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Doctor, I said on my last trip to the shrink.  My wife has histrionic personality disorder.

What makes you think that?

Last night while stoned on camel dung hash she kept repeating, How do you get this damn thing to stop blinking?  She was trying to figure out how to make her Tamagotchi have sex.

Is she American? he asked.

No, I said.  As a matter of fact, she thinks she’s Queen Elizabeth, queen of fucking everything.  My wife whips me when I disobey, too. Imagine – she has me whipped bloody!

Maybe she’s the self you have to live with, he said with a sigh.

What do you mean? I asked.

Well, he said, shifting in his seat.  Look at Charlotte Roche, author of Wetlands.  She once wrote a book about Angela Merkel naked in the sauna.  Like some landscape artist on crack in London, it was a surreal collage of naked pictures of girls with tube breasts, American females totally shaved in German saunas, pictures of zoo animals with buggy eyes copulating while making screaming granny sounds, nude klingons, photos of naked ladies and girls from Squamish, sex in wheelchair pictures, photos of spanking all over Europe, ending with helpful tips on how to make your own shank out of a toothbrush and things to alleviate cramp.

Look, I said, I couldn’t care less about Charlotte Roche’s chaotic nightmare, saunas or Angela Merkel’s butt.   I’m worried about my wife!  Just the other day she came out with: I’m so British, I shit the queen!

Perhaps you should bring your wife’s cuddly butt into the office next time, he said.

I would, I said, but it might be easier to drag her to a cave dwelling in Capadoccia or skating on canals in Holland.

Hmmm… let’s deal with your wife when the time comes.  You aren’t thinking about quitting blogging are you? he suddenly asked.

What? What gives you that idea?

You, Canadian skier Ian, may be the author of more than 300 posts ranging from chess and Hitler to Dutch canal winter skating,  but you’re starting to look like a Canadian idiot.   An EasyJet crashing into Big Ben wouldn’t make half the mess this blog is turning into.  You’ve got everything from how to make a bike look crappy and the dangers of ipods in saunas all the way to 12-year-olds buying condoms and a nude olive run video clip.

Besides, you hardly ever post lately, and when you do, it’s some take on something that happened 30 years ago.

Don’t give me any of your putrid paranoia! I said. I never set out to write the definitive answer to everything like some Greenland girls’ nude blog.  Those are just search terms that landed here!  And it’s not just text searches, either.  Most of them cough up photos via google image searches.

Really? he said, perking up.   You mean if you post photos, and stick tags on them, they will show up in searches?

Sure, I said.  Everyone knows that, even Derbyshire nude grannies, Canada’s most toxic waste dump/flute player or a jobless bum.  Besides, the less often I post, the more hits I get.  Go figure!

Well, he said with a sigh.  The hour’s up.  Same time next week?

Why not? I said.  I hope by then you’ll have done something about the reading selection in your waiting room.  Monocle Magazine is shit, and the “little red book” of Mao, 1968 is really out of date, don’t you think?  You should subscribe to magazines that answer life’s imponderables, things like what if the world stops spinning, or is nine too young to have a baby?

No way, he said.  To pass the time in a waiting room, it’s much better to read all about camel penis and skunk families in Montreal while peeking at pictures of mausi naked.  Her oldest got sprayed by a skunk, you know.

Just in case you’ve never read my sidebar, every line in this post is drawn from a search that coughed up this blog – most often as an image search.

Blogging for nothing, but the kick’s for free

Nobody likes to do something for nothing at all for very long, so it’s no surprise that most blogs peter out and die after a while.

I started this blog exactly two years and nearly 250 posts ago on January 19, 2007. Back then I had vague ideas of writing posts as if they were the letters back to my family, something to replace the emails they’d for one reason or another stopped responding to over the years.

If you subscribe to this blog in a reader, by the way, that’s the sub-heading you’ll see.

Because I quickly realised how confining that would be, after about six weeks I dropped the letters and simply started writing about whatever I was doing, thinking about or had an urge to let loose on,  occasionally indulging my wildest fantasies of being chief editor of The Onion and posting a photo or two to gussy it all up a bit.

So given the format change I suppose I should follow all the how-to sites out there and re-do everything, give it a punchy name and graphics and monetise my blog, but that whole thing just seems too much like work.  I’d just rather concentrate on writing about what interests me and perhaps a few others out there.

The thought occurred to me only a couple of months ago, but in the process I hope to have built up something that one day my daughter will be able to read, so that she can learn about her old man in a way I never got to know mine.

Still, there are times when I ask myself why I keep doing this.

And, once in a while, the answer just lands like a bird on the balcony railing:

So Ian isn’t particularly hidden.  But if you’re a fan of satire, irony, beautiful photography, a world-view wide as the horizon and occasional posts as poignant and touching as could be found,  expat Ian in Hamburg’s  point of view may be exactly what you’re looking for.  His Desiderata for Bloggers, 20 Blogging Commandments and What If the Buddha Were Just Some Guy in His Mom’s Basement are as inspirational as a 2×4 to the head.  Read him.

That comes from Linda, a most under-rated blogger who in the past nine months has not only rebuilt her life in the wake of Hurricane Ike, she’s kept her blog going and is now starting to get her writing published in “the real world.”  Linda, it really touches me to know that my writing has been an influence on you, and I hope you keep at yours as far as you can take it.

In a comment a while back the author of Deutschland über Elvis needled me as usual: Now, 2009 is the year that both of us get published thanks to our heroic blogging efforts. What’s our plan?

Good question, HB8.  We’re already getting published, aren’t we?  Or did you mean for real?

Time to donate to charity

I wrote a rather long travel / what-we-did-on-our-summer-vacation post not too long ago with the following tucked in around the mid-point:

What?  You’re still reading?  Good for you!  Most would have started skimming or given up ages ago.  In honour of your perseverance, I will donate 10 euros to charity for every reader who takes the trouble to find my email address in the sidebar and send a mail with the following subject line:  I can’t believe I read the whole thing.  I bet I won’t have to pay a dime.  I’m dead serious.

Despite that rather cocky assertion that I probably wouldn’t have to fork it over,  four readers let me know they indeed had read the whole thing.  One left a comment instead of writing an email, but that’s OK.

So now it’s time to put my money where my keyboard is.

Saving the rainforest, curing cancer, feeding the homeless and supporting animal shelters are all worthy causes and I suppose the money would be put to good use wherever it goes.

We already sponsor a girl in Sri Lanka through Plan International, but there are also people close to home who could use a hand.

That’s why I’ve rounded it up by €10 and given €50 to a workshop in Hamburg that employs deaf people as bicycle mechanics.

They take bikes that nobody wants anymore, fix them up with spare parts, and sell them for a reasonable price.  They not only give a steady job to people who might not otherwise find one, they recycle the most environmentally friendly mode of transportation going.  I’ve bought two from them over the years, using them as bad-weather wheels to save my main bike from the ravages of winter grit.

They have also developed a really good sideline business rejuvenating out-of-date computers and computer equipment and selling them on to people who might otherwise not be able to afford top-of-the-line gear.

So thanks once again Michele, Bellicose, Onkel Mo and Silke, who took the trouble to let me know they’d slogged through the whole thing.

It was a pleasure to drop by there and say hello today, and pass along the money to a worthy cause.  They were quite happy to see me, too.

Canadian blog awards results

Careful readers of this blog will recall that this has happened before.

I make it into the finals, yet come in last.

No matter! Back in 1977 the race was broadcast live on TV, the winner blew past everyone, set a record that stood for years, and went on to compete for Canada in the Olympics.

In this year’s Canadian Blog Awards the race was live on the Internet, the winner of Best Personal Blog blew by everyone, and if her latest post is anything to go by, who knows where she might end up?

Knitnut gets some shots of some Ottawa cops after they’ve roughed up a woman on a downtown street. She refuses to give in to their intimidation, keeps the photos and publishes them. I hope that post – and her blog – get the attention they deserve.

Knitnut actually won two categories. Best local blog as well.

As they noted on the page announcing the winners, the personal blog category was especially competitive. Based on the number of votes cast, even the fourth-place finisher would have won had that blog been slotted in other categories.

Thanks to all who voted for this blog, and once again to Indeterminacy for the nomination.

Second place went to No Ordinary Rollercoaster, Meg Fowler third, The Peach Pit fourth, and Under the Mad Hat fifth. By careful process of elimination, that puts me in sixth.

A total of 57 blogs were nominated, many of which I think should have made it to the finals. Check out these, for example:

Matthew Good

It’s like I’m mmmagic!

Rigo’s Days