At least your online search interests changed this year vs. last year, when we peered into search terms used to discover Today in Montclair, 94611.  The people have spoken!

During 2009, everything we could unearth and share about the Oakland Bay Bridge was hot stuff.  All the changes, disruptions, accidents and new construction captured so many dependents living here.  Next on the list was the local graffiti, which definitely created a depressing buzz when the latest round hit hard:  “SNS” tags, anyone?

This year, the virtual art shows also were very popular.  Pixs from our local sidewalk festival artisans and grade schoolers created the most traffic.  There was plenty of searching for Bert Monroy, who creates photoshop realism, as well as Marisa Muliadi-Kleiber and Janette MacKinlay.

On a newsier front, we covered Oakland Police Officer Murray Hoyle’s funeral and FC Gold and Olympic Soccer Star Tiffeny Milbrett’s appearance – and you keep searching for them today.  By contrast, our top searches were all about Hans Reiser last year, when he fully confessed about killing and burying his almost-ex, Nina.

During 2008, Montclarions were more focused on fires, crime, voting and home values.  A year later, we hadn’t experienced major flames, above-average burglaries, another U.S. prexy election, or more precipitous declines in real estate prices.  Ergo, your interests and searching activities also mellowed out.

What’s stayed the same?  Despite the 2009 recession, you are still shopping online and remain quite tuned into all the places closing or opening in Montclair Village.  You still love your pizza, and that need for the quick and easy feed makes sense.

Finally, we witnessed Hollywood’s hold on our collective zeitgeist.  As proof, Brad Pitt’s plans to film in Oakland created feverish pitch and then died down quickly.  Plus one little Pixar flick, Up, caused an uptick in anything mentioning Fentons Creamery and the Merritt Bakery’s Hamburger Cake – and we expect that to continue forever.

She would be an odd superhero. I certainly don’t think she’d save Christmas. The robot santas would most certainly defeat her.

Men I’ve Known returns on the 4th January.

Now that we’re up-to-date, posts will now be published once a week on a Monday, next post being the 21st of December. Don’t forget to subscribe via email.

And because the title of this post reminds me of a bus timetable, and given the nature of this blog, it seems entirely appropriate to quote the divine Wendy Cope.

Bloody Men

Bloody men are like bloody buses -
You wait for about a year
And as soon as one approaches your stop
Two or three others appear.

You look at them flashing their indicators
Offering you a ride.
You’re trying to read the destinations,
You haven’t much time to decide.

If you make a mistake, there is no turning back.
Jump off, and you’ll stand there and gaze
While the cars, the taxis and the lorries go by
And the minutes, the hours, the days.

For writers of TG Fiction, this news is incredible.

Researchers have found that the body is in a constant fight to remain either female or male and the suppression of just one gene could cause it to “flip” from one to the other.

The remarkable findings refute the generally held view that sex is determined at birth and is irreversible in later life.

They could also lead to treatments for certain gender disorders in children, early menopause in women and even eventually non-surgical sex changes.

In mammals, males have XY chromosomes and females XX. The new research shows that another gene is responsible for switching women into men.

If the FOXL2 is switched on then the body grows ovaries, switched off and they are replaced by testicles.

But what really surprised the researchers is that the process continues after birth and the body remains in a constant tussle to either switch on or off the gene – even in adulthood.

“No one would have betted on this,” said Professor Mathias Treier of the University of Cologne in Germany. “That’s why the finding is so spectacular,”

The team found that in adult mice by turning off the FoxL2 gene, the ovary cells started to change testicular cells. This suggest the same effect could happen to humans.

“It was thought that you were born either female or male and then your body forgot about it,” said Dr Robin Lovell-Badge, the co-author at Britain’s Medical Research Council’s National Institute of Medical Research.

“But this suggests that the battle of the sexes continues all the way through your life, “

The researchers believe that the process could be similar to that in some fish who are able switch sexes at times when there is a scarcity of either males or females.

Break out the retroviruses

Hrm, and there was me thinking that WordPress was the new Jesus, but after tagging all of my posts, it turns out that if you click the tags, or categories filed under on the post, it searches for that tag globally on wordpress, which is not what I intended.

It works okay if you click the main categories on the left, but surely it should work for tags too.

Or am I going to have to retag everything (for me, the whole point of tagging posts as “prose” or “poetry” was that if somebody wanted to, they could click that and see only those posts)

Any WordPress ninjas out there have any suggestions?

EDIT: I suppose that leaving it at the categories as it is isn’t too bad, but the tags had me so excited. I can’t really make 500 categories though; four or five is more than enough

Kakashi19 is my younger brother, about 3 years younger than me. He’s a hockey player, and he wants to be a hockey player when he grows up. He just got chosen as team captain! He’s a non-member, but he used to be a member when he had Goofydude. Anyway, Kakashi19 will actually be posting with the same account as mine until he gets his own. See ya guys later!

-Indytig10

Welcome to Indytig10 and Kakashi19’s Club Penguin Cheats, or IK CP Cheats for short. This blog is being run by me, Indytig10, and Kakashi19, my brother. We are big CP fans, trying to collect all of the toys and stuff. We’ll be trying to give you the best CP cheats possible, IF possible, because normally we’re off doing something. XD We’re still under construction, and pin cheats are coming soon, so hang on!

I should introduce myself.

My name is Mark and for a while I was writing a series called Men I’ve Known and then my interest waned and it kind of died. The first ten MIK’s were published on Gay Community News as a blog called Brief Lives, and were later reprinted on my personal blog. But I kind of want to do something more with them.

Eventually, I would like to turn MIK into a collection, but there’s some barriers to that. Well, one. Me.

I’m your average fiction writer; hiding in layers of characterisation, cloaked in layers of twice-removed subterfuge, I’m just not used to the naked honesty that MIK requires of me. Now, if you knew me, and we were talking, that honesty would be fine, but for some reason, in print, it makes me uncomfortable. To badly paraphrase a line from the movie Velvet Goldmine, “Give him a mask and he’ll tell you the truth”.

I think mostly I’m afraid of pissing someone off, which is hilarious, considering that if I’m writing something negative about them, then they’ve done something pretty fucking horrendous in the first place.

Anyway, enough about these uncertainties. Bear with me so, if the blog takes a good while to take shape and if MIK veers from left to right for a while, I vaguely know what I’m doing.

And so, to the men. I’ve done “old” ones, from a few months ago that I’m going to repost at one a day until we’re upto date. After that, I’ll try to post once a week.

Before I go, a brief note. Men I’ve Known was intended as “an autobiography in the second person”. I don’t quite know if it will be able to reach that lofty task, but we’ll see. All Men I’ve Known pieces are numbered, but untitled. There’s also another strand of (less frequent) posts called Radials which thematically fit here but whose focus are too broad, or are fictional, or are about more than one person.

(from the original introduction post on GCN: “This is a blog about the men that have crossed my path; be it in a small, fleeting way or in one that made a huge and lasting impact to me. The one night stands, friends, strangers and the men you never had the courage to speak to, the dreams you have and the flights of folly we all go on. Also, in a way, it’s a blog about my relationship with men, and surely, like all blogs, you’ll learn more about me too.”)

You can now subscribe to my posts via email! Just go to any page on my site and you will see “Email Subscription” at the top of the right-hand column.

Please take the time to click on one of our affiliates and buy something nice. A percentage comes back to keep TG Captions running.

I am not a little kid to play club penguin anymore.I will change this site to a site that it’s posts will be about Worms,strategy games and war games.

EDIT:I will make a new site.Visit  wormsandempires.wordpress.com from 7th november 2009.

Well, there’s the first change that’s a bit obvious being the banner. Next is a content change: Starting soon (probably with Aoi Bungaku) I may join the large number of anime bloggers. I’ll keep doing the picture of the day ’cause that’s something I enjoy doing (sometimes.)

There might also be a few random posts thrown in such as rants on… whatever pisses me off that day. Basically this’ll become what it’s supposed to be: a blog. So enjoy, or don’t. Hell if I care.

—–
Any show I’m watching will be done. Right now that means: Bakemonogatari, Umineko, Trapeze, Railgun, Aoi Bungaku, Kobato., and Seitokai. Oh and when subs are out: Zetsubou and KnK.

Oh and banner credits: niji and kou.

Hey, I suppose it’s about time for an update here! Especially since the last update was… what. Nearly three weeks ago.

I guess I’ll use every few posts to just give a general outlook on what’s going on and why I’m distracted from posting a lot. That’s what most of the blogs I visit do, and while I’m not out to make a carbon copy of them, it’s nice to have basic ideas about how I’m supposed to be doing this, especially with an update schedule that isn’t daily/every-other-daily.

More after the jump! No, I won’t force you to read about my recently not-as-boring-as-usual life! No, there aren’t pictures of the two clean spots in my horribly messy room!

I recently applied for and got a job at Gamestop! After weeks of looking for an actual meaningful job (read: applying at convenience stores), I landed the one job that I thought I’d never have a chance at. I also got my State ID, so that I can legally work for said stopping point of the gaming variety. This comes with obvious benefits.

The two special-edition Dissidia: Final Fantasy boxes and a relatively happy A Boy and his Blob stress ball atop my TV.

And then there's this little... um... thing, from Squeeballs: Party for the Wii.

As much as I knew about the ‘freebie’ stuff they got, it’s pretty awesome to have first access to it, even if it means getting things from games I don’t and probably won’t ever own. If you live in the area I primarily inhabitate, feel free to swing by when I’m in and visit. Also, buy Edge Cards!

In other news, I may be starting college this coming spring semester, if I can get everything together by then. I’m the tiniest bit leery about this, since I didn’t want to go to school here at first, but since I really don’t have another option, it’s looking like I’m going to have to bite the bullet. Oh well. I’ll at least get crap out of the way, I guess.

In closing, the “smooooch・∀・” song has been stuck in my head for weeks now. I may need to just go find an MP3 and be done with it.