Meow House Theatre

Something Silly for Today:

One of my favorite blogs, No Fact Zone, which is a veritable waterfall of Stephen Colbert information, reported this past Monday about a campaign being engineered by Alchemist Media to google bomb enough sites so that Stephen gets listed in the top spot should anyone do a search on the phrase “greatest living American.” This ties in to an idea Stephen himself had (which he mentioned during the Q&A before a recent taping) that he’d like to rank first on Google under the search query “giant brass balls.” (O Stephen, you already have the giantest ones in the hearts of your fans. If it’s possible to have balls in one’s heart.)

(To explain how the “bomb” relates to Google searches and number of sites participating in the bomb: in short, Google uses a search algorithm whereby the more sites linked to a certain word or phrase, the higher the chances of the search result being the “right” one that any random person is seeking, and thus the more sites with that word, the better its chances for coming out Number 1 in a seach for that word. The Wikipedia article linked above explains it in more depth; or just go to Google and google “Google Bomb.” How’s that for repetitive and self-perpetuating referencing.)

If you’d like to join in the fun and make Stephen even more saturated into the Internet Series of Tubes than he already is, paste the following code (provided by Alchemist Media) somewhere in your own blog or Web site:

(Note: I’m an HTML mess so go here and copy No Fact Zone’s code; as soon as I can figure out how to get it to show up on my own site I’ll de-link them. I don’t think this will be a burden on their bandwidth because only about 10 people read this blog.)

Once you paste the code, you’ll get two links:

Giant Brass Balls

Greatest Living American

I have to say that all these links to the Colbert Nation site are probably not going to bode well for them, seeing as how they are already hopelessly and shockingly mismanaged and inadequately administered, technology-wise. They are using software meant for a board of perhaps 5,000 users, and they have, I believe, over 50,000 registered as of this point. The site goes down regularly, sometimes for days, and usually every night every time Stephen says anything “squeeable”: something his [often female] fans have to go post about immediately with the utmost urgency. I have found the Webmaster in the past to be quite an idiot but I’ve been thinking that really, the state of the equipment–the servers–is not his fault and I’ve been too hard on him, at least in that one area. For some unknown reason, Viacom chooses to have Stephen plug the site almost nightly and yet they apparently will not spend any money on maintaining it. It’s a curious situation. If I were a sponsor, who is being charged advertising rates based on number of site users, and then I found out the site is down and unusable 30% of the time, I’d be hopping mad. Maybe someday Viacom will wake up and join 2007 instead of continuing to flounder along in 1994, which is where that site is living.

Just wanted to mention that I know this site has the most visually boring layout possible. I am in the midst of deciding which WordPress template I want to use; or I might go with Textpattern, which I’ve heard good things about. Textpattern seems to be more of a cross between blogging software and content management, which might work out better for me even though most of what I do is writing.

The template I use actually is a WordPress template (the “Kubrick,” which is their original and default template) but it’s run through my own domain host’s coding and cannot be customized to any great extent. And I hate fixed-width layouts with those giant margins. I just have to make a decision and then install the software. And copy everything from here first, because with my luck Something Bad Will Happen and I’ll lose all this writing.

There is just so much to do and not enough hours in the day. I really wish I could be like Leonardo Da Vinci, who is said to have only slept 3 hours a night. I loves my sleep but it’s a giant time-waster. That’s pretty much why I gave up TV except for TDS, TCR, CNN, and C-Span. And Faux News when I want to fulfill any fleeting masochistic tendancies I might ever have, since watching them always gives me a giant pain in the stomach and a headache. But sometimes I can’t stop myself. I do watch a few regular shows now and then but I can hardly remember the last time I watched some certain series 2 weeks in a row.

In years past I have always gotten HBO for the time when The Sopranos came on but this year I didn’t. For one, I just hate to have to be glued to the chair in front of the TV set. Two, I can get them for free via The Mysterious Underground, assuming I’m willing to wait at least a half day past original air time, and that’s fine with me. And three, much as I like the series, those people are just so revolting. The women especially are so … gross … I can’t think of a better word. They all know that their husbands/boyfriends make a living off robbing, torturing, and murdering people–often totally innocent non-Mob-connected people–and they are all totally fine with it as long as they get to keep buying their designer clothes and German sports cars. If I were Meadow, when I realized what my father was, I would have moved away in the middle of the night and changed my name. But she’s all cool and fine with it and now she’s dragging her fiancé into it. Like she can’t figure out what goes on at that “construction” site. They’re just all such shallow putrid people. Yes I know they are fictional characters. They can still be revolting and generate feelings of disgust in those who are watching. They wouldn’t be “good” fiction if they didn’t cause a reaction like this. I, myself, have just had enough of subjecting myself to feeling a little sick when watching them. I can get that from Faux News, and it takes less time.