FIRST OF ALL I’D LIKE TO THANK MY DEAF READERS FOR COMING TODAY. WE LOVE OUR FELLOW DEAF PEOPLE AND THINK THEY ARE JUST LIKE REGULAR PEOPLE ONLY… WHAT’S THAT?…
Oh. My producer is telling me that I don’t need to yell on my blog for deaf people. I guess they must have one of those newfangled hearing-impaired Blog Reading Devices (or, BRDs for the acronymically-inclined).
However, there is another group of people I’d like to welcome to Nanny Goats in Panties and that’s the blind people. You heard me (YOU TOO, DEAF PEOPLE! - I mean - you too, deaf people.)
Anyway, to all my new blind readers:
HELLO TO ALL MY NEW BLIND FANS! CAN YOU SEE ME OKAY? FIRST OF ALL, I’D JUST LIKE TO SAY THAT WE LOVE BLIND PEOPLE. AND THAT WE HERE AT NANNY GOATS IN PANTIES CONSIDER YOU TO BE JUST LIKE NORMAL HUMANS…WHAT’S THAT?
Oh. What? Them too? Excuse me, my producer has just informed me that we don’t need to yell at the blind people, either. Boy, the next thing you’re going to tell me is that we don’t need to yell at dumb people as well.
Anyway, now that all the niceties are past us, I’d like to tell all you other insensitive bloggers how to be more accessible to the visually impaired. Seriously. You probably didn’t even realize that blind people surf the internet all the time. And that’s why I’m here to help. ‘Cause I’m a helper.
If you have a blog roll, move it to your left-hand sidebar. Blind people use screen readers that begin from right-to-left and the last thing they want to do is listen to one long ass list of links before getting to your blog post for the day.
If you want comments, don’t make them “enter characters seen in an image”. Also, if you can, label all your text entries in the comment form properly so they know what you are asking for.
Describe your images. In HTML, you can provide alternative text for images by adding alt=”your description of the image” within the image tag. Here is an example of a properly alt-tagged image:
< img alt=”blind man walks into bar” height=”30″ src=”imgdir/blindmansbrokentooth.jpg” width=”30″ />
It’s all about making your site more accessible. For more detailed info, you can go to the site from the AFB (American Federation for the Blind).
So if you know any visually impaired or blind people, send them to Nanny Goats in Panties. Or if YOU are visually impaired or blind, I’d love your feedback. But your Martian friends? You can tell them to forget it. We don’t need their kind here, the green boyfriend-stealing bastards.
A new movie comes out November 6th starring George Clooney (also Kevin Spacey, Ewan MacGregor and Jeff Bridges) called The Men Who Stare at Goats.
It is based on a 2005 nonfiction book by UK journalist Jon Ronson.
From the book’s dustjacket: “In 1979 a secret unit was established by the most gifted minds within the US Army. Defying all known accepted military practice - and indeed, the laws of physics - they believed that a soldier could adopt the cloak of invisibility, pass cleanly through walls and, perhaps most chillingly, kill goats just by staring at them.“
Paranormal? Goats? Conspiracies? A secret wing of the U.S. military called First Earth Battalion? I am SO buying this book!
The movie trailer includes a goat scene. (I wonder if they cast those “fainting goats” for this movie)
So this man-eating squirrel attacked me while I was rooting around in his nut stash (whatever THAT means) the other day. He came at me squealing like a banshee and by merely trying to defend myself, I accidentally smashed him over the head with my Pillowcase O’ Pennies. As hard as I could.
Then I felt horribly guilty about it and decided that since he was only trying to protect what was rightfully his, I should try to resuscitate him. That’s when I remembered a little something called CPR.
I put my ear to his chest and couldn’t detect a heartbeat. Or breathing. He wasn’t breathing either. So I pinched his nose - at least I think it was his nose - and blew into his mouth. His little chest puffed up and air squeaked out of his little mouth.
I put two fingers together from each hand and began pressing down on his little chest. Which brings me to the real reason I brought you here today.
Did you know that when you are performing CPR on a person, it needs to be within a range of a certain number of beats per minute? Like 100 beats per minute? Right about now you’re probably asking, “How on God’s green earth am I going to be able to know what 100 beats per minute is?”
Funny you should ask. Because I recently learned EXACTLY how.
Apparently, the typical human being can automatically remember a song at the correct original tempo, even if he can’t carry a tune. So all you have to do is sing a song while your pushing rhythmically down on someone’s chest.
And what song can you sing that is exactly 100 beats per minute while you’re frantically trying to save the life of a person, be he man or squirrel?
Staying Alive. By The Bee Gees. No I’m not kidding. Ask any EMT (e.g. the lady behind Dispatches from the Outpost):
♫♫♫Well you can tell by the way I use my walk, I’m a woman’s man, no time to talk. Music loud and women warm. I’ve been kicked around since I was born…♫♫♫
Of course, if you have an aversion to the The Bee Gees, or in the case of a stupid man-eating squirrel whose life you’d just as soon care less about except that now the neighbors have come out to see what all the squealing was about and now you have to feign heroism for the crowd that has gathered - the bleeding heart squirrel lovers…well, you have an alternative song to sing.
Another One Bites The Dust. By Queen. Again - not kidding:
♫♫♫Well, another one’s gone and another one’s gone. Another one bites the dust. Hey, I’m gonna get you too Another one bites the dust…♫♫♫
And while mourners set up a shrine of flowers and streamers and memory books on your front lawn, they will claim that at least you tried. They will not know that it was pointless restarting his heart because of his brain dislocation from the Pillowcase O’ Pennies. They will say that there was nothing you could do.
And then you can go sneak back later and raid his nut stash.
I want to thank Joanna of The Fifty Factor for helping spread the gospel that is Coconut Queen. She put a badge in her sidebar and everything! She’s currently in the middle of a nail-biting saga about her husband. That she may have married twice, I don’t know, because she’s only released the 2nd of 3 chapters so far and I’m on the edge of my seat!!!!
I normally can’t stand music on people’s blogs that suddenly scare the bajeezuz out of you because you forgot to turn it down last night after watching some stupid crappy YouTube video of a man in green lederhosen singing The Hills Are Alive. But I stumbled onto Glamour Girl’s blog the other day and Dixieland Delight by Alabama began to play, taking me back to my Country Music stage of life.
In the mid-1980s, during college, I worked part-time for a country music radio station in Sacramento. Perhaps some of you remember KRAK 1140 AM, or KK105 FM. The DJs had names like Joey Mitchell (who ran the morning show for 20 years, and received Billboard Magazine’s Best Country DJ award in 1988), and Big Jim Hall .
circa 1985
A few years later, when I first moved to Southern California, and was looking for a way to “get into” the L.A. scene, I tried country music dancing at a place called Denim & Diamonds. Because when you think of Los Angeles, aren’t cowboy boots and Garth Brooks the first things that comes to your mind?
Granted, line dancing in California was a fad back then, so L.A. treated it like one, scooping it up, milking it for all it was worth, and then dumping it on the side of the road like an avocado-colored refrigerator.
Country music fans are some of the most red-blooded, down-to-earth Americans you’ll find and somehow, Santa Monica managed to glean the Ferrari-driving, the bling-wearing, and the most painfully fashionable western clothing-donning supermodels alive to perform on the dance floor.
It was disgusting. Yet, there I was, Neon Moon-ing it on Saturday nights with the big-haired and mini-skirted in my generic T-shirt and blue jeans.
You might be asking, “what…the hell… was wrong with you?” Don’t worry I got a little better the next year and began playing beach volleyball (although it took me another year before I would take off my shorts in public because even though I was healthily fit - everybody else was bonily fit. I had played college volleyball, indoors, and had eaten real food (cheeseburgers and fries and spaghetti and burritos - you know, college food), and all the girls were “healthy” so my caboose didn’t look so big compared to my teammates. But surround yourself with a bunch of girls in bikinis on a Southern California beach and you suddenly feel like a hippo. A hippo with an unhealthy body image. I had a non-anorexic behind. Think Jennifer Lopez. Five minutes after she had the twins.
But I didn’t come here to talk about my ass, I came here to talk about that OTHER Dixieland Delight - my brief career in country music.
The California State Fair opened this last weekend in Sacramento and it goes for two weeks. When I worked for KRAK radio, they’d haul their mobile studios to Cal Expo every year for the State Fair and park near the exhibit buildings. The mobile studio was an RV, filled with radio equipment and a back window that would open to expose the DJ to the public so that fans could stand and stare at them. My job was to stand out in the 100+ degree heat all day in a black KRAK T-shirt, doling out bumper stickers, T-shirts and the occasional cowboy hat, while the DJ’s sat in the air-conditioned RV doling out George Strait, Randy Travis and the occasional Reba McIntyre.
When I wasn’t working remote broadcasts all over town and then some, I was at the station calling random Sacramento residents at home. I’d call a number and say, “Hi, this is Margaret from ABC Programming and we’re just taking a survey to find out what radio stations you listen to.” Those first seven words were carefully crafted by scientific studies and research, along with only hiring women, all to increase the chances of being better received by the poor schmuck unlucky enough to pick up the phone. We couldn’t tell them that we worked for the radio station, it would sort of ruin the survey.
But it worked! These people would actually answer me. If they listened to a country music station, then I’d ask them if I could play some songs for them so they could rate them. And they would do it! They seemed to enjoy it as well, listening to music and telling me if they liked it, didn’t like it, somewhat liked it, loved it, etc. Today, you couldn’t get out a “Hello Sir or Madam, this is ABC Programming calling for -” before you heard the distinct “CLICK!” and dial-toney “Brrrrrrrrrrrr!” in your ear.
But this was the 80’s. Before we had things called “telemarketers” calling us at dinner time. It was also when real people called you, not the autobots who seem to insist on a daily basis that the warranty on my car is about to expire. And we were nice, we didn’t start demanding to know why they didn’t listen to country music and what would it take to get them to buy a Dwight Yoakam album TODAY!?
Anyway, here is a crappy quality video of Dixieland Delight by Alabama. I’ve included it here for your reference, not your opinion. Although if you want to tell me or NEED to tell me if you like it, somewhat like it, somewhat dislike it or hate it, knock yourself out.
Coconut Queen (iWin.com) Gets Awesome Reviews!
If you’re just joining us, I wrote the story (and other content) for a new video game called Coconut Queen by iWin.com.
If you’re not just joining us, Coconut Queen is getting FANTASTIC reviews! Including comments about how funny the story line is - YAY!
In fact, if you go to iWin’s Home Page, and look at their Top 10 List, Coconut Queen is their #1 game right now.
You can see the reviews (and download the game for a free trial) HERE and HERE.
