Putting things on cats? Cats???

As you may have guessed in advance, we didn't get so much as a whiff of a nomination at the 2006 Bloggies. There's no link because I'm bitter about the whole thing. (Oh, all right!) I suspect it's because we are completely unknown to all but our most loyal, devoted, and obessive fans. That would include Mrs. P. Westinghouse of Loyola, Maryland, who should please stop writing me e-mails about how she would love to introduce me to "her gerbil."

All right, I made that up. that's how desperate it's become. Even our regular fans haven't bothered to e-mail anything for the First Anniversary festival. So we're extending the deadline until Tuesday evening, to give you a greater chance of permanently damaging our self-esteem by ignoring us.

On top of all this, I was looking over the nominees for "most humorous weblog" and only two made me so much as titter. Now, humourists are a tough lot to begin with, and for the most part I could see how a few of the nominees were deserving of some sort of recognition. However, I refuse to accept that the website stuffonmycat.com is more deserving of comedic recognition than this or most of the other blogs in the known universe, including this one, this one, and even this one. (All right, maybe not that last one...but it's close, you must admit!)

I think I can say, with a fair amount of authority, that pictures of putting things on top of your cat are not particularly amusing unless you have a large, wet hairball for a brain. "But Earl," you protest, "That site got favourable mentions in GQ Magazine and ELLEgirl!" I rest my case.

On top of that, no pun intended, such a site must draw in a fair amount of loony animal abusers. "Enclosed, one photograph of my precious kitten, with my new Jeep Wrangler on top of it," or worse, they must dread the Peter Singer submissions. They should know better than to tempt such individuals.

I must say that to some extent I am relieved about the whole Bloggies thing. I was eagerly looking over the site the other day, sort of the way a columnist at the Weekly World News watches the wires in anticipation of the Pulitzer nominations, when I noticed that one of the donated prizes was a DVD of a film called The God Who Wasn't There, donated by the filmmaker. For those of you unfamiliar with this work, its primary conjecture is that Jesus Christ wasn't a real person in history. In other words, that somebody made Jesus up and that all those apostles and first century saints suffered and died awful deaths for something they invented in an apparent fit of creative heresy. I find that rather insulting to the intelligence, not to mention being contradicted by 2,000 years of history and scholarship. So, regardless of your own religious beliefs, this film is clearly the work of a dedicated nutter. I suppose though that the bloke had a few thousand spare DVD's lying around and thought it would be a nice, cheap way to get publicity. Give him credit for creative marketing, at least. A shame the Bloggies are so hard up for prizes.

My only regret is that, had we been nominated and won, that we couldn't include in our acceptance speech that we were going to "put the DVD in Stew's high-speed compactor", and ask the director to, "with all due respect, as Jack Nicholson said in As Good As It Gets, 'Go sell crazy somewhere else.'" We could have done our first video link of the DVD imploding.

However, I digress. The real point of this post is to acknowledge that our own marketing plan is in need of a massive boost. Awards like the Bloggies and The Weblog Awards are all decided upon by public voting, so quality and craft (and in our case sheer gall) have nothing to do with it. Since we don't have 30 copies of our own magnum opus Lame Duck Refusniks to peddle to the Bloggies, we need to find some quick, foolproof, and cheap way to promote this site, so that next year we can resume our plans for worldwide blog dominance.

Knowing that hardly anyone is currently reading this bleedin' thing, Ive decided to let you in on what I've come up with so far:

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Earl Fando's Secret 7-Point Marketing Plan for Promoting The Dictionary of Unfortunate Ideas
copyright 2006

1. Redesign the site. The new design will feature a user-friendly navigational scheme, a font that is easy on the eyes, and numerous pictures of Cameron Diaz. In other words, the same blog, with numerous pictures of Cameron Diaz.

2. Offer prizes. From now on, every lucky 1,000,000th visitor will win a free e-mail from Stew Miller declaring his undying gratitude for their support. At our present pace of readership, Stew's as yet unborn grandchildren should be able to award this sometime shy of the next century.

3. Suck up to the big blogs and online sites. This one is so easy I can get started right now. I hereby declare that we absolutely adore Dave Barry's blog, except for the somewhat raunchier humor. Dave, feel free to link to us anytime this week. There's no rush. Thanks, mate!

4. Go political. Yes, I know that we have declared this site off-limits to overly partizan politics, preferring to make fun of everyone and more importantly not to hack off anyone who might choose to become a daily reader. Nonetheless, the poltical blogs are where it's at, so I hereby declare that this blog will stand firm in the political beliefs of its authors. We will, I believe, be the first Neo-Anti-Anarchist-Antidisestablishmentarianism-Semi-Aquatic-Farmland-Cheetos-Bacon-Silly Party blog ever. The only problem with this move, is that we are the only members of this party, and that leaves out Juan Carlos, who is a Spanish Royalist.

5. Beg for attention. More, I mean. That has been the current strategy.

6. Go Avant-Garde. People love avant-garde. It makes them feel hip and intellectual, even if they haven't a ruddy idea what it is that's being discussed or displayed. Therefore, I hereby declare this blog an "avant-garde" blog, which should put us in front for next year's Best Avant-Garde Blog categories in the big awards, should they decide to include them.

7. A massive grassroots campaign. This would be the favourite of Stew's old buddy Lukas P. Short, inventor of grassoline. We will simply contact every single person on the face of the globe and inform them of our blog. The easiest way, a simple chain e-mail, is beneath us, though. So, we'll have to try a trickier method. We'll simply mail several key political blogs a message declaring them to be "lying scumbag fascist commies" and put every single e-mail address on the face of the earth in the "From" field. Thus, when they send their angry reply, we won't get blamed for all the spam.

I hope it works. If not, we'll be miserable around here this time next year...until the Oscars.

Update: E-mail suggestions of "Hire better writers!" will be flamed.