The Blogosphere: Naughty Posting & Grown-up Catchy-Catchies

Some blogs are about blogging. Some blogs are about the Scooter Libby trial. I've noticed that many blogs, personal or otherwise, often cut & paste from the news. This serves a puzzling function, like just generally alerting the public what news stories you found relevant or interesting. I guess some bloggers even harbor the pretension that they're 'monitoring' the media. I cut & paste Melville quotes that sound like totally gay - I'm monitoring classic American Literature for its content & bias.

My mother keeps warning me to consider what I post on the internet, because a future job or school may reject me after discovering questionable shadows in my personal fountain of public artistic disclosures, or for confusing run-on sentences. Consider the lad who was rejected from an Ivy League when he bragged on some online venue that he had lied on his Financial Aide papers. Or the grade-schooler who was taken out of class to meet with the FBI about posting a presidential assassination threat on her MySpace page. Mom, I'm considerably more cautious than that, or maybe simply more innocent & less stupid. I tell her I design the content on this weblog to be impressive, maybe actually help me get a dream job or into some University.

But how clean do I have to be? I recently mentioned 'vaginal irrigation'. Is this a problem? And I recently refrained from reporting on the conversations at my last dinner party, as funny as they were, because I thought someone somewhere might be offended by humor at the sake of dead American soldiers. I was offended, actually, at my own jokes, & as I'm pretty much the one who reads this blog the most, offending a majority of your readers could be a serious blunder. But of course the more taboo an issue, the better fodder for humor. Do college admission boards google your blog with a hawkish nose for sketchy taste. I put the word 'fuck' in this blog's search engine & got two hits (three now). Who cares? Do HR departments really regularly do that? Such perverts!

Anyway, I wanted to cut & paste a news story about some of Dan Savage's filthy exploits. There's a whole Wikipedia entry on his re-definition of the word 'Santorum', deliberately making the name of the homophobic ex-Senator into the grossest term imaginable:

Santorum is a proposed neologism popularized by American humorist and sex-advice columnist Dan Savage in 2003 to "memorialize" former US Republican Senator Rick Santorum from Pennsylvania due to the controversy over his statements on homosexuality. The word became a successful Google bomb when Savage created a website for it, which unseated the Senator's official website as the top search result for his name on the Google search engine.

Savage asked his readers to submit disgusting sexual definitions for "santorum"; the winning definition was "the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex."

I just love that aspect of revenge by manipulating the elastic English language. Some day Rick Santorum may actually find his picture in the dictionary next to his name. I also couldn't believe that Savage followed around 'conservative Republican Presidential hopeful' Gary Bauer on his campaign tour, licking doorknobs & handing him saliva-covered pens, attempting to infect him with influenza. What a genius!

Meanwhile, while I'm on the blogosphere, I wanted to congratulate my college roommate Sam Amidon on his new album, But This Chicken Proved Falsehearted. I've already over-listened to this album. There'll be a CD release party this Wednesday at Tonic in New York. Go!

Also, I was just listening to Gilbert & Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore. (I'm still finding all my old cds & slowly converting them to MP3s.) I had forgotten about this duet where Buttercup warns the Captain about the twist at the end, using all these pithy hints:

BUTT. Things are seldom what they seem,
Skim milk masquerades as cream;
Highlows pass as patent leathers;
Jackdaws strut in peacock's feathers.
CAPT. Very true,
So they do.
BUTT. Black sheep dwell in every fold;
All that glitters is not gold;
Storks turn out to be but logs;
Bulls are but inflated frogs.
CAPT. So they be,
Frequentlee.
BUTT. Drops the wind and stops the mill;
Turbot is ambitious brill;
Gild the farthing if you will,
Yet it is a farthing still.
CAPT. Yes, I know.
That is so.

Then, he, to prove he's understood her drift, invents these amazing irrelevant sayings:

CAPT. Though I'm anything but clever,
I could talk like that for ever:
Once a cat was killed by care;
Only brave deserve the fair.
BUTT. Very true,
So they do.
CAPT. Wink is often good as nod;
Spoils the child who spares the rod;
Thirsty lambs run foxy dangers;
Dogs are found in many mangers.
BUTT. Frequentlee,
I agree.
CAPT. Paw of cat the chestnut snatches;
Worn-out garments show new patches;
Only count the chick that hatches;
Men are grown-up catchy-catchies.
BUTT. Yes, I know,
That is so.