4/20/2003
My younger sister is an junior education major at a nearby University. Earlier today she showed me one of the many books I had forgotten from my childhood (for worse this time). It’s a laugh-out-loud lampooning of well-known fairy tales entitled ‘The Stinky Cheese Man and other Fairly Stupid Tales‘ featuring:
- Chicken Licken
- The Princess and the Bowling Ball
- The Really Ugly Duckling
- The Other Frog Princess
- Little Red Running Shorts
- Jack’s Bean Problem
- Cinderumpelstiltskin
- The Tortoise and the Hair
- The Stinky Cheese Man
- The Boy Who Cried “Cow Patty”
And it’s not for the faint of heart as it states:
Surgeon General’s Warning: It has been determined that these tales are fairly stupid and probably dangerous to your health.
Anyways, I liked the Chicken Licken one personally because of the names and phrases used, to wit:
Chicken Licken ran to her friend Ducky Lucky and
clucked, “Ducky Lucky! Ducky Luck! The sky is
falling! The sky is falling! We must tell the President!”
“Let’s go,” quacked Ducky Lucky.
Chicken Licken and Ducky Lucky ran to their friend
Goosey Loosey and yelled, “Goosey Loosey! Goosey
Loosey! The sky is falling!
We must tell the President!”
“Let’s go,” honked Goosey Loosey.
And so on, with additional names like Cocky Locky, Foxy Loxy and a surprise appearance by Jack the Narrator.
Anyways, if you’re in the mood for watching movies that spoof similar stories, I recommend two, both staring one of my personal favorite actors, Cary Elwes:
Robin Hood: Men in Tights and The Princess Bride. Last year, both received the coveted Tim Swanson Stamp of Damntasticness Approval. That’s not given out lightly, easily or for anything less than 4 camels and 3 bananas (up from 2 each). So get the book and show your kid(s) how funny old people look like when they laugh at fairy tales.
I was looking through my referrer list and noticed that a blogger by the name of Ryo Chijiiwa (cool name) has created a script that looks for blogs that have similar links/wording as yours. The basic idea is that a blog that links to the same things as your blog has some topical commonality and may be of interest to you.
Test it out here and notice the eery results. Somehow I ended up related to Playboy, Hustler and MILF-Hunters Anonymous. Err, that was another match making service.
Anyways, there is a similar service through Blogging Ecosystem via an application called ‘New Door,’ developed by Mark Pilgrim (what can’t he do?).
Neither one has a clear cut advantage and would probably benefit if they could somehow merge the code together (at least feature-wise). Mark’s gives you a list of 20 “similar” blogs of which you can customize just like you do with Amazon.com (where you choose a sample of books/music/movies your interested in, Amazon then churns out a listing of similar products you might be interested in).
Ryo doesn’t have that, but what he does have is an extensive listing of blogs and what links yours has with them in an “outline” format (you see exactly which links they have that are similar to yours). However, this would probably benefit casual bloggers more than myself, as I have hyperlinked to hundreds of sites. Another disadvantage of Ryo’s — he only has 1700+ blogs indexed to use in his comparison database, versus thousands in Blogging Ecosystem.
A couple of days ago I found a few more directories and was holding out in hopes that I would compile a larger list (that you’ve become so accustomed to), but that wasn’t happening. No dice.
Blogdigger - Giving your RSS a good swift kick! This reminds me of Feedster in more than one way. I looked it up to see if I was in there, and discovered quite a bit of information on Tim Robbins (Shawshank was great). That wasn’t quite what I wanted, so I put “quotes” around my name and found all of one listing, which so happened to be discussing my Swedish adventures from last week (remember how I listed my blog in a Swedish blog directory?). Anyways, add your blog to Blogdigger and see if you have better luck.
Glitter - They actually just changed the design/look/colors of their site (basically the whole thing). It is a 3000 member directory of blogs and journals (some “normal” sites too). Here is the submission form - fairly straight forward (feel free to start a Tim Swanson Fan Club).
YooNoHoo! - Aside from having a cool name it is, a directory for those who still believe the web is about people, creativity and the sharing of ideas… What really separates this directory from most is the lack of pop-up ads or body-enlargement kits flashing in ones face.
Oh, and my other “business” is coming along — real life kicks in every now and then, thus slowing down my abilities to do good and do awesome.
