Post Urination Drip

Don’t look so shocked. Someone out there had to have the nads to bring this shameful secret to light, and I’m just the Geek to do it. PUD has haunted mankind since the dawn of time and no one has ever mentioned it. Because we’re all ashamed to tell the world that we pee our pants.

Don’t look so high and mighty; you know it’s happened to you.

Oh yes, it has. No one likes to talk about it, we all pretend that it doesn’t happen, but it does. And the truly sad thing is; everyone knows it. It’s a fact of nature that cannot be denied and no matter what we do to try and stop it, we never will. We shake, we wipe, we squeeze, we even do little dances and pray in front of the porcelain alter in the hopes that just once, just this one frickin time, it won’t happen to us. And every time, every single time, the porcelain gods laugh as that one last drop spreads its wet warmth around our loins and we spend the next half-hour doing the “Am I showing wetness” crotch-check. And then, as a final, cruel joke, because your crotch is now cold and wet, you swear you need to pee again.

And you know you don’t.

Every day we live in dread of the moment when PUD will happen to us. If a pharmaceutical company were to spend the time and money to create a pill that would eradicate PUD from the world I think they’d make billions, as long as they didn’t give it some stupid name like PUD-B-Gone, Urin-NOT or DripAway. No one would want to be caught dead carrying a little bottle with one of those names on it. Can you imagine the water-cooler talk if someone saw you popping DripAway at the office?

“Hey Frank, you hear about GeekMan?”
“No. What’s up?”
“He’s got a… little… problem.”
“What? Drugs?”
“No. Worse. He’s got a [vague hand gesture] little problem.”
“What? Oh. OH! You mean…?” [spills a drop of water on floor]
“Yeah.”
“Wow. The poor schmuck.”
“I know.”
“We should do something.”
[awkward silence]
“Do you think Hallmark has a card for this?”

Web Log Awards season is upon us again, and this year instead of simply keeping quiet I’m going to go ahead and speak my mind. In fact, I’m not even going to spell check or take the time to craft this post into my usual format of short paragraph, statement, short paragraph. I’m not even going to try to make it funny. I’m just going to speak my mind for once and let the dust settle where it will and if I upset some people so be it, because what I really want to do is make everyone think about these awards in a different light and maybe, just maybe, change them into something much better for everyone. You see, when I look around the internet I see that people who are taking these things as seriously as if they were some kind of REAL awards ceremony and I don’t understand why because they’re not.

Now, hold on there, Sparky. Don’t get all righteous on me just yet.

I know what you’re thinking right now and you’re wrong. This isn’t a bitter post of hatred towards the awards by an angry, disgruntled writer who didn’t get nominated for something even though he thinks he’s all that and a bag of dried monkey snot. The truth is that I have been nominated for these things in the past and I’ve even won a couple.

But so what?

All of the so-called awards being given out by these well-meaning Bloggers are good for an ego boost but not much else. They’re basically a popularity contest, where the Blog with the biggest, most loyal readership wins every time regardless of whether they deserve the win or not. That’s why I believe that even though I’m sure the people running the awards sites are doing everything they can to be fair and unbiased; they are unfortunately merely perpetuating a really big high-school clique-fest.

And every year it’s the same. He, or she, with the most friends; wins.

And before someone writes me an angry email saying that those who have the most popular sites DO deserve to win because they are so popular, let me state here and now that you’re wrong. Well, you’re wrong if the goal of the award is to reward excellence and not popularity. There is a very big difference between being popular and being a shining star of Blogging excellence. For an example of what I mean we need look no further than the music industry. Britney Spears, Ashlee Simpson and Outkast are some of the most popular artists out there right now but how many of you would ever hold their repertoire up as an impeccable example of musical perfection to your grandchildren? You might like them and enjoy them, but I doubt you could keep a straight face if you were trying to claim they deserved accolades for their musical talent.

To reiterate, popular does not mean extraordinary. It just means popular.

Now I’m not one to simply spout off without having some sort of solution in mind, and this is no exception. I do have an idea as to what would help “legitimize”, for lack of a better term, these awards. Basically, the main problem with ALL of the Blogging Awards as they now stand is the fact that they’re voted on by the general public. However, if you remove the general public from the entire proceedings then no one will actually care enough to tune in and thus the awards themselves stagnate and die. So what I’d like to see, what I think the Blogging community needs now that it has finally grown into something more than a small collection of hobby sites into an exceedingly large and diverse group of mostly personal websites, is a better method of soliciting nominations and voting on the nominees. Something that will also help the winners feel that they are actually winning something, even if that something is just the respect of people they believe to be their peers in the Blogging community.

It wouldn’t hurt if there were a statue or certificate, though.

Now, I’m no statistician, but it seems to me that there has to be a way of incorporating general public voting with a sort of elite group of opinion leaders who would do the final voting and/or tallying to discern the eventual winners. Something like an amalgam of the Academy Awards and American Idol, whereby the public at large has a say in the outcome, but a small group of respected peers in the Blogging community also have a say, thereby keeping the awards from degenerating into a popularity contest. I’m just talking off the cuff here, but I think it might work something like this;

1. The general public nominates whoever they think is worthy for each category,
2. The top XX in each category are then presented to a small group of highly regarded reviewers/bloggers for review,
3. This elite group votes for the 5 Blogs in each category they believe to be the best,
4. (If applicable) These 5 Blogs are then contacted and must submit a single post from the past year that they believe exemplifies why they should win in their category,
5. The general public, or better yet, an ever-expanding ‘Academy’ of past Blog Awards winners, then votes for the winners.

With this system, or one like it, the award truly becomes a mark of recognition by your blogging peers, and not simply a popularity contest decided upon by mob mentality. Not only that, but it also makes it that much harder to cheat since real people need to review the nominees and possibly even vote on the winners. No automatic web-scripts will influence the results and so I believe that those people who actually make it to the final five in each category will actually feel that they HAVE been honored, that perhaps they are being recognized not only by the general public, but by people who they themselves might look up to and admire.

Say what you will about how elitist this system might sound to you now, but if you found yourself in the final five and knew that people out there who’s writing you admired had actually liked your writing enough to nominate you, I bet you’d be thrilled.

And really, isn’t that what an award is all about?

Someone at Amazon has been busy.

When I visited Amazon today I was greeted with a brand new feature they’re beta testing called a Plog. Not quite sure what to make of this bastardization of the word Blog, I clicked on their little link to the ‘About Plogs’ page where I discovered that “The Plog™ Service provides a personalized blog for each Amazon.com customer.”

Well, put me in the corner and call me baby.

Further reading revealed that “Your Amazon.com Plog is a diary of events that will enhance your shopping experience, helping you discover products that have just been released, track changes to your orders, and many other things.” Well, as you can imagine I was thrilled to hear this because lord knows that all the wish lists, wedding registries, recommended items, personalized stores, favorite shopping pages and Amazon Gold Boxes just aren’t enough personalization features for me to be able to find and purchase the next trivial, throwaway summer read I’ve been just dying to buy.

But that isn’t the worst part.

You see, the worst part is that in order to help their clueless customers understand what a Blog is, Amazon has supplied a helpful list of “some of the best and most popular blogs” out there on the internet today. There are fifteen Blogs on that list, and while I guess they’re not the worst choices Amazon could have made to help show their customers what a Blog is, guess who didn’t make the cut? Go on, guess. Seriously, I bet you won’t guess who was left out of their little reindeer games even though he is the greatest blogger to ever grace the internet with his funny stories and self-depreciating humor. Go on, try to figure it out. Betcha can’t guess who. You know what? I don’t think you’re smart enough. You’ll never figure it out. Who do you think it is? Huh? Huh? Come on, guess. Guess already!

Oooo! Lucky guess.

I hate Mirna.

I’m not exactly sure why I hate her as much as I do, especially since I am not the kind of person who actually believes that the way people seem on TV are the way they are in real life, but… well, I still hate her. I mean, for some odd reason everything about her annoys the hell out of me. Her voice, her face, her whining, her general attitude, everything about her just makes me want to grab a fistful of wet noodles and slap her silly. I especially want to smack her with a cod fish whenever she manages to cajole some clueless pedestrian into helping her when she would otherwise fail in the tasks set before her.

Like the whole meat-carrying fiasco.

One of the tasks set before the contestants was that they had to carry a gigantic hunk of raw beef from one butcher shop to another shop about one mile away. Now, I enjoy meat as much as the next guy, but when the hunk of meat is raw, weighs about 100lbs., and needs to be carried a long distance in the hot sun by hand then I can sympathize with whoever the poor schmo is who’s carrying it. However, I have no sympathy at all for whiners who depend on other people to do things for them instead of doing it for themselves.

Which brings me back to Mirna.

You see, instead of carrying the beef to the butcher herself, Mirna first cried to her partner Charna, who is a midget mind you, until she attempted to carry the beef which was bigger than her! When that proved too difficult for the small one, instead of picking up the beef herself, Mirna cried to strangers on the street until she managed to find a guy dumb enough to carry it FOR her! Then, and this is the real kicker, she got mad at the world because, “Nobody would help us find the butcher shop.” and they walked three blocks out of their way.

I swear, if she wins I’m going to cut out her eyes with a spork.