The Year In Re-Doo-Doo
I ain’t got the time or the inclination to make another year in review video. Maybe next year. Until then I’m recycling this garbage from two years ago. Use your God-given powers of imagination and relive 2014 Shouts From The Abyss classic moments like these:
Timeline: Demo T. Vader
Demo is in the house, yo!
Every morning the guru of negativity loads up his Facebook which pushily insists, “What’s on your mind?”
Oh no. I’m not about to fall for that one.
The people you’ve connected with on Facebook are called “friends.” Laws, yes. Friends. Good one!
Of the various types of content on Facebook, my favorite goes a little something like this:
- The opening: You want something. State what it is. Ex: “I’m curious how people feel about my sexual organs.”
- The insult: Get things rolling with a jab at your so-called “friends.” Ex: “I know only approx. 4-1/2 of you ever read my posts.”
- The hook: Describe the payoff in terms of pleasure centers of the brain that will glow upon compliance. “I’m going to give you a chance to prove your friendship.”
- The plea: This is the objective, the thing you hope to see accomplished. Ex: “Reply to this with a graphic description of your favorite sexual organ on my body. Sexual organs only, please!”
- The demanding social element: This is self-explanatory. Ex: “You must then copy this to your own timeline so my ego can grow. Please don’t comment and not copy to your own timeline.”
Out of respect, I’m not going to comment because I have absolutely no intention of following your rules. Thanks for trying to control me, though.
For the record:
- Yes, I actually read your shit. And I loathe myself for it.
- You can’t handle the truth. I won’t comment on our alleged “friendship.”
- It’s news to me that you have sexual organs so I’m unable to comment further.
- I will decide what pieces of evil hate go on my timeline. Not you. Nice effort, though.
- A real friend wouldn’t have done this. Thanks for reinforcing my theories.
Has Facebook invented a squelch feature yet or must I continue to be subjected to this crap with a little help from my friends?
Guest Blog: Raising the ego bar – a year in review
To help get into the spirit of the New Year celebrations, I asked Mrs. Abyss to highlight a few of her favorite blog posts of mine from 2010. You know, one of those ubiquitous “Year in Review” type of deals. This is what she came up with…
Mr. Abyss must really love me. He actually entrusted me to choose my favorite Abyss blog posts of 2010. Me! His harshest critic and fierce foe of his negativity bull crap. The task was actually much harder then I had imagined. I figured there may be one, possibly two posts I would ever consider worthy of additional praise; however I ended up with well over 30 Abyss-mal rantings that made me really laugh. It was tough, but I narrowed it down to 15.
#1. My favorite rantings are about gerbils. I personally think Abyss could start a blog strictly based on gerbil activity and FENS. As angry as I get about my son and his son, Tom’s take on our kids helps me to heal. If you are new to Abyss’s gerbil posts, I urge to search them out. They are funny, informative and terribly accurate. If you have your own gerbil at home and suffer from FENS, you are not alone!
Post: Something gerbil this way comes
#2. Ah, here is a classic! Abyss is always searching for a way to feel superior to every other human on Earth and his search is over. He did drop his status some by later giving up vegetarianism. Guess he’s not as quite as perfect as he thought?!
Post: Intelligence is a beach
#3. Tom told me to choose my favorite posts from his blog and I certainly picked this one right. His mistake in asking me to do this? He didn’t say the post had to be written by himself. Here’s one of my favs written by me! Why is it my favorite? Because it’s an accurate representation of one of my favorite people in the whole world… Mr. Abyss.
Post: Ode to Mr. Abyss
#4. I’m not much for Tom’s posts about his work woes. I hate whiny, poor me, my life is so pathetic rantings, however, I love this one because I can relate to it. Sadly, I think most of us can. Most bosses are A-1 assholes. Of all the asshole bosses I have ever had, none can compare to the one Tom had up until recently. This guy was not only a horrible excuse for a human, a loathsome liar and master manipulator; he was a also a world class fake Christian to the core.
Post: How to destroy your employees
#5. Simply one of Tom’s best creations!
Post: Hyppo and Critter – Inventions
#6. I was a vegetarian before Tom posted this, however it really helped confirm that I made the right decision. A co-worker of mine refuses to eat anything with a beak. “I only eat beef, chickens and other winged birds that eat off the ground, and it’s totally disgusting.” Guess what honey? Cows go cluck!
Post: Chicken Litter says the sky is falling
#7. This one just made me giggle.
Post: Someone’s knocking at the door
#8. What’s worse then a human dressed as a mattress? A tweaker dressed as the Statue of Liberty holding a sign for a tax business that just fell off his skateboard that rolled into a lane of traffic. Yes, I’ve seen that.
Post: Human spam at home and on the road
#9. I know, too much gerbil jargon, but this mystery is still unsolved!
Post: The Adventure of the Raspberry Bar
#10. I once worked for an orthopedic surgeon. A small bathroom was attached to our break room and it had extremely thin walls. Said surgeon would waltz into the bathroom, do his biz and walk right out. We could hear everything; from the zip of his zipper to a guess of what he had for dinner the previous night. Every single time there was one thing we NEVER heard… the sound of the surgeon washing his hands.
Post: Employees must pretend to wash hands
#11. Poop. Need I say anything more?
Post: Breaking the poop barrier
#12. Pretty sure there’s some law somewhere that says if a marriage is not consummated on the wedding night, the union is null and void. 48 hours of hiccups equals, well, no consummating. Finally a way out!!!!
Post: Five-year marriage hiatus
#13. My all time favorite. If you really want to delve into Abyss’s mind, it’s all spelled out here.
Post: Shout Abyss on America’s Got Talent
#14. The best day of my life; Tom finally saying, “Fair thee well and fuck off you fucking fuckers.”
Post: So Long, and Thanks for All the Pish
#15. Dear Charter, I was going to drop off our cable box today but I forgot that I have to have a valid driver’s license so that you can confirm I am me and that I am there to discuss my own account, you know, the one that I pay you for. Since your pathetic puss bag of an employee talked me into setting up an account with a fake name, I can’t do that now. It’s ok though. I have called your puss bag employee to come pick it up himself. Charter…. fuck you asshole.
Post: Roku – A New Hope
A cool tip to improve your online writing
Here’s today’s thought-provoking tip for writing online. (This alleged “tip” is pretty much useless on typewriters and such.)
Tip: Never use the number eight followed by a right parentheses. Ever. Somewhere down the line some device or web site or widget will turn that character sequence into the “cool” smiley.
Case in point: http://broadsideblog.wordpress.com/2010/09/28/ten-ways-to-seriously-improve-your-writing/
Just look at that little bastard there, all smiling and shit, feeling oh so proud of himself! I found the unexpected presence of the cool smiling in a post about improving your writing just a little ironic. 🙂
If you must number things, use “ordered lists.” (If you are in HTML.) WordPress provides a little icon for that in their online editor. If not, then try using periods. They seem less susceptible to involuntary smiley replacements.
🙂
Something new on the WordPress bar
So there I was this morning, surfing the Living Dilbert blog and minding my own business. I swear.
Suddenly a star and the word “Like” leaped out at me from the WordPress bar at the top of my browser page. (This feature seems to be context sensitive and only shows up when viewing a specific post.)
Like a monkey wanting his banana I pounded that button as fast as I could. Mmmm, banana!
Well, long story short, I didn’t get a banana. But the button did change to say, “You like this” and drops down to a menu that includes the choices “Reblog this post” and “View all posts I like.”
Looks like we have a new WordPress feature to start the month of June. Woot!
An update from the shouter
The end of a month is a milestone of sorts. As we put November 2009 to bed, I thought I would share a few random thoughts about my blogging experience so far.
With this posting I have successfully met the self-imposed challenge of posting at least once a day for an entire month. Woot! Late in October I signed up to become an “official” NaBlaPoMo blog. My brain is so hyperactive with background noise it was actually fairly easy to do. Setting a goal and meeting that goal: Not something you’ll find me doing all that often. 🙂
To celebrate, I started off this post with a graph showing the activity of this blog as reported by the WordPress stats function. The graph shows “views per week.” I’m still a new kid on the block. I’ve only been doing this for 10 weeks. But the overall trend seems promising. When CNN and FOX News start calling to get my opinion on things I’ll be sure to let you know. And yes, the Y-Axis labels have been omitted to prevent the leaking of critical proprietary statistical information. Ha!
The WordPress dashboard tells me that in those 10 weeks I have posted 128 times using a whopping total of 681 tags. That makes this post number 129. And while someone like They Call Me Jane has yet to write her 100th post, she has already hit the 1,000 comments milestone. Me? With more posts than her I’m about 40.1 percent there.
I hope that this blog makes you laugh and occasionally prompts you to think. I deeply appreciate those of you who read and share my private thoughts (since I’m doing this anonymously). It has been a lot of fun and I’ve met some wonderful and amazing people that I already consider to be friends. I plan to keep writing full throttle and see where this blog takes me. Horton could hear a Who. It’s nice to know that the outside world can sometimes hear my shouts from the abyss, too.
Shouts from the Abyss 
WordPress tagging
Do you use them? Give them any thought at all? Do you ever go exploring blogs by tag?
No great insights here. I haven’t studied them that much yet. But I did notice that recently I was #1 for the poop tag. Still am! I have to admit that made me very happy. There is nothing inherently “negative” about poop but somehow it became a fixture around here. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Did you know if you have the “tag cloud” enabled on your blog, clicking a tag link there will show posts with that tag from your blog only? But that if you click the tag in the post’s header (or footer, depending on the theme) it will take you, instead, to the page for all WordPress blogs with that tag? It’s pretty neat.
I’m still not sure how to tweak my tags for maximum results. Should I use the plural version of the word, the non-plural version or both? I do know that as far as WordPress is concerns the plural and non-plural versions of the same tag are treated as two different things.
What else have you learned? What is your experience? Got any funny stories? Maybe you’ve been #1 for a tag a lot? Or maybe you have questions about tags, too? If so, let me know.
Tags a lot!
Note: I know this is a super-lame post. I waiting too long and gave myself about four minutes to write it. Epic fail!
Edit: By the way, I just noticed this is my 500th post. I guess that puts me knee deep in the hoopla!