Blogsday 2007

Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)

It’s here again. No, not Groundhog Day, our annual rite of the dead of winter. It’s the third-annual Blogsday, our bloggy riff on Bloomsday.

In case you’re new to this party, it all started two years ago when Chelsea suggested a novel way to pay homage to the existing homage to James Joyce. Brendan explained it this way last year:

Taking as our model Bloomsday, Dublin’s very real June 16, 1904 in which James Joyce set his very fictional Ulysses, we took a look at one day of the blogosphere, in our case Tuesday, June 14, 2005. We gathered an hour’s worth of blog posts — about Britney Spears, about buying a car, about coming home from Iraq, about a night at a barbecue joint — and read them on air.

Brendan, in the 2006 Blogsday post on Open Source.

We’re doing it again. June 16th is a Sunday this year, so we’re celebrating a bit early: we’ll record the show next Thursday, the 14th. And the search has begun. We’ve chosen yesterday — TUESDAY, JUNE 5, 2007 — as the arbitrary but still official day for blog posts. Anything posted between midnight and midnight on June 5th is fair game.

We’ve learned a few lessons in the last few years, chief among them that brevity makes the blogsday world go round. This should be a fast-moving show, a sort of pointilist account. In the post-game analysis after the first show, I called it, somewhat breathlessly, “a symphonic, mosaic portrait of our nation as written by a legion of writers — some famous, some not — on one day. ONE DAY!” But we can only get a sense for the grandeur of that portrait if it moves quickly. And it will only move quickly if the posts themselves are succinct. Stories are good; moments in time are better.

Besides that, the sky’s the limit. Give us the personal and the political, the petty and the profound. Help us craft a portrait of the online world that does justice to the real one.

How you can help

• Check your favorite blogs (or your own), and if you find something fabulous that was written on June 5, grab the best chunk of the post and leave it in the comment thread, along with the blogger’s name, the blog title, the time it was posted on the 5th, and a permalink — the URL that links directly to the post, not to the front page of the blog. You can often get to the permalink by clicking on the timestamp at the bottom of the post. More on permalinks here.
• Run some blog searches. There are a few solid search engines out there that search only blogs — we’re partial to Google Blogsearch and Technorati. Start there. You should be able to sort the results of your searches by date so that you can weed out anything that wasn’t posted on the 5th.
• We’ve found that one of the best ways to find stories in the blogosphere is to search for random, mundane words: canteloupe, flyswatter, sand. Since we’ll be reading these on the radio, it helps if the posts are rich in visual description, so we like to search for nice visual adjectives, too: crusty, soapy, pendulous.
• Keep a listening audience in mind. Try reading the posts out loud as you search. Dialogue can work well for our purposes, so can poetry. We bring in two great local actors to read the posts on air, and we love to give them beefy, theatrical material to work with.

Stephanie Clayman

Actor

Greg Steres

Actor

I accidentally poked myself in the thigh with a syringe of Bovine Blackleg Immunization yesterday, so any fears I ever had of developing the dreaded condition are gone for good. I can finally relax.

Ree, Pack of Marboro Lights, Confessions of a Pioneer Woman, June 5, 2007.

Is this war in the present tense, here in America? Iraq is on the other side of the globe and the events there are mostly reported in the past tense. And yet when I walk through a Home Depot and hear a sheet of plywood dropped on a pallet, I hear an airy breath followed by an explosive crack–the signature echo of an incoming mortar round. And when I listen well enough, late at night, I sometimes hear one of our Iraqi translators, Saier, repeating to me: ‘The wrong is not in the religion; the wrong is in us.’

Brian Turner, War in the Present Tense, Donkey O.D., June 5, 2007.

I was only vaguely teary at the airport when we said goodbye, and I thought I’d get away from it without crying, but then as soon as I rounded the corner at the security check, I was basically sobbing, and while I am mostly okay, I keep thinking about things and get all teary again.

Balefully, The Fancatus Bureau of Incest, LiveJournal, June 5, 2007.

Why am I drawn to that woman so much? I perfectly well know there’s next to no chances that i’ll see her again, but still she’s haunting my dreams and every time I end up crying while I’m sleeping. I met a very nice woman, she slept at my place a couple of times and the last two times she asked why I was crying in my sleep. She told me it wasn’t little sobs, I was crying like a baby, with tears and everything, crying as if my father or mother had died.

Mr. Lex, Haunting Dreams, Welcome to My World, June 5, 2007.

A pot of tea.

The smell of laundry that’s dried on the line.

The sound of an owl hooting whilst you’re lying in bed.

How much better the mouse works after you’ve picked all the crud off the bottom.

Anon, Simple Pleasures, Thursday’s Child…Has Far to Go, June 5, 2007.

My Shins Are Stupid. I wish they’d darken up a bit.

The problem is, they’re always in the shade. My broad and well-muscled back prevents any sunlight whatsoever from getting to my shins. Plants die from lack of sunlight when I ride by.

Fatty, I Contemplate My Shins, and Find Them Wanting, Fat Cyclist, June 5, 2007.

I find it hard not to read everything and anything . . . including the Customer Complaints Book that I saw hanging by a tatty string in the toiletries aisle in Bon Marche, Borrowdale. Many of the complaints revolved around the High Prices of commodities but someone else took the supermarket to task for keeping the fleshy parts of pig heads for the staff and leaving only the teeth and noses for customers.

Bev Clark, Emergency sex and other desperate measures, Kubatana.Net, June 5th, 2007.

If life is invariably fatal, cancer is a kind of accelerant that God squirts on you, His human charcoal briquet.

Michael Little, Unremitting Failure, Futility, June 5, 2007.

Mandy gets the results from her latest tests, tomorrow. We will know almost without doubt what type of cancer Mandy has and what, if anything can be done. We will find out if she will have surgery next week. After the meeting with the doctor, Mandy will go to her first chemo appointment.

Sodapopnskii, If wishes were horses, I would still want a pony, LiveJournal, June 5, 2007.

I have fallen head-over-heels in love with Mandy the market-trader from Milton Keynes. She smells of hot dogs and counterfeit perfume.

Andre Jordan, Ordinary Love Stories: Mandy, A Beautiful Revolution: Blog, June 5, 2007.

And when we picked you up you didn’t want to leave without showing me the Dora potty, so I was all, fine, let’s have a look at this Dora potty. So we walked into the bathroom, and you ran right over to it, and before I could stop you, you hugged it. You hugged a toilet.

Heather Armstrong, Newsletter: Month Forty, Dooce, June 5, 2006.

Both Erin and I have been known to kiss Josie on her cute little mouth. We both love taking baths with her, and we both do an inordinate amount of pinching and kissing of her fat little body, in particular her thighs, which now have these wonderful, curvy little tiers of fat. It’s not a sexual thing (duh) but it’s certainly a deeply physical thing.

Almondjoy, My Baby, My Girlfriend, Baby Daddy, June 5, 2007,

I have decided to focus on and seek things out that make me happy.

Hawaiian dancing makes me happy.

Julie Bo Boolie, What Makes Me Happy, World According to Julie, June 5, 2007,

There is something about mixing Shakespeare with zombies that is simply irresistible to me. Can’t say why for sure. It’s just how I’m wired I guess.

Joy, Shakespeare and Zombies, I’ve got a crush on…ME!, June 5, 2007.

You know when you leave water on the stove for too long and the water starts boiling over the side? Maybe you even left the lid on the pot, so now the thing is bucking and jumping off the pot as the bubbles slime their way to freedom and down on to your stove. Right now, that’s how I feel about my job.

digital_dave, Boiling Over, The Karmic Restitution Tour, June 5, 2007.

I’m a dentist, and I have a nurse called Cookie.

She has headphone wires sticking out of her ears most of the day and – for fear of appearing out of touch – I tend to keep my thoughts on through-brain irradiation to myself.

Still, on Friday last week, with rubber dam stretched like an elastic lettuce leaf across Mrs Pinkleblower’s enormous mouth, Cookie removed one of the wires from her brain and asked me if I had said anything. I told her I had been speaking to her for the past half hour, to which she stared at me with what appeared to be disbelief. She said she hadn’t heard a word but if I wanted to ‘ramble on’ I should start a blog.

Stan Johns, Cookie’s Great Idea, Half Dentist, June 5, 2007.

So, I’m trying to decipher the difference between movement and hiccups. With the baby that is. I can tell when it’s a kick or punch instead of simple movement. But what do hiccups feel like? All in all, trying to explain to someone what any of this feels like is pretty difficult.

All star me, Disjointed Thoughts, Incognitus Scriptor, June 5, 2007.

While Erin was breathing and pushing (and waiting), and then breathing and pushing again, I was realizing, much to my horror, joy, and more horror, that I was going to become a dad.

Robison Wells, She’s Having My Baby, Six LDS Writers and a Frog, June 5, 2007.

What on earth am I going to do? I was thinking of applying for a job at the AMF Bowling Centre, just so I have an excuse to hang around the place. Perhaps I will pursue the dream of a career in radio. What I should do is try and get something decent written and look for a publisher. I just don’t know what to do. Because I don’t have that many skills. I’m of course almost employable in any call centre now, having been trained at Telstra.

Jaguar7482, Shots Are Flowing, THe Daily Grind You Into the Ground Show, June 5, 2007.

I was slammed today.

It is good because “idle hands are the devil’s work shop.” That’s an old cliche meaning that if you stay busy you will not have time for Satan to get to you. In theory that maybe sounds good, but I believe it is that very concept that plagues our churches today. If we stay too busy to stop and read the Breath of God and ask Jesus Christ to be glorified through our actions each day, we will then become powerless busy-bodies. Our Lord tells us that the important duties in life that keep us from God are not really duties at all but sin.

JRoe, What a Day, JRoe Live, June 5, 2007.

My gameplan for today was to skip breakfast and go to McDonalds for lunch, where I got a McChicken sandwich for $1.10 and picked up some free condiments.

So far, so good, although I am already ready for a snack.

Congresswoman Barbara Lee, Congresswoman Barbara Lee Joins the Food Stamp Challenge, Congressional Food Stamp Challenge, June 5, 2007.

Paris Hilton’s stint in an LA jail is getting the American ink, along with CNN’s self-serving over-coverage of the two premature presidential debates in New Hampshire. There was a little oxygen left for one 40th anniversary — of Sgt. Pepper — but none for the 40th anniversary being covered by news media outside this country almost universally: the Six Day War.

Harry Shearer, It Was Forty Years Ago Today, Kinda, Huffington Post, June 5, 2007.

Well we did it again, security cameras be damned! We are number-one murder capital superstars. The top of the heap. More dead per capita than Gary, Indiana! Even Detroit!

Humid Haney, Hey, Thanks Gary, Surviving and Living the Dream in Post-Katrina New Orleans, June 5, 2007.

I remember visits where I would stay with my Grandma, my Uncle Norm and his clan or my Uncle Gene and his brood. Sure, there’d be the brief bout of home sickness, but it was nothing that a trip to the park or some Cadbury candy bars couldn’t fix.

You know, now that I am a parent with a 3-1/2 year old I have to wonder if my folks didn’t bundle us off to get some peace and quiet for a week.

Craig D, Let’s Get Away From It All, Who Really Cares, Anyway?, June 5, 2007.

I decided yesterday that I would get a grasp on the summer holiday and have the children begin their first Official Day of Summer Vacation with productivity; the chores began at 9 a.m. Loren was in the dog yard with his new weed eater, Cass was in the front yard with her new electric grass trimmers. Devon and I were in the flower beds pulling weeds and planting petunias. All was well until about 10 when the older two met up, she was bored and he was looking to take a break, and the arguments began. By 10:10 I was yelling at them both and wondering if there is a convent somewhere willing to accept witchy, willful reheaded ‘tween girls and if there is some sort of work camp accepting mouthy, wiggly, otter-like 13 year-olds.

Caloden, I don’t know why I even bother, Caloden, June 5, 2007.

Recently in a fit of uncharacteristic generosity I bought my girls the latest Avril Lavigne CD. Because they’d heard of Avril Lavigne from a friend in their grade one class, and they’d heard her music and they loved it, and I thought it would make a great out-of-the-blue present for them. I don’t regret buying it because they’re deriving great satisfaction from it, and I bought the sanitized version at Walmart, the one with at least one of the bad words partially bleeped out, but…

…now my seven-year old girls are wandering around the house saying “damn” all the time. “The best damn thing” they say.

Joe, Watch Your *&^%^ing Language, Assorted Nonsense, June 5, 2007.

Sunday we couldn’t make any plans because Mike was waiting for a call when the autopsy was complete and the body hopefully identified. Once they ID’ed him, Mike and the other Detectives would have to start doing interviews of every person in the dead guys life.

Lisa Mulvey, Anyone see a problem with this?, Lifestyles of the Easily Obsessed, June 5, 2007.

Somehow I penetrated the crowd and found myself right in front of the locked entrance where all the action was. Inside, an elderly woman maybe in her late 30s or early 40s lay unconscious on the floor.

Natasha Msonza, Yesterday, Kubatana.Net, June 5, 2007.

We always describe amputations as “below knee” or “above knee”. Every time the doctor told his mother and wife that he had a below-knee amputation he would sit up, mad. He wanted to make sure we said he only lost his feet.

SPC Ian Wolfe, Fifteen Months and Counting, THE SANDBOX (A Doonesbury milblog), June 5, 2007.

There are Russians outside my window. They are talking in harsh tones. I wonder if they’re friends.

Tony Rat, Manifesto, Cat Waiter, June 5, 2007.

1. Buildings.

2. Muffins.

3. Comb-overs.

Anna, Things That Are Big in New York, Little.Red.Boat, June 5, 2007.

Turns out, I breached the manly code…Men don’t want the immasculating experience of collapsing face first out of “plank position” because they slipped on their own sweat smeared all over the floor.

Caryn and Dan, This crazy thing that girls do…, Can You Ouwehandle This?, June 5, 2007.

I realized I was exhausted so I just fell down on the floor and let the cold water run down my body. I was exhilarated and started laughing like some madman.

Idai, Freedom, My Life Review, June 5, 2007.

Am I awake now? Or am I only dreaming that I am? how can I possibly find out? I just pinched myself.

I often pinch myself in my dreams. just to make sure that I am in control. A dream that is solid enough to survive a pinch is a seriously fun dream.

Witold Riedel,

A Mix Of A Freshly Ground Day.Dream, witoldriedel.com, June 5, 2007.

My chocolates seem to disappear into the air. It is making me peeved because of I HAVE NOT TRIED A SINGLE ONE AND SOMEONE HAS THE FREAKING GUTS TO EAT HALF THE BOX WITHOUT MY PERMISSION.Prime suspect: My lil’ cousins who had came to stay over and have been sneaking surreptitiously near the fridge.

efmw87, Who Stole My Chocolates?, As My Mouth Prattles, June 5, 2007.

Listen. I need to tell you this before I’m too wordless and powerless to go on, because I’m fading fast. Literally fading. Gone before dawn, I’m told. So. Listening? Are you?

You will no doubt have seen the cardboard box in the hallway. It was the largest one I could find. The box, I mean. Not the hallway. Why? Because I’m clearing out, that’s why.

An Unreliable Witness, Packed, Wrapped, and Folded, An Unreliable Witness, June 5, 2007.

When I put my hand on her, I realized that she had large areas of skin that were necrotizing — literally rotting on her body — with pockets of what I was pretty sure was pus underneath. I stuck a needle into one of the fluid pockets and got out a brown-grey fluid that looked and smelled like raw sewage. When I stained some of the fluid later to look at it under the microscope, I could identify at least three distinct populations of bacteria.

Mel, Life in The (Animal)ER, Cabezalana, June 5, 2007.

Remember last Saturday? I bought eight pairs of new socks.

What happens to the old socks or ones that get holes…If it is too greasy or ugly-dirty, then just throw them away. But mostly they can be used and then just put in the laundry and will be ready again. Cheap rags that will last a very long time.

Mr. Crazy, Twice Used, My Fun House, June 5, 2007.

We sat on my couch and talked and laughed. Talked about our exes and our kids (he has an 8 year old girl). He marvels at my intelligence and maturity. Says that I’m a lot different than other women that he’s known. And then, out of nowhere he starts saying that he’s too old for me. Granted, he is 42 (looks like late 20’s). I laughed and explained to him my preference for dating older men. I told him that he was lying to me and that I thought he had a girlfriend and this was what he saw as an easy way to get out of what we’d started.

Jasmine?s Momma, Help Me to Understand, Jasmine?s ?Mommy?, June 5, 2007.

Ok, living with five other people is good. And I do like all of them. I just need some me time. Time just to zone out. At least I got my own room. It’s not a bad lil’ room. I need like a little tv tray or something to put my keyboard on. That would be sweet.

Chucky, Alone Time, The Really Super Duper Kinda Okay Really Great On Tuesday Guy, June 5, 2007.

I told her caseworker that Mom had not been with me in the past month and that no, she could not live with me when she gets out. I told her I would help her in whatever capacity I could, but that she cannot live with me.

I felt guilty as heck about it afterwards and still feel sick to my stomach about it. I wish I didn’t feel guilty about it, but I do, and it’s eating me up.

rachelpennington, Yakkity Yak, How I see It, June 5, 2007.

People die. It happens. More often than not, people die when their time has come. It’s never easy to say goodbye, but it seems somehow less hard to swallow when an 86-year-old man dies after a lengthy illness surrounded by extended family. It’s a good death.

Couz, Eye See You, Tales from the Emergency Room, June 5, 2007.

If there is one phrase I’m sick of hearing it is “Sally get your foot off that accelerator!!!”

I know I’m just learning to drive, but do I need to CREEP ABOUT like we’re in a spaz-chariot?

My teacher Alan now says his nerves cannot take a lesson any more than THREE times a week.

HUH!

sallypointzero, Driving Lessons, LiveJournal, June 5, 2007.

I always like going to Aunt Ida’s house in the springtime, the zydeco music blasting from the living room, smells of the barbecue and German chocolate cake coming from the kitchen and the slapping of dominoes on the card table…grandma using her two fingers to eat her famous mustard greens while reminiscing about the old days when things were pure….

Michelle, 8th Grade, Aunt Ida’s House, A Poem A Day, June 5, 2007.