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2010 Top Ten Posts


Australia Day Fireworks

Image by Sam Ilić via Flickr

Top tenning is THE new year eve’s week thing to do in the blogosphere.  Mostly because bloggers need vacation time too.

Thanks to the wonderful tech team at WordPress’s need to constantly justify their paychecks, I have a plethora of data aggregating goodies to help keep track of posts by popularity.

So here are the top ten posts by page views at anniegirl1138 for the year we are about to bid adieu:

10) Brad Pitt shaved the scraggly thing off months ago, but it lives on in my post about goatees and dead husbands.

9) Though I’ve successfully steered my daughter away from the cash-grabbing universe of “dance” studios, my contempt remains. Remember the Single Ladies? 9 year olds hoochie dancing for the dirty old men who troll the Internet?

8) Although I wrote this ages ago and it’s true intent has been repeatedly misunderstood, Angelina’s non-weight problems continues to be a big draw.

7) Another oldie but goldie, Lisa Parker still pulls readers and comments.

6) It’s hardly the only Facebook Meme worthy of scorn (I ignored the equally awful Movember Movement), but breast cancer awareness meme’s, and pink ‘s co-option by Susan Komen for that matter, sparked a rant that people read.

5) Jennifer Petkov was another post that missed its mark but certainly got read.

4) I’d originally planned to write this for Care2, or maybe I did and it got rejected, regardless, young and dumb in America was a huge hit.

3) Jillian Michaels is a poor role model and apparently I am not the only one who thinks so.

2) Musing on my life of plenty.

1) And the biggest post of the year? Women with no basic understanding of dressing for body type.

“You know,” my husband observed as he glanced through this list, “not one of these posts is about your family … or me.”

“Can you believe that? ” I said, “No one wants to read about you guys.”

“I am dismayed, disappointed and disgusted, ” he replied, ” but not surprised.”

Nor am I.  My best stuff is usually not the most popular, but that is the bane of all bloggers.

I hope you enjoyed the year’s effort and will continue to read in the new year.

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Resolving to Be Myself in the New Year


Happy New Year 1910!

Image by Puzzler4879 A Blessed New Year To All via Flickr

As the last days of 2010 speed by, some of us are plotting new courses for a new year, and this means – naturally – making those awful, and often fruitless, resolutions.

Most people concentrate on the concrete. Resolving to lose weight, which more often ends up with the health club having a fatter wallet and no significant body improvements for them save a skinnier bank account. Diet improvement or renouncing counter-productive habits are biggies, as is the ever popular “getting organized”.

Make-overs are big because of the broad applications. Nearly anything can be “made over” and “improved”.

A smaller portion of the population tackles the interior with goals intended to improve, cultivate or jettison relationships.

Typically, I don’t make resolutions anymore. I have goals but my success is not measured by how quickly they are achieved. Rather I look at how they incorporate into my life and I would say that my goals are in a constant state of refinement as I pursue them in a non-manic way.

One thing I have noticed about myself as I head into my fourth year living in Canada, is that I am more and more myself.

In my old life back in Iowa, there were obligations and responsibilities that obliged me to stifle who I am more often than was good for me (though it probably benefited a small group of others). I don’t employ many of the checks by which life was precariously balanced. Nor do I masque myself.

Oh, I can still be inscrutable, but more often, what you see is who I am.

This year, I resolve to continue being more and more myself.

Perhaps you might too. It would certainly be easier and more inexpensive than a lot of other superficial options.

In case I don’t see you again before the new year, have a joyous and peaceful one, dear reader.

You were not meant for crawling, so don’t.
You have wings.
Learn to use them, and fly.
-Rumi

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Ashton Kutcher and Apocaplyse Preparedness


Ashton Kutcher greets 2nd Security Forces Squa...

Image via Wikipedia

In the February issue of Men’s Fitness, Ashton Kutcher, Twitterati royal and husband to the preternaturally preserved Demi Moore, informed the world that end days were upon us and he was not going to be caught with his bunker bare or minus the necessary para-military skill set.

“It won’t take very much, I’m telling you. It will not take much for people to hit the panic button. The amount of convenience that people rely on based on electricity alone. You start taking out electricity and satellites, and people are going to lose their noodle. People don’t have maps anymore. People use their iPhones or GPS systems, so if there’s no electricity, nobody has maps.”

Ashton’s end of the world prep includes a well-stocked arsenal, hours of running the canyons that surround his suitable remote home and studying Krav Maga, the deadly Israeli combat techniques used by their assassins special ops forces.

He motivates himself to run by envisioning hordes of wild boar bearing down on him and he keeps himself limber and lean for all the hand to hand combat with daily Bikram, which is a beginner practice. I would have thought a survivalist would go for Ashtanga , but I digress.

Normally, Ashton amuses me with his lightness of being, so I am chagrined to find myself rethinking his weight class.

I am not convinced the world will collapse in the next year or the year after. The world tends to tip and totter and right itself for extended periods between major collapses. We are due, but a lot of things have to happen before anyone in the U.S., at least, is motivated to actually step outdoors and take up the torches and pitch forks. French or Russian revolutionaries, Americans are not.

One has only to look at footage of the Beck and Stewart rallies this past year to see just what kind of “radicalism” might fuel the next uprising and those people? They had lawn chairs and coolers packed with snacks. Not exactly matches for the heavily armed killing machine like Ashton.

Ashton. So not a name that strikes fear – my apologies to all you rough and ready Ashtons – he might want to rethink and go with something a hard vowel sound.

Kunstler, over at Clusterfuck Nation was spouting French Revolution comparisons in his most recent uptempo post about the coming of “end days”, but I think both he and Ashton overestimate people in the lower part of North America (and I am including those Canadians who dwell close to the U.S. border in my low opinion of their potential inner-anarchists).

No one is going to protest until it’s all but over and the only choice will be meek submission or meaningless death.

Look up from their texting or Internet surfing long enough to really see what’s going on around them and potentially do something positive and productive?

Nah. This is America folks. The proud, uber-prepared few are training like Ashton as I type this and will be the new overlords in the future, which isn’t here yet and not likely to be for another decade-ish or more and that could change. Yoda did say that “difficult to predict is the future, always changing”.

Ashton, of course, has time and money to burn. Nothing pesky like a nine-to-five or living among the masses to distract him from one day taking his rightful place  of territorial dominion over the grasshopper people.

In the meantime, people will scoff and he will bear the Internet equivalent of a swirlie, but he will have the last villainous laugh when the credits roll.

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