We Just Want to Make Sure You Are Not a Robot

In an earlier post, I explained how I am trying to "make money" with Swagbucks. I put "make money" in quotations (twice) because thus far the process is entirely hypothetical. Anyway, sometimes? When I actually win some Swagbucks? They make me type in one of those annoying CAPTCHA codes to add them to my account instead of just adding them automatically. And in the little pop-up box explaining this, it always says, "We just want to make sure that you are not a robot." I love this.

Apparently there's this thing people do called CAPTCHart where they take the randomly-generated pair of words they were made to type - you know, to prove they are not robots - and they make a comic to illustrate them. I love this, too.

Plus also, I have an idea for a comic of my own a la Allie Brosh, but since it would probably take me a year to figure out how to draw it well enough using MS Paint, you'll probably never see it.

So now you know.

Weird

Have you ever been driving your car and pulled into a parking space and stopped and then immediately the car in the space next to yours starts to reverse and you look over at it and for a crazy moment your brain tricks you into thinking that your car is the one that is actually moving so you press the brakes a little harder just to make sure that you are in fact stopped and not about to roll into the curb?

No?

Damn.

Your Disappointment Is Misdirected. Also Baffling.

FOUND TAPED TO A BOOK AT THE LOCAL LIBRARY:

"Dear Librarian:

Book was mutilated. 10 or 11 pages are missing.

Very disappointed."

Very disappointed. Two words. Volumes of despair.

And then? We looked to see which pages were missing... and they were all there. Did they misunderstand the story and assume that part of it had to be gone? Did it end too abruptly? Or did they tape the note to the wrong book?

WHILE WE'RE ON THE SUBJECT OF COMMUNICATING WITH NOTES, THIS COMMERCIAL IS AWESOME AND SOMEONE SHOULD TOTALLY STEAL THIS IDEA:

Post-It notes Proposal


I actually would have sworn to you that this commercial was advertising Post-It notes before I searched for it, however, everyone else who searches it on YouTube seems to think the same thing. Sorry, ad guys - that's kind of a FAIL.

OVERHEARD, WHILE SCARLETT WAS PLAYING WITH HER DUCKS IN THE BATH:

"Look at you, you've gotten all dirty again! Oh, my cuttery!"


I'M PROBABLY WAY LATE TO THIS (JUST LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE ON THE INTERNETS) BUT I LOVE IT:

Sassy Gay Friend


YOU'RE WELCOME.

If That's What You Mean

Some of my favorite blogs are such Internet juggernauts that they can frequently post which strange search terms are currently bringing traffic to their blog. I'm not an Internet juggernaut [pauses while some of my devoted readers faint from shock and then recover] but as a post idea, I love it!

So here are mine. I used a screenshot so y'all can't accuse me of making this up. However, it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out how to use Paint to get it to look like this and admittedly, it looks kind of crappy. Please don't be all judgy; the next time I do this (in five years when I have enough blog traffic that it will actually show some new search hits) it is going to look badass.

I am not kidding when I say this is the 17th version of this picture, y'all. Sigh.

I think my favorites are "annoying avon ladies," "if that's what you mean," and of course, "mom spanks daddy." Good to know that my blog is now on the perv radar. Pervs account for a ton of Internet traffic. Maybe I'll get to be a juggernaut after all.

My Ears Are Still Ringing.

Created by Oatmeal
 
I've never been so not excited to find out that I am still "young" and have successfully avoided damaging my ear drums with my loud rock-and-roller music. Yay.
 
If they played this hell-noise at my mall to get me to leave? I would be way pissed. If I ever went to the mall, that is. Currently I don't because the whole place manages to reek of men's cologne because of all the guys that go there to pick up girls. Hot girls. Not me, formerly-hot girl. What were we talking about?

I Wouldn't Have Taken That Bet

My sister likes to take Scarlett shopping. Often? Those shopping trips include Target. Oh, how I love Target. I could spend days in there, just looking at everything. I don't go there too often, since a "I'm-just-running-in-for-toothpaste" trip often turns into me taking about $100 worth of stuff up to the register and not really knowing how it happened. But this story isn't about me. It's about my sister.

So if you have been to a Target lately, you know that right by the door, after you walk past the pile of red shopping carts, is the Dollar Spot. Where there is a small section of trinkets that cost a dollar, or maybe two. They have all kinds of stuff there - things you would expect to be cheap, like stickers or thin coloring books, and other things that you might not have known existed otherwise, like tiny pots that allow you to grow your own windowsill plant or pocket-size For Dummies books on subjects such as "Baby and Toddler Meals," "Feng Shui," and "Conversational Spanish."

My sister was pushing the cart through the Dollar Spot when Scarlett spotted a Winnie the Pooh-something and, like a flash, she reached out and grabbed it. "I want this," she said.

"You don't need that," my sister said. "You don't even know what that is." My sister was feeling lucky. "If you can tell me what that is, you can have it."

Scarlett said, "It's a tambourine." The duh was implied.

We laughed and laughed when my sister called to tell me this story. I would never make that kind of bet with Scarlett. All she does all. Day. Long. Is ask me "Why?" and "What's that?"

Scarlett knows what everything is. Everything.

You Probably Shouldn't Bother Reading This, Y'all

Right now I am sick and my nose is alternately stuffy and runny and all I really feel like doing is sitting around and whining every few seconds. Scarlett refused to let me lay down and take a nap because she wanted to go to the store and she kept insisting that we had to go right now and she was all, "I have my shoes on, Mom" and I was like, "Uuuuunnnh" because that's kind of like what my whining sounds like. Eventually I got tired of her badgering me and we went to the goddamn store even though I really could have laid down and slept straight through until morning.

Of course today was going to be the day that I really buckled down and got started on my YA novel instead of just endlessly planning it because you can't get a million-dollar advance from ten pages of character summaries and plot points, you actually have to have a manuscript which means I have to actually write something. But now I'm feeling like those people in the Claritin commercials before they take the Claritin and get magically un-fogged and my mouth is hanging open because that's the best way for me to breathe and really, mouth-breathers can't possibly write best-selling manuscripts.

I remember when I got braces the orthodontist was all flabbergasted because my teeth didn't touch together in the back of my mouth and they were like "How do you chew?" and I was thinking "With my mouth" but I would never have said that out loud because I don't say much of anything out loud but especially not something that might be construed as either stupid or rude (but especially stupid) because that's one of my biggest fears.

But I digress. They slapped some braces on me and one of the things they did was give me a palate spreader which was this weird little box on the roof of my mouth and every day I would put a long, thin "key" in it and "turn" it once so that the top of my mouth would grow to be the same width as the bottom of my mouth. And I was used to having a lot more room in my mouth because of the whole teeth-not-touching-in-the-back thing so for like a month after they put it in I would have these moments where I suddenly realized I had been walking around all day with my mouth hanging open like a total freak. As if seventh grade isn't hard enough on a painfully shy nerd-girl with glasses and braces.

So I was going somewhere with this post (at least I think I was) but now I've started thinking about mouth-breathing and chapped lips (because the two always go together, natch) and I can't really remember what the hell I was going to say because I'm pre-Claritin clear, which is to say way foggy, and I should really probably take another dose of DayQuil and crash so that I can get up and go to work tomorrow.

Okay, yeah, that's definitely what I'm going to do. This post is probably completely pointless and should not be read. But that's the sort of thing you should warn people about before they read it and I'm too lazy to go back and put a warning at the top. Plus I totally just tried to plug my laptop power cord into the network cable jack. I told y'all, I'm foggy.