Dig: The Nooks and Crannies of the Internet

Sorry I haven't posted in a while.  I'm sure ones of people have been drinking themselves to sleep at night waiting for my next commentary on the things in my life that make me happy or miserable or confused.  Fear not, for today I am finally getting off my caboose and sharing with you something that I dig.  And what is that, you ask?  I dig nooks.  I also dig crannies.  Plus I dig the internet.  And together?  Puh-lease!  It's like when two really good-looking people have a baby and the baby comes out already signed to a modeling contract.  Kind of like Brad Pitt and Angeline Jolie and not so much like, say, Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley.  See, Christie is hot and Billy, well, isn't.  For a future post, I might discuss the love life of Billy Joel:  He lost Christie but is now married to some other young thing who is also hot.  See what being a musician will do for you?  Damn Bill Joel to Hell!  See also my post about not having any musical ability.

Here's the deal.  I'm a lurker.  There, I've said it.  In certain circles, I could be called a stalker but I prefer lurker - mostly because it's kind of a fun word to say and also because it's not a felony.  And what better place to lurk than the internet?  I've found that when I surf (do people still use that word?) the internet, I prefer to skip over the "big" sites like yahoo, cnn or google and dig deep into the soft underbelly of the internet.  Certainly, cnn.com is fine for major, mainstream information but I can find out the latest on Sarah Palin on about a million websites out there - and I prefer the ones that have photoshopped her head onto bikini-clad, gun-toting bodies.  That's what the internet is all about!

So this post was prompted by trading comments with a chick who has a blog in NYC.  I found her blog through some comments on another blog and the next thing you know I'm learning all about life in New York City.  It was sort of a Six Degrees of Separation kind of thing.  This chick is nothing like me.  In addition to not having a penis, according to the pics on her blog she is always dressed to the teeth.  She is not a middle-management suck-ass in the automotive industry and she does not live in a small town.  She does seem to have a command of the language so reading her stuff doesn't feel like heavy lifting.  It's a match made in heaven!  And the more I read her posts, the more I realized that the reason I kept reading was because I had nothing in common with her except for her ability to communicate at some level higher than my seven year old kid.  As much as I like to read all about myself, I'm pretty familiar with the subject matter and I get bored of reading what a great guy I am pretty quickly.

I find lots of blogs and sites through other people's comments and recommendations and the common denominator is that the weirder the content, the more I'm interested.  I don't visit blogs/sites of people who post pictures of their kids' birthday parties.  Do you know how many pictures there are in Internet-Land of babies sitting in high chairs?  There are exactly a shitload of high chair pictures and there is more shit going in the load every day!  I'm not interested in people's crafts - unless it's something unique like making furniture out of discarded ball point pens.  If you have a site about your nifty needlepoint pictures of your cat, I'll take a pass.  I also don't visit sites with too many words.  Mr. Short-Attention-Span just can't handle too many words.

The internet is kind of like the Olympics for me.  The nice people at NBC heaped hours and hours of Olympics television coverage on us last month.  There was also some stuff on non-NBC cable channels.  That goofy-looking Michael Phelps was on NBC.  The guy who won the trampoline competition was not.  (Yes, there was a trampoline competition in the friggin' Olympics!)  He wasn't even on the second-rate channel at 3am on a Tuesday.  And the dude that won that event sure ain't hosting Saturday Night Live and nobody knows a damn thing about him.  He may be just as goofy looking as Mike, but we'll never know. He spends a shit-load of time jumping on the trampoline and he is theoretically the best tramploliner in the world - just like Michael and the whole swimming thing.  Where I'm coming from, though, is that Mr. Trampoline Man probably maintains his own website and just by virtue of NOT having nifty little bios about him, I want to know more about him.  He's not slick and I don't like slick.

People put stuff on websites because it is important to them and they think others will find it interesting.  Yep, Mrs. Smith puts pictures of her brat kid blowing out the candles on his Garfield birthday cake because it is important to Mrs. Smith.  Unfortunately for her, though, she is wasting valuable space on the internet because NO ONE ELSE CARES!  Garfield sucks and unless the cake is worthy of being on Cake Wrecks, it's a waste of everyone's time to talk about it.  Mrs. Smith should be posting pics of the dent in her minivan where she backed into Mrs. Jones at the daycare place and then go on to say what a bitch Mrs. Jones is because she stole her brownie recipe.  Follow that up with a dissertation on why Mrs. Jones' kid will never get into a good college because he doesn't know the difference between a square and a rectangle in pre-school and now you're talking my language!  A good story always has conflict and what causes more conflict than pre-school angst?!

Now, I am not going to list for you the sweet websites I visit, mostly because they change all the time and I never remember to mark them as favorites or anything.  (Before you say anything, yes, I know I can look at my history file...)  You can do like I do and click on the names of people who have left comments on this blog (especially this post because it has a lot of comments) and see where it takes you.

And now, just like a singer in a cheesy wedding reception band who is going to switch from the Chicken Dance to "When a Man Loves a Woman", I'm going to bring it down a little.  It's a big world out there, gang.  I do my thing, you do your thing and most of the time my thing doesn't touch your thing.  (Sometimes it does, but I usually have to pay extra for that.)  Think about that chick in New York.  Walking down the street and taking the subway and cabs and buses and stuff, she probably interacts with a thousand different people just on her way to work in the morning and they're all doing their thing.  They're all unique.  Each one of them has something interesting going on, even if it's their upcoming doctor's visit to have that thing finally removed from their left butt cheek.  And that's the stuff that I dig.  If you've got a story about a butt blemish, I want to hear all about it.

OK, sorry to wreck your buzz there for a minute but I had to make my point.  And now, before we get out on the dance floor for the Macarena, go here for a blog about bad parking or here for a blog about passive-aggressive notes.  It's internet gold and it can only be found in a nook or a crannie.