Category Archives: This Blog

Reader Reviews of The 100 Billionth Person
Posted on January 19, 2024 by CHC   ᐃ ᐁ

[Editor’s Note:  You know that these reviews are genuine since a few of them are not five-star.]

Fabulos (Brenik Francišak, Belarus)

I read The 100 Billionth Person over and over and it is definately the best wesbite.  I show to my brother and he talks, same thing.  Good site for us to hack tomorrow.

Just what you’d expect from a lib (Hess Stark, Montana)

I thumbed through a few of your posts.  I thought this was supposed to be a humor site but it’s not funny.  Dumping on President Trump is not respectful to our past and future president.  He only wants to make Americans safe from foreigners who are poisoning our blood and stealing our future.   I am cancelling my subscription to your blog, I don’t care that it was free.  Freedom is not free as every real American knows.  Get with the pogrom.

Not as cheeky as I am! (Ricky Gervais, England)

Plonky title for a site full of pissy little rants, right?  You do a few lame jokes but it’s mostly bo-oring shite from what I can tell.  I searched your site for videos of cats landing on their feet but couldn’t find any, so you haven’t even done the basics!  Have you ever listened to a BBC shipping forecast?  Try it some time, it might give you a vague idea how to entertain English-speaking people.  Oh sod off, I’m wasting my time here.

Your website changed my life (Dazi D., Tampa)

This is real.  I am not a kind of person who writes fake reviews for money.  This is a review that no one paid me to do and that is the honest truth.  I usually review luxury skin creams (my favorite is Abeille Royale Honey Treatment Day Cream, only $180 on this site) but your sincerity is an inspiration to all.  This skin cream changed my life — I hope it changes yours!  Keep up the good work.

For the (Beatles) Record… (Yoko Ono, New York)

Your posts have mentioned The Beatles 39 times — I counted.  And for the record, I did not break up The Beatles.  They just grew up.  Imagine Peace, Y.O.

P.S.  A personal message to Paul:  AIH-AIH-AIH-AIH AIH-AIH-AIH-AIH AIH-AIH-AIH-AIH AIH-AIH-AIH AIH-AIH-AIH AIH-AIH-AIH AIHHH.  Imagine Peace, Y.O.

I found a mistake! (Pippa Pedant, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY)

Ha Ha!  In your 2015 post titled Just Saying, you said, “I’ve always been fascinated by the similarites and differences among languages.”  SIMILARITES!  Would they be the people who inhabit the land SIMILARA?  Ha!  Gotcha!

I love this site but… (Arlene, Idaho)

Hey.  I was born in Amarillo, in the Texas panhandle.  Then my parents moved two hours north to Hooker, in the Oklahoma panhandle.  I lived in Hooker until I was old enough to read The Book of Revelations, then we moved another seven hours north to the Nebraska panhandle, to a place on Jenkins Road outside a village called Melbeta.  I was just a teen, and I remember thinking, this isn’t much of a panhandle.  Then I met a boy at Chadron State College two hours north but still in the panhandle, and we hit it off.  You know where this is going — he proposed, I accepted, we got married, and we moved to Coeur d’Alene in the Idaho panhandle.  Now I’m a part-time swim instructor and he’s an executive assistant for an asphalt supply company.  May you be lucky enough to live in a panhandle just once in your lifetime.

Scrute this! (His Holiness D. Lama, Tibet)

Your blog, compared to more interesting blogs, is like Mount Kilimanjaro compared to more interesting mountains.  They’re out there but harder to climb.

 

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39 Dollars (and 42 Cents) Later…
Posted on April 1, 2023 by CHC   ᐃ ᐁ

In July 2021, I made the Momentous Decision to display Google Ads on selected posts on this site (see The 100 Billionth Person Sells Out).  This was meant to capitalize on the fact that my various posts on hanging picture frames get a thousand-plus views a month.  Well, that experiment is coming to an end.

Google says that my ads “earned” a total of $39.42 in the 20-month span they appeared.  But Google won’t send me one cent of it until the total reaches $100, which in my case will take another two-and-a-half years, or somewhere around President Biden’s 83rd birthday.  Put that way, it’s clearly time for me to break up with Google and wash them right out of my website’s hair, I mean, code.

To replace the ads on my picture framing posts, I now display a “Buy Me a Coffee” appeal.  You have probably seen these on other sites — they are essentially micro-donations of coffee-cup size.  I will give the proceeds to charity, as I planned to do with my ad income, but I don’t have to wait for the total to reach x dollars.  One generous reader, an artist from the Midwest I believe, already tipped $10.  (I mention this not to go all Jerry Lewis on you, but to point out the effectiveness of this approach vs. the ads.)

You might ask, why bother with this at all?  I guess it’s mainly a way for people to express (and for me to receive) a tangible sign of appreciation that goes beyond a thanks.  It says that some people see enough value in what I wrote to actually pay something for it, which is affirming.

Now I can look forward to each and every one of President Biden’s birthdays this decade without thinking about Google, worrying about selling out, or being reminded of my poor entrepreneurial skills.  May Joe live 100 years.

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Call for Contributions: “Shared Shorthand”
Posted on March 16, 2022 by CHC   ᐃ ᐁ

I am inviting my treasured subscribers and readers to help co-write a future post here at The 100 Billionth Person.  The subject, as best as I can frame it, will be shared shorthand. Let me explain…

You and your partner/best friend might use a word or phrase whose full meaning only the two of you understand.  Either of you might occasionally mention it in conversation with the other, to quickly convey a certain concept or idea.  The word/phrase likely sprang from a specific shared experience, but has since become your shorthand for a more general idea.

For example, I can name two shared-shorthand terms of ours: “The Ashley Principle” and “The John Sexton Rule.”  (I will explain the meaning of these when I compile the post.)

To clarify, shared shorthand is more than a simple analogy like, “This is just like the time we ran out of gas in Sheakleyville, Pennsylvania.”  Instead, just the word Sheakleyville suffices to refer (for the umpteenth time already) to the consequences of being inattentive to one’s fuel situation while driving late at night in the dead of winter in the middle of nowhere.  But more generally, the word Sheakleyville conveys the lack of foresight at the worst possible time.  At least it does in a certain household.

There should be a better term for this than shared shorthand.  Secret word and codeword sound too conspiratorial, while jargon and lingo refer more to local or in-group language.  It is not metaphor (e.g., “the world is a stage”) and not really metonymy (e.g., using “suit”  to refer to a business executive).  Maybe some English major who subscribes to the blog (you know who you are) can help us all out here.

In any event, I am calling on my readers to share personal examples of shared shorthand.  This will make the post more fun than me just writing about ours.  In your contribution, name the word/phrase, of course, along with some details about its origin and the shared meaning it now has for the two of you.  A few sentences would be fine, but feel free to be as lengthy as the story calls for.

Rather than post your contribution as a comment, I would prefer that you email it to me at the100billionthperson [at] gmail.com.  That way, I can compile and publish all the entries at the same time.  I will use contributors’ first names only.

I’d like to publish this post in the next few weeks, so please don’t delay!  I look forward to hearing/posting your shared shorthand examples and the stories behind them.  Thanks!

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