I am not sure what possesses me to do it. It is not always considered a manly pursuit, but the fact is, I occasionally like to write poetry.

Today, while I was at my wife’s toy store, I decided to pick the most unlikely topic I could think of for a poem. Since I was already writing an article on apoptosis – which is programmed cell death – it was a likely unlikely choice.

I scribbled it on the back of an envelope, so I am including a scan of the original work for the gratification of biographers and historians at a later date (certainly not right now).

Apoptosis Poem

Here is the text:

A cell causing halitosis,
Went to a doctor for diagnosis
Said the doctor, “You ought’a know this.
The best option is apoptosis.

Well, you can tell me how you think it turned out! Don’t feel like you have to show any respect for my false modesty. BTW, all unfortunate remarks and comments will be deleted.

Boy, was I wrong in my notion that if there was more info above the fold it would look good to Goog. I conducted an experiment on a couple web-pages that ranked pretty well. Over a month’s time they lost about one-quarter of their traffic. Today, I ratcheted the pages back to the previous iteration. Hopefully, they will return to normal.

I confess, I am not heartbroken, I did not particularly like the new look. Of course, had it done well on the search engines, I could have prettied it up. What I did like about it was the fact that it was configured so that I could isolate the content completely from the structure, so any changes I wanted to make across the board could be done easily. However, there was a drawback to this. It made it difficult for me to tailor info to specific pages.

Well, I will likely keep experimenting. But not for a while. Here is the old new look:

InDepthInfo ScreenShot

Well, I try never to waste good words, especially when I have labored over them for a long period. I was going to enter my Grezundl and the Frog Prince in a contest. But it turns out that the book is a tad bit short on words. The min number is 50,000. Grezundl is a bare 17,000 or so. An excellent book, though. Why didn’t I make it longer? You try writing 50,000 words of sparkling wit!

Truthfully, I have done it before and it took me a whole year to do it. Suffice it to say, that Grezundl and the Frog Prince is a great story. By the way, the words I intend not wasting are contained in my application blurb. Here it is:

Near a black-water swamp sits a forlorn prince with bulging eyes, webbed feet, and a wickedly fast tongue. He contemplates with grim delight the delectable crunchiness of a blue-bottle fly. Meanwhile, across a moat and up three stories in the corner tower of a castle, a princess, with hair so long she must tie it around her waist, contemplates a blue bottle of her own. It is filled with a scent imported from the best shop in Paris. She regretfully dumps the perfume out the window and stuffs in a meticulous, closely written note. “To whom it may concern…I am a lovely princess trapped in a tower…need rescue… — … et cetera and ad nauseum…Yours forever, Grezundl.” She tosses the note-in-a-bottle from the window. The frog, without thinking, flashes out his tongue at what he mistakenly believes is a blue-bottle fly. So the adventure begins.

Written with keen psychological insight, intense characterization, light humor, and some really big words, “Grezundl and the Frog Prince” is an adroit blending of two familiar fairy tales. The story reeks of alliteration, smells to high heaven of metaphor, yet exudes a mere whiff of moral. Grezundl is short, sweet, and entertaining (the book, not the princess). A great read for all ages.

Well, if that doesn’t make you want to rush out and purchase a copy, nothing will.

I have been teaching some homeschoolers history, and as part of the class I have been creating web-pages on various historical periods. This week’s lecture was on the French Revolution. My research prompted me to make a page on Robespierre and the Reign of Terror. I link all the pages in indepthinfo by hand. To do this I will type in the subject and related matter into the InDepthInfo search engine looking for compatible pages. Any time I write about history or any remotely calamitous subject Nostradamus appears.

There were no less than three page references connecting Nostradamus and the Reign of Terror.

I am not in the least superstitious, so I see nothing sinister in this. I put the complete works of Nostradamus online some years ago, more or less as a lark. When so many searches result in a Nostradamus page I realize that there is a logical reason. There are a tremendous number of calamitous words in the writings of the “seer”. Since one can find almost anything in the enigmatic lines, one may also see a serendipitous connection to whatever subject a person happens to be preoccupied. No wonder Nostradamus has convinced so many people for so long!

Anytime I can just pick some weed in my back yard and turn it into something useful, it intrigues me. I have long been a fan of making dandelion wine, in spite of the fact that it is an incredibly time consuming task.

But there is another backyard weed that I find can be put to good use with far less trouble. It is Chamomile. You can actually make tea from the flowers. In fact it is thought to have a soothing effect, so it is great as a bedtime tea. I have also plucked raspberry leaves for the same purpose.

With chamomile all you have to do is pluck the flowers and dry them out. The next step is to steep them in hot water. Without going into detail, you can believe me when I say that it is much easier than dandelion wine. But then it is not quite as satisfying as dandelion wine either.

The other fact I found interesting about chamomile, after putting together a folio on the subject, was that the vikings used to put it in their shampoo to make their long braided locks shiny and lustrous! It is a comical image until you think of those braids protruding from a horned helmet on top of the head of an axe-wielding berserker!

Yes, I am back to mucking about with PHP. I concieved the idea a couple of days ago to create a magic 8-ball. Not sure what gave me the idea. Things like this flash through my miniscule mind on a pretty steady basis. Usually it goes in one neuron and out the other. This time it was a bit different.

I had scribbled a few notes on it on the back of a scrap piece of envelope at the toy store. Robin keeps a stack of them for such spurious purposes, so I don’t waste good paper. I was packing up my stuff (laptop and all) to head home, but had left the envelope on the office desk. She picked it up and examined it, as she does most scribbled on scraps of paper.

“What is this?” she queried. I explained the dubious concept to her, and she said “Neat.”

Well, that was all I needed to create the Sarcastic Magic 8-Ball. The code is PHP. The image was cobbled together on my old Jasc. It is actually a fairly simple script. Robin and the kids enjoyed asking yes or no questions and getting funny random responses. I put it on my impulse buy domain, www.ImNervous.com. Someday I will do something constructive with that domain. For now, it is just for fun.

Well, I have been tampering with InDepthInfo’s format again. I really liked the “new” look, but the fact was that the number of page views went down on every folio where I installed it. Also the ad revenue fell off. I consoled myself, thinking that at least the better look might get me more links, from those who did visit the site. Alas, it was a false hope.

Honestly, I could not figure out why there was a fall-off in traffic. But a quirk of fate stepped in to clue me in to a possibilty. I found a photograph for my how to make eggnog webpages. It was fairly large. When I put it on the site, it immediately dropped several positions on the search engines. I was flabbergasted. I have always been told that images are good. When I create a page on squidoo it fairly screams for some kind of image.

I removed the image, and POW, the folio pages were back up to normal. I put on my thinking cap, made sure the gears interfaced with the gears in my brain, turned the crank, and started the wheels turning. The only real difference between the two situations was that the photo forced a lot of the text below the fold. I am thinking that it might make a difference how much of the text, not just content, appears where the average browser will see it without scrolling.

So I have created a new template. I am still not happy with how it looks but it does force a considerable amount of text above the fold. I am trying it out on the Days of the Week folio. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

Weekdays, the New, New Look