Updates! And Freelance Rantings

Sorry I've disappeared for awhile, folks, life got a little crazy there for awhile. I'm no longer working for International Monolithic Coffee R Us, and have instead focused on freelancing full-time.  It's working pretty well so far - looks like I'll be able to pay all of my bills this month on writing alone, though granted I live on a pretty small scale.  But still, I can now say I'm a professional writer, and damn if it doesn't feel good.

In fact, it's this very writing gig that brings me to this blog entry.  As I've mentioned before, I choose my assignments from a database of article titles, which have been compiled by title-makers, who base their creations off of search-engine queeries.  This has led me to believe that A) title-makers have a pretty loose grasp on what makes a feasible article and B) if this is really what people are searching for, then civilization is screwed.

I mean...who really needed to know "How to Tame a Wild Emu?" What the hell is the story behind that?  All I can picture is two yuppies, vacationing along the vast plains of Australia, looking for kangaroos and what have you, when suddenly their car breaks down and they find themselves surrounded by a flock of angry wild emus.  Turning frantically to each other, the man in this coupling (we'll call him Kevan, as both the ubiquity of the name and the pretention of the spelling suits our tale) whips out his iPad, praying to God for a signal as he Googles, "How to Tame a Wild Emu."  But, alas, while the signal held out, Google will have failed him, because myself and 12,000 other freelancers couldn't tell you how to tame a squirrel, let alone an emu.  And so, as his girlfriend Chantelle (again, fitting, n'est-ce pas?) hisses "I TOLD YOU TO USE BING" Kevan will offer his soul to God, resigning himself to the failure of the interwebs and, more specifically, me.  Sorry Kevan.  Maybe if they paid me $30 an article instead of $15, I could have made something work there.  But alas, I leave you to the deadly wild emu.

Deadly Emus.  There's a punk-rock band name there, methinks.

What about the yutz who asked for "Funnel Cake Games?" Umm...really? It's a funnel cake.  You don't play games with it, you douse it in powdered sugar and inhale that sucker.  I suppose you could stretch it and make a game up by detecting shapes and images in your funnel cake (bonus points if you find Jesus or the Virgin Mary), though I'm not sure what the prize would be (half the proceeds from horking the holy funnel cake on eBay?).  And is it just me, or do I see funnel cake games not ending well at, say, a child's birthday party? "Okay kids, whoever makes the largest funnel cake by pouring a stream of batter into molten-hot vegetable oil wins a case of third degree burns!" It's the gift that keeps on giving. 

"Dangers of Rice Cake Machines" is another one that inspired a hearty giggling fit during an otherwise mundane work day.  I don't know what a rice cake machine even looks like, but I can guarantee you that any minute all of us disgruntled dieters, sick to death of those carbohydrate abominations, are going to weaponize them.  The biggest danger of a rice cake machine? A dieter who has been told by one-too-many diet experts that rice cakes are great hunger suppressants because, after all, they expand and make you feel full!

"Coming Soon to a theatre near you, 'RICE CAKE REVOLUTION.' Get ready to meet your Quaker...Oats Man."

At the same time, the title-writers themselves need to spruce up their spelling.  I understand that they're working with search engine questions, but still, a little common sense never hurt anybody.  "Passion Poll Assembly Instructions" was a favorite at Casa RedDeb.  A five-second Google search for "Passion POLE" and "Passion POLL" leads to two different results, only one of which can be assembled in the privacy of your own home.  And both of these are very different from what happens if you assemble a Passion Pol, which if memory serves, did not work out so well for Cambodia. Spelling and context, folks.  They matter.

"Taylor-Made" is another frequent offender.  Unless a certain country music songbird is extending her empire to auto parts, I don't think you can find a Taylor-made exhaust pipe. Though it certainly wouldn't surprise me.