Well, this is it

Based on the number of text messages I got last night, the people who read (past tense) this blog expect and demand a picture of Peyton Manning being sad today.

So here you go:


And that's it. The NaturalBlog has been limping along for more than a year now, and this will be its final post.

But fear not. You can still get your daily dose of me, Dave Shaw, by following me on Twitter. It's a new experiment -- can I be funny in 140 characters or less? Find out. Click the link.

How many miles does a runner make?

Those are insoles, which I use to correct my flat feet. The top one is from 1992, when I was 14, around the time I tore my Achilles Tendon. The bottom one is new this year, and rather space-age in comparison.

I mention this because I ran a race Friday and Saturday (12 people, 207 miles) and am debating whether I'd call myself a runner yet. I guess by the strictest definition, I am, but it seems to me that being a runner is more a mindset than a measure of miles.

Summer Break (II)

We're on the eve of my second summer sojourn. If you think I should return in September, drop me an ecard.

Off!

The blog is on vacation until Tuesday. In the meantime, enjoy Georges Seurat's "Sunday Afternoon On The Island Of La Grande Jatte," which is an obscure reference to where I'm going.

Jessica available (again)

The Internets are abuzz that actress Jessica Simpson and Cowboys quaterback Tony Romo have broken up. This is good news because it makes Romo less distracted and therefore more valuable in fantasy football.

It also reminds me of this posting from the early days of the NaturalBlog, back before I was totally mailing it in. Enjoy a walk down memory lane with me.

Jessica, please stop calling
(Nov. 24, 2005)

Well, here we go again. Phone calls at all hours of the night. Love letters left on my doorstep, their I's dotted with little hearts. Oblique references to our relationship in songs that sniff the Top 40.

Jessica Simpson is available again. And she's after me.

We've been down this road before. Jennifer, Lindsay, Angelina -- they've all sought sweet solace in my arms. But Jessica, she's in a class by herself. Tenacious with a capital T.

Don't get me wrong. She's great, really, but I just can't keep up with her. All she wants to do is play chess, visit art museums, read policy papers. That girl has needs, and they're all the intellectual kind. Not that I condone it, but no wonder Nick turned to strippers.

I guess that about does it

Open letter to my fan(s):

As you've probably noticed in the last week or so, the NaturalBlog has really been mailing it lately. So I think I'm gonna call it a blog. Thanks for the love everybody.

--N.B.
April 1, 2009

This is why we play

When I started this blog three-and-a-half (!) years ago, I did it because I thought the Internet needed a place to be a repository of the dumb things that occurred in my brain.

I figured that there were hundreds, if not thousands, of people who'd be thinking the same things and making the same jokes, that they'd find the blog, that we'd form an online community.

I've revised that figure to dozens, if not a dozen. But every once in a while there's a real diamond in the rough. Like the person who logged onto the blog a couple weeks back after googling "here comes the hotstepper jaap scheffer."

Sure enough, there was someone else out there who had thought that the former UN Secretary General's name sounded like the early '90s Ini Kamoze hit, a topic I covered in December 2007.

I know not who you are, great thinker, but I salute you nonetheless.

Wannabees

Occasionally I ask myself, "Who is stealing my thunder?" Often I'm just being rhetorical, but today I pose the question literally.

Here are several blogs that are busy in the thunder-stealing business. First up, we've got naturalblog.blogspot.com, which jumped on the blogging train early enough as to sew up my domain name without that nettlesome zero. And what does this blog cover? Nothing. There's not a single posting since its 2002 inception.

I am also annoyed, however less so, at www.naturalblog.org, which is about the "adventures of raising a teen and a tween in the 21st century deep south." I guess I can't fault the Natural Momma, as the blogger is known, since she bought the domain, but has apparently stopped paying for it. Also, it seems we have different target audiences.

I have nothing but respect for thenaturalblog.blogspot.com, which seems to be a legitimate enterprise that keeps up with a baseball team called The Naturals. It hasn't been updated since June, but who am I to judge -- I took a month off this fall.

ENTJ, actually

There's a new web site that's making the rounds on some of the blogs I read, and it promises to anaylze the way you write on your blog and tell you about your personality. I plugged the Ol' NaturalBlog into the Typealzyer, and this is what I got.

Natty B is an "ISTP" (presumably a Myers-Briggs designation, though the web site doesn't come out and say that), a "Mechanic" who is the "independent and problem-solving type."

They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.

Um, keep trying.

They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously. They generally prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts.

Getting warmer.

The best part of the site is the noggin map (above), which (allegedly) shows the parts of my brain are firing while I prepare your quotidian entertainment.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain

Back when the NaturalBlog started in November 2005, I set up a statastics tracking service so I could spy on my readers. I figured the last day of 2007 is a good one to share some of that info. Here's a graph that charts unique visitors by week.


I'm not sure what made April '06 so good, though I do think the blog was funnier back then. Judge for yourself, if you like.

I had 9,320 unique visitor this year, up about five percent from 2006. If I keep that up, I should get close to 10,000 in 2008. I think I'll give No. 10,000 a set of a steak knives.

Continuing Coverage

I'm pleased to present DAY TWO of the continuing coverage of the NaturalBlog's second birthday celebration. How long will it go on? Who knows? In the meantime, kick back and enjoy this post from The Vault -- all the way from June 1, 2006.

Somebody get Akshay Buddiga a chair, and fast

This week ESPN and ABC wake up to what I've been saying for years: Spelling makes for great television. The 2006 Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee finals are on network TV. During prime time. Chris McKendry is out on play by play, and Robin Roberts is in. It's even in spectacular HD. I'm not making this up.

This is like geek survivor, with gangly home-schoolers facing off against their gangly public and private school counterparts, comparing the size of their respective mental muscles before they head back to their hotels to don their head-gear and curl up with some comic books. Only the most awkward survive this day.

Could the tension be any greater, when a speller hacks his way through schwarmerei, pausing after that final "I" to see if he'll get the dreaded ding that sends him back to the "comfort room." That's bee-speak for the room for the vanguished, where the weak bawl and even the strong whither under the angry gaze of their "When-I-was-your-age" parents. They should put a camera back there, and put it on PPV. I'd pay $100 to see an eleven-year-old get scolded for not knowing how to spell appoggiatura.

Watch the excitement, distilled one letter at a time, tonight at 8.

Happy Birthday to me

The NaturalBlog turns two years old today. Hard to believe, I know. Let's take a trip in the wayback machine and see how it all began...

When Blogging Jumped the Shark

Though the jury is still out on whether blogging was ever cool (witness for the prosecution), historians will likely cite November 8, 2005 as the day blogs jumped the shark -- the day I acquiesced to what is probably the most powerful cultural zeitgeist since disco, certainly since the Macarena.

Think of this as a nascent attempt to chronicle the all the times I think I'm being funny, the way the sediment along a riverbank traces the history of that river, the oldest deposits at the bottom, the newest at the top. Perhaps it's not a bad analogy considering blogs appear on your computer deep but not broad.

That's me, the Grand Canyon of funny.

Bloggin' ain't easy

I was worried that when I recommended a pair of funny video blogs about a year ago that I would lose all my regular readers because the sites I was recommending were funnier and took better advantage of the medium.

As it turns out, I'm the last man standing. Amanda Congdon left Rocketboom in a contract dispute a few weeks after I made my post, and Ze Frank wrapped up The Show over the weekend.

I suppose there is some pride in outlasting both of them, but it's tempered by the fact that Congdon now works for ABC News, and Ze is leaving because he got famous, got an agent, and is moving to Hollywood.

I prefer to think they couldn't hack it at being funny once a day and hung up their spikes. Sure, they may have been funnier, but now they're gone. I'll be less funnier, but for longer, thus arriving eventually at a higher total level of lifetime humor displacement.

Or something.

2006 Year Ender

It's my final post of 2006, so please indulge some rambling inspired at least in part by the events of the last 12 months.

In the year that brought us a Hollywood love pentagon (featuring David Spade, for Pete's sake) the fire crotchtroversy, and Rosie vs everybody, I suppose I shouldn't complain about celebrities' bad behavior, since it gave me so much to write about.

Let's just hope the coming year will bring more moral judgements from our own present-day Atticus Finch (Donald Trump), more leisure sports to consume me, and enough silly gimmicks to fill in the weeks when I run out of ideas.

I do have some resolutions, one of which is to start using spell check. You'd think I'd be able to get grammar right, but writing the first draft of history (on deadline) isn't as easy as most people assume.

I'd also like more inanity, but why wait til the new year to start:

Also-rans

Occasionally, I come up with an idea that I think will be a funny bit for the blog, but it just doesn't work. So I decided to compile a couple of them to give you an idea of just how high the bar is for a gag to get posted. I ripped off this idea from the Chapelle Show (R.I.P.).

Mr. T. Reads Your Horoscope. Self explanatory. You'd think this would just write itself, but I couldn't make it past Libra.

Cheerleaders: Brave, undaunted. Somehow, the cheerleader who kept cheering even after she was seriously injured during a college basketball timeout escaped my wrath. By the time I was ready to post something about it, I couldn't think of anything funny. I'll get you next time, cheerleaders.

The Shut Up Fund. I wanted to write about how Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy always pissed me off, and that I figured I wasn't the only one. My suggestion: Everybody who gets angry at Shaughnessy throws in $5 or $10, and we pay him not to write. But since I came up with this plan, a better idea dawned on me: I just stopped reading Shaughnessy.

A comment on comments

Due to the exploding popularity of the NaturalBlog, the sad underbelly of the Internet (spammers) have taken to leaving spamish comments. So I added a Ticketmaster-style word verification option.

Sorry for the inconvenience, spammers.

Here's looking at you, kid(s)

People occasionally arrive at my blog via a search engine, and while I welcome all comers sometimes I wonder what kind of people I'm attracting.

When I made a throwaway joke about Marilu Henner, someone logged onto the site the next day from an IP address in Italy, after googling her name. I can only assume it was Marilu herself, until information to the contrary becomes known.

Many have logged on looking to see if the name Tony Soprano assumed in his coma was an anagram for something. Fortunately for them, I'd already done the heavy lifting.

Lots of people come wondering "Why so blue, panda bear?" And a handful link from the Washington Post to my extremely inappropriate joke about an autistic boy. D'oh.

But my "Who is searching for this?" hall of famer must be Cathy Poulin, the semi-sexy siren who appears alongside Bob in the Bob's Discount Furniture ads. About five people a day end up on the NaturalBlog after searching for her on google. Usually, they've also included "hot" or "naked" in the search string.

I just got a great idea on how to boost traffic:

Cathy Poulin naked Cathy Poulin naked Cathy Poulin naked.

There. Are you happy, sickos?

Who's reading? Evidently, everyone.

I was once worried that no one would read the NaturalBlog, but now it seems I've stumbled onto the opposite problem -- everybody's reading, and everybody's taking my jokes.

Witness:

• The scalawags at Barstool Sports (a rag you can pick up free in Boston) jumped on my dislike of fitness celebrity John Basedow, in one of their weekly e-mails. Alert reader Sebastian Dangerfield was kind enough to flag the plagiarism. I had them (and their bad spelling) scooped by about a month.


• Need to figure out which bowl game to make fun of? Read the NaturalBlog from last Thursday, as this sports writer apparently did, before writing his column for Monday.


• Even the old grey lady is in on the act. See my November news roundup on declining values in Maine, versus this remarkably well-written, well-reported story that appeared in The New York Times Christmas day.

NaturalBlog only hopes that Jessica will take the hint, and actually start calling.