I’m so annoyed. I want to add the RSS feed to my blog to my Google web clips — if you have Gmail, you’ll know these are the links that appear at the top of your inbox.

When I try to add the feed for this site, it says “No feed was found at the URL you provided.”

Yes there IS a feed there — I can see it.

When I add the feedburner url, it gives me the same message. GAAH. Of course it’s there!

I think I’m doomed to having a blog that only three or four people ever read. Google hates me.

Sigh…

OJ “Killer” Simpson is back in the news again, this time for the crime of pedalling his tell-all book published by ReganBooks, an imprint of the formerly respectable publishing house HarperCollins. Sadly, he details the crime of killing his former wife (and mother of his two children) Nicole Brown Simpson and a friend, Andrew Goldman, from the perspective of “if I really did it, this is how it was done.” His publisher was quoted by Forbes as saying that she considers this book to be “his confession”.

And if all of this isn’t nauseating enough, since Simpson was set free by a jury, he’s going on Fox News to promote the book. Which…isn’t surprising, considering the typical Fox News demographic.

How incredibly sad for the families of the two victims, and I hope that OJ Simpson doesn’t make a thin dime off this book.

I wonder how libraries will justify buying the book — granted, I’m not a big proponent of banning books, but this might push me to think this is the one time a book shouldn’t be purchased with taxpayer money. Being a donor to the library, I’d be a little upset if I saw it in the prominent place with all of the other new acquisitions.

It would be nice if OJ Simpson would just…go away. Stop drawing attention to himself. I completely agree with the blogger who said

It’s time for us to blame ourselves for this nonsense. To blame our culture for letting it go on so long. For still being interested. For laughing at the jokes on late-night television. It’s all on us. If we had paid no attention to this in the first place, it wouldn’t be the phenomenon that it is.

Sometimes ignoring the crazy really does work. It’s time we try it with OJ Simpson — ignore him, and ignore his desperate ploy to make money off the sad deaths he caused.

So I was sitting here messing around with the Web Archive, looking at all of the pages I had on my old website — I started this in 1998 or so, so it’s been through many revisions. My old website was more like a blog…just with more pages, and it didn’t get updated as often. Now I’ve brought back more of the recipes that I was able to find, and some of the genealogy pages that people seem to still be searching for.

I also found a page I called “Lists”. A list of things that make me happy, and a list of things that royally piss me off. (Or, as I said back then…”are a constant source of ire”.) That page was fun — and not much has changed. I still love driving too fast on twisty country roads, I still own well over a dozen turtlenecks, mostly black…and I still hate ISP tech support people and so-called “religious” people who shove their views down everyone else’s throat.

Then I came across a page I grandly titled “Life Changing Snippets”. I enjoyed that one. Now I send my daughter random photos I take with my cel phone as I’m going about my day — an egg, my feet, a lizard….(yes, I really came across a live lizard once — I was at the PetsMart.) But back then, I had no cel phone, certainly not with a camera…and I don’t even think digital cameras were the norm. Maybe….but I definitely didn’t own one. I used to write things down as I’d hear snippets of conversations, and some of the good stuff stuck with me. Remember — it was 1999.

A sampling:

Overheard From A Schizophrenic Homeless Man on the L2 Bus 11/15/99

From A Book About Helen Keller

Dating Advice From My Mother

Life Advice From My Cousin Stephanie

As you know, I’m opening a coffeehouse in my “up-and-coming” neighborhood. It should be open in just a couple of weeks, pending a health department review — something that I’ve been agonizing over for months. But there’s another part of this that bothers me. The potential for failure.

Granted, if one is worried about failure, starting a business isn’t the best way to cure that worry. But it’s more than that, really. There’s talk of a splashy grand opening “ceremony” (what the hell? I thought they only did that for public buildings like libraries and hospitals) — a speech, presumably made by me. Did I mention that I abhor public speaking? Really, all I have to say can be summed up in two words: “Thank you.”

Thank you to my father, my mother, my grandmother, my friends, my children, my neighbors, and the builder.

That’s it. No grand proclamations, no grandiose promises to the community. Just a simple phrase of thanks, and nothing more. Anything else seems insincere to me, like the “common man” speeches politicians make. Haven’t we had enough of that for a while? I’m not a politician, I don’t want to be anything more than someone who’s known for selling good food at a fair price, in a place where people feel good. Period.

I just want to serve coffee…and leave the speeches to someone else.

Today is the 231st anniversary of the United States Marine Corps. Congratulations, and OO-RAH!

So you’ll have to excuse the mess. Aaron is working on fixing my blog and putting it back into WordPress, after my dabble in Serendipity (aka “Doesn’t do trackbacks or much else very well”).

I owe Aaron a coffeecake. A big one. Perhaps with pecans in it.