Last Round Up At The Blog Award Corral

So, last time you were here, I talked about...

(Hmmmmmmm. I'm assuming you were here to read the last thing I wrote. I don't know that for a fact. For all I know, the last time you were here was during the Bush administration.)

Last time I was here, I told you about how I was going to get rid of a bunch of dead links on my sidebar. I have done that. I also said I was going to delete other stuff. What follows is some of that other stuff. They are the awards I've been given.

My reason for getting rid of them isn't because I've suddenly become less ego-driven and more humble. Even if I was, you wouldn't believe me if I told you I was, so why bother? No, the reason for getting rid of these is there's way too much crap on my sidebar. I want to give the blogs of folks I link to an actual chance at being visited. The more clutter on the sidebar, the less chance anyone will see the important stuff.

(I think that's why I'm doing it. Jungian analysis might prove otherwise. So might being sober for any appreciable length of time. Neither is likely to happen, so I'm sticking with the previous paragraph.)

Getting on with whatever this is, I'll warn you that I am about to hit a new low vis-a-vis republishing old and previously-seen material. What follows is all readily available on my sidebar as of this writing. Yes, that's right. I am making a post out of what you can see on my sidebar any old day just by scrolling down. Talk about being a slug! The reason I'm doing this (aside from, again, Jungian or possibly fermented reasons) is that, should I ever find myself regretting getting rid of these awards (let's say I suddenly find myself needing rock solid proof that I'm a bloviating asshole) I'll have a ready place to access them again.

Yup. That's my story. If you find it hard to swallow, feel free to make up your own. Have a drink first.

Well, in any case, here we go. Feel free to read this silly shit here, or on the sidebar (or not at all, if you want me to have wasted the previous five minutes of my life, you bastard.)

One last useless note: Clicking onto any of the awards as displayed here will bring you to the post I did about receiving the thing, if indeed I did a post about receiving the thing. If there isn't a link, it's because I either never wrote a post about it or I've just plain forgotten where I put it (and, if you really feel like it, you can search my entire archive for it. That ought to keep you busy for a while, as well as lose me about half my readership when they discover what a jerkwad I can be. It's a win-win!)

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This is an award I received. Obviously, somebody made a huge mistake.

(This was the first award I ever received. I was young, naive, and didn't realize that just about everybody who writes a blog ends up with some kind of an award sooner or later if they stick around long enough [I was 280 posts into blogging before I got this one, and it would be 411 before I got another.] Go ahead. Click onto the link. If you're used to me being a total dick when I talk about receiving an award, this might be the funniest entry of them all. I'm polite and thankful and gee-gosh-golly about the whole thing.)

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Here's Another Award I Received. Obviously, ANOTHER Mistake Was Made.

On the other hand, this seems to have been no mistake at all.

(And this here is where I started doling out the vitriol. It seemed appropriate, since I was the one insulted first, although not really. And, after I published it and saw the comments, I said to myself, "Self, this could be a good recurring theme. You'd have the joy of throwing dirt onto wonderfully kind people on a regular basis and they might even thank you for it. Damn. Life couldn't get much better than that!")

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Here's yet ANOTHER award some misguided soul bestowed upon me. Egads!

What in the hell is that thing, anyway?

(I don't believe I ever did an actual posting about receiving this one [or, since I can't find any posts about them, the 7 or 8 following, as hard as that is for me to believe now.] Too bad, because it was with this award that I decided to start commenting on these hideous gewgaws on the sidebar. Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!)

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This came from Crazy Cath, thus proving that she deserves the name.

And then, not too long after, she disappeared from the blogosphere altogether (although I have a feeling she may be lurking around here, even now, but just not telling me.) Her case was similar to some others. People (I use the term loosely) would give me an award, get what they expected from me when they did so, and then never be heard from again. That happened on a lot of these. It would be enough to make a man with more sense than I've ever shown become paranoid.

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This is getting ridiculous, people. Are you frickin' blind? I don't deserve any awards at all, let alone however many this makes. Lay off! I do NOT want to have to live up to these.

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Yet another award from some misguided soul. Million Dollar Friend? Me? Maybe in Guyanese Dollars...

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Must See Blog? THIS?!? You people are becoming more demented with each passing minute. The only way this blog is a "must see" is if you want a brain aneurysm from trying to work your way through my convoluted (and painfully parentheses filled) paragraphs full of lies, vulgarities, self-aggrandizations, and out-of-date references. If you came here from Sandra Ree's place, rest assured that, by actually directing you to this pile of perfervid putridity, she hates your guts.

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You people never learn. Here's another award. Or so I'm told, anyway. Apparently, it is written in Portuguese. It purportedly says all sorts of swell things. For all I know, it says, "Take this tree and shove it up your ass!" No, it couldn't say anything like that. Michelle is far too nice to tell me that. I think.

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Apparently, you get this one because you're a long-winded bastard who hijacks other people's comments sections. Finally, an award I deserve!

(I'm rather amazed I didn't find a post connected with this one. Anyway, it came from Jeni, one of my long-time and most-faithful readers, the poor soul.)

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In the same way that poop is fun to eat! Another award. Amazing. Somehow, I seem to have bamboozled whole bunches of otherwise sane people into thinking I am worthy of notice.
Of course, this award comes from Supreme Exalted Empress Lime, so I can't refuse it and expect to live.
(Cute girl. Maybe I'm supposed to be the pooch?)

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Supposedly, this was given to me because I keep it real. The mind boggles.

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In being awarded this spiffy new, um, award, part of the qualifications for it read as follows:
[these bloggers] are not interested in self-aggrandizement.
Beelzebub on jet-powered roller skates! Me? Not interested in self-aggrandizement?
My every waking thought concerns self-aggrandizement.
But I'm taking the award, anyway, because, well, see the previous sentence.

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I Em Onnurred!

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Aarrgghh! It's coming to get me!

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Aarrgghh! Michelle Hickman Gave Me PD!

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When life gives you lemons, tell life to go and fuck itself.

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I Jiggled Her Jell-O!

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Finally! An Award That Makes Sense!

(The stupendously wonderful thing about this post is that right about now, if you look over to your left, you'll see that what you already read up above is now showing up on the sidebar!)

(Well, that's if you're reading this now, and not a year or two later. In that case, I have no idea what's on the sidebar to the left. Probably porn of some sort.)

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Friend Of Brassieres Perry Como Flowers? WTF?

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Accepted with the proviso that I don't have to eat any crawfish.

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From Eddie Bluelights, internationally famous duck fondler and Queen Elizabeth impersonator!

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Well, At Least ONE Person Finds Me Entertaining...

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I Like To Slather 'em In Ketchup And Wrap Them In Baloney!

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These, Too!

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HIGH-larious? Might there be something illicit here? A bit of Barbie contraband, perhaps? *snort*

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I Was Named Something-Or-Other Of The Year! Wahoo!

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I am also the Adrian Adonis of Articles, as well as the Hulk Hogan of Hieroglyphics!

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I believe I may be Pooh. And I am also apparently some character from A. A. Milne.

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The Honest Crap Award. Well, I certainly deserve THIS one! Oh, wait - it's The Honest SCRAP Award.
I have no idea if I deserve THAT. I'm keeping it anyway.

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A woman in an apron? Wow! That's What I Call Over The Top!

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'cause I'm like all smart 'n stuff

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'cause I'm like all melted 'n stuff? Or I'm funny - haha - like a clown? Or I'm scary? Or something.

Damned if I know.

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From Eddie Bluelights, Internationally Famous Duck Fondler & Queen Elizabeth Impersonator! No, wait. I already said that up above with another of these travesties he foisted upon me. I'll just call him a big poofter and see how long it takes him to find out. Tee-Hee!

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In case you're wondering, it's an asshat!

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By this time in the game, do I really need to make another joke? I mean, if you've scrolled down this far on the sidebar, you've certainly seen enough of my style to make up your own. Go for it.
No need to tell me about it, though, OK?

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The Spinning Sun Award For Post Of The Week (from Everyday Goddess)

(Except I don't think it's spinning because I'm useless when it comes to technical aspects of blogging. Actually, I'm useless in most ways, so it should come as no surprise that I'm versatile in that way, too.)

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And now, I come to the realization that there are a couple of awards, given to me in recent times, that I never even had the decency to put on my sidebar at all. Here they are, with appropriately snotty commentary.

This one came from Sweet Pea (who is not Popeye's bastard child, but rather a lovely young woman with a resemblance to... no, if I tell you that here, it will be giving away most of any reason to click onto it and read the actual post wherein I accept the damned thing.)

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Oops! Lime gave me the same damn award just a couple of months later.
That means I had an extra excuse to release the venom!

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And, finally, here's one that came from Sick Bitch. Yes, that's her blog handle, not my opinion.
I think she's lovely and only semi-demented, which is the same as me except vice-versa.

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One more, again from Sweet Pea. She so enjoyed being flayed the first time around,
she offered her fine arse up to me again, silly child!

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And that, my friends (or, what's left of my friends), is that. I tried my damnedest to make this the first blog I ever wrote to actually extend below the end of my sidebar, but I failed (and, as explained earlier, that's why these things are going the way of the dodo.)

I am done with accepting awards, so don't send me any more. They will be righteously ignored.

However, if you like these baubles, and want one of your own, feel free to take one or two and plaster 'em up at your place. The only rule I require you to follow is that you don't tell a single soul where you got them.

If you want to tell some married souls, OK.

Soon, with more better stuff (but a much less crowded sidebar, sometime next week.)

Defenestration

My promise to you: Today's post does not feature wombats, bugs, or Barbara Streisand.

Moving on to other things...

For a long time now, I've had a desire to defenestrate.

(That sounds perverse, yes, and that's why I chose to use the word. It doesn't truly describe what I'm about to do, as it actually means "to toss out of a window", but it sounds slimy, so I couldn't pass it up even if it's wrong. So sue me, Daniel Webster.)

The three or four masochists among you who continue reading my pieces to the end every time you stop by have certainly noticed how far the crap on my sidebar extends below the bottom of anything I write. And, God knows, I write some damn long pieces, so that means there's a lot of useless shit on my sidebar. In the interest of providing old friends and new visitors a less-cluttered Suldog experience, I'm going to trim things down.

Before I do, however, I'm going to explain what will get tossed, and why. That way, if you happen to be the owner of something I'm going to toss, and you care enough to not want it tossed, you can contact me and plead for the bloggity life of whatever it is. I'll listen patiently, then do exactly as I damn well please. So, yes, feel free to beg, but don't be surprised if your thing hits the pavement despite your protestations.

The first things to go will be links to blogs that haven't published anything during the previous 45 days. This will involve some good old friends, and that pains me, but I figure 45 days is long enough to come up with at least one new idea even if you're soft enough in the head to have me as a friend. If you haven't published in that length of time, and you've offered me no good excuse for not having done so, consider yourself defenestrated. Out the virtual window you go, Bub!

Next to go will be links to folks who don't have links back to me. They name streets after you - One Way! If you aren't willing to deface your sidebar with me, I'm not giving you a place to crash, either. Hasta la defenestratio, chump!

Not everything I give the ol' heave-ho to will be a link. Some will be pieces of ephemera that may have irritated you as much as they did me. I'm talking about awards, of course. While I've had some fun with them in the past, insulting hell out of whomever gave me one, I'm tired of that game. I'm never accepting another one. And I see no need to keep those that I did accept hanging around and stinking up the premises. I'm going to go about the defenestration of these in a casual way, though, as my ego is too big to just toss 'em all in one fell swoop (which begs the question of there being other sorts of swoops, but let's not worry about that now.) I'll begin by deep-sixing those that are linked to non-functioning blogs, and then later on (as my ego enters a refractory period) kill those that still send you to someone living. They will all go eventually.

That takes care of the sidebar cleansing. One other thing I'll be doing (which won't affect the look of this blog, but I feel it only right to mention it) is a general purge of posts. I am going to go through my backlog and delete anything poorly written or personally embarrassing.

(Ha-ha-ha, wise ass. No, that doesn't mean everything here will disappear.)

I've contemplated this for quite a while. There are a lot of hideously-constructed, poorly-worded, ill-conceived, too-many-dashes (or parentheses) pieces of excrement clogging up the cesspool of my back pages. They will be assigned for relocation (the relocation area being the eternal void, so if you're a Buddhist, or otherwise believe in some form of reincarnation, then perhaps you can look forward to them returning some day as either planks in the Republican Party platform or Hallmark greeting cards featuring chimpanzees, depending upon their karma.)

The last time I said I was planning to do this, my brother-in-law strongly opposed it. He said that it wasn't cricket - or words to that effect - since a blog is supposed to record one's day-to-day thoughts, feelings, etc., and going back in time to revise history wasn't fair. He had a point, but I'm tired of having those skeletons lurking in my literary closet. On the off chance that some dope is impressed with my current writing, and wants to offer me bazillions of dollars to do this sort of thing on a regular basis, I don't want the ship of my dreams scuttled because of some random split infinitive (if I ever figure out what in hell a split infinitive is, I mean.)

(By the way, when I say "embarrassing", I only mean in a literary sense. Most of you know by now that I have a high threshold for personal embarrassment, so stories concerning masturbation, inability to manage anger, evidence of my unsuitability for public consumption, and other such things that folks with some restraint might have had second thoughts about making public, will likely remain extant rather than become extinct.)

Anyway, that's what's going to happen. It will begin next week as I have the time, so if you feel something of yours (or something of mine for which you feel an unnatural affection) might be headed for oblivion, start pleading obsequiously now. Otherwise, it may well be gone the next time you come here.

(Of course, that assumes you'll be returning, which is a leap of no little faith considering the spectacularly unreadable drek I just gave you.)

Soon, with consolidated stuff.

Exclamations Of Disgust

[Quirky has just discovered a wombat in her panties. What should she be saying? I'd go with "Yikes!", but...]

[There are two possibilities for envisioning that, by the way. The first, and the one I had in mind, was that she looked down into her lady-drawers and saw a wombat roaming around. The second, which I just now thought of - and which gives you some idea of the whirlwind of activity in my brain - would be that she looked up from, say, reading Lady Chatterley's Lover, and saw a wombat wearing her panties. For purposes of this blog, feel free to use whichever amuses you the most.]

[Actually, there's a third possibility. Quirky might have dressed some wombats in cute little outfits (maybe a sweater and Capri pants, like a tiny wombat Laura Petrie) but then one of the wombats stripped down to its teensy little wombat panties and... I'm talking far too much about wombats and panties. Sorry.]

[Above: Wombat
Below: Laura Petrie]

[This makes five parentheticals, two digressions, and I haven't even gotten to the beginning of this piece. That does not bode well for you, gentle reader.]

[Here comes the actual beginning of the piece, probably, but you'll still have to visit someplace else. I do appreciate the effort.]

In reply to THIS POST over at Lime's place, I said the following...

Eeyucky!

(I'm never quite sure concerning the gradation levels of such exclamations when made in replying to a blog post about something disgusting. "Ugh" is probably the least, with "Oh, Puke!" perhaps being the most. "Ewwww!" falls somewhere between, I suppose, as does the [to the best of my knowledge] new exclamation I've invented here, and which I hope serves the purpose adequately.)

So, that's what I said in response to Lime's story about... well, if you clicked onto the link, you know (and if you didn't, I'm not going to tell you, you slacker.) I'm not sure why, but this seems important to me at the moment. There should probably be disgusting standards of some sort, shouldn't there? Obviously, if one person says "Gee! That's kind of grody!" and another person says, "Sweet Merciful Jesus, kill me immediately so I needn't be cursed to live with the memory of this vile and grotesque sight!", it's relatively easy to divine which person is more upset. However, where do these two people fall on the discomfited scale?

Commenter # 1 - "Oog!"

Commenter # 2 - "Bleh!"

We can safely assume neither one is delighted, but beyond that? Your guess is as good as mine. So, what I'd like to know is how YOU express yourself, from least disgusted to most disgusted. What are your usual expressions of disgust? Let's say I showed you this...

And this...

What would you say in the comments?

(Naturally, I leave it up to you to decide which one is worse.)

Soon, with (Feh!) more better stuff.

[Bug Sandwich from HERE.]

(Oh, and if neither Babs nor the bug sandwich is gross enough for you, you might visit Growing Up In Waldron and look at The Chicken Choker.)

(No, not that kind of chicken choker.)

(Just go there, for goodness' sakes.)

The Fallout Candy

After exploring the topic of Finding Stuff, I realized that I hadn't told one of the more interesting stories related to that subject. Here it is.

In the mid-1960's, when this story takes place, fallout shelters were still something that people thought seriously about. There wasn't the full-blown paranoid hysteria about atomic warfare that seemed to pervade some segments of the populace during the 1950's, leading to folks actually constructing their own personal below-ground fallout shelters in their backyards, but the Iron Curtain was still up, Berlin was divided by a wall, and nuclear war was still considered a reasonable possibility.

(As a child, I never imagined a world without The Soviet Union, The Berlin Wall, or a cessation of what was known as The Cold War. That I even feel the need to supply informative links, in case someone reading this has no idea what those things were, is a small thrill. It's nice to realize that some of the situations that crazy adults thought of back then have actually gotten better.)

Anyway, nuclear war...

Places to hide yourself from the resulting radiation were designated by the sort of signage seen above. Most of them in the Boston area were in school basements and other such places that no kid in his right mind would ever want to be trapped in for a few years while things cooled down, but in our neighborhood of Dorchester Lower Mills, the nearest public fallout shelter was the firehouse on the corner of Temple and River.

[The firehouse - photo from HERE, an excellent site for information concerning Boston firehouses.]

The firehouse hadn't housed any actual firemen or firefighting equipment since the late 50's. It's only real function, aside from being the place where everyone would run like deranged lunatics when an atom bomb fell on us, was as a rehearsal hall for some neighborhood members of a drum and bugle corp named The Crusaders. Its non-proximity to residences made it a good spot for these teens to blow their trumpets and such without disturbing too many folks.

(Not to digress far afield, but we younger kids thought the guys in The Crusaders were gods. We'd often hang out by the big garage door of the firehouse and listen to their rehearsals. When one of them actually deigned to talk to us, it was as though the kid spoken to had been knighted. The words were usually something like, "Hey! Don't touch that tuba, ya little bastid!", or something similarly kind and heartwarming, but we didn't care. They could do no wrong.)

After a while, the firehouse wasn't even used for rehearsals. It was completely abandoned, and fell into general disrepair. Tall weeds sprouted in the surrounding yard and litter piled up in the driveways. And that's where our story truly begins.

Stephen Murphy and I were walking around the neighborhood one summer day, with nothing in particular planned as entertainment, and we passed by the old firehouse. We were about 9 or 10 at the time. We took a detour off of Temple Street and onto the grounds of the firehouse itself. We circled around outside of it, poking in the weeds and trash for whatever might be of interest to young boys. We came to a door. We didn't expect it to be unlocked, but we decided to try the handle, anyway.

The door opened.

With about as little hesitation as a Democrat offered an opportunity to raise taxes, we went inside. While we had seen some of the firehouse during the drum and bugle rehearsals, much of the place remained a mystery to us. And is there anything in the world quite so fascinating to a couple of preteen boys as a firehouse? The mere thought of actually being able to slide down the firepole without anyone telling us not to do so was enough to make it one of the best days we would likely ever have.

We crept about in the hot and dusty interior. There wasn't much of anything in the place, other than a few ramshackle wooden chairs and a dilapidated desk, and after sliding down the pole a couple of times each (which was not done without hesitation on my part, as it seemed inordinately higher than I had imagined it) it didn't seem like there was much else to do there. Then Stephen tried a door we had assumed was a closet. We found that it opened into another room we had yet to explore. And, inside of that room, we found The Fallout Candy.

A large barrel-shaped container, made of a hard cardboard of some sort, was the only thing in the room. It was imprinted with a "civil defense" symbol.

When we got closer, we saw that it had metal-ringing on top and bottom, and a metal lid. It was somewhat similar to this...

... but it did not bear markings identifying it as being full of supplies for the toilet. With the direct logic of youth, we decided the best way to find out what was inside was to open it. So, we pried off the lid and found, much to our immediate delight, that it was loaded to the brim with CANDY.

We could hardly have been happier had a genie popped out of it.

It was hard candy, in three flavors - raspberry, orange, and lemon/lime - and it looked like it wasn't rotten or anything, so we each had a couple of pieces. We didn't die, so we decided to take the barrel and have the rest of the candy for ourselves at a later time.

As we dragged the thing home - which wasn't easy, as it probably weighed between 30 and 35 pounds, it was an unwieldy shape, we were just kids, and we had to haul it up one hill and down another for a total of three blocks - we just naturally assumed that our parents would let us keep it. After all, it was United States of America government-issue food, even if it was candy, and we had been taught for years that Communists were evil but our government was beneficent and kind, so if you couldn't trust government candy, what in hell could you trust?

We brought it inside. My Mom and Irene Murphy inspected it. The barrel did have writing on it, which we hadn't noticed in the dim light of the windowless room in which we found it, but it gave scant information. What it did seem to say was that the candy was jammed full of vitamins and minerals. We all figured out it was meant as a ration of some sort should there have been a nuclear attack and folks had become trapped in the firehouse for a century or two. It had been sealed tight, so it didn't appear to present a danger from being spoiled or contaminated (and, anyway, it was hard candy, and that stuff has a shelf life similar to petrified wood, which was probably why it had been chosen in the first place as the vehicle for conveying vitamins to people whose skin would be peeling off due to radiation poisoning.)

The upshot of it was that we kept it in the basement for a few months and, every so often, Stephen or I would eat a piece. We showed it to our buddies, and they had a few pieces, too. But, even though it was free candy, it wasn't the sort you felt like gobbling down over and over. We got tired of it in a relatively short time. We finally threw the whole shebang into the rubbish after the container started getting wet and moldy from being stored in our leaky cellar.

The firehouse was eventually torn down and now there's nothing on that corner but a vacant lot. So far as I know, neither Stephen or myself suffered any deleterious effects from eating the fallout candy. As a matter of fact, what with all of the vitamins in it, we might have been the healthiest kids in the neighborhood. Had there been a nuclear war, I suppose we might have felt a pang or two of guilt about moving the only food in the fallout shelter to our own house, but there wasn't one, so we didn't.

And, if the government has been looking for that missing candy all these years, and they decide they might want to press charges against us, this is all a lie.

Soon, with more better stuff.