Beyond “Highlight”: Paying for Promotion on Facebook

~ Laura ~ 29 Comments

Facebook is testing a new feature that lets users “highlight” their important posts, making them more likely (but not guaranteed) to appear in their friends’ feeds. This is a fantastic idea. I can’t begin to count how many of my status updates have failed to get even a single comment or like. The only possible explanation is that people aren’t seeing them; this new feature would fix that.

Highlighting is a premium service; this price list includes some additional options that I’m sure they’re working on:

Description Price
Highlighting Your post is more likely to appear in your friends’ feeds and to stay visible longer. $2 / post
Super Highlighting Your post is guaranteed to appear in all your friends’ feeds. Friends who have not yet liked or commented on your post will be presented with a popup window inviting them to do so. $3 / post
Ultra Highlighting All the benefits of super highlighting, plus Facebook will send each of your friends an email and text message notifying them of your post. $4 / post
Mega Highlighting All the benefits of ultra highlighting, plus Facebook will send each of your friends a series of reminder email and text messages until they comment on or like your post. $5 / post
Imaginary Friends™ Facebook will create a fictitious “friend” for you who will post flattering comments and likes to your status updates, photos, and links at random intervals. $6 / Imaginary Friend™ / month; 10% discount on orders of more than 4.
Imaginary Friend™ Wall Posts One of your Imaginary Friends™ will post a message of your choosing to your wall. Popular selections include “You look great! Have you lost weight?” or “I know you don’t want anyone to know it’s your birthday, but HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!”. $4 / post; only available to people who have at least one Imaginary Friend™.

If you highlight a lot of posts, this could get a little costly. I looked at my own timeline to figure out how much I’ll wind up spending on this feature. I started by circling the updates that are so important that they practically cry out to be highlighted:

A very boring Facebook timeline, with some updates marked for highlighting.
An excerpt from my Facebook timeline. The circled posts are the ones that I’d highlight.

Only about a dozen of the updates I post each day are super-important, and I think I could probably get by with just the basic highlighting. So for just $24 / day — about what I spend on my daily half-dozen coffees at Starbucks — I can make sure my friends are somewhat less likely to miss my most significant news. Thank you, Facebook; this is just what I (and my friends) needed.

—

I’m going to be moving this blog to a new server, probably around May 26. If you use an RSS reader, have the site bookmarked, or come in through a static html link (like a blogroll), , or if you do NOT have a wordpress.com account, then you shouldn’t notice any difference. But this blog will no longer be available through the wordpress.com reader, nor will it be sent via mail to people who signed up using wordpress.com accounts after the move, so if that applies to you, please switch to one of the other methods. Please, please switch. This blog will be a sad and lonely place if you don’t come with me. But, you know, no pressure.

Don’t Look a Zombie Chocolate Bunny in the Mouth

~ Laura ~ 38 Comments

A few weeks ago, Thoughtsy from Thoughts Appear’s Blog sent me a lovely seasonally appropriate confection in the mail.

Cat inspecting a zombie chocolate bunny
Health and safety inspection

Of course, the first question one asks when presented with a chocolate zombie bunny is: will biting into this thing turn me into a zombie? After all, biting a rabid dog will give you the rabies virus (which is why you should never do that — also, rabid dogs taste terrible), so wouldn’t biting a zombie give you the zombie virus? And if it does, will I turn into a regular human zombie, or a zombie bunny, or what? And is the chocolate chocolaty enough to be worth it?

I turned to the bunny’s packaging for answers. The ingredient list didn’t include “zombie pathogens”, “zombie virus”, or anything else with “zombie” in the name, which was encouraging. But I also made a horrifying discovery: the main ingredient wasn’t dark chocolate or even milk chocolate. This bunny was made of white chocolate. A pale, lifeless imitation of real chocolate. Zombie chocolate.

That’s right — this wasn’t a chocolate zombie bunny at all; it was a zombie chocolate bunny. Instead of a zombie bunny made of chocolate, I was harboring a bunny made of zombie chocolate. And it turned out to be even more dangerous than I suspected: a few days later, I found evidence that it had been attacking my other chocolate.

I got this as a present a couple years ago. It’s designed to be eaten on backpacking trips, but I never go backpacking, so I was saving it for the zombie apocalypse. Which has, apparently, just started.

Clearly, it was time to act. Chopping off its head seemed like a reasonable precaution. And I’ve been trying to build up a natural immunity to the zombie chocolate virus by eating a little at a time.

A zombie chocolate bunny with a severed head.
Snapping the bunny’s neck was surprisingly easy. Please don’t quote me out of context.

So far I’ve only eaten an ear. A zombie chocolate bunny ear, not a human ear. It was delicious.

Better Living Through Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups

~ Laura ~ 73 Comments

Recently, the lovely and talented Peg of Peg-O-Leg’s Ramblings invited several people to write about the same topic on the same day. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? Naturally, I jumped right in (and in case you’re wondering — yes, if all the others jumped off a bridge, I probably would too). Peg’s rules were simple: we had to write a piece called “Better Living Through Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups” and post it at the appointed time. We also each had to focus on a different subject area, so, naturally, I chose fashion. I consider myself an expert in this topic because — and I swear I’m not exaggerating — I wear clothes every day. Even on weekends. Seriously.

Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups aren’t commonly used as clothing today, but they have been in the past. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, oversized peanut butter cups were often used in ballet costumes, as we can see in paintings from that period.

Edward Degas Ballet Scene painting, with two dancers wearing Reese's tutus.
Ballet Scene With Reese’s, Edward Degas et al., c. 1879

In 1944, the The Hershey Foods Corporation landed a lucrative contract to provide hats to the US Navy in an attempt to raise sailors’ spirits by furnishing them with chocolate-based headwear. The resulting Reese’s Peanut Butter Sailor Caps were popular at first; however, their low melting point created such a mess that the Navy terminated the program after the first year.

Alfred Eisenstaedt's V-J Day in Times Square picture from Life Magazine, featuring a sailor kissing a woman, while wearing a Reese's peanut butter cup hat.
V-J Day in Times Square with Reese’s, Alfred Eisenstaedt et al., Life Magazine, 1945

Up until this point, peanut butter cups had been used in costumes and uniforms but still weren’t part of an average person’s wardrobe. This all changed in 1955, when Marilyn Monroe wore her famous peanut butter cup skirt in The Seven Year Itch. Some little-known movie trivia: although it appears that Marilyn’s skirt is being blown up around her by a gust of air from a subway grate, in reality, peanut butter cups just aren’t that pliable. The skirt’s apparent movement was the product of a stop motion animation sequence that took ten hours to film and required Marilyn to change into more than 200 different chocolate skirts.

Marilyn Monroe standing on a subway grate with her dress -- or in this case, her Reese's peanut butter cup skirt -- blowing in the wind, from The Seven Year Itch
Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch, 1955.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Reese’s were a standard part of any elegant woman’s wardrobe, due in part to Marilyn Monroe’s famous dress and, of course, Jackie Kennedy’s signature Reese’s hats.

Jackie Kennedy wearing a Reese's peanut butter cup instead of a pillbox hat.
White House portrait of Jackie Kennedy

Reese’s fashions fell out of favor in the 1960s, possibly because Jackie’s peanut butter cup hat became associated in people’s minds with the Kennedy assassination. But it’s been almost 50 years — perhaps it’s time they made a comeback.

You can read more about Reese’s on all these fine blogs today (unless it turns out they’ve been playing an elaborate practical joke on me, and I’m the only one):

The Big Sheep Blog
Childhood Relived
Go Guilty Pleasures
Fifty Four and A Half
Fix It Or Deal
Play 101
k8edid
Lenore’s Thoughts Exactly
Life In The Boomer Lane
Peg-o-Leg’s Ramblings
Refrigerator Magnate
Running From Hell With El
She’s A Maineiac
The Byronic Man
The Good Greatsby
The Monster In Your Closet
The Ramblings
Thoughts Appear’s Blog
Unlikely Explanations

Bonus fact: The results of a Google image search for “Rhesus Pieces” are a little disturbing, but not nearly as bad as you might expect.

What I Use My Time Machine For, Now That The Novelty Has Worn Off

~ Laura ~ 27 Comments

Like many people, I get a number of free products to review. Sadly, that number is zero, so when I decided I wanted to try the Acme Chrono-Jump Personal Time Travel Device, I knew I’d have to buy one myself.

When the Chrono-Jump arrived (a year and a half ago or last Tuesday, depending on how you count), I did all the things you’d expect: I dropped in on famous historic events, took a peek at what’s in store for the future (I won’t reveal any specifics, but you might want to stock up on those little plastic thingies they put in pizza boxes to keep the cheese from getting stuck to the lid), and even tried to change a few things from my past. Each trip sent me into a nightmarish spiral of attempts to correct whatever horrible mistake I’d made the previous time around, more or less like every time-travel story you’ve ever read or seen on TV. (Are butterflies attracted to time machines, or what? I’ve never stepped on one while living in the present, but for some reason they’re always getting underfoot in the past). So I got a little burned out.

I was going to write a negative review and take it back to the store, but the warranty had expired, so I decided to look for smaller-scale, safer, more practical applications. I’m glad I did. Here are some of the things I use my time machine for today:

1. Any time I forget something, I just pop back in time, call my younger self on the phone and ask where I parked my car, or when I last saw my next-door neighbor alive, or whatever else it is I’ve forgotten. The only problem might be that it can be a little annoying; any time I sign up for a new website, for example, five or six older versions of me show up asking for the password. Also, sometimes I forget how long it’s been since I remembered the thing I’ve forgotten.

2. I use it to make better choices at restaurants. I just wait until all the entrees have arrived and then go back in time and order the one that looks best. I am, of course, very careful to always order last, so that people who know what I’m doing don’t copy my order and create one of those annoying time paradoxes.

3. I hooked the time machine into my alarm clock, so now instead of a snooze button, I have a “go back four hours and get more sleep” button. It’s amazing.

4. Before I had the Chrono-Jump, if I wanted a baked potato, I’d have to either wait an hour for it to cook, or microwave it and deal with that awful microwaved-potato skin, or try to figure out one of those hybrid oven / microwave potato-cooking recipes. But now I’ve hooked the time machine into my oven, so I can just put the potato in and set the timer to start cooking an hour ago.

So there you have it. I wouldn’t recommend the Chrono-Jump to someone who’s looking to have adventures or change their past, but it’s the best alarm clock I’ve ever had. Four stars out of five.

Self-Referential Sunday: My New Posting Schedule

~ Laura ~ 35 Comments

Themed days of the week (Caturday, Wordless Wednesday, etc.) seem to work well for other blogs, so I’ve decided to adopt that strategy to add some much-needed structure to this blog. From now on, I’ll be posting according to this schedule:

Pictures of the real thing are coming on Monday; here's a stuffed toy from tapirback.com to tide you over until then.

Maggot Mondays: Some of my most popular posts have been about insects, so as a special treat, Monday posts will be chock-full of high-resolution photos of everyone’s favorite fly larvae. Read Maggot Monday posts over breakfast for the perfect start to your week.

Terrible Tuesdays: Tuesday posts will be just awful — meandering, pointless diatribes full of spelling and grammar errors. Just thinking about them makes me cringe. But if you can force yourself to read through them, they’ll make the rest of the week — and, really, the rest of your life — seem so much better in comparison.

Washing-Machine Wednesdays: Each Wednesday, I’ll post a detailed account of every load of laundry I’ve done in the past week and an inventory of the dirty clothes I still need to wash. Wednesdays will also feature lint trap art and, of course, the weekly mismatched sock round-up.

Thunder Thursdays: Okay, I admit it — I stole the name Thunder Thursday from Kitten Thunder, which features a different guest cat every week. My Thunder Thursday posts will be similar, but with a twist — instead of just focusing on a guest cat by itself, I’ll explain in detail why my own cats are better. For the ultimate personalized blog-reading experience, send me a picture of your cat, and I’ll devote a Thursday post to pointing out its flaws.

Forgetful Fridays: Each Friday, I’ll post a few questions about some minor detail about your life; for example, I might ask who your first-grade teacher was, what street you lived on as a child, your first pet’s name, your social security number, the name of your bank, or your credit card number. Join in and show off your awesome memory skills!

Sugar Plum Saturdays: Remember Sugar Plum Awareness Month? Every Saturday, I’ll tell you how many days are left until December 1.

Self-Referential Sundays: Sundays on this blog are all about writing about this blog; for example, I might describe my blogging schedule or announce the grand opening of the Unlikely Explanations Store.

Three Scary Things In My House

~ Laura ~ 66 Comments

Scary thing #1: creepy-looking insect.

I was going to use my cat's paw to show scale, but he wouldn't cooperate. You'll have to go by the carpet fibers instead.

What is this thing? What planet is it from? Why is it in my house? How many more of them are there? If my cats try to play with it, and it bites them, will they turn into mutant alien insect cats? Do mutant alien insect cats eat cat food, or what? (Actually, based on the pictures at whatsthatbug.com, a site that actually exists, this appears to be a potato bug. But my other questions still stand).

Scary thing #2: ambiguously-labelled water filter.

Sounds delicious, doesn't it?
Sounds delicious, doesn't it?

The scare quotes on the label do not fill me with confidence.

Scary thing #3: confusing condiments.

Sugar and spice.

On the left is a jar containing a mixture of crystallized sugar, chocolate, and coffee beans, with a built-in grinder; on the right is a jar of pepper with a built-in grinder. Alone, neither of these is scary — but I know that one day, when I least expect it, I’ll confuse the two. It’s like having a ticking time bomb in my kitchen.

March Madness! A Pop Quiz

~ Laura ~ 25 Comments

1. You get an email from your college alumni association informing you that your school’s men’s basketball team is in the semifinals for their national championship. You are …

a) Not surprised, because you’ve been following them all season (and every season since your freshman year).

b) Surprised to learn that the school even has a basketball team, and delighted that they’re in the March Madness semifinals.

c) Not surprised, because the email went straight to your spam folder.

2. March Madness is:

a) The annual NCAA men’s college basketball championship tournament.

b) The annual NCAA Division 1 basketball championship tournament. Because the NCAA is divided into divisions, each of which has its own separate championship, and being in the Division 3 semifinals means you’re not even in March Madness, much less the semifinals, whose participants haven’t even been determined yet.

c) Similar to Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), in that both are afflitions in which a person’s mood is influenced by a spherical object — in SAD, under-exposure to the Sun contributes to depression; in March Madness, over-exposure to a basketball contributes to mood swings.

3. You would use a March Madness bracket to:

a) Record your predictions regarding who will win each game of the March Madness tournament.

b) Hang your March Madness curtains.

c) Determine what percentage of your March Madness income you need to pay in your March Madness  taxes.

It's the second from the left, right? (Bowling ball picture from wpclipart.com; all others from Wikimedia).

4. If I showed you a picture of a basketball, a bowling ball, a mothball, a hairball, an eyeball, and Lucille ball, the probability that you’d be able to correctly identify the basketball is:

a) 17%

b) 110%

c) No one told me there would be math in this quiz.

5. You discover that your office has a weekly pool in which people predict the winners of that week’s March Madness games. You decide to join in because:

a) You have a really good system for predicting March Madness winners.

b) The pool goes by point spread, so in theory you’d have a 50-50 chance of choosing each winner correctly just by guessing randomly.

c) If you don’t, other people will be having fun without you, and the idea of that happening is just intolerable.

d) All of the above.

6. In your office pool, you choose the Jets to beat their long-standing rivals, the Sharks, by at least 9 points. The final score is Jets 73, Sharks 66. The next day:

a) You’re happy because the team you picked won their game.

b) You’re sad because the team you picked didn’t beat the point spread.

c) You’re devastated by the tragic loss of life that occurred during the huge dance number / knife fight that broke out after the game. Although you think you might be confusing this with a movie.

Answers: 1-b, 2-a, 3-a, 4-a, 5-d, 6-c.

Before There Was Spam…

~ Laura ~ 48 Comments
I can't decide whether I blurred his name and contact info to protect his privacy or because I didn't want to give him any free advertising.

Before there was spam, there were advertising circulars. My front door is a magnet for these things — every day, I find flyers for real estate agents, restaurants, dry cleaners, and home improvement services. Occasionally, I’ll see one for an optometrist or a dental clinic — so I really shouldn’t have been surprised when I got one from a gynecologist.

I could tell right away that this guy is better than my regular doctor, because his flyer offers a menu of “Specialties and Procedures” including several that my doctor has never mentioned (for example, she’s never once asked me if I’d like to have “Major Surgery”). So of course I decided to make an appointment.

I did have some misgivings, though. The silhouette of a pregnant woman on the left side of the flyer didn’t fill me with confidence. I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure that having skin that particular shade of green is not a sign of a healthy pregnancy. Also, her hands look kind of ghostly and skeletal, although I may be biased because my own hands are freakishly small.

So I did extensive research (okay, five minutes of googling) on this physician and found a detail he’d forgotten to mention: he’s currently on probation in California for a “misdemeanor count of sexual exploitation of a patient” (his defense to the criminal charge was that no one ever told him he wasn’t supposed to have sex with his patients). This raised a question about the “Specialties and Procedures” listed on the flyer: at first, I’d thought that “STD’s” meant that treating STDs was one of his specialties, but now I think he may have meant that transmitting STDs is one of his more common procedures. I should probably ask for clarification when I call for my appointment.

The Five Stages of Realizing You’ve Written a Poorly-Worded Blog Comment

~ Laura ~ 85 Comments

Sometimes I read other people’s blogs. Sometimes I leave comments on other people’s blogs. And sometimes that process goes terribly, terribly wrong.

Self portrait (assuming that, in a previous life, I was Edvard Munch and imagined this is what I'd look like today).

I don’t want to alarm anyone, but every time you write a comment, you run the risk that someone will misinterpret it. While everyone is different, most of us go through the same five stages when faced with this kind of emotional trauma.

Stage 1: Denial

You notice that a blogger has replied to a comment you left on his blog — but instead of engaging in friendly banter as you’d expected, he seems to have interpreted your comment as a personal attack. Your immediate reaction is to assume there was some glitch and that his angry response was intended for someone else, but then you notice specific details that could only have been directed at you. You decide he must be hypersensitive. Or crazy. No sane person could possibly have thought you meant that.

Stage 2: Apology

At the end of the denial stage, you read your comment once again and are shocked to realize that it really could be interpreted to mean that. Easily. By a sane person. You’re hit with an intense wave of embarrassment, which you try to alleviate by shooting off a combination apology and explanation of what you really meant. This will fix everything, you tell yourself. He’ll read the explanation, understand what I really meant, and we’ll both laugh about it. You just need to check back later for the friendly response you’re sure is forthcoming.

Stage 3: Stalking

You check back later. No response, but maybe he hasn’t seen it yet. You reread your apology. You’re not sure it’s clear — after all, you wrote it kind of hastily. You write another comment expanding on the explanation. Then you wait a reasonable amount of time (say, 90 seconds or so) and check back again.

Still no response. You look at your apology and your apology clarification, and even though you meant them sincerely, you realize they could look like the comments of someone who was initially wrong but is now backpedaling. So you post another comment explaining that that’s not what you’re doing. That just makes it worse, because denying it makes you look even more guilty. You post a comment explaining that.

You decide all these comments are starting to make you look like a stalker. You post a comment explaining that you’re not stalking him and that you’ve never stalked anyone. Unfortunately, you can’t resist ending that one with “but there’s a first time for everything”. You post another comment explaining that the last bit was a joke.

You begin to regret leaving all these comments. You send the blogger a tweet apologizing for the first one and asking him to ignore all the others.

You send another tweet explaining that you meant he should ignore all your other comments, not anyone else’s.

You send another tweet explaining that you meant he should ignore all your other comments on this post, not the two previous posts of his you’ve commented on, and that you remain steadfast in your opinion that his children and pets are adorable in their matching purple sweaters and that his brownie recipe looks delicious but could probably be improved by adding a cup or two of chocolate chips along with the nuts. Technically, you have to break this into three tweets because of Twitter’s character limit.

You send another tweet explaining you’re not a stalker, because you just realized that if he follows your instructions and doesn’t read all the comments you left on his blog, he’ll miss that very important bit of information.

You send him a friend request on Facebook.

You add him to your “People I Am Definitely Not Stalking” circle on Google+.

You realize there’s probably nothing more you can say to him at this point, so you start asking friends to act as character references. No one seems particularly enthusiastic about the idea. You can’t imagine why.

Stage 4: Depression

All your tweets and friend requests and comments go unanswered. The blogger clearly doesn’t believe you. You feel like you’ve lost all credibility. You start to wonder how many other people you’ve offended without realizing it — after all, lots of people just ignore comments they think are offensive, so how would you know? You withdraw from the Internet and resort to speaking to people in person. You realize you’ve hit rock bottom when you find yourself buying the print version of a newspaper.

Stage 5: Acceptance

You begin to put the situation into perspective and return to the Internet. You’re filled with something that you try to convince yourself is a sense of inner peace, but it’s really just numbness. And then a thought comes to you, bringing with it a shining ray of hope: hey, this might be a good topic for a blog post.

Valentine

~ Laura ~ 30 Comments

I needed a theme for this year’s Valentine, so I decided to turn to my blog’s search term stats for inspiration. I reviewed the list carefully and narrowed it down to these three:

so many flies all of a sudden
how decomposed would marilyn monroe be
cat happy valentines day

I decided to go with the cat one. You’re welcome.

The Unlikely Explanations cats would like to wish you a grudgingly happy Valentine's Day

Want to do something special for your cats on Valentine’s Day? Serve them a lovely homemade chicken and gravy dinner and give them a nice gift, like a CatSofa or a Squeaker 3000 Robotic Toy Mouse.