Just Think of It as 'Blog Post Roulette'

October 4, 2003

Just Think of It as ‘Blog Post Roulette’

Maybe I’m born with it; maybe it’s Blog™.

Q. Can a public service announcement be self-serving?

A. You bet your ass, it can!

Think about it. You think Sally Struthers makes us suffer through those ‘Feed the Children’ commercials just because she’s into the kids? Oh, come now. Sure, she probably cares and all, but she’s also angling for a gig in some Lifetime movie. Seriously, look at her career in the last twenty years. You think she wants to keep doing shit like Marie Osmond’s Merry Christmas? Please. That ‘cup of coffee a day’ crap is free publicity, which is the only kind she can afford these days.

Want another example? How about the Schoolhouse Rock folks? Now, you know they were all proud of themselves over those bits. They were showing off, bucking for promotions and jingle-writing spots. How else do you explain the stuff they chose to present? Conjunctions — harrumph! Nobody has problems with conjunctions; of all the parts of speech, they might be the most used and easiest to get a handle on. We really didn’t need an educational spot about conjunctions.

Ah, but it rhymed with shit, and so, that’s what they used. They could get funky with conjunctions, whether anyone needed the lesson or not. Heaven forbid that they tackle ‘gerunds’ or ‘dangling participles’. Important, sure — but what rhymes with ‘participle’? ‘Hearty tipples’? ‘Farty ripples’? ‘Party nipples’? Clearly, we’d have had a much different Saturday morning with that sort of material.

So, why do I bring this up? Well, I have a public service announcement of my own to make. And frankly, it’s even more self-serving than my examples. You see, you won’t be saving any children, or building any schools, or learning how bills become law from my announcement. At best, you might get a smile out of it, or a snippet that you can use yourself. And in the process, you’ll have to read a bunch of shit that I thought was clever.

(Um, at the time, anyway. The harsh light of day shines a bit unfavorably on some of these things now. You’ll no doubt see what I mean.)

Anyway, here’s the scoop. Things have changed a bit around here recently. Like, yesterday. And thanks to all of you — JadedJu and Suzette in particular, so far — who approve of the new design. So far it’s three ‘for’ (counting moi), and zero against. Those aren’t landslide numbers — yet! — but I’m pretty happy with the results. I think this layout’s a ‘keepah‘, as the Kennedys would say.

But, as you may have noticed, there’s no good spot for a tagline in this design. At least, not one as loooong as mine. So, I scrapped it. Easy come, easy go. Ah, but that brings up another little issue. You see, at the top of every post, just under the title, I’ve been including an ‘alternate tagline‘. I started doing this on my second (aka, next-to-first) post, and never stopped. I figured that I’d eventually get tired of my tagline and think of better ones, so why not just include them in posts? That way, I wouldn’t spend all my time futzing around with one meaningless part of the site, agonizing over which one I liked the very most bestest, and I could get on with writing the damned posts.

But now, there’s no tagline at all. And frankly, sometimes coming up with the alternate line for the day is the hardest fricking part of writing an entry. So, I think I’m going to retire this particular feature, and get back to simply telling stories about how stupid I and most of the people around me are. Oh, and my dog. Yeah, she’s a real shit-for-brains sometimes, too.

(Maybe it’s contagious. Who knows?)

So. I tell you all of that, to tell you this.

(This is the ‘Public Service Announcement’ part; hope you weren’t holding your breath all this time.)

Since I won’t be needing a tagline again anytime soon, I’m inviting all of you to use any or all of them that you like. Use them as your own mottos, or your blog names, or just work them into posts — whatever you want. Some of them are actually pretty good, if I do say so myself. (And some of them are pure crap that I scribbled down to get a post rolling. So sue me.) But all of them are yours now; go forth and spread the word to the six corners of the Internet.

(‘Cause we all know the Internet’s a hexagon, right? Right?)

As a matter of fact, I’m gonna make it easy for you.

(That’s just the kind of stand-up, do-right, and lots of other hyphenated words, kind of guy that I am.)

I’m going to repost each and every tagline I came up with — one hundred and twenty-four in all — right here, for you to browse and pick over, like some online trailer park yard sale. All I ask of you is this — if you use one of these, just drop me a comment. I like to know what my babies are up to. Hell, if you even like one, let me know. Or if you have some of your own that are better. Or you just want to say hi. Anything, really. I’m a comment whore; there’s no shame in that.

(And if there is, I’ll drink enough to drown it. Don’t you worry about me.)

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, comes the self-serving part. Well, some of that is obvious: I like to think that some of these lines are pretty cool, and that I came up with a helluva lot of them.

(Needlessly? Perhaps. Still, there they are. We don’t mock Stonehenge just because the druids didn’t know what the hell they were doing, now, do we?)

And so, I’m proud to show them off all at once, in a sort of tagline tour de force. Or, um, something. That might be going a bit far, even for me.

But — but, I say! — the self-servitatiousness doesn’t stop there! Oh, no — not by a longshot. Because, you see, I’m also going to take the time to painstakingly link each and every tagline to the post on which it appeared. Why? I don’t honestly know. It’s not like you can tell anything about the post from the tagline; they’re completely unrelated. If you click on any one of them, there’s no telling what sort of fracas you’ll end up in. Maybe something bad; maybe something good. You don’t know. But it’s another chance for you to make clicky-clicky on my little links, and read my shit, and that makes me feel good.

(In a strangely arousing way. You cheeky little monkey, you. Rawr!)

So, give it a whirl. Feed my ego. At least this is the last time you’ll have to read one of my taglines. You know, unless a really good one pops into my head. In the meantime, enjoy the show. And be glad it’s not costing you even the cost of ‘a cup of coffee a day’ to put up with this shit. Even I have my limits.

The Gallery of Taglines, ‘Where the Hell Was I?‘ Wing

Note: The very first post didn’t actually have it’s own tagline, so I’ve linked my original blog description to it. You wouldn’t want to miss one, now, would you? The lines are listed in the order in which they appeared.