Kings of their castles

Making your way in the world today, it has been said, takes everything you've got. And working for the man will take whatever's left over. But working for yourself isn't any easier, and so I salute these acquaintances for doing it day in and day out, sometimes on the side but mainly full time:

• Prosper Media Group: Kentucky's multimedia production solution
  
• LionArt Creations: arts and/or crafts
  
• Nuts.com: nuts and snacks by the pound, possibly ton
  
• Greg Tito: a stand up guy doing stand up in the place where you live. Now face north.
  
• Dr. Zlotnick: The optometrist that Central Jersey calls their own. No relation. Yet.

May these links boost your Google site rankings and keep the wheels of commerce headed out on your highways.

Ladies of Song from A to Z

I know a man who once tried to record an album solely of songs about specific women. He got far, but a few letters/ladies eluded him. Below I offer his playlist and ask you, the blogosphere, to fill in the blanks or offer alternate tracks.

Ground rule: the name must be in the title, they needn't be love songs, but wherever possible, the singer should be male.

	NAME	ARTIST	ALTERNATE SONGS
A	Allison	Elvis Costello	Angie
B	Barbara Ann	The Beach Boys	Billie Jean
C	Sweet Caroline	Neil Diamond	Cecila
D	Donna	The Misfits
E	Come on Eileen	Dexy's Midnight Runners	Eleanor Rigby
F	Fran
G	Gloria	The Doors
H
I	Goodnight Irene	Leadbelly
J	Sweet Jane	Lou Reed	Hey Jude
K	Kate	Ben Folds
L	Layla	Derek & the Dominos	Lady Madonna
M	Maybelline	Chuck Berry	Michelle, Maggie May
N			Nikita, Nancy Whiskey
O	Ophelia	The Band
P	Polly	Nirvana
Q	Queen Jane Approximately	Bob Dylan
R	Roxanne	The Police	Help Me Rhonda
S	Sussudio	Phil Collins
T	(Tina's Got A) Big 'Ole Butt	LL Cool J
U
V	Victoria		Veronica
W	Windy	The Association
X
Y	Oh Yoko	John Lennon
Z	Legend of Zelda theme	Nintendo

Cast your ballots in the comments below.



Update: two commenters have more than filled in the gaps.

Banter

I've written short plays for school before, but I could never write dialogue this insightful, telling and true:

MALE: Whatcha gonna do with all that junk; all that junk inside your trunk?

FEMALE: I'm a get get get get you drunk, Get you love drunk off my humps.

To paraphrase James Lipton, if you have not bought the Black Eyed Peas' CD, buy it, turn off the lights, listen to it, it will change your life!

Strike out

If nothing else, the transit strike will let me someday scold my whippersnapper grandkids about how easy they have it. "When I was your age, I had to walk thirty blocks and five avenues in 20 degree weather just to get to my job."

Welcoming words

Thanks to Google Analytics, I now know exactly how many people visit this site (a bandwidth-busting 77 visits in the last month) and, more interestingly, what search terms brought them here. Some relate to specific posts, yet you wonder why people are searching on "kelly ripa eggnog" in the first place. Or "pictures+buckets." And to the 4 people who came here looking for "hotstockings," I hope you found what you were looking for.

Keyword	Visits
hotstockings	4
blackfriday	2
kelly ripa eggnog	2
pictures+buckets	1
nobody listens to andrew + book	1
*blackfriday	1
geico commercials caveman	1
frog procter& gamble	1
picture from geico caveman	1
nobody listens to us	1
cheapskate christmas	1
now alums from the 80's with george michael + careless whispers	1
my chemical romance action figures price in us dollars	1
nobody listens to andrew	1
us weekly kelly ripa eggnog	1
pharrell rolling stone interview	1
this is not awesome geico	1

More adventures in thrift

Expanding on Why pay more?:

• Cheapskate Christmas: The day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday, is a mecca of crazy deals. Two years ago, I scored a $35 karaoke machine, $15 DVD player, and $5 Simpsons Season 1 DVD at Best Buy. Now many stores offer below-cost prices to tempt early holiday shoppers. BFads.net tells where to go first.


• Pitting one against the other: My credit card, for a $50 annual fee, gives flier miles for each dollar spent. Some competing cards are fee-less, so I called my card company up, said I was thinking of switching, and--hollaback--they refunded the annual fee and agreed to lower my interest rate. Even if you don't pay an annual fee, call and asking for a lower rate. I've read that you'll usually get some break.


• Anatomy of a deal: Aquafresh Extreme Clean Toothpaste on sale for $2.00, down from $3.29. Sunday circular coupon: save $2.25 on two. And the store had a "try it free" rebate that refunds the original purchase price. Net: I made $1.54 off the transaction.

For those of you keeping score:
Andrew: 162
The System: 0

Just like Us

Just in: Kelly Ripa "likes eggnog a lot!"

Also: Us Weekly makes my head ache in throbbing dumbness.

Testify

From Rolling Stone's interview with hip hop uber-producer/star Pharrell:

Whose record have you listened to the most this year?

"I like My Chemical Romance and Green Day, in terms of rock. I'm looking forward to the new Puddle of Mudd and the new Strokes albums. And people need to show more love to Ben Folds. Hell, yeah!"

You could learn a lot from a lab

My illict connections to the publishing biz netted me an advance copy of Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog, one man's memoir of life with a big ass labrador retriever. It's a heckuva book, crampacked with humor, sharp storytelling, and, in the end, a poignancy that'll shake you to your very core.

This intense resonance may correlate to the fact that I too once shared a home with a yellow lab named Annie. Behind that sweet All-American girl's name lay 75 lbs. of intensity that could knock an aunt to the ground with the mere ring of a doorbell. Who, when set free from the chains that bind her (namely, a fraying red leash), could outrun the NCAA athlete in the family. Whose appetite could be not sated by mere dog food, forcing her to snack on the TV remote control and our Brutus Beefcake action figure.

And yet the enthusiasm that awaited me every trip home, with a tail wagging hard enough to clear a coffee table and a tongue falling out of her mouth, always made her indiscretions seem trivial. You can't buy love like that, at least since Guiliani cleaned up Times Square, and you genuinely wanted to protect her during the thunderstorms that sent her under the coffee table cowering in irrational fear.

Would life be better if we were more like dogs? At the end of Marley and Me, the author reflects on lessons learned from his labrador:

Marley taught me about living each day with unbridled exuberance and joy, about seizing the moment and following your heart. He taught me to appreciate the simple things - a walk in the woods, a fresh snowfall, a nap in a shaft of winter sunlight. And as he grew old and achy, he taught me about optimism in the face of adversity.

Mostly, he taught me about friendship and selflessness and, above all else, unwavering loyalty.

Not such a bad dog after all.

Sweet music to my ears

A man + a plan = a PEZ mp3 player. Each one is built one-at-a-time by a one-man operation who got the legal OK from the PEZ Company. Holds about 120 songs, and you turn it on by flipping the head back.

The iPod Shuffle just got a whole lot lamer. It even comes preloaded with hipster indie music - why doesn't Apple do that?

Could this be the thing to revive my dormant and unwieldly PEZ collection? If it dispenses music as well as it dispenses candy, quite possibly.