I’m going to be messing with the CSS and other design elements of the site throughout the day today, which may cause the site to briefly go “all pear-shaped” as they say in the UK. If it looks terribly wrong right now, count to 20 and reload the page; chances are I will have fixed it by then. If not, please leave a comment in the “YOUR TURN” for this post, if you can find it.

Also, there I will be conducting experiments aimed at finding a more colorful but not overwhelming background design for the Me.site, mostly using tiled backgrounds from AbsoluteCross.com which has hundreds of freebies, most of which are colorful and overwhelming. You may be briefly disoriented. I know I am.

A version of this was originally published, and is incredibly still accessible at epinions.com. Thanks to a link at the perpetually popular “Belgium Doesn’t Exist!” page, I will be required to keep this in a prominent location at every version of my blog until the Internet burns itself out (which should be in the next six months or so - but that’s ANOTHER story). I just did a long-overdue rewrite, so I’ll put it here up front instead of back in the archive.

For those of you who are considering to include Minneapolis, Minnesota in your future “See America” plans, there is something you need to know. But let me first explain how I came to learn it.

It started when I attended a 1998 event at Hollywood’s Museum of Broadcasting saluting “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”. The emcee, Gavin McLeod, announced that all of the show’s original writers were present “except for Allen Burns, who, as you probably know, is so busy with the Minneapolis Project.” There was a scattering of applause, and I, puzzled, asked the sunglasses-wearing-indoors person next to me what the writer/producer was doing in Minneapolis.
“No, man, he’s not doing anything IN Minneapolis, he is DOING Minneapolis.”
And he went on to explain that the metropolitan area of Minneapolis/St. Paul was the totally fictional creation of Hollywood writers, devised to provide a location for the popular ’70s sitcom.
THE REST OF THE STORY…

If you haven’t yet taken advantage of my musical recommendation in the Steely Damn! post, it’s too late. It’s over. “Aja” has returned to its regular price of $6.93 (99 cents per each of 7 tracks) and “The Best of the Beach Boys” is now $7.99 (which for 29 songs plus “Kokomo” is still a pretty good deal). At this moment (1AM PDT on Aug.28th), the Daily Deal is something from Björk, proving quite conclusively that Your Mileage WILL Vary. But hey, if you are Björk-curious, I can suggest “The Björk Song”, a TOTALLY FREE download from the Web’s Legendary Brunching Shuttlecocks primarily featuring Lore Sjöberg, whose “jö” in his name gives him some strange kind of simpatico with the outlandish Icelander, even though the “jö” is pronounced very differently - a “sho” instead of a “yo”, which makes sense since Lore is kind of a Sjö-off, as proven here.

The money quote in Lore’s latest weekly missive is “Right now, I do not post to Twitter every time I see a dachshund.” Which is true; I am one of his 838 followers on Twitter and I have never once heard him mention a dog breed smaller than a Labrador. He has mentioned acai berries twice:

Where the hell did they come from? Did another berry have to be removed from the Canonical Berry List?

I have given it some thought and I have decided that acai berries must be attempting to replace kiwi on the Grand Council of Fruit Flavors.

Web browser features (almost mandatory for Twitter users):

Firefox, I love you for your “recently closed tabs” menu. Your ability to anticipate my regret has won my heart.

Embarassing personal moments (another required Twit-topic):

At the cafe. Brought my laptop but no power cord, my iPod but no headphones. I should check if I’m wearing pants but I’m afraid to look.

And the casting of the next Batman movie:

I’m hoping that rumor is wrong only in that CHER is playing the Riddler, and DEPP is playing Catwoman.

Why am I bringing his Twittering to your attention? It’s easier than writing my own one-liners and I’m feeling seriously lazy right now.

Of course, you can also follow MY Twitterizationing, but most of my contributions over the last few days were extremely snarky replies to others’ comments. (example: “@jkottke So Victor Borge couldn’t walk around N.Y.C. unmolested?”) Ya had to be there.

It’s been so long since I’ve seen a genuine Nigerian Scammail, it surprised me to get one today. The email server where it got through the filters? Yahoo! Mail. (I keep a Yahoo! address to isolate the advertising mailing lists that have something I MIGHT be interested in… don’t want to miss the next Papa Johns online special for Perfect Pan) Yahoo! does serve up some of the most annoying ads in the right sidebar (the cost of being free and not Google), but the one accompanying the Nigerian was just plain weird…

(don’t bother clicking; my copy goes nowhere and does NOTHING)
It’s the selection of expressions used for the various occupations that puzzle me. I’d think the “Social Worker” would be more frustrated than the “Graphic Designer”. And I wouldn’t go near a Pharmacy counter where the Technician looked like THAT. The Teacher is TOO happy, the Psychologist looks totally insincere (many of them are, but they don’t LOOK it), the Criminal Investigator looks like a Pirate, the Health Care Manager looks hopelessly confused (that one may be accurate), and “More” looks like he’d bite me if I clicked on him. The lameness of some web ads discourage me for the Future of Advertising, especially if they’re that way on purpose to fit their target audience.

I confess to being semi-addicted to Amazon.com’s MP3 Download Daily Deals (upper left hand corner) at which entire albums I may not already possess in digital form are made available for $1.99 or $2.99 (an excellent MP3 price point for cheapskates and content moochers). I didn’t check it out yesterday, but today when I hit the MP3 Home Page, I saw the Daily Deal was some heavy metal mess for $3.99 but the #1 downloaded artist was Steely Dan. I wondered if they had suddenly released a new album or -ruhroh- if there was some new interest in them because one or both of the duo had just died. Well, the answer was farther down the page when I saw that “Aja” was the top downloaded album and clicking the link saw that it was yesterday’s daily deal for 99 cents (that’s all seven 4-to-8-minute long songs) and they hadn’t put the price back up yet! I have to say, if you don’t already love the Dan and have “Aja”, this is THE best gateway drug to a Steely Dan addiction. They call Alabama the Crimson Tide, call me Deacon Blues.

Also a good deal (from last Friday’s $5 deals but not yet re-upped in price): The Very Best of the Beach Boys. 30 BB tunes for $5 (even if one of them is “Kokomo”) is a good deal, and should provide the right amount of ’60s surf music to anyone’s shuffle mix.

But hurry, both the Dan and the Boys are up past their official expiration time for the special price and I would NOT recommend even “Aja” at 99 cents a song. But if you haven’t checked out the Amazon MP3 Deals Page, it has some free tracks too. And nothing beats free (and LEGAL!).

DISCLAIMER: I am an Amazon Affiliate and I have pimped out all the links (even the heavy metal mess) so that if you use them to buy something I get a kickback. Of course, for a 99-cent-special, that kickback is really really trivial, but as I said before, I believe in Financial Transparency.

UPDATE: It’s too late. It’s over. “Aja” has returned to its regular price of $6.93 (99 cents per each of 7 tracks) and “The Best of the Beach Boys” is now $7.99 (which for 29 songs plus “Kokomo” is still a pretty good deal).

I have thoroughly enjoyed every one of the of the too-few railroad journeys I have ever experienced (starting with a cross-country trip at the age of 10 when the 1966 Airline Mechanics Strike emptied the skies while my family was visiting relatives in Ohio - although an all-day stopover at a non-air-conditioned Chicago Union Station was one of the most miserable experiences of my life that didn’t result in hospitalization). But I refuse to join the semi-official organization of train passengers and railroad fans. Why? Because the group’s name - NARP - is way too similar to AARP. (And if AARP’s magazine and website are going to have an article about Natalie Cole hitting 50, are they going to do the same for Madonna? I DARE THEM!)

There was a post today on MetaFilter’s MetaTalk page questioning the term “users” on the site, as opposed to “members”, or the site-specific slang “MeFites”. (This is the kind of ‘overthinking-a-plate-of-beans’ that makes the MetaTalk fun for me.)

I didn’t discover it until over 150 comments had been made and interest had died out. I thought of a couple tongue-in-cheek terms for MetaFilter users/members, and was pleasantly surprised they had not been suggested in the previous comments.
THE REST OF THE STORY…

The 140-character-or-less community of Twitter has stopped accepting my attempts to Tweet to it… unless I do it through my “new blog post” auto-tweet function. Which makes it a crappy way to communicate. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Mmmokay… I was experimenting with various Twitter Client apps and apparently one-or-more of them took the site hostage. All deleted and I am now Twittering normally. Good news for me. Maybe not so good for Twitter.

As part of my ongoing policy of being an attention whore, I thought I’d pick up on xkcd’s latest meme-on-demand (I probably should put this in the FunnyPaperless blog, but it’s still kinda “beta”) and go for the first Google listing for the phrase “7 Girls 7 Cups”. Why? Well, I honestly feel everyone should have their own cup, whatever they plan to do with it, seven’s a lucky number (and was the standard number of primary cast member in an ensemble sitcom before “Friends”) and the lower right-hand corner of the grid is a comfortable place for me.

Oh, did I mention that the cups are Burger King collectors cups from this summer’s “Iron Man”, “Hulk” and “Indiana Jones” promotions? If you’re really nice to me, you get Shia LeBeouf in “Indy”, if not you’re gonna get Hulked.

I just hope I don’t end up regretting this.

UPDATE: That didn’t take long.

The highly esteemy Matt Haughey sent this message to Twitter a few minutes ago…

Someone contacted us and misspelled their ISP’s domain name. Boring right? Until you find out what the domain was: cocmast.net

That’s… that’s… Cocmastic!

If Matt doesn’t blog this himself, I have a very good chance of becoming the #1 Google result for Cocmast and Cocmastic.