Birthing A Blog

The Daily Post asks, “Why did you start your blog? Is that still why you blog, or has your site gone in a different direction than you’d planned?”

They’re kind of nosy that way.

But that got me to thinking . . . and that is always a dangerous thing.

You see, when you think about things, bad stuff happens.  Most wars occur because some politician or military general thought about things.  Einstein thought about things and eventually that led to the nuclear bomb.  If I think about a putt too long, I miss it.  (I miss it if I don’t think about it and just whack away at it, but then missing it doesn’t bother me so much.)  But I digress.

I first started blogging about Penn State football in the late 1990’s.  I had a free site on a place called Xoom.  It was basically free, which was the most significant criterion for my blog at the time.  You are now reading my ramblings on Word Press, so that criterion is still pretty significant.  Some things never change.

At one point, Xoom died as a web hosting site and I went to GeoCities.  It went belly up as well, except in Japan.  I don’t speak Japanese.  I am not a legend in Japan.  I’m not very funny in Japanese.  Or so I have been told.  Actually, I didn’t know GeoCities still existed anywhere, let alone Japan, until I Googled it.  I think they are hiding from me!

The basic formula to date has been to find a free web hosting service and then help it go bankrupt.  (If you have stock in Word Press, you might want to bail now.)

Along the way, I also diversified from a simple football blog to what you are reading now.

Ta Da!  (Jazz hands!)

(Actually, it was not an evolution from one to the other as it was a spin-off.  This is Frasier to my old Cheers blog.  Or something like that.  I still blog about Penn State, but the humor is secondary.)  Both blogs coexist, but they don’t communicate well together.  Kind of like my multiple personalities.  But we digress.

When I first started writing about Penn State football, I pictured myself as the Dave Barry of the football world.  Except for the part that I didn’t have a syndicated column with a gazillion readers.  And I didn’t make up names for rock bands.  But I thought I was funny.  Alas, looks aren’t everything.

I found that football was too narrow a subject and there were times–like when Penn State lost 6-4 to Iowa–when there was no way to make that humorous, unless you lived in freaking Iowa and had a corn fetish.

Humor is cathartic.  It’s what keeps me sane in an insane world.  I’m no longer Dave Barry trying to make a Sugar Bowl loss to Alabama into a joke, but rather Hawkeye Pierce surviving a daily war with humor and surgical skills as my only weapons.

Damn it, Jim, I’m just an eye doctor.

Living the Eye Life.

Welcome to the war.

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Connecting Bytes

The Daily Prompt has challenged Word Press bloggers to analyze their top 3-5 posts and find a connection between them.

Since The Eye Life was hatched, here are the top 5 posts:

The Little Piggie That Should Have Stayed Home		2,835
My Lunch Bucket List		1,321
Youse Guys Ever Eat at Five Guys?		1,002
Signature Moment		841
Sponge Boobs		588

For those that don’t feel like clicking through the links, The Little Piggie That Stayed Home is a light-hearted post about my experience having several toe nails surgically removed.  I am a runner, and this activity is apparently hard on toenails.  But I think the number of hits has nothing to do with HUMOR or RUNNING, but rather visitors are brought there by Google Images–there is a picture of cute little toes decorated to look like piggies.  This picture has also been linked to Pinterest.  There are also before and after photos of my feet but I’m pretty sure that is NOT what has driven traffic to that page.

People love this pic!
The Blog–not so much!

My Lunch Bucket List is a post based on a Facebook posting of 100 Things One Should Eat Before You Die, which may include some things which might cause me to die if I actually tried to eat them.  The article is humorous and the title is an amusing play on Bucket List (things to do before you die) and Lunch Bucket (which implies foods.)  Get it?  Whatever.

Youse Guys Ever Eat At Five Guys is an amusing tale of my trip to Five Guys where I’m pretty sure there were a couple of women working.  This confused me, but I am easily confused.  Search terms that bring one here are led by FIVE GUYS.  Go figure.

Signature Moment is my tribute to our founding fathers and always gets a blip of hits on July Fourth.  GO FIGURE!

Seriously, if the Congrefs of today was meeting to pass this resolution, we all know what that would mean.  We’d still be British citizens.  God Save the Queen!

And lastly Sponge Boobs, which has nothing to do with boobs as a synonym for female anatomy, but probably benefits from searches for said anatomical parts, is about a study that showed that four year olds who watch just nine minutes of Sponge Bob (that’s two episodes minus the commercials) experienced learning difficulties.  I know!  I watched an entire Sponge Bob Marathon one day–but I did it at a Holiday Inn Express!

It should be quite clear what the connection is here between these posts.

They were all posted on this blog.

I’m sorry.  I’ve got nothing else.

It’s a humor blog, so I guess they have that in common.

Two are about food.  The rest, not so much.

Oh, and they all made this post about stats!  So they’ve got that going for them too.

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Freshly De-Pressed

FRESHLY PRESSED!

I only started this WordPress Blog in April.  Maybe I’m expecting too much from the Eye Life.  But patience is a virtue that has eluded me all my life.

You may be wondering what I am talking about, or typing about as the case may be.  I can understand that.  I barely know what I’m talking about myself.  But let me enlighten you.

WordPress has this “thing” called Freshly Pressed which is featured on their website.  It is a kind of reward for “good” blogs which drives more traffic to your site.  After all, if someone writes a blog on the Internet, and no one reads it, does it make a noise?

Two months–well, nearly two months–and 16 posts later, I still have not been Freshly Pressed.  I am wrinkled.  Ugly.  Not even freshly squeezed.  I don’t even know why you are bothering to read this, since my blog is obviously worthless as blogs go.  Print this out and use it to line your bird cage.  Buy a bird if you have to.  I mirror mediocrity.  Maybe I should aspire to mediocrity.  Hope for it.  Embrace it!

So I began to wonder why my incredibly entertaining blog was not getting the limelight it deserves.  After all, I have a catchy title and a beautiful picture.  I am more or less funny looking.  Alas, blogs are not judged by their titles alone.

My wonderment sent me looking for answers.   Google is my friend.  I quickly found an article about Five Ways To Get Featured on Freshly Pressed.  I thought I was on to something here, but I couldn’t be sure.

The author looks young enough to be my daughter and she uses phrases like “video rocks.”  I am in serious trouble here.

I quickly scanned the article, but shamelessly submitting my article was not an option.  Neither was paying her off.  I’m not savvy enough to hack into their system and feature myself.  I am in really serious trouble here.

So I actually tried to read the article.

Write unique content that’s free of bad stuff.

I do that!  I have written about how I named this site, about my two new dogs, how I voted, my MahJong angst, about the recent Rapture that did not occur and Satan visiting my site.    How many blogs can say that!  (How many would want to?)  Whose side are you on?

Include images or other visuals.

They want “original” images or ones that are properly credited.  OK.  Hmmm.  I included my own pictures of my dogs, although my wife technically took the photos.  I have included videos and I believe that credit was paid where credit was due.  The picture of the baby suckling on the cow was my idea and photoshop.  Still not good enough.

Add tags.

I added tags.  I’m three for three, or maybe two and half for three since I probably didn’t credit every single image, but this is not a term paper for a grade or an application for a Nobel Prize here. 

Aim for typo-free content.

Hunt and peck.  Spunt and heck.  I can spell check.  My grammar ain’t too good though.  She’s got rheumatism.

Cap off your post with a compelling headline.

Let’s look at some of mine:  Picking your Noes.  Get it.  Not nose, but noes.  Since I was voting “no.”  Funny, right?  Creative?  Apparently not. 

MahJong MoJo is No Mo.  Unique?  yes.  My own screen shots–very original.  Neat name.  Didn’t tickle any fancies.

Who Let the Dogs In?  Pretty funny story about our two new dogs.  Kind of a play on Who Let the Dogs Out–get it?  Apparently not.

Udderly Ridiculous, a post about genetically modifying cows to produce human breast milk.  Udderly?  Utterly?  Get it?  They didn’t.

I’m flummoxed.  Stymied.  Constipated.

What have those other blogs got that I ain’t got?

Courage.  Free advertising, apparently.

So I checked out a few of these blogs featured today. . .

Happy Towel Day.  Seriously?  “Awesomely Nerdy News and Reviews?”  Sure there’s a Youtube Video–and I guess that rocks.  I guess it’s unique since I’ve never heard of it.  As a Steeler fan, I have a Terrible Towel.  Does that count?  But the final picture is clearly copied . . . you can Google it here.

Homemade Peking Duck with Mandarin Pancakes.  I can’t cook, but I love duck.  If you ever get a chance to visit the Village Inn in Belgrade Lakes, Maine, stop in and have the duck.  Best.  Ever.  But this site has pics of the duck in preparation.   Duck hanging from a string.  Was it suicide or fowl play?  I don’t know.

Egg Farming?  Built a chickencoop.  Now they have chicken poop.  Yea!  [Doing jazz hands.]  Original pictures (and a really kickin’ chicken coop!), but hardly unique.  I tried to farm chickens once.  Nothing grew.  I either planted the eggs too deep or too close together.  I gave up after that.

Six things you won’t be ordering from SkyMall.  I have never ordered from SkyMall so my list is way longer than that!  The pictures look like they were taken from the magazine and it certainly seems to be advertorial, whatever that means.

I could go on but what’s the use.  I may as well be typing at the wall.  And no one is reading anyway.

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Hello world!

Welcome world to Living the Eye Life!

One might wonder where that name came from.  I guess the primary reason is that the names I really wanted were already taken.  When you sign up for a WordPress site, you have to choose a name.  The site then informs you whether that name is available.

I am not new to blogging.  I blogged for PennLive for six years writing about my greatest passion: Penn State Football.  I still blog about Penn State at The Lion’s Den.  I haven’t figured out how to make the link button work yet.  Hey!  I finally figured it out.

But I wanted to blog about other passions in my life:  my work as an eye surgeon, life at home, running, golf, politics, or whatever strikes me as amusing at the time.  I am easily amused most of the time.  But I digress.

In my mind, I was thinking of calling the new blog “The Village Idiot.”  I live in a town small enough to be considered a village.  I am not a complete idiot, but I am a partial one.  But both villageidiot and thevillageidiot have already been taken.  Apparently, there are a lot of villages out searching for their idiots.

I love the catch-phrase ‘I digress.’  So I tried idigress as a website name.  Taken.  I am not the only digressor here in the world of WordPress.

Vitreoushumor.  I’m an eye surgeon and while there is nothing funny about vitreous during cataract surgery, I do enjoy humor, I consider myself funny looking, and it seemed like an obvious winner.

Taken.  As was the British spelling, vitreouhumour.

Aqueoushumor was taken, but not aqueoushumour.  It just doesn’t have the flair or feng shui of vitreoushumor, though.  And I’m not British.

Laughter is the best medicine.  Bestmedicine already exists!

I am now running low on ideas and short on patience.  And a doctor without patients is not a doctor–perhaps a teacher. Or just another somebody in a white coat.

So I tried a few “eye” names.  Iforaneye.  TAKEN!  And some others names that I can’t even remember now.  But WordPress denies me almost faster than I can type in the suggestions.  It’s a wonder I have any hair left.

But as I sipped my Miller High Life, I was struck by an epiphany.  It wasn’t available either but “the eye life” was.

So here I am.  Living the EYE LIFE.

I hope you enjoy it too.

And I want to thank Craig Wolf for allowing me to borrow the beautiful picture you see on the header.  Check out his photography site!

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