This time he has gone too far...

This time he has gone too far. One advantage of writing my column on Sunday night is I can read the nonsensical dribble that appears each week on the “Lunatic Ravings” column by Stephen Johnson and I do not appreciate him making fun of religion!

But since his column doesn’t deserve attention, let me draw your attention toward “Paperback Writer" by P.S. Gifford. His latest book is now being printed called “The Further Accounts of the Imaginary Friend.” And yes he shares his thoughts and shorts right here on our blogs.

Back a few years ago, I wanted to set up our columns so each of us can post by logging onto the site and posting it. With the technical aspects of the being too great at the time, I set up our blogs/columns on the google blogger site. But now I have obtained that knowledge and soon our columns will be available on our own server at www.MyStrangeStories.com.

Not only that, but the general public will be able to log on and write columns as a “guest” writer. But why would someone post a blog on our site when they could set up their own blogger/MySpace/Facebook page. The answer is simple…traffic. In the past ten years we get good traffic on main search engines and if someone wants to write a silly blog and wants people to actually read it…this will be the place. Anyway, that’s my idea. We’ll see how it works.

One thing that held up this process is I wanted the updates to the homepage to be automatically updated by MyStrangeStories and not another web site. However, I didn’t know how to do that until last week. Previously the homepage updates on MyStrangeStories was provided by an outside service, but now that I figured out how that service works…I can proceed.

One lesson I learned a few years ago is that I should never rely on an outside service from another web site. Even the counters I used to put on short stories back in 200 that were provided by Microsoft no longer work. So the blogs will be hosted by us and the auto-updates will pull from my server rather than an outside web site.

Now that I think about it, this is probably only interesting to me; however, there is one thing most will be interested in, as a result of the recent changes this web site loads much faster, which give everyone no excuse for not visiting at least once a week.

Now back to Stephen and his TiVo god. Here in Nebraska we are the children of the Corn. We wear hats made of corn husks, we smoke “stuff” from corn cob pipes. We wear overalls with a great big red N’s on them. We even make pies out of cream corn.

And why? Because we want to be as close as possible the patron saint of Nebraska, Harry Husker. Harry is a zealous god. One year I foolishly planted sunflowers in our backyard instead of using that space to plant corn. Harry sent a plague of thousands of baby grasshoppers to our yard. Each step in the yard and hundreds of tiny “hoppers” jumped on our legs. It was horrible.

I bought a spray to kill the hoppers, but they only grew more angry and jumped at our car windows when I pulled into the yard (like all Nebraskans I park in the back yard). They were everywhere…except our neighbors yard who had corn stalks growing tall and proud. The only way I could keep our children safe was too build a small mote around the house and fill it up with cream corn…sure it got smelly, but it kept out the vermin.

It wasn’t until the next spring, when I planted corn, that the hoppers went away. Blessed is he who plants the corn.

I spit upon Stephen’s false TiVo god, I spit on him with pellets of Sacred Nebraska corn.

And now you know.

COMING NEXT: Another scarry dream!