I am not going to attempt to thank everyone who has contributed the comments that make this blog so much fun because I am afraid I will leave somebody out. Instead, I would like to acknowledge someone whose innovative blogging has contributed so much to Blogstream. Take a bow:

Lucy

Your Blogstream Inquirer, 'Overheard on the Stream',  video compilations, plus the Saturday sing-alongs, and so much more have shown the rest of us what an interactive and fun medium blogging can be. And now I am blatantly ripping you off by borrowing one of your ideas to create an award series.

Mind you, I am confining myself to reviewing comments bloggers have left here on The Corner. Even with the assistance of your 'staff of sleuths', I don't know how you manage to produce 'Overheard'. I have almost more than I can handle acknowledging the ones I have received here. Still, I am going to try. And this is where all of you may come to my rescue because I need to know what to call the blasted things.

Should I call them 'The Outies' in a nod to my most frequently-used icon, the outhouse? I am a bit wary because some may think I am discriminating against 'innies' or that I have a bellybutton fetish.

I could, I suppose, label them the 'Corner Creative Comment Awards' but then what sort of trophy or statue (icon) would I present? (By the way, if 'Outies' wins favor, winners need not fear that they will receive an actual outhouse, unless of course they are New Orleanians still awaiting post-Katrina federal disaster relief, in which case an actual outhouse might come in handy.)

Should I perhaps simply label them 'The Orneries'? 'The Corneries'? All of those have occurred to me, but there may be more or better ideas. So before I fall further behind in designing and distributing the awards, I will ask for suggestions. Anyone?

Stop laughing! It's true! Honestly. I now know how to become an expert on any subject. Find someone who knows even less than you do.

A friend of mine fits that latter category. She knows I spend a lot of time on my computer and so mistakenly believed that this meant I know a lot about the things. (Clearly she has never read my blog or she would know better.)

Anyway, she called to ask me; A) would I like to have her old printer and B) would I take a look at her new computer and try to straighten out a couple of problems she was having.

My answer to A was 'yes'. Unfortunately, she took that as a blanket answer to both questions. And before I could say, 'I am a technological idiot,' I found myself sitting in front of a state-of-the-art machine that looked like the brain of the Starship Enterprise. Without the pointed ears.

Yes, I can see all of you shuddering, imagining King Kong trying to fake it as a concert pianist. Never mind that the tux is a little tight. He can't even manage 'Chopsticks' because one finger covers half the keyboard.

I caught a break. All she wanted was anti-virus software download and some strangeness cured in Word 2007. Those I could handle, so maybe it was she who caught a break. Mine came in the form of her 65-pound canine.

He thinks he's a lap dog. This can be a tad distracting. It is a tad distracting. Not only did he block my view of the screen, but I found it necessary to shift him or me lest he cause me to emit a sound that at such close range would have rendered him deaf.

I am happy to report though that the computer still works, the dog is not deaf, and I will henceforth answer all questions, ‘no'. And the lady in question still thinks I know something about computers.

Since I can't hear any of the posted music and since my versions when trying to fill in for Roy or Kenny or anyone else sound more like Weird Al Yankovitch songs performed by a drunk chimpanzee, I have been forced to occupy my time with (shudder!) housecleaning and gardening.

Gardening, hah! Basically my 'gardening' has consisted of going along the flowerbeds and yanking out anything that grows.

'The flowers, Ornery!' you may say, to which I reply, 'flowers?'

These plants cannot be flowers for the very facts that I did not plant them and that they are growing in proximity to me. No flower in its right bloom will do that. So my gardening resembles an end-of-the-year clearance sale. EVERYTHING MUST GO!

Would that it were possible though. Some of the things I latched onto fought back directly - and here is a helpful gardening tip. When grabbing hold of thistles, wear gloves. I did not, with the result that my hands are now covered with countless tiny pinpricks.

Nor do thistles or dandelions or whatever in heck else was growing cede their space easily. In fact, I believe thistles in particular sink their roots to the earth's core where the fibers melt and re-form into some sort of rock. Or maybe not even the earth's molten interior can damage them. For all I know, the blasted things grow clear through to the other side of the earth and I spent a half hour playing tug-of-war with somebody 12,000 miles away. I just hope he did not fall on his butt when I abruptly quit tugging on my end.

I fared somewhat better with the housecleaning. No, I did not find any money, but I did find my house key. It had fallen out of my pocket in the bathroom awhile back and seemingly disappeared. I heard but did not see it hit. How it ended up wedged between the toilet bowl and the pipe through which stuff goes bye-bye is beyond me. I had to pry it out of there. In fact, I was afraid for a minute that it had put down thistle roots and I would end up in another tug-of-war with a guy in a bathroom 12,000 miles away.

In and around wrestling thistles for their place in the flowerbeds and trying to make the toilet return my house key (it's not like the fixture ever goes anywhere so I could not understand its fixation, unless it has a Gollum-like fascination for things that gleam), I did manage to wash and hang out laundry as well as pick apricots from the tree in the back yard.

Shows the extremes I will go to when my computer speakers won't work. I don't even like apricots. On the brighter side, at least I didn't have to wrestle a guy 12,000 miles away to get them loose.

And what do I get?

You mean aside from several people who want to stop by the house today? Well, I also get to try to figure out what has gone haywire with my speakers here. They were working fine until my son borrowed them to hook to his discman while he was washing dishes.

Yeah, yeah, I was and am thankful he noticed that the dishes needed washing, but he has to have his music while performing any household chore. Mind you, this is not to say that when his music is playing, he is cleaning something. (Get real.) He can also sit and listen to music. It is just that he cannot even contemplate cleaning without musical accompaniment.

So, since his discman headphones wre torn up, he borrowed my computer speakers to create a mini-stereo in the kitchen. Returned them afterward, plugged them in, and they haven't worked since.

I just hope one or another of the people who stop by brings along a little technical expertise. I really would like to paddle up and down The Stream and hear something other than 'The Sounds of Silence'.

Visitors will be happy to know that I have begun the story of how Stanley Hutchinson wound up in a mental hospital, 'begun' being the operative word. So far he has only made it to his private railroad crossing and been blocked by a train for the first time. On the up side, this is the first time in thirty years or so of off-and-on writing that I have gotten him out of the house. Now if women will quit trying to smuggle rare Asian fish in their dresses and the Swiss will quit invading Liechtenstein ...

'You Know, There's Something Fishy About Her'

So Australian customs officials probably said when Sharon Naismith was re-entering the country after a flight from Singapore. It seems they heard 'flipping noises' and upon investigation discovered that the woman had a specially designed apron under her dress with water compartments containing Asian catfish and a rare arowana.

The catfish makes sense to anyone who has ever attended a good old Southern fish fry - catfish fillets being a popular item - but I have yet to see a good recipe for arowana. Before I could check online for same though, I noticed that:

Switzerland Invaded Liechtenstein

I know. I was pretty astonished too. I mean the Swiss and neutrality go together as aptly as the Swiss and Nazi loot. So what the heck were they doing crossing the border into neighboring Liechtenstein?

The best guess is 'practicing' in case they decide to come bursting forth from their Alpine stronghold to conquer Europe. When or if they do though, I hope they make a better show of it than they did this first time out. Not only did they send just 170 soldiers to subdue a country somewhat smaller than Washington D.C. with a population of 34,000, but their troops did not even carry ammunition. What was worse, the good people of Liechtenstein never even noticed.

Thus shamed and humiliated, the company of Swiss soldiers used the cover of night to turn around and return the mile or so to their own country. Luckily for them, Liechtenstein does not even have an army. If it did, Liechtensteiners would probably have sense enough to carry ammunition and so could have swept all the way to Bern with the precision of, well, a Liechtenstein watch.

Now, so long as no more Australians (especially the blokes) do weird stuff like smuggling fish under their dresses and so long as the Swiss give their troops compasses and maps before they inadvertently invade a country like Germany or France, maybe I can get back to Stanley. Unless, of course, I am downwind of the Netherlands where authorities have burned 3 tons of hashish and I get a serious case of the munchies ...