Thursday, February 25, 2010

Sundries

If you are one of the 3 remaining people on the planet who still doesn't have ad block, you may have noticed that something is missing from my left sidebar. If you did have ad block, you wouldn't have seen them anyway. What was there were advertisements from a site called BlogHer. They were meant to support women in blogging, and the ads were so that women could earn revenue from their sites. Never mind that my blog doesn't get enough hits for me to make any real money, I thought it wouldn't hurt anything to put them there.

Boy was I wrong. OK, so it didn't really HURT anything, but it just got plain annoying. A representative from BlogHer was constantly nagging me about my blog format. Constantly complaining about the ads not being high enough, or not visible quickly enough, or could I put one in my other sidebar, or could I widen my sidebar a bit? Frankly, the minuscule pittance I was being remitted was not worth the headache of trying to comply with all their ticky tack rules. I finally got fed up and cancelled my account.

I received an e-mail saying that any remaining balance would be paid out on such and such date. I laughed out loud when I read that. Well, really I guffawed. For three years, I have hosted their ads on my blog, and in three years I've made exactly $25. That's right. Twenty five dollars. That works out to just over $8 per year. I made more than that when I was in the Navy. Needless to say, it's almost a relief not to have to fool with them any more.


Unless you've been living under a rock the last two days, you've no doubt heard about the killer whale that killed one of his trainers yesterday. Today, I was shocked to read that SeaWorld plans on keeping the whale. I was even more shocked to read that this was the THIRD person this whale has killed. Why is this animal still around? And why was it still doing public shows???? How many people witnessed this horrifying attack and murder of this trainer? How many kids will have nightmares for the rest of their lives because of what they saw? It should have been either isolated or destroyed after it killed the first person. It's a sad commentary on the state of our society when a marine mammal is considered more important than a human being. And yes, I know an orca is really a dolphin and not a whale, but when three people are dead because if this one animal, does that really matter?


Last night, about three AM, my smoke alarm started chirping. The one in my bedroom. For a while, I tried to ignore it, but it just would not be ignored. Finally I got up and changed the battery. Trouble is, I couldn't find a fresh 9V, so I had to borrow one from one of the other smoke alarms. But, it was far enough on the other end of the house it didn't disturb me.

The bad news is, by that time I was wide awake, and didn't get back to sleep at all. So basically, I've been awake since 3 AM. It's been a long day.

I have a post about Apolo Ohno and short track that I need to get finished and posted, before it becomes like the one on Michael Phelps that is still in my drafts folder. (After all this time, there just doesn't seem to be any point...) Somehow, I don't think it will happen tonight.

Somehow, I don't think much of anything will happen tonight.

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2 comments:

Steve said...

So many things to comment or laugh at in your entry! I put hug a pillow really, really tight around my head if something like the battery thing happens. If that still doesn't work, I bring out the night time cough syrup!

Becky G said...

I'm such a light sleeper, though, that even a pillow wouldn't have helped. And by 3 AM, I think it would have been too late for cough syrup. I get up at 5 anyway, and feel that I would have been groggy for several hours after that. With me, the drowsiness of those types of medications long outlasts the benefits of them.