There are some days when God just seems to smile on me… almost as if He had forgotten that I was supposed to be a marked man and as a result let a blessing through by accident. 

This one came in the form of only having to pay $300 for auto body work which would have normally cost me as much as $1,900 had I gone with somebody else.  They even polished it too!

So I was outside cleaning up my sleek black ride afterwards, and putting a new hitch cover in when I heard, “Wow that’s a NICE ride!”

I looked up and it was an old dude.  “Yep, sure is.”

He then hooked me into a conversation, and after chatting a bit about my baby, he seemed surprised that I had gotten the car out of state.  That was the only way I could get it for under the invoice price though, which is virtually unheard of in this town.

“My daughter is looking to buy just this car too,” he said.

“Is she seeing anybody?”  I quickly asked.

“Uh, no…, um, she’s married and has two kids.”

“Oh.”

Awkward silence.

“Well it was nice talking to you.  Again, nice car!”  He quickly walked away.

Was it something I said? 

Hard times call for more inventive ways of doing things:

BBQ on the cheap.

Local autobody repairing vehicle at discount rates.

Who needs Bluetooth when duct tape will do?

Discount Skydiving

What thieves do when they can’t afford burglary tools.

You know the handwriting’s on the wall when a personal ad I respond to on Craigslist turns out to be spam.  Whoops. 

Now before you start ragging on me for surfing Craiglist, I was bored, ok?  BORED.  I was checking out apartment prices and then out of curiousity (and absolutely nothing else) I checked out the personals for my area.  That’s when I came across this one:

Okay so here is the deal: I am an attractive 28 year old woman who tends to attract emotionally unavailable men….of course! So basically I am trying this out too see if this “dream guy” actually exists. I would be interested in a man who is attractive (I am a face person) with a great smile/great teeth. I tend to be attracted to men who are not thin or overly muscular. I like a man to have a little meat on his body. I love to laugh and am looking for someone who can make me laugh. I am a born again Christian and would like him to be the same. I love music and love to sing. I also love animals and could not imagine someone not loving them too! I am fairly low maintainance (who also may not be able to spell the word…HAHA). I am somewhat of a homebody and dont need to go out all the time. I am interested in a man who is caring, thoughtful, a “team player”, handy, outgoing, moderately successful, and “real”. I am a very genuine person who’s biggest weakness is my “big heart”. I am thoughtful, caring, and have been told I can “light up a room”. Being my own worse critic I would like to be a little thinner. However, I do have great curves and the softest skin! I came to this website because I really believe that I am a “great catch”. PS) hair is red by choice not by nature!

Seems like a nice enough girl right?  So I emailed her and asked her how strong she considered her Christian beliefs to be.  I got a response shortly afterwards:

Hi, I got your email and wanted to get back with you to see if you might still be interested.  I know you don’t know much about me but you can at least go see what I look like at http://www.eimages.info/barbera21. I posted them on this free site to make this whole “getting to know you” thing a little easier.  Just tell me what you think & if you want, a little about yourself and we will go from there.  Thank you.

When you click on the link however, it actually turns out to be a phony one and is in fact a redirected AFFILIATE link that takes you to the signup page of a dating site.

This whole time I had been communicating with an automated script that had been set up by an affiliate marketer spammer. 

I should have had the foresight to Google some of the phrases in the Craigslist ad to see if it showed up elsewhere, and sure enough the exact same wording shows up on a profile page at PlentyofFish, only this time she hails from Michigan.

Sigh.  And people wonder why I’ve become so bitter and cynical in my old age.

I consider myself to be a somewhat intelligent person, and if I got fooled by this, I’m sure many others have as well, especially as these bottom feeding scum of the earth affiliate marketers get more and more sophisticated in using deceptive methods to make money.  Just make sure, if you experienced something similar and you were tricked into clicking on an affiliate link that leads to a signup page, flush the cookies in your browser, so even if you happen to sign up for that very site in question a few months or so down the road, the spammer won’t get credit for it (affiliate links typically insert cookies into your browser that can last several months to over a year.  Read my article on affiliate spam for more info.)

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be drowning my sorrows in Dairy Queen’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Blizzard.  Oh wait, there’s no Dairy Queen around here.  Sigh, not even this huh, Lord? 

One thing I can’t stand about the effort to drive more traffic to a site is the almost mandatory need to play suck ass to some high traffic megablog in the hopes that maybe, someday, somehow, they might acknowledge your puny existence for one microsecond and throw a fraction of their gazillion readers and visitors your way.

If I write a post I think is particularly funny, charming and relevant, I email a link to it to a couple of high profile bloggers, then pray, beg, sacrifice chickens and hope hope hopey o’ change hope that it doesn’t disappear into the darkest catacombs of that blogger’s inbox, never to be seen again.

Except that of course it does, because I am a speck of dust who can never evolve to the point that I could successfully grab their attention, though mostly I think it’s because I’m not a hot babe who blogs in her underwear (and leaves up a webcam to prove that she does in fact, blog in her underwear.)

Makes me feel like I’m in high school all over again, trying to get into an exclusive, elitist club that nobody wants me to be in, partly because they weren’t even aware of my existence, and if the time should ever come that they did become aware, then they’d rue the day I was born.  It seems that I can only inspire either indifference or sheer, unadulterated hatred.

All I can really do then is watch from the sidelines while these successful bloggers happily fondle each other and share links and traffic and readers, and yet I myself can only but trudge endlessly in the mud of Google irrelevancy.  It all seems so unfair, because really, all I’m asking for is a microcosm of acknowledgment, just a F*%&ING link or two from your millions-of-hits-a-month blog that takes all of two seconds to post, which would at least give me a fighting chance to succeed.  And I’m not even doing it for me, I’m doing it to help my sick, sick Mommy, who I can’t fully care for unless I can find a way to supplement my already heavily taxed salary.  A link for a life.  That’s all it takes, but noooooo, I’m not in your “speeeeeecial” club see, and worse yet, I’m not a half-naked chick prancing around my blog and uploading sultry looking photos of myself to Flickr either, so therefore I’m not worth the poopie poo on your shoe.

Well screw you big boy, and screw this ridiculous internet caste system we’ve made for ourselves.  A-list blogs and B-List blogs and C-list blogs and whatnot?  F&^% that.  I got my own label: the One-of-a-kind, All-night-long, I-am-your-Daddy’s-Master Blog.

And this club can only fit one member, baby:  Me. 

Having done just about all I could do to optimize my blog for banner advertising, I’m now setting my sights on contextual ad links.  There are a few networks out there for this type of advertising, but Kontera is one of the larger ones that’s been around a few years, so I signed up for them the other day.

You’ve probably seen these links before, as they are usually depicted by a double lined link, which pops up a small ad window when you hover your cursor over it.  Since I don’t use any underlines for links on my blog, the ad links here are denoted by one line instead.  That should help reduce the link clutter while still keeping the ads distinguished enough from normal links.  So far, it looks and loads pretty decently on my site, so I’m happy. 

I may continue to shop around for an alternative network though (such as Infolinks), since Kontera has a few caveats that annoy me.  For one, if you want to block certain keywords from converting into ad links, you have to email them.  If you want to block certain advertisers too, you have to email them.  If you want to limit the number of ad links that show up on a page, yep, you have to email them.  In addition, the ad links don’t always spread out evenly enough on a page, so one post might theoretically contain only one link, while another post contains over 20.  Three years they’ve been around you’d think they’d improve on this by now, but oh well.  If they pay me well enough I won’t complain, especially if I see ads like this:

Heh. 

That’s probably due to my blog not being completely analyzed yet for optimization, but still, that was funniest thing I’ve seen all day. 

It’s no secret that one of my favorite pastimes is to bash women and their womenly ways on a regular basis, being that I’m an acidic women hating hairy baboon and all.

And yet oddly enough, it only occurred to me recently that most of the people I chat with and consider myself friends with are… women??

So I decided to do some research. I went back and evaluated how many guys and gals touched bases with me over the past year, then cut out those I either hadn’t known long enough or whom I rarely ever spoke with.

As it turns out, over 83% of the people I consider myself friends or good acquaintances with were all WOMEN. The number of women I talk to on a regular basis outnumbered the guys by a ratio of 5 to 1.

Dude, whaaa__?

But I also noticed something else: ALL of the women I knew were married or at least 5 years older than me. In fact, to this day I have yet to make a woman friend who was both single and within the ages of 18-30. Unsurprisingly enough, this also happens to be the same group I reserve all my virulent, bile, acidic hatred for, so much that within the underground women-hating movement I’m widely known under the callsign of KILLBITCH.

I’ve asked around about this, and from what I’ve been told so far, many single, young women are basically stupid-ass creatures who don’t get over themselves until they either hit their thirties, or they get married, or both. And sometimes not even then. Mind you this is women telling me this, but who knows, maybe my misogynism was rubbing off on them.

Anyone else have any theories? Why is it so easy for me to make friends with married or older women, and yet it is a bitch and an ass and a half when they’re single and around my age?