They Melt in Your Yard, not in Your Hands

Curiosity overcame me in the checkout line today, and I bought a bag of wild cherry M&Ms.

I just tried them. They taste okay. It’s a little odd to mix cherry flavoring into chocolate, but it’s not bad. The big problem is that they smell just a little bit like dog poop.

I am a New Man

I want to apologize AGAIN for saying anything that seemed even slightly critical about the Pope. I have been Googling around, and I can see that I did not understand how protective his flock is. I saw an article online that said completely benign things about his home and lifestyle, and Catholics were posting furious comments. If that made them mad, it’s no wonder I caught hell. My remarks were somewhat negative. They were extremely mild, but I can see that that doesn’t matter.

I think you could get lynched for something like this, if you did it in front of the wrong crowd. I didn’t understand, because there is no Protestant equivalent. There is no one Protestants are that sensitive about. You can say things about Jesus that you can’t say about the Pope. So I would like to move on. Hooray for the Pope. What a fine person he is, in all respects. I cannot praise him highly enough, so I will not bother trying.

In other news, the Manly Grub forum died last night, but it’s working again. Kudos to Hostrocket, my new hosting company. They responded to my support ticket, fixed everything, and gave me a clear explanation of what went wrong, all in about three minutes. I have to thank Kenny for recommending them.

I hope the forum is easier to navigate than it used to be. I don’t understand why it suddenly went offline. Maybe the Catholic Defense League hacked it, or maybe it was just a run of the mill divine smiting.

I Didn’t Sign up for This

Really sorry about the lame blogging lately. I’ll tell you some sad facts about being a writer. You have endless leisure, and you can do what you want with your time. Until you publish something people actually might want to read. Then it’s almost like having a real job.

The book is going into a second printing, and retailers are placing more orders, so I have stuff to do. I can’t lie here on my fat rear end and blog all day. Instead I lie here on my fat rear end doing other things. I might be able to turn this book into a success. I keep thinking it would be great to have a cooking show for men.

I have not abandoned you. I shall return.

Here’s one thing I’ve done. I reworked the Manly Grub forum. I didn’t understand how the software worked the first time around. Now I’m starting to get a clue. I’ve broken things up into three general areas. General, Food, and “Beer, Wine, and Booze in General.” Hmm…two “generals.” I better fix that. The food category is broken down into a bunch of boards, like Steak and Miscellaneous Meat and Breakfast. The booze board is broken down into various types of liquor and beer and so on. Makes a little more sense now.

More photos are going up, and people are posting recipes.

The other day I threatened to come up with a recipe for blueberry cornbread, but I haven’t made good on it yet. Blueberries are really getting nice now. They’re fatter than they were in June, and they’re two bucks a pint. Probably cheaper at Costco.

Be back when I have more time.

Or Next to the Steak

I just put up a shameful post at Manly Grub. It’s about the healthy breakfast I eat most days. You can’t eat pork fat at every single meal, unfortunately.

I put up my final recipes for pita and hummus.

Crap

Had a problem with the blogroll at Manly Grub. If your site fell off, it doesn’t mean I delinked it. I am working to get all the links back up.

If you’ve ever heard of St. Louis gooey butter cake, go over there and tell me about it.

How Wrong You Are

It’s 9:16 a.m., and I’m already tired. Lots of things going on.

I’m too lazy to write a whole blog post right now, but let me point you to one. Longtime reader Wormathan used my recipe to make a blueberry cheesecake, and it’s gorgeous.

You can see it here.

Don’t forget to join the forum.

EWWWWW

I did a radio show to promote the cookbook, and host Mike McConnell told me to steal his idea and write a book based on it: “Sounds Disgusting; Tastes Great.”

So I put up a board in the forum, with exactly that theme.

I am sure you will have no problem filling it.

Scones

I am now putting unpublished recipes up at Manly Grub. There is a link to them in the sidebar, and you can also find them on the forum.

Today’s treat: scones made with bacon grease, cream cheese, and rum-soaked raisins.

I want to thank everyone who joined the forum. It looks like it’s going to get plenty of business. Now I have to worry about bandwidth expenses. The hosting company says bandwidth is unlimited, but I have a feeling that is something they only say until it starts to hurt them.

Ordinarily, I get around 340 page views per day. Today it’s over 4,000. The unique visits aren’t high, but maybe they will be in a month.

People are posting recipes and food photos. I have a beer board up. I’m now putting submitted photos in the Coppermine gallery.

Come on by, if you get bored.

By the way, a well-known Blogosphere personality will be starting his own forum pretty soon. I am not cleared to reveal the news, so I can’t tell you who it is. But I’ll pimp it when the time comes, and you WILL join or face my disapproval. I know that would just tear you up.

Eat, Burp, Post

To stimulate participation in the Manly Grub Forum, I have created new ranks based on post count. Everyone starts off as a Tofu Eater. Then eventually you work your way up to Human Garbage Disposal and beyond.

I hope this is inspiring.

More

Readers Aelfheld and Pepi have graduated from Smelly Vegan Hippie to Salad Boy! Congratulations!

Unbalanced

A bunch of people have signed up for the forum. And as far as I can tell, only ONE is a woman.

God help her.

I also tested the profanity filter, which substitutes terms of my choice for common bad words. Seems to work quite well.

Don’t forget: if you have food pics you want the world to see, you can email them to me, and I may put them in the gallery.

Thanks for signing up.

Forum Open

Let’s give this forum thing a shot.

I put together two forums. One uses PHPBB. The other uses Simple Machines. These are forum programs. I picked them because they were free, and because I was able to set them up using Fantastico. The SMF (Simple Machines) forum was much better looking and easier to operate, so that’s the one I plan to go with.

I’m going to run it for at least a week and see how it goes. Because I have limited time to administer it, I had to make horrible draconian rules, which I posted in the “Say Hi Here” subforum. I’ll repeat them here. I’m not making these rules to be a pain in the ass; I have to minimize the time I spend babysitting, and this is the only way to do it, for the time being. I can’t play around, adjudicating trivial disputes, so I’ll have to ban or suspend people. Shouldn’t be a problem for anyone except dedicated troublemakers.

RULES:

1. No heavy-duty profanity. Only the mildest three of George Carlin’s ten deadly words, please. You should be able to figure out what they are. Also banned: the A.H. word. If your username is dirty, you’ll have to change it. Don’t say anything here you can’t say at 9 p.m. on national TV.
2. Try to be polite.
3. Don’t get involved in repetitious, endless arguments that bore everyone to death. Take it to email.
4. Don’t post anyone’s personal or private information, or anything about another person that isn’t true.
5. No spam.
6. No dirty pictures. If in doubt, keep it to yourself.
7. Expect to be held to the broad disclaimer language you agreed to when you signed up. If you didn’t read it, that’s your problem.
8. I may add to these rules. You have to keep up with new rules, without being informed.
9. No photos of salad or tofu.

This isn’t a court of appeals, so you have no rights. I try to be fair, but I may screw up, and I or my moderators may ban people or alter or delete their posts unfairly. That’s life, and you consent to it by being here. It’s not that I’m a jerk, although that is probably the case. It’s that I only have so much time to fool with the board, so I can’t get dragged into lengthy arguments over whether I did the right thing.

Have fun, if that is still possible.

Here’s the URL: FORUM.

Tell me what you think.

Grub Embargo On

Manly Grub will be down for a while as I move from one server to another. Please try to be strong during the transition.

My Amazon Adventures

I am taking a break from reading the book of Acts, whereby I hope to give myself strength to continue being saintly and superior. Not everyone can be as great a Christian as I am, but thank goodness, I have the humility to refrain from putting down those who fail.

I checked Amazon. So far, I have done nearly nothing to promote the cookbook; things are in the works, but very little has happened so far. Nonetheless, it keeps bobbing in the popularity rankings. Ordinarily, book sales work like this: you do some PR, and the book’s sales improve briefly. Then they sag pretty badly. So you do more PR. This time, the sales don’t appear to be closely related to the PR.

That seems like a good sign. Optimally, you want a book to sell by word of mouth, because no promotion can compare to an army of individuals hyping the book to friends and relatives. If that were to happen, I would expect the sales peaks to follow the arrival of the book in people’s hands. In other words, I would expect a bounce from initial PR, then a drop, and then another bounce as the people who bought books in the first bounce recommended the book to other people. And eventually, you expect the peaks to sort of merge into a gradual upward trend, as buying and shipping dates become more numerous and less rhythmic.

I hope that’s what’s starting to happen.

If Amazon’s site is correct, they’ve run out of copies twice. So someone must be buying.

I seriously believe this book has more appeal than the others. It kills me that I wasn’t able to publish it a year ago, because even then, I thought it was my best shot at success, and at establishing a series of books based on the same theme. When you publish a book, you are relying on other people’s money; the publisher has to make an investment in order to get the book onto shelves. So you have to rely on their marketing judgment, and you can’t blame them for going with projects that seem safe to them, based on the success of other books. You can either let them make choices for you, or you can start your own publishing company.

I almost lost the opportunity to publish the cookbook. My agent sold it, but we didn’t execute a contract, because we were fooling with other things. Then the offer disappeared, and I had to get him to sell it to them again. I was mortified. I had assumed that my agent and editor wouldn’t let anything fall through the cracks, but here is a fact of life: nobody will ever be as interested in looking after you as you are. People have their own problems to worry about, so worry about yours, and you’ll be okay.

This book was accepted almost as a favor to me. My editor liked it, but it didn’t thrill the marketing people the way…don’t laugh…the caveman book did. My advance was about as low as advances get. But I took it, because, unlike a lot of sharp operators masquerading as writers, I think more about royalties than advances. Now, in comparison to the other books, it appears to be a much easier product to sell. Life is funny.

I dread the idea of running an Internet forum, because it will be work, and I know from moderating comments that whatever I do will make people mad. But I think I’m going to set up a forum anyway, because it’s good business. If I do, it should be up and running this week. I’ll tell you right up front that only four of George Carlin’s ten deadly words will be permitted. If you can’t say it at 9 p.m. on CBS, don’t write it in the forum. And if you’re just generally obnoxious and a pain in the ass, your stuff will get deleted over and over.

Maybe I’ll con someone into helping me moderate.

I’ll need a new hosting account in order to have a forum, so Manly Grub will probably go offline for a day or two this week. Best to do the switch now, while the site is attracting so few readers.

If you cook my recipes and take photos, feel free to send them. I’ll put them in the site’s gallery. In fact, any impressive and original food photos will be welcome. No salad; let’s be clear about that from the get-go.

That’s all.

Magical Drawers Required

I am considering changing hosting companies. It’s really hard to find objective reviews. The jerks who run the companies spam the web with bogus “review” sites that appear to be poorly disguised advertisements.

I checked into Bluehost. Sounded pretty good. Then I noted the location: Orem, Utah. I did a little Googling. Guess what? They police the content of the websites they host. Are they Mormons? They won’t say. But they will tell you to remove “vulgar” content from your website.

If I start a forum, I plan to keep it PG. No F word, no S word, no C word. And so on. So I could probably get past the vulgarity thing. But the Mormon church is a hoax, and I have said so on this blog. So I think there is no point in dealing with Bluehost. I would be asking for trouble.

I applaud Bluehost’s efforts to keep the web clean, but I think they’re in the wrong business.