Trouble I've Stirred Up

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Captain JP has asked that we put together a 'best posts of the year' post. This is a good way to get a post up without actually having to write anything new at year's end, when most of us are too stuffed from holiday meals and too woozy from holiday spirits to write much that's coherent.

Since I've been blogging for only four months, anything I've written here will probably still be painfully fresh in the minds of anyone who reads this drivel.

But there's always the annoying stuff I've left in the comments pages of other people's blogs over the past year. I could mess up your day by reminding you of some of those moments. So, in the spirit of JP's challenge, if not to the letter of it, here are some examples of trouble, pain, confusion, and embarrassment I have caused other bloggers throughout the past year.

Blog Commenting For Dummies. Not a comment, but a full-fledged, half-baked blog post, this was a response to a Tillerman writing project, in this case to write a review of something.

Before I started this blog, I was in a great tactical position to torpedo Tillerman's blog by simply writing entries to his writing challenges, which he was sort of obligated to post as part of the rules of the challenge. No matter how embarrassed he was by my writing, there it was up on his blog and there wasn't much he could do about it. Ah, those were the days.

JP's Weekend Puzzler. Poor old JP was just trying to make a simple point about how no one pays much attention to day shapes anymore. Day what? You know, those funny balls and cones we're all supposed to display during daytime hours indicating what we're doing afloat (from which small fry like Lasers are exempt, I think). I noticed something telling in his example photo that he probably forgot about and decided to make some mischief. I do that whenever I can. I did pull off a pretty creditable save, though, I thought.

Bonnie's French Quiz. I'm not quite sure how this all began, but I ended up commenting on Bonnie's blog about an old riddle from one of my high school French classes. The next thing I knew, Bonnie turned this into a blog post, which was going OK until someone named Nathalie With An H left a comment in French, claiming to be a native French speaker. The problem was she was completely missing the point. Since I was the one who got Bonnie into this, I thought I could save the situation by attempting to reply in French. Big mistake. It wasn't the first time in my life that an attempt at chivalry left me looking like an idiot.

In the blog I come and go, speaking of Michelangelo. Oh, what the heck, I've already broken the rules of JP's challenge, why not bust the time constraint, too? This is from late, 2008, but it was a seminal moment in blogging. Tillerman chose to reply to one of my totally off-topic comments and paid dearly for it. This encouraged me to do more of this, which eventually led to me writing this blog. If only he'd ignored me, think of all the trouble he could have saved the world. Don't those Brits ever learn? First Neville Chamberlain's weakness, then this - with even worse consequences.

Happy New Year, JP.

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