Earlier today I was watching Nigella Lawson’s show, and saw a simple recipe that she called her favorite comfort food. It couldn’t be simpler:
Tear French bread into small pieces, place in a bowl
Sprinkle some granulated sugar on top
Bring whole milk just to a boil
Pour over the bread
Simple. I made it and let me tell you, it’s absolutely lovely. I used Italian bread and added a drop or two of vanilla extract to the milk as I don’t have vanilla sugar.
The feel of warm bowl in the hand, the delightfully hot milk and its naturally sedative effects, the soft bread and sweet sugar are delightful. This is the kind of dish you want on a cold day, resting on the blanket that’s over your knees. Watch a movie, talk to a good friend or watch the snow fall outside with a bowl of hot milk and bread. You’ll be very glad you did.
Eventually, every male child will play “Old Faithful” and launch a geyser of pee into the air, usually while flat on his back. After much trial and error, I found the best way to combat this.
Get a stack of paper Dixie cups and some tissue. Take one cup, wad some tissue into the bottom and place it within reach. Now, when Jr. lets it fly, quickly grab the cup and invert it over the stream. The tissues will soak up the pee and you’ll stay nice and dry. When the performance is over, simply toss the cup into the trash. Set up the next cup and you’re ready for the encore.
Pay special attention to the last tweet and realize that each one is a lie. Not all of his 90,000+ followers realized this, however, and his tweets were picked up by The Wall Street Journal and TechCrunch. Why would a person intentionally deceive his readers?
Because Jason’s purpose is to promote Jason, and in his mind the ends always justify the means. For example, he posted a rambling, anti-Apple rant a few months ago that was designed to draw outraged reaction from readers (I’m ashamed to say that I bit). Thoughtful debate was not Jason’s intention with that piece — he simply wanted the unique visitors and pageviews.
There are two lessons here for all bloggers. First, never lie to your readers. Ever. Stunts like this destroy the credibility that we bloggers work so hard for. At this point there’s no chance that I’ll listen to anything that Jason says. Don’t prompt your readers to ignore you.
The second lesson is even more important, and the root of Jason’s problem. Don’t write to Digg or Stumbleupon or Facebook or any of the others. Write because you have something valuable to say. The moment you think, “Ooh, writing about [topic x] will get me lots of links!”, stop. You’re about to sink to the bottom of the blogosphere where you’ll do something stupid like this just to boost your stats, which you’ll regret almost instantly.
Inspired by Ged’s list, I had to make my own. Here are some of my favorite funny movie moments. I couldn’t find other clips I wanted, so I’ll have to save them for part 2. Enjoy.
Definitely add “reddit this” buttons to your site. In addition, add a bunch of awful “digg this,” “tweet this,” “facebook this” buttons all over it. Remember, the key to successful online marketing has nothing to do with creating valuable, interesting content – but instead adding massive amounts of obnoxious share buttons.
That was all I needed to hear to listen to the rest of the Spilled Milk podcast. The show combines “…food and comedy in a bowl and stir it up until it explodes.” It’s a good listen for foodies and the hosts are funny.
I’ve set up a WordPress blog with my contact form plugin of choice, Contact Form 7. For some reason, messages to the target email address (associated with a Network Solutions domain) via the contact form won’t go through.
Now, if I insert ANY other email address, it works fine. I tried other contact plugins like Clean-Contact and cforms with the exact same result.
Do you have an idea? I’ve been at this for hours. Thanks.
