fun.
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Two days in the job.

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I'm still here. Just a little dizzy and bewildered.

I am now "Laboratory Director" of a reasonably large laboratory in Melbourne; part of a worldwide chain of American laboratories; so, who knows, I may get to the US yet.

I have tried to sever the links between the 'work me' and the 'blogging me' - my picture's changed, all links to my website gone. Just in case my various forays into sex, religion or politics touch any unnecessary nerves. Likewise I need to be a little careful with the Chemist's Kitchen blog, dealing only with generic issues, not specific products. Nor will I write about the company or the staff here.

But it has been an interesting two days; lost and floundering as one always is when new at a job. But the people are nice and it is a pleasant work place so it bodes well for the future.

And the coffee is excellent.
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Good news and bad news.

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Good news: as of tomorrow I will be working full time in a laboratory in Melbourne.

Bad news: the learning curve(s) will be steep and I will have my mind elsewhere; blogging will suffer.
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A return to the past...

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I used to have a blog where I put up my various chemical thoughts on life, the universe and everything, but mostly food.

From the chemist's perspective.

I have felt the need to re-invent the blog and the link to it is in the side bar. No posts yet.
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A weekend off. At home, but off.

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This is the 925th post on A Curate's Egg and my 1,522nd post over all in five blogs.

No wonder I feel knackered!

This morning I was all for chucking it in but I am feeling a little less impulsive this afternoon. I must apologise to folk as I have not been particularly diligent in travelling around the commenting traps of the blogs in my Reader (358 unread posts waiting for me.).

It is interesting blogging but at times I feel that I am starting to repeat myself, having flogged my hobby horses numerous times. Speaking of which, the above figures don't include the now defunct Chemist's Cookbook, a blog about food from a chemist's point of view.

However, I shall persevere, as long as people keep coming back to read!

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Just an update on the ads. I have been looking at the figures and this is how it pans out:

◊ Roughly one person out of every 250 visitors clicks on an ad. (0.38%)

◊ Most of these people have come because of Boneman's fine efforts at propelling The Curate After Dark blog into the international limelight.

◊ Limelight fades.

◊ The ads have brought in 69¢ a day, roughly one good coffee a week. Boneman, I owe you!

◊ There is no retirement plan there but they add an element of interest.
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Big Game Hunter

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Something odd happening out there in Blogland today.

Henry the Dog posts about the wrongs of fur.

J Cosmo Newbery posts about a big game hunter called Henry.

All in all it seemed useful to post the above cartoon.

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BTW: the attendance figure for the day over at The Curate After Dark is now 497 new visitors for the day. 6 people have returned. Ad revenue has passed $4 for the two days. No comments posted.

Yikes! Boneman rattles the cage!

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Well, so much for all my attempts at meddling with visitor numbers.

Above is the chart of visitor stats for my sex blog. Boneman, internet savvy, put a link to a post in my sex blog on some high traffic site and all of a sudden there are visitors! It's not who you know, it's where they link you from.

Now it is only 9:20am on Friday so the last column still has a while to go. It even seems to have paid off - 18 of of the 730 visitors clicked on ads and my retirement fund is $3.89 better off.

The orange bars are my returning visitors. They are the loyal band of regulars! It would seem that the folk who visited yesterday are not returning at this point. No comments, no new followers. So they come from curiosity but it seems that they don't like what they find. *sigh*.

Oh yeah, I did try putting every naughty word and phrase I could think of on a post on my nursery blog. Nilch. Not one visitor. But as it doesn't post, I guess the spiderbots have never been their either.

Better check the job ads.
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Words fail me.

(Click to enlarge)

Well, my words failed me.

Above is the graph for visitors to this blog (ignore Thursday as it is not finished yet.) and yes, there is an increase on Wednesday after I posted the Sadism, Besiality & Necrophilia post. But that is not why the numbers are up.

The numbers are up because I posted twice yesterday after getting all excited about the supposed Islamic punishment. The numbers are up because regular people visited twice. And those people who did come via Google had been looking for pancakes and eggs. (And an aside - my religion blog is regularly visited by people chasing up that old myth about how Beethoven would have been killed if abortion was in Germany in his day. That post was put up over two years ago and it is the primary entry point. There you go.)

And, AND, I suspect the vast hordes of internet bottom feeders out there had no idea what necrophilia was, only a scant idea about sadism and probably misspelt bestiality. It was all my fault, I fell for the lure of a cheap and old joke about flogging a dead horse. In reality I should have used "oral sex, anal sex, whores and studs".

Next time.

Bah! The difficulty of doing a controlled experiment!

I do have a test blog, where I trial bits and pieces for layout etc. Perhaps I will turn on statistics for it, leave it a week to bet a base line and then post a post called "oral sex, anal sex, whores and studs".

Stay tuned.
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Sadism, necrophilia and bestiality.

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I don't know if the cool, blandness of the pictured junket will undo the damage done by the blog title but I wasn't about to continue with the theme.

What I AM doing is playing to see what effect, if any, the title has on the number of hits received by my blog. I'll set it to post at midnight and collect data for the day then I'll publish the graph of hits. A bit of a statistics tragic.

And if you do like sadism, necrophilia and bestiality, your flogging a dead horse.

But so that your trip here wasn't wasted and continuing the theme of statistics, I now have something that I stole from Dan. No, not Dan, Don.

But I guess that means his trip here will be wasted. Sorry, Don.

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BREAD IS DANGEROUS.

1. More than 98 percent of convicted felons are bread users.

2. Fully HALF of all children who grow up in bread-consuming households score below average on standardized tests.

3. In the 18th century, when virtually all bread was baked in the home, the average life expectancy was less than 50 years; Infant mortality rates were unacceptably high; Many women died in childbirth; Diseases such as typhoid, yellow fever, and influenza ravaged whole nations.

4. More than 90 percent of violent crimes are committed within 24 hours of eating bread.

5. Bread has been proven to be addictive. Subjects deprived of bread and given only water to eat, begged for bread after as little as two days.

6. Bread is often a "gateway" food item, leading the user to "harder" items such as butter, jelly, peanut butter, and even cream cheese.

7. Bread has been proven to absorb water. Since the human body is more than 90 percent water, it follows that eating bread could lead to your body being taken over by this absorptive food product, turning you into a soggy, gooey, bread-pudding person.

8. Newborn babies can choke on bread.

9. Bread is baked at temperatures as high as 450 degrees Fahrenheit! That kind of heat can kill an adult in less than two minutes.

10. Most bread eaters are utterly unable to distinguish between significant scientific fact and meaning-less statistical babbling.
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Grumpy Blogger moment. Again.

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My poor dogwood - brown and crunchy.

Life has been a pain of late. The finances, as represented by the shares that were funding my retirement, is on the pox side of ghastly; job prospects are slow and far from encouraging; my garden has been cooked and crunched by the "non-existent" climate change; my state has been been hit by the longest drought, the hottest temperatures and the worst fires on record. Also apparently a non-result of a non-climate change.

My enthusiasm is not high.

What I have learnt from my garden is that plants, when stressed, discard the unnecessary. Leaves are discarded, in some cases whole branches are discarded, to save the core plant.

I must learn from that. I have been discarding unnecessary stuff.


Inspired by Braja, one irritant I am going to discard is word verification.

I don't use it myself. I have finally tired of it elsewhere.

Come this weekend I will no longer be commenting on blogs that require me to use it. It is such a pointless thing to do and just makes commenting a greater pain than necessary. There is nothing personal in this, it is just self-preservation.

Grumpy? Maybe but that's the way it will be.

Oh, and if your blog takes 30+ seconds to load because of all manner of widgets, gidgets and gadgets in the side bar, please forgive me if I move on before it finishes loading. I have other things to do.

Now, for a nice cup of tea and a wee lie down...
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Are you a Reader or Follower?

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Sometime ago, I started out using Google Reader to keep track of my favourite blogs, let me know when they have changed to save spending time visiting static ones.  You know the sort of thing.

Then Following came on the scene.

And now I have a mix of the two - there is a certain social pressure to follow people and 'be their friend'.  But not everyone has a Follower link.  Not everyone has RSS for that matter.

So, what do you do?  And why?

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Am off on a "Foodies Tour of Melbourne" in a minute (Xmas present).  Will do a report and a garden update later on.

After three days of 43°C today will be a mere 37°C.  No rain of any worth this year yet.  (0.8 mm is not of any worth.)

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Shaking a fist at a largely uncaring world!

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I'm just feeling like treating myself to a rant about blogs.

Don't worry, I will lie down in a minute and all will be well. Here goes:

1. Word verification.

What are people hoping to achieve with word verification? I have ten blogs (yeah, really. Some inactive, some experimental and one that lets me have a therapeutic outlet without scaring the neighbours), none of them with word verification and I have never had any serious problem with them.

Occasionally some bod (or bot) will post a suspect comment but they often do it in old posts and so no one sees them anyway. When I did the sex blog post on the effect of Viagra on the drooping of cut roses I got a couple (2) dodgy comments but they are easy to delete.

All word verification does is slow up people who are out to comment-graze.

And most of us bloggers want people to post comments; make it easy for them! How many have something like "Please comment, you really want to, go on, just do it" above your comment screen but then have word verification? Mmmm?


2. New format word verification

Most of the blogs that have word verification look like this:


But some of the new ones look like this:



The nasty difference is that the old style word entry field will let you push 'return' after entering the word and publishes your comment.

The newer style one deletes your comment if you hit 'return' instead of clicking 'finish'. A few times, after composing possibly the most brilliant repartee for a blog known to man, I have deleted it accidentally by pushing 'return'.

3. Moderation

I can sort of see the use of moderation if you feel that you have enemies and want to vet the comments before they a posted. But it is no great thing to delete a troublesome comment. It is disconcerting to post a comment and then wonder where it has gone (no chance for last minute speeling apolgies. Sorry.). And, for the mentally challenged like me, I sometimes comment twice on the same blog. Always embarrassing.

So what is the purpose of moderation? I'm not really sure as it is easy to remove unwanted comments. Mind you it is often funnier to leave them there.

4. Moderation AND word verification.

Really, if you are going to moderate the comment anyway, spare us the hoo-ha of word verification. Why have word verification if your are going to moderate anyway?

5. Slow loading blogs.

Some blogs show the last 50 posts and take ages to load. Just show the last 10 or so. Let the occasional interested person click the 'Older Posts' link. That's what it's there for. Widgets, gadgets, awards, fancy backgrounds and all the other 'guff' in the sidebars can take for ever to load. Do you need them all? People have come to read your latest post, not find out the ambient temperature in Irkutsk.

6. Music.

Arrrgh! Your music is part of you, true enough, but I don't necessarily share your taste. And neither does my wife trying to sleep in the next room.

7. Videos.

They can be funny but they are time consuming and bandwidth consuming. Sometimes they are not funny, they are just sweet and twee. I don't do much sweet and twee. At least give some idea of what they are about and how long they will run for.

That's it.

Time for a nice cup of tea and a wee lie down.
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I don't believe it!

Above is the first Blogger verification code that I have seen that is a real word.

Afterwards, when I posted to the blog I was visiting (Mark take a bow), the following came up as the replacement code:


To the best of my knowledge it is not an English word.

But it could be:

1. A Swahili word for belly-button fluff.

2. An Irish explanation for the state and direction of the economy.

3. Something entirely different.

The big D.

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This is my 500th post.

That is including the sex, religion and politics blogs in with the sedate Curate's Egg.

It is the second time I have reached this milestone; the last time was just before the old Curate's Egg blog imploded and then relaunched. Perhaps the egg belongs to a Phoenix.

So it could have been the Big M. Without the girls, of course*.

Looking back over the posts, they are a real mixed bag, aptly grouped with the Curate and his egg.

Paraphrasing Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Finish each post and be done with it.
You have done what you could.
Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in;
forget them as soon as you can.
Tomorrow is a new day;
begin it well and serenely
and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.
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*Obscure reference to an advertising campaign for Big M flavoured milks that were, for a while, advertised with the aid of some rather well endowed ladies.

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From the gazebo to the world...

Sorry about the photo - especially if you haven't had breakfast yet. In response to yesterday's post, Mark wanted a photo of me in the gazebo with the new laptop. I took a photo using my camera on time release but then realised that I didn't have the connector to get the pic from the camera to the computer, so the above photo is taken with the computer's built-in camera. Be careful what you ask for.

I will add the camera shot later on.

Re naming the computer: consistent with Margaret's assertion that the computer is my mistress, I have opted for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phryne"target=_blank>Phryne</a>, a famous courtesan. (thinks: I wonder if blogging by email permits embedded links...)

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A little later: it didn't seem to like the hyperlink. Oh well...

Still don't know how to tell Blogger I want the picture in the centre either.

There may be some of you who remember that I referred to Phryne in a past blog.


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Full gallop...

Haven't blogged much for the last few days.

What with Simon's return yesterday, a dinner with friends on Saturday, dinner with family tonight, Margaret's birthday tomorrow...

Feeble excuses, I know, but things have just been busy!

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Part of the goings-on involved shifting Simon to another room. No big deal but it did mean that, on his first day back, still fresh (?) from an 18hr flight, he was crawling under the house relocating computer cables to the other room.

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