Dear CogDogBlog Spammers,

Thank you for your loyalty over the last 7 years, your patronage was never wavered, and your activity has continued to grow over the years. Your work is a tribute to perseverance in your discipline, and I am sure your clients, the various pill retailers, online gambling parlors, body enhancement providers all have prospered greatly because of your sheer genius.

But I have been stingy in keeping your daily, hourly, often Russian, flow of wisdom to myself. Until now, I have vigorously kept a chain link fence around this blog with various anti-spam plugins, but I wanted to let you know that the guard dog has been chained and you shall sometimes be let in the yard…

… well, that is, after I edit your stupid-ass comment’s URL and email address. I thus leave your poetic comments to be available to all of the readers here who have been missing out the pleasure I have been hoarding myself by moderating your steady torrent of activity.

with sheer love and affection,
CogDog

I thought if I kept my head down low enough, I’d avoid being tagged by the “Seven things you don’t know about me” meme. My plan was working perfectly, and out of nowhere, whap! Rob Wall smacks me.

Seriously, if there is such a thing around this blog taken as serious– I enjoy reading the way people I know or follow take this on. No I do not believe in chain letter like tragedies as a motivator, I am compelled to dig through the past and find something interesting.

Oops not much there.

First, I cannot repeat any of the Five Things I posted in 2006. Maybe the next meme will be six or eight or twenty-three.

So for what its not worth, here it goes…

1. The first car I owned was a frackin blue Pinto, 70′s vintage. My friends from high school drove more muscular Pontiacs and Novas and I had the cute little bubble. Actually, I bought it off my sister. I cannot remember how long I had the nothing magnet, and was absolutely tickled I managed to sell it.
2. One year at summer camp I fell for a country girl named “Johnny-Sue”.
3. Despite my adult dog fascination, we had but one dog when I was growing up. “Sunny Duke” was a Shelty Beagle mix, and while having adorable coloring, he is a neurotic nutso. I am convinced my sisters locked him in their room and performed some sort of mental psychosis training. I thought he hated me.
4. In high school, when it came time to start monkeying around with liquor (which was not easy to come by at 16), I started a process of draining what was in my parent’s cabinet, just down low enough to slip the bottle back. I have mo idea what they said when they moved out of the old house and found a whole cabinet full of bottle with 1/2 inch of liquid on the bottom. I think we polished off a really old bottle of scotch.
5. I studied Geology as an undergrad and got a Masters and still stink at identifying rocks and minerals. Don’t ask me to do it, I’ll mumble something like “milky quartz” or “foliated schist”. I’m making it up.
6. Like Rob I devote one thing to a Who Concert experience, except I don’t really remember the (?) 1983 concert at Veterans Stadium in Philly. I was a Who fanatic from high school, and in college at University of Delaware, when I found out there was a concert, I was determined to round up my old crew to go see the old guys live. A problem was my friend Kevin was down in Blacksburg, Virginia and had no transport. I go it in my mind to drive 6 hours down there on a Thursday, picking him up, driving back to Baltimore Friday, going to a concert Saturday, and doing a Virgina round trip Sunday- in the damned Pinto from #1. I got so *****ing drunk I don’t remember the concert, but apparently I tossed some cookies in a sub shop and did some other things of which luckily there is no evidence.
7. The last year of my undergraduate program at University of Delaware, I lucked into a great part-time job taking scanning electronic microscope photos of samples at a DuPont lab. It was great cause I would do it at night after the regulars were gone, so I could blast music. It paid something like $13/hour back in 1985. When it was slow, I would insert strands of hair or cheerios.

There. Nothing is left to fill in any more memes.

So now…. who do I inflict with the contagion? I aim the meme at…. Sean, Martha, Devon, Hilary, Coop, and Cole.

And maybe we should all pummel D’Arcy with tags