the tree of woe

I know all my readers (and by “all my readers” I mean “both of you”) would like to know how an amazing blogger such as myself is able to maintain an outstanding blog such as this one. I can tell you, it’s not easy. All the other blogs that blog about blogging are filled with useful information for everyone else. Here’s a good example: [Blog about] Why you’re different (and better) than your competition. Who’s my competition? I don’t see any other guys in their late 20s whining about how often they don’t blog. I’m pretty sure I’m an industry of one. So, for anyone else who finds posts like these useless, I now present my solid gold blogging tips:

1. Talk about current events. I’m a little behind on this, but I promise everyone I’ll finally get to the Leno-Conan issue as soon as we get through the Lincoln-Douglas debates next week.
2. Challenge people you’ve never met to duels. This one works for awhile, but gets old pretty fast.
3. Mention something from your childhood. Imply the era you grew up in is superior to any other era.
4. Review a product. Suggest that you could be bought.
5. Talk about something that has recently happened to you, or something you have recently done. Don’t talk about completely uninteresting things, though. Save those for Twitter and Facebook.

Seaworld still exists, which is news to me. I guess I had assumed they had all closed at some point, due to the closing of the Seaworld in Cleveland, which brings me to my point:

What was a Seaworld doing in Cleveland?

I’m pretty sure all the Seaworlds were in coastal cities, but Cleveland was the only one not on the ocean. Were they suggesting that they found that killer whale and all of those dolphins in Lake Erie? There are lots of things in Lake Erie, but healthy marine life is not one of them, let alone ocean-going, salt water marine life. At the age of eight, I failed to question all of this.

If we’re going to have inappropriately located theme parks, then I’m opening up a wildlife preserve in downtown Detroit, a year round waterpark in Fairbanks, and a Disney themepark in Paris. Ludicrous.

That’s it. I’m through playing around. You can tell how serious I am due to the lack of an exclamation point in my title. I’ve never not had an exclamation point up there.

Dear Pioneer Woman: It’s on.

You get 125 comments every time you burp, and I’m sick of it. I suppose I could get the same readership through hard work, patience, and effort, but I thought of an alternate plan that requires none of that. In the tradition of the Klingons, I challenge you to a duel.

I’m going to beat you at your own game. Sure, I could pick contests that play to my strengths (such as whining like a 12 year old girl, or not posting on my blog) but I won’t. Instead, there will be five challenges, based on the five super popular sections of your site: Cooking, Photography, Home & Garden, Homeschooling, and Confessions. I’m not really sure how those last two are going to work, as I don’t have any children to homeschool, and there’s not a good way to measure the winner of a confessing contest. If anyone has any good ideas for that, let me know. (If anyone has any children they would be willing to pull out of school for a year so I can homeschool them for this contest, please let me know, also.)

So, Pioneer Woman. It’s on. You have until Friday, December 18th at midnight PST to respond. If you fail to answer my challenge, you will forfeit, and I will crown myself champion. If you respond in time, you’re still going to lose, and I’ll crown myself champion. Either way, I get a shiny, pointy hat.

That darn Pioneer Woman is stealing all of my press. This is mostly because she puts actual time and effort into her site, whereas I tend to treat mine like an abused pet goldfish, feeding it then forgetting about it for the next three weeks. Whatever the reason, I am jealous of the attention she gets.

Now she’s getting even more attention for writing a cookbook. I wrote a cookbook, too, but you don’t see me waving my arms, trying to get attention because of it. Her cookbook is a collection of apparently delicious recipes. Mine is a series of descriptions of delicious food. “Chicken is delicious.” – “Octopus is delicious.” – Stuff like that.

Dungeness crab is a particular delicacy that is popular from the Pacific Northwest all the way down to San Francisco, where I have had the unfortunate experience of dealing with it.

It’s not that I don’t like crab. Crab is delicious. It’s the methods employed to actually get the crab meat that I have a problem with.

This website offers simple, straightforward, and unemotional methods of preparing dungeness crab. I will now offer you the real methods of preparing crab, the method no one tells you about until it’s too late.

Take several living animals, animals that could still have their entire lives ahead of them, and place them in a pot of boiling water. Count yourself lucky that they are unable to scream.

Once you have successfully boiled them alive, take the crabs out and put them on a serving tray. This is where the real fun begins.

Take a single crab and put it on your plate. Rip its legs off (legs that just hours earlier were engaged in a futile struggle for life), one by one, and suck out the sweet crab meat. If the legs prove too sturdy for you, simply use a nutcracker to smash them to smithereens.

After you’ve torn the poor animal limb from limb, crush its body with your bare hands. Rip out whatever is inside and stuff it indiscriminately into your mouth.

It’s not that I don’t like eating animals. Animals are delicious. The cuter the animal, the more flavor I find that they have. The difference is the level of violence involved. If every recipe for steak started with, “Go get a hammer, a hacksaw, and a rifle,” I’d feel the same way about cows.