A neat new take on memes!
(If you click through, just start selecting the pix that appeal to you, and it will analyze your choices at the end.)
Category: How I love the Interwebs
We’re not so different after all
The last line, about being mistaken for a Canadian a lot, made me laugh…
| What American accent do you have?
Your Result: North Central
“North Central” is what professional linguists call the Minnesota accent. If you saw “Fargo” you probably didn’t think the characters sounded very out of the ordinary. Outsiders probably mistake you for a Canadian a lot. |
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| The West |
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| Boston |
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| The Midland |
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| Philadelphia |
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| The Inland North |
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| The Northeast |
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| The South |
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| What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz |
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A Thinking Blogger – that’s me!
I’ve been had an honour bestowed upon me which is also a tag, a meme that is an award. Because you know this motherhood thing? It’s all about the multitasking. The clever, witty and insightful Mad Hatter has kindly tagged me with the Thinking Blogger’s Award.
Nice, eh? She nominated me on the basis of my little rant on child care, but she said that it was your comments, from all points on the political spectrum, which increased the “think factor.†I’ve long known this little blog of mine wouldn’t be half the fun it is if it weren’t for you guys, so we can share this little award.
And speaking of sharing, it’s all about the sharing. Now I’m supposed to come up with five other Thinking Bloggers worthy of nomination. Except at least three of my favourites have already been tagged. Am I allowed to repeat? No? Okay, but I’m a little behind on my blog reading and this is spreading like the flu through preschool, so I hope I’m quick enough.
First off, I’d like to tag Phantom Scribbler. I heart Phantom. She has a way of using her own life as a lens to examine some weighty issues, and while she’s opinionated as hell, she’s never didactic. I like that in a smart blogger. But I’m nominating her for this particular honour because of a recent post written in response to a recent article in New York Magazine called the “Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids.†I thought the idea of over-praising your kids was totally bogus until I read her post and the subsequent comments from the Pixies. One of many, many posts that I’ve found myself contemplating long after my browser window was closed.
Next, I’d like to tag Kerry at Popwatch Canada for her post on religion a week or so back. She also posts great Grey’s Anatomy recaps, and has an obsession with Justin Timberlake that continues to perplex me, but threaded through the shiny bits about pop culture, Kerry blogs some pretty interesting ideas and opinions. And I’m not just saying that because she writes my performance reviews, or because my boys are both in love with her and she may yet end up to be my daughter-in-law some day.
My next nomination goes not to a particular post, but to the blog The Smartmouth Mombie in general. For starters, I love any blog with a permanent preamble that says something like “This is what a feminist writes like.†Like the other blogs I’ve tagged so far, Chris strikes a lovely balance between weighty thought pieces and ‘minutiae of mothering’ pieces.
Sadly, my next nominee has gone on temporary hiatus. Angry Pregnant Lawyer is freshly back at work after maternity and painfully sleep deprived. I already miss her quick wit and cutting sarcasm, and I have learned a lot about American culture and politics from her. And yes, that’s a compliment!
And finally, my last tag goes to JF Scientist at A Natural Scientist. I’ve only just started reading this blog, but Jenny writes, according to her tag line, about “science, education, feminism and religion.†I love love love her “ask a scientist†series, and the incredibly wide scope of her posts. I never know what I’ll find when I drop by, but I am assured I’ll learn something – often something I didn’t know I needed to know, but sure enough, turns out I did.
Wow, this was way harder than I thought. I tried to wander away from my usual favourites with this process. Thanks again to Mad Hatter for nominating me, and if reading my nominees makes you crave even more thinking bloggers, there’s five more back at Mad Hatter’s place, and five more at Bub and Pie’s place, too. I’m not going to get any work done at this rate!
Another mothership??
Just a little post today, because I am being steamrolled by the beginnings of what I think will be a nasty chest cold, augmented by a headache that makes my whole body hurt.
I wanted to ask your opinion of something, though. Lurker Julianne (*waves*) sent me a note saying that she noticed a blog launched last month with the rather familiar title of Postcards From The Mothership.
Hmmmm.
It’s on a blogspot address, and has an unrelated URL. To be honest, I’m not terribly threatened, but I have to admit feeling a little territorial. I don’t imagine there is anything I could, or even want, to do about it. I suppose since I came up with the title, it’s conceivable that someone else could come up with it as well, but I can’t help but feel like someone filched my idea. (It’s certainly not as bad as bitacle.org or any of those splogs, at least.)
What do you think? Would it irritate you to find another blog with your title, or am I just cranky because I’m not feeling well? And how much can anyone ‘own’ anything on the blogosphere? You can own your domain, and slap a creative commons license on your content, but does that cover something like a blog title? Interesting questions….
Sign # 312 you need to get a life
I’d been hearing a lot about a viral video called “introducing the book,” so I went looking for it on YouTube. Unfortunately, the video has apparently been removed by the user who posted it, but I did find the original Norwegian version.
You know you spend way too much time on the Internet when you find yourself watching non-dubbed Norwegian comedy skits on YouTube. And laughing your ass off. I’m just sayin’.
Love Meme Tender
A friend sent me this via e-mail, and I thought it would make a nice Valentine’s Day post.
10 people I love:
Beloved, Tristan, Simon, my mom, my dad, Sean, Natalie, Noah, Brooke and Katie. (Okay, so Katie is a dog, but I’m not sure she knows that.)
9 movies I love:
Star Wars, The Princess Bride, Moulin Rouge, Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, Fight Club, Casablanca, A Christmas Story, Monty Python and the Holy Grail
8 words I love:
Serendipity, Mommy, Free, Obtuse, Seriously, Peccadillo, Scribble, eh
7 books I love:
Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw, An Acre of Time, On Writing, Generation X, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, The Time Traveler’s Wife, the dictionary
6 songs I love:
Good Mother, Jann Arden
Clumsy, Our Lady Peace
Danny’s Song, Kenny Loggins
Blow at High Dough, The Tragically Hip
What a Good Boy, Barenaked Ladies
It’s Not Easy, Five for Fighting
5 TV shows I love:
Survivor, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, My Name is Earl, Corner Gas, The Rick Mercer Report
4 foods I love
Guacamole, barbequed steak, take-out, delivery
3 places I love
The Pont Neuf in Paris, my bed, Britannia Beach
2 quotes I love
“I used to be a 34D, now I’m a 34 long.” (I’m sure this is Carol Burnett, but I can’t find the reference anywhere!)
“I love deadlines. I like the wooshing sound they make as they go by.” Douglas Adams
1 thing to love about me
My decisiveness. No wait! My dimples, cuz I’m pretty sure they get me laid. No wait, I can’t say that, my mother read this blog. Okay, how about my sense of humour?
And now! I’m not going to tag anyone with this, but if you do decide to snag this meme, leave a note in the comments and I’ll amend the post after the fact to link to you.
Edited to add: Hooray! Bex played along!
And Sharon did, too! So did Shan and Mrs Gryphon!
730 days, 762 posts, too many words to count
Today marks two years since I started this blog. Two years = 730 days, and in those 730 days, I’ve put up 762 posts. This is what a year of blog posts looks like when you kill a small forest of trees in fear of losing your precious words to the interwebs, stored somewhere far from you with no backup:
I saw over at Elizabeth’s place in early January that she had put up a post with her favourite posts of the preceding year, and I liked that idea. So, if you’ll pardon the inherent narcissism, here are a selection of my favourite posts from the last year:
Coincidence (February – on registering Tristan for kindergarten)
Picture this (February – on getting our family portraits done)
Transitions (March – on the boys growing up)
The day my pants betrayed me (March – anecdote)
Bad words (May – on what makes a ‘bad’ word)
The one with the conspiracy theory (June – on sleep deprivation)
The one with too much information (June – on frostie and buying an OPK)
Sketches of Quebec City (July – a six-part series on our trip to Quebec City)
Saying goodbye to frostie (August – the end of our frozen embryo cycle)
Notes from a therapy session (August – on Tristan)
The memo (September – early pregnancy results)
Getting ready for school – a monologue (September)
I’m outraged (October – a rant on grammar rules)
The one with the coconut (October – anecdote)
Random attempts to cope (November – after the miscarriage)
An open letter to Proctor and Gamble (December – consumer rant)
CBS announces Rockstar: Wiggles! (December – a bit of fun)
How do you know? (December – on families)
Don’t ask me what criteria I used to category a post as a ‘favourite’; I have no idea. Some of them I liked because I think they’re well written, some of them are funny (to me, at least), some of them mark significant moments in the past year, and some of them just resonate with me.
It’s been a truly amazing year, and I’ve had the chance to do things and meet people I never would have imagined because of this blog. Thank you for making it possible, and thank you for coming along for the ride.
A Friday comment game
I went nearly 48 hours without Internet access while I was in Kingston, and ironically, one of the main things we discussed at the conference was new communication technology and social media. It was really interesting, and I can’t wait to get to work on some of that stuff with my day job.
But today, I’m drawing a blank. I’m playing “stay at home mom” today, because our caregiver is out of town, and I’ve got one of those headaches. I have no idea what to write about.
Hey, it’s been a while since we’ve played a comment game. You seem to like them. Wanna play?
I think it’s been almost a year since we played this one. First person names a famous actor/actress (i.e. Nicole Kidman). The next person names a movie that person played in (i.e. Moulin Rouge). Next person names a person who was in that movie (i.e. Ewan McGregor). Next person names a movie that person was in (i.e. Trainspotting). Hint: IMDB is your friend!
Ready? Let’s start with… Matthew Broderick.
Friday night’s alright for memes
As seen at About Miche and Raising WEG:
You are The Sun
Happiness, Content, Joy.
The meanings for the Sun are fairly simple and consistent.
Young, healthy, new, fresh. The brain is working, things that were muddled come clear, everything falls into place, and everything seems to go your way.
The Sun is ruled by the Sun, of course. This is the light that comes after the long dark night, Apollo to the Moon’s Diana. A positive card, it promises you your day in the sun. Glory, gain, triumph, pleasure, truth, success. As the moon symbolized inspiration from the unconscious, from dreams, this card symbolizes discoveries made fully consciousness and wide awake. You have an understanding and enjoyment of science and math, beautifully constructed music, carefully reasoned philosophy. It is a card of intellect, clarity of mind, and feelings of youthful energy.
What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.
***
You are Spider-Man
You are intelligent, witty,
a bit geeky and have great
power and responsibility.
Spider-Man 90%
(Or, maybe the supervillan quiz is more your style?)
New blog toy: MyBlogLog
I’ve signed up for MyBlogLog. If you haven’t been there, it’s part stats and referrals, part blog widgets, and part online community. I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time over there lately. (As if I weren’t already piddling away enough of my time playing with the sitemeter, let alone bloglines, not to mention the blogosphere as a whole.)
So far, I’m intrigued. I like the stats page, with information about where people have come from, what they read and what they click on while they’re here. I even installed a little widget that keeps track of the most popular out-clicks every day and gives a little pop-up window when you hover over a link, showing how many people have clicked that link today. (Try hovering over the comment link from yesterday and you’ll see what I mean. The top 5 outclicks box is waaaaaay down on the sidebar, near the bottom.)
But there are a couple of things I am less sure about. Another widget you can get shows an avatar (photo you upload) and the name of the most recent visitors to your blog. So, if you’ve signed up for MyBlog Log, and the blog you are reading is also registered, even if you are only quietly lurking, your avatar and name appears in the “recent visitors to this blog†widget.
That, for reasons I don’t entirely understand, freaks me out a bit.
I have always liked the anonymity of blog surfing. You can peek in, take a look around, and leave without saying a peep. Yes, your IP address leaves an electronic signature for those who are tech savvy or simply persistent enough to know how to trace it, but it’s a long way from an obscure character set representing my internet service provider to my name and photo right there under the ‘recent visitors’ column.
(I still haven’t figured out whether you can turn off the recognition thing, or whether you have to be logged in for it to work, or whether it follows multiple IP addresses. One of the reasons I actually signed up for MyBlogLog is because they are sadly lacking in useful FAQs and so I signed up out of curiosity to see if I could figure it out as I went along.)
And then there’s the whole community aspect. I’m wondering if I’ll be any better at this one than I am with any of the other social media sites. I’ve got my Flickr account, and a Linked-In account, and I’m still terrible about the ‘friends and contacts’ part of it. (This would probably be why I’ll never have a MySpace or Facebook account!) If I know you and you ask me to make you a contact, I’ll happily do so, but I never actively seek out contacts.
I’m shy about approaching people. MyBlogLog makes it as easy as a single click to join a blog’s ‘community’(you don’t need to have the community owner’s approval), and when you do your avatar and name are shown on that blog’s community page (here’s mine). I wasn’t too sure about that whole aspect – I was more than content to grab the outgoing-click widget and play in happy solitude on my stats page when one blogger I’ve never encountered before joined my community, and my courage to be social was bolstered. I even ventured out and joined a few communities of my own, mostly because I’ve had personal contact with the blogger. But my barely-repressed inner 14 year old worries that maybe these fairly popular bloggers don’t want awkward me attaching themselves to their blog. (Terrible the scars that high school leaves on you, isn’t it?)
What do you think? I’ve temporarily installed the ‘recent visitors’ widget so you could see what I’m talking about, but I don’t think I like it. Do you also find it vaguely unsettling to be ‘outed’ every time you drop by for a visit? And of course, if you have an account or you sign up for one, let me know while I’m still in a social phase and I’d be happy to join your community!