Kiss Up/Kick Down
Hey, let's play a game. Would you like to? No? Great!

Here's the game: I'm going to post a picture. A simple question will be asked with regard to said picture. See if you can answer the question. You have two hours to complete the exam.

OK, here it is.

Look at the following Sitemeter usage graph. See if you can tell which day the Bucket (average of about 500 visits per week, with a one-day record of 108 visits) was linked by a blog that averages over 6,000 visitors a day.


Take your time. No rush. Look carefully and make your best guess.

Since there's no way to code in any HTML for the passage of minutes, I'm going to assume you're done.

OK, so it was kind of obvious. There's no mistaking it. It looks like Bob Dole after his first day home with the free samples from the Pfizer people.

You don't see it? He'd kind of have to be laying on his back...

The thing of it is that on the surface, the Bob Dole-Viagra thing seems like a great story. Grizzled old war hero, professional obstructionist and public servant finds--through the miracle of modern science and the kind people at the giant pharmaceutical company--a little bit of his old youth and vigor, a nugget of hopelessly forgotten vitality, in the form of a Little Blue Pill. A little spring, a little swagger and a whole lotta moxie, wearin' 'em out from Topeka to Salina. The old dog gets his teeth back, past hope or expectation.

But for every Bob Dole in a story like this, no one ever remembers there's an Elizabeth Dole. Liddy, pushing 60, settled into a life of comfortable companionship, a peck on the cheek or a held hand (the one without the pen) from time to time, but for the most part left to do what she wants when she wants, enjoying the benefits of the name and the status without the fussy indignity of gettin' it on. There's no need for it; that's something Democrats do. At night she retires to her Scarlett O'Hara four-poster, half a glass of sherry and a Danielle Steele novel while Bob scutters off to his hard army cot in the damp dark of the root cellar.

Then suddenly one day her happy predictability is ruined. She's stuck trying to figure out what the hell you're supposed to do with an 80-year-old with a hard-on. She loves him and all, so it's not the end of the world, but we're talking about a man old enough to have retired from the Senate.

Man, this metaphor has really gotten away from me. It's completely self-referential now. I can't remember: am I Bob Dole and the new readers are viagra and the faithful existing readers are Elizabeth? Or am I Danielle Steele, new readers are Scarlett O'Hara and the faithful Bucketeers are Hillary Clinton?

I don't know, the thread is lost.

The point is, for the new readers who came here from TBogg might have gotten the wrong impression from a) the type of blog TBogg runs (with the reading and the smartness and the current events and all) and b) the coincidence of my post featuring Putin and Condi Rice the day before. This isn't actually a political blog. Sure, I'll touch on it from time to time, but this post should give you a better idea of what the Bucket is about.

Dick jokes. Lots of them.

And making fun of old people.

And dick jokes. Did I mention dick jokes? Dick jokes.

For my regular readers, the stalwart and beloved Bucketeers, who may worry that larger returns on my Sitemeter charts might drive me into new, unimagined heights of egomania, consider: however impressive an 8-fold improvement in my one-day record for visits might be, 838 visits means over 4,000 TBogg users ignored me completely.

Also: for all that new traffic, I got only a few dozen new comments. That means I have to assume that the 800 or so others who didn't leave a comment were driven to suicide by a massive fit of boredom brought on by terminal underwhelmed-ness.

It's not so much humility as a crippling fear of success, but it'll do in a pinch.

And there, I've driven the new people away with long-winded droning. So that's two, two things the Bucket is about: dick jokes and droning and an endless string of tired references to 35 year-old comedy sketches--three things!

God bless. All are welcome.



This post on the Narcissus Scale: 10.0 (instead of going to 11, we've made 10 louder)


Pops


PS- if you've left a comment on an older post and you now think I'm a dick for ignoring it, please remember I'm too cheap to pay HaloScan so I can upgrade to get e-mail notification of comments. And also, I'm a dick.

PPS- New permanent links to the Bucket will be reciprocated ASAP. I do them all by hand instead of that fancy one-click Blogroll stuff. I need the HTML practice.
- posted by Pops @ 10:04 PM