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Are Margaret & Helen for reals?

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Dunno about you, but I’ve developed quite a crush on Margaret and Helen, two alleged old bats with strong sentiments about moronic politicians, about the state of the economy, and about life, the universe and all that. I especially enjoyed their pre-election characterization of Sarah Palin, which was somewhat less kind and distinctly more on-target than anything that ever appeared on SNL. Apparently I’m not alone: as of this evening they’ve scored more than a million hits.

The question is…are they real? Are these really two li’l ole ladies given to tooling around on electric scooters and, incidentally, regaling the planet with their trenchant opinions on the lunatics, nincompoops, and would-be dictators who have been in charge of this country lo! these many years? And if they’re not real, well then…who’s behind the blog, anyway?

I hope they are real. They’re my kinda women, if I had the guts to be their kinda woman. But I’ll admit to harboring some doubts. After umpty-gerjillion years teaching English and editing writing from all kinds of scribblers, I’d hazard a guess that they sound more like 28-year-olds than 80-year-olds. The syntax, the vocabulary, the rhythm of the language…none of it rings of 1928.

Right up until my generation (and beyond, really), women with the kind of education and wit reflected in the blog’s writing were powerfully socialized to refrain from vulgarity. Nice girls did not use coarse language. Neither, surprisingly, did many men—certainly not in mixed company. Not until Vietnam radicalized us and the women’s liberation movement oversensitized us to the restrictions that bound us to the pedestal did women begin to use the f-word, or even the s-word or the p-word or any other of those words. It just wasn’t done. You can be sure my mother would have thought all sorts of “words” about the incumbents, but even more surely, she wouldn’t have said them. And god forfend that she should put them in writing!

That kind of training is not easily overcome.

Hilariously typical, for example, is this passage, where the conversation turns to bail-outs:

So many of you kept wanting us to talk about Sarah Palin. Sorry, but I have tuned her out. If I want to hear an ass talk I can just ask Harold to pass gas. And speaking of gas, several of you asked about the Auto Industry Bailout. At first we thought “How Boring” but then Harold showed me his credit card bill from Exxon and that got us going…

But just when you’re thinking “naahhh! The grandson’s writing it. This is the language and the humor of a 28-year-old guy of the sort who sits in front of the computer a lot,” ZAP! Up pops something unmistakably produced by a female mind of a certain age:

Life is short. You realize that even more when you are old. I have said before that in dog years I am already dead. So each morning when I wake up there is a brief moment until I realize that I still need my glasses to see the clock before realizingI must still be in this old body of mine… Then I turn and put a mirror under Harold’s nose to determine ifI still need to put on my make-up and do my hair.

Even a passage or two in the Bitch Palin post can ring of the mature voice:

I’m old enough toremember the Republican party of Barry Goldwater – when the party stood for fiscal responsibility, small government and personal freedoms. I remember whenI couldtalk withfriends about politicsand just agree to disagree. And then religious nut cases decided that if you didn’t agree with them you were immoral.So they went and elected George Bush President so he couldtake the Republican Party from being a party full of respectable people to a party filled with asses, jackasses and yes – bitches like Sarah Palin.

Goldwater himself famously used the a** word in reference to the neocons, and if he were alive today I’m sure he’d be using it and other choice expressions…dare we say it?…liberally. And I do know one woman pushing 75 who has been heard using plenty of strong language about our soon-to-be former leadership. One. A wild one, she.

Here we have two wild hares. Is that credible? What do you think? Are they real or not?

My money’s on the grandson. But my heart is with Margaret and Helen.

Tip’d is official

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If you’ve been awake in the PF blogosphere lately, you’ve probably heard of Tip’d, a new personal finance social networking site that’s been a-building for awhile. Well, it’s out of beta format and has “gone public.” Check it out!

For some reason, it seems easier to use (to my mind, anyway) than other social networking sites I’ve looked at. The layout is really attractive—soothing to the eye and handsomely designed—but more to the point, it’s extremely simple to navigate. The right-hand sidebar gives you many clues to what’s current, with a “what’s hot” list, latest comments, and the “20 top tags” cloud. Though the footer is a long way down the homepage, it’s worth scrolling to for its links to handy tools and the community blog.

I like it! 🙂

Mysteries of blogging

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Tina, my associate editor at the Great Desert University and partner in crime at our business enterprise, e-mails to report that our Copyeditor’s Desk site appeared among WordPress’s fastest-growing sites. It arrived at number 64, after a reader stumbled one of Tina’s recent entries.

Isn’t that amazing? Our readership is anything but huge, and so, I suppose, when a spike to 340 hits appears, it’s relatively so large it creates the impression of rapid growth.

I never cease to marvel at what attracts readers. The olive-oil hair conditioner story still is cranking readership: over 300 yesterday. Every day, someone out there googles “olive oil” and “hair conditioner” and shows up at Funny. Interestingly, the piece I posted on using lemon juice or vinegar to bring out blonde or red highlights hasn’t generated anywhere near that much traffic. Must be a lot of folks out there with dry hair.

Wish I knew what people love. Then I would give it to them. But then, if we all knew what people love, we would all be rich, eh?

Or better yet, happy.
😉

In the wells of silence

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Somebody has been marking my comments at others’ blogs as “spam,” making me incommunicado where WordPress sites are concerned. The WordPress support guy used the term “users”—plural—which means more than one person doesn’t care to hear from me.

So, I guess I’ll stand down off commenting. Too bad: it takes some of the fun out of blogging. But it does consume a lot of time that I ought not to be diddling away, particularly if comments go directly to the trash. Oh well.

Sploggers get rich quick off your work

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Several sploggers have been harvesting posts from Funny about Money. Most recently, a site called “The Retired Millionaire” has been reproducing passages from Funny and monetizing them. I have contacted Adsense to let them know that if they don’t bring a stop to the use of their service to steal money from me by using my work as an advertising base, they soon will be hearing from my lawyer and from the U.S. Attorney General, and to instruct them to remit all revenues generated from my content to me.

You’ll notice a new addition to the blogroll atFunnyand atThe Copyeditor’s Desk:Exposing Sploggersis a group of WordPress bloggers who are banding together to fight back. They propose to track down the owners of offending groups and to develop various ways to force them to remove members’ copyrighted material from their sites and to stop the wholesale theft. Exposing Sploggers also lists several other sites with information and resources, which you should know about.

It is against the law to use copyrighted material without the copyright owner’s permission, and profiting off that material is actionable. I am not above filing lawsuits against anyone I can catch in the act. No © symbol or copyright notice is required to establish your rights in your work, nor is it necessary to register your work with the Library of Congress to establish rights. Copyright applies to all reproducible hard-copy, film, and electronic material, and the law protects such material from the instant it is created. If you would like to know more about this, my chapters on copyright and on libel in The Essential Feature were vetted by an internationally prominent publishing lawyer, who pronounced them the best summaries in layman’s language that she had seen.

If you’re a blogger, I urge you to join Exposing Sploggers and work actively to bring a stop to theft of your work. In some cases, copy pirates have ripped off entire blogs, so that Google searches go to the thief’s site instead of to the real blog. Obviously, if you are trying to monetize your site, these crooks are stealing from your pocketbook. Even if all the slimeball steals is your ideas and your creativity, you should care. You should care very much.

The Copyeditor’s Desk has a new URL

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It took us a while to obtain and then ensconce our new domain name at The Copyeditor’s Desk. We’d expected to apply the domain name to the site shortly after we started it, but somehow we didn’t get the process done until after we had picked up a number of readers, who now probably think we’re lost and gone forever.

If you’re an unmoored reader of The Copyeditor’s Desk, here’s its URL: http://thecopyeditorsdesk.com

Please come on back! Or, if you haven’t seen it, c’mon over. Tina just posted a squib on getting scholarly work published; in the next day or two, I’m planning to write on the progress of starting a small business. To our amazement, our little enterprise has already generated as much work as we can handle — if we get any more assignments this month, we’ll have to farm them out. We’ll let you know at that site how we did it, what worked, and what apparently didn’t work.