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Book Nook Greatest Hits Collection
This book bloggin’ is fun! I have been doing it for a while now. The Book Nook blog archive is all there on-line and I get a kick out of seeing which archived entries are attracting the most visitors. The top three posts for traffic might surprise you. I was surprised. Here they are:
none dared call it SCRABBLE…it is LEXULOUS!
By Vick Mickunas | Sunday, September 28, 2008, 01:31 PM
Living without electricity for 8 days was a painful experience. Without a well pump there was no water. No baths. No showers. A real stinky deal.
The food in the refrigerator spoiled. Any cooking was done outside over a fire. Thank heaven the weather was good!
For me one of the most disgruntling aspects was losing the use of my computer. I missed deadlines. I could not blog. And I lost the ability to play on-line SCRABBLE through the SCRABULOUS application that two brothers in Calcutta have created. This fantastic application became embroiled in a lawsuit. The owners of the SCRABBLE copyrights, Hasbro and Mattel went after the Agarwalla brothers in court in India. That lawsuit has apparently been resolved in part.
I learned about the court’s decision after I tried to log on to the SCRABULOUS website and discovered that the site had vanished. Perplexed - I checked Google News and found several news stories about that litigation. The court ruled in favor of the Agarwalla brothers. There was also a judgment that the Agarwallas needed to change the name of their application because SCRABULOUS was too close to SCRABBLE.
I kept checking the news knowing that the Agarwallas would quickly create a new website under a new name. Last night I was surfing the net and I found a mention of the new website. I clicked on it. I tried to start a game. Nothing happened. Then, right before my eyes the site went from some sort of beta test mode to the real deal. The familiar game rooms appeared along with my personal statistics. Nobody was in any of the game rooms.
I clicked on my favorite game room, SOWPODS JUNCTION. I was alone there for a moment. Then Minna, from Sydney, Australia clicked in. We played a game. She stompled me. It was heavenly!
To play the new on-line game that is exactly like that game we won’t ever mention in the same breath click on www.LEXULOUS.com.
I just did a search on Google News for LEXULOUS and didn’t get a single match. You heard it here first…..
I’m in heaven! I’m in heaven!
and here’s #2:
is Laura Bush a chain smoker?
By Vick Mickunas | Friday, March 16, 2007, 01:09 PM
Well, she could be. That’s the rumor. Presidents (and their spouses) are entitled to some measure of privacy, right? That’s why you never saw a photo of FDR in his wheelchair. That’s why JFK’s hound dog ways were virtually unknown until years after his death. And Bill Clinton ? Well, he put it best when he said that he did not have sex with that woman.
Besides, smoking isn’t that cool anymore. Lots of people still do it but it is a dirty little secret for many. Even in tobacco growing states like Tennessee the popularity of the stinky weed is in decline.
I try to avoid cigarettes and pretzels. I don’t enjoy choking (or smoking) but I am fascinated with tobacco. My dad smoked. Winston’s. A pack a day. He blamed the Marine Corps. It seems that the tobacco lobby was so powerful when my dad served during WWII that every soldier’s rations included cigarettes. Most young guys who entered the service didn’t even smoke. Many picked up the habit during those moments of boredom when the guns were quiet.
A lovely new book has provided me with lots of info about this noxious but completely legal product.THE CIGARETTE CENTURY- The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America by by Allan M. Brandt (Basic Books) is a veritable humidor of material.
Brandt, a professor at Harvard gives readers all the scuttlebutt on this amazing product. No product has ever been so heavily advertised. It was portrayed as sexy and glamourous. Athletes and movie stars endorsed what is essentially a useless, dangerous product. For years the hazards were concealed from the public.
Those sexy ad campaigns are here as well as the strategies the tobacco companies employed to sell their products. Then, there are the lies. Lots of them, that were perpetrated to protect those profits while they were killing their customers.
It’s good stuff. When I finished the book I almost wanted a cigarette. Almost.
So #3 won’t be much of a shock…..
chain smoking with Laura Bush
By Vick Mickunas | Wednesday, July 2, 2008, 02:36 PM
Wild raspberries- They reach their peak around these parts right before the 4th of July. I picked a quart along the road in front of my place this morning. I have learned that you have to get to them early. Otherwise the daddy long legs are drinking raspberry drupes through straws by high noon. I won’t even mention the farmer across the way…(that berry poacher).
My middle name is Hussein- Actually, it’s Osama. I’m kidding! My middle name is Amos and I won’t even consider this new fad of pretending my middle name is Hussein. When Jenna Bush is president anybody who had the middle name of Hussein during these giddy days of 2008 will probably be living in forced exile somewhere in Paraguay (maybe near George W’s ranch there?)
Don’t Bogart that Marlboro my fiend, pass it over to me- The other day I interviewed Tony Horwitz and I asked him about his recent op-ed in the New York Times that suggests that if Barack Obama wants to connect with blue collar voters in states like Ohio and Kentucky that he needs to dump the nicotine patches and start smoking Winstons in public. He was kidding! Most readers didn’t get the joke. They thought it was an outrage (comedic impairments) or they thought that it was a plausible idea. They didn’t actually inhale it. That was that other guy… Obillma Bin Lyin.
All Googly Woogly- This bookish blog has been rolling it for a bit - this morning I looked to see which Google searches were generating the most traffic here. Call me astonished - the term that was bringing random searchers home to the ashtray was “Is Laura Bush a Chain Smoker?” I’m serious. I wrote a post about it a long time ago and that post is drawing all kinds of traffic. Bizarre!-who knew?
When I interview people I always have fantasies about asking them the really obvious, outrageous questions. You know, the ones that seem insane to ask - what everybody wants to know. I have actually asked some on occasion but it is always a guaranteed way to annoy your guest. You don’t ask Bill Clinton about Monica. You don’t ask Hillary about Bill. I didn’t ask Jenna Bush if her mom, Laura Bush is a chain smoker. I wanted to ask but I don’t really want to move to Paraguay. Not yet.
You never saw Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a wheel chair. You won’t ever see Laura Bush sucking on a cigarette. Rumor has it that she really likes a good smoke..we shall probably never know. They hide things from us….really obvious things.
Vick Mickunas
Permalink | Comments (5) | Post your comment | Categories: scribbles and scraps
Comments
By Ann Llewellyn
December 7, 2008 11:36 AM | Link to this
I read of your anguished search when Scrabulous disappeared. Now Lexulous is ruined what are we adicts to do. Why can’t the owners of Scrabble pay the Agarwallas lots of money for the software or, alternatively, the Agarwallas pay Scrabble some sort of royalty. I don’t know why I’m asking you really except you seem to care a lot!By vick
November 13, 2008 12:15 PM | Link to this
Mike, I think a higher power would make short work of that plot. I think I’ll just start smoking instead. That makes more sense to me….By Mike
November 13, 2008 11:49 AM | Link to this
So, Vick, the smart thing to do would be to write every day about Laura’s smoking. And in each post just link to previous ones about Laura’s smoking. And in short order the Book Nook blog, through the magic of Google’s search pyramid hierarchy, would vault to the top of the list! I say go for it!! You deserve to be #1.By vick
November 13, 2008 11:17 AM | Link to this
Mike, as far as I can tell those are the archived posts that readers have viewed over the past 72 hours or so. One would assume that they find those pages from search terms on the various search engines like Google,etc. Apparently there is some interest in Laura Bush and her tobacco use? I’m delighted that the interest in on-line word gaming is even greater than that for the First Lady’s nicotine indulgence. The third post is derived from the second. This new post about those posts is also derived in a way from the others so I would expect this post to be popular in the archives as well…By Mike
November 13, 2008 11:00 AM | Link to this
Are these the most popular relative to hits directly from this website? People actually drilling down through the archives to look at these particular posts??? If so, that is very, very weird. If these are most popular relative to Google searches which pointed to these posts, then I think it speaks to how kooky the algorithms are that Google uses. Either way, one could spend an endless amount of timing trying to psychoanalyze the meaning of it, Vick. Very strange, indeed!