Dear Santa, thank you for the dolls and pencils and the fish. It's Easter now, so I hope I didn't wake you but... honest, it is an emergency. There's a crack in my wall. Aunt Sharon says it's just an ordinary crack, but I know its not cause at night there's voices so... please please can you send someone to fix it? Or a policeman, or...
Back in a moment.
Thank you Santa.

Carnival The Next

The next Carnival of the Vanities will be appearing at Jessica's Well where the team will be presenting your finest posts as interpretive dance.

The place to send your submissions is carnival@jessicaswell.com. Neatest correct entry wins a prize!

Well, and all the other entries too.

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Carnival Of The Vanities

Overture, candlelight...
And welcome to the Carnival!
What we present to you tonight
Is something quite remarkable:
We've gathered here for your delight
A most astounding spectacle
And now before your very sight,
The unlikeliest of animals -

From far across the Blogosphere
The finest work we've deftly pluck'd;
(While we left for the Bonfire here
The posts that we thought, frankly, were not quite good enough to be worthy of bringing to your attention.)
The words are music to your ear;
(The ones that weren't, you'll note, we chucked.)
We hunted far, we hunted near,
A finer showcase to construct.

These shining jewels we bring to you;
The Web we scoured for rarities -
Despite a dose of Martian Flu
And RAID-5's failing parities.
Here's unicorns! And mermaids too!
No donkeys now, nor manatees.
So let's begin; without ado
The Carnival of the Vanities!

---

We start with Nikita Demosthenes,
Who has a serious question to ask:
Who most could harm the Land of the Free
And he takes standard wisdom to task.

Jeff Doolittle (dot com)
Seeks ubiquitous high speed connection;
With a little spectral freedom
He sees a positive economic inflection.

Ann is at the Fuse Box
Studying labour statistics,
She looks at the numbers (as does Fox)
And reports on Kerry's poor twist tricks.¹

My favourite Canadian ethereal insect
Would have to be Ghost of a Flea;
When I visit his blog I never know quite what to expect
Which is exactly how it should be.

Today he offers us maxims
For surviving converse on the 'Net;
Built from undeniable axioms,
I'm sure they'll be proved, but not yet.

Kevin at the Smallest Minority
Asks are we headed for Civil War?
I sure hope not, but I²
Think some people have a lot to answer for.

Answerman remembers Ronald Reagan
Actor, governor, president;
Anyone but a hippy neo-pagan
Should admire what the man represents.

Karol of Spot On (yes I know the URL says Alarming News)
Talks to us of Girls, Girls, Girls.
Now pay attention to her views -
Because sometimes blogging is like casting swine before pearls.

And over at Patriot Paradox
Nick comes out of the starting box,
With a post comparing Liberals and Conservatives.
I personally prefer Liberals because they contain only natural ingredients and no preservatives.

Quibbles-N-Bits! Quibbles-N-Bits!
Alas, it's a blog not a cereal;
Reports that Harvey has cashed in his chits³
But I somehow suspect it's not real.

Jon of QandO has a report
That the wedding party was nothing of the sort.
No bride? No dancing? No Hava Nagila?
No half-empty bottles of cut-price tequila?

Susie, Susie, a lithium smoothie
Has never tasted sweeter;
She's just so groovy, she can screen us a movie
Using nothing more than a flashlight, an old bedsheet, two pie plates, half a dozen coathangers, and a broken egg-beater.
She tells us her woes, makes Harvey propose
With her wicked sense of humour.
Then nails Evil Glenn, yet again, yet again,
With the latest scurrilous rumour.

Linda talks of separation
And how painful it can be,
And how there's two sides to every situation
And sometimes even three.

CD isn't semi-intelligent -
That's just the name of his blog
This is satire at its most relevant:
ACLU's 'bout as smart as a log.

A change of pace, to fill some space,
Madfish Willie presents his Ultimate Salsa
Don't eat it all at once, it makes 15 gallons, you dunce!
And with five pounds of Jalapeno Poppers⁴ you'd probably end up with an ulcer.

Wally from Irreconcilable Musings
Is back from California,
Where he has been visiting his grandmother
And for some reason my electronic rhyming dictionary seems to have crashed.⁵

Bussorah Merchant
Has a Wicked Thought
About a government
Cat what don't behave as it ought.

Pietro of The Smarter Cup Cop
Notes that others seriously need to grow up.

Sorge, a new blogger, at Total War
Explains to us what freedom's for.

By night the Cheesemistress of Chaos
But by day she's the Candyfloss Fairy.
Her cow-orkers don't know Lesotho from Laos,
And they couldn't spell "irony" with the help of a Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.

Jennifer, Jennifer, trolls should beware of her,
How does your history grow?
With notable quotes and the choicest bon motes
And dead presidents all in a row.

Bill Adams comes from Idler Yet
With a detailed and enlightened post
On links between the Saudi set
And those people whom we count on most.

Peaktalk too bids sad farewell
To Ronald Reagan, 93,
Where e'er he's gone, we wish him well;
A finer man you rarely see.

Jim comes to us from Snoozebutton Dreams
Where nothing whatever is quite what it seems.
The Bestofme Symphony strains at the seams -
Don't touch it lest you end up covered in memes!

At Zero Intelligence
School Knows Best
You'd think before they became teachers
These people would have to pass some kind of test.

Chicken is as chicken does
Cranial Cavity takes off the gloves.
(After all, you can't lick your fingers if you're wearing gloves.)

Last but not least, from DCGI
Thoughts on life without electricity
No computer! No modem! No internet too!
I'll just save this post before something goes p

---

And what's all this?
There's three I missed!
Best add them to my list -
Because otherwise someone might get annoyed with me.

At Quantico, Virginia,
Is another National Cemetary
Ted from Rocket Jones reports to us,
Our cultural emissary.

John Moore of Useful Fools
Shows us some dangerous political operatives
Dangerous at least to those far-left tools,
Who really could do with a sedative.

And Simon returns from his travels,
With a review of the movie Cold Mountain,
Not so bad that his brain quite unravels,
But I'll stick with Three Coins in the Fountain.

---

Laughing Wolf, Laughing Wolf, where have you been?
Trapped in my spam filter? Languished unseen?
Sprung free from the trap, he sinks his jaws -
Not into me, but the Old Media, of course.

---

Alas, poor Helen,
I know her well.
What happened to her entry
Only Mozilla can tell.⁶

And whatever her name is,
And who she might be,
Is for her to decide -
Not the phone company.

(And from 2:01 to 2:03
She can call Malaysia for a pound a minute.
Sounds like a good deal to me
I doubt there's any money in it.⁷)

---

At the bottom of the garden, down behind the rusty shed,
Is a spamtrap made entirely out of glass.
It mostly does its job and leaves the spam completely dead,
But every now and then it bites me in the arse.

The Watcher of Weasels was stuck in the trap,
Whence I'd already pulled Laughing Wolf out,
His post takes on people with minds full of nonsense,
And who ought to be slapped with a large fish.

---

King of Fools brings us the sad story
Of a marine, two reporters, and 7% diversity.

Dissecting Leftism takes on a difficult word,
Greenie Watch says 7 billion will now go unheard,
And PC Watch reports something yet more absurd.

Northstar reports on a maritime disaster...
Only he slept through the whole thing and didn't find out about it until after.

---

¹ CityRail apologises for any invonvenience caused.
² Okay, you try to find a workable rhyme for Kevin, or indeed Minority.
³ Frankly, I don't think this makes any less sense than the more conventional phrasing.
⁴ Sorry, little MuNu in-joke there.
⁵ Even Shakespeare didn't rhyme all the time. Help me out here!
⁶ And it's not talking.
⁷ My day job just happens to be implementing exactly that sort of inane marketing ploy. My all-time favourite (at a previous place of employment) was a plan where if you spent more than $X in a month, your call rates were reduced retroactively - so the calls which you had made that brought you to the $X mark now cost less and no longer brought you to that mark, meaning that you weren't in fact eligible for the cheaper rates...

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The Carnival is Coming!

I'm working on it right now... Or after my nap, anyway. But you still have a chance to get your last minute entries in - just email your best recent post to carnival@pixymisa.com and we'll do the rest!

Update: Still working on it. Darn you Tiger, it's your fault for setting such a high standard!

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It's Nearly Carnival Time!

Carnival of the Vanities is coming to Ambient Irony this week, so the time to get your entries in is now!

Send them to carnival@pixymisa.com and I'll make sure that something good happens to them.

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So Many Moles, So Few Mallets...

Bill Whittle is playing whack-a-mole with the enemies of civilisation.

Read it.

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How Are You Using The Tool?

Hi Mena.

My name's Pixy Misa. I run MuNu.

MuNu is a blogging community. (It's other things too, but we're talking about the blogs today.) We have personal blogs, public service blogs, group blogs, test blogs, gimmick blogs, joke blogs... We have over one hundred blogs, some with as many as eighty authors; we have over one hundred and fifty authors in total. (It just sort of grew.)

And we kind of like Movable Type. It's not perfect (what is?) but we're used to it.

But. I just added a new blog and a new user, and I've got more people waiting to join, and every Munuvian is free to add guests to their blogs, and that just doesn't work with blog-count and user-count limits.

We'd like to move to MT 3.0. I'm happy to pay for it - and pay more than $69 too - but it needs to be unlimited. Single installation, fine. Non-commerical, okay. But we just can't survive with restrictions on users and blogs.

Thanks.

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Okay, Now I'm Dead

Nonetheless, my freshly disinterred corpse is conducting the Bestofme Symphony over at the main Mu.Nu website.

Any excess pongage is entirely due to Abby Normal's brain.

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Cooking Up A Storm

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This Is Still My Blog

There aren't any quite like it, and this one is mine all mine.

Happy 1th birthday Ambient Irony!

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Bonfire!

Gonna be a bonfire tonight, a bonfire tonight, I know, I know...

Gooood evening ladies and germs, and welcome one and all to the Bonfire of the Vanities!

I'm your host, The Extremely Reverend Pixy Misa, and tonight we will be sacrificing our most worthless, our most inane, our most incoherent babblings to the flames! And if things get a little carried away, possibly a blogger or two as well!

Right, who's up first?

...

Shy crowd, eh? Well, I'll just draw a name out of the hat. Oh, look! It's

Susie of Practical Penumbra, who takes great pride in connecting the dots with... the other dots. Burn for me, Susie!

And now we have John Moore of Useful Fools who tries to contribute by throwing a couple of Democrats into the fire! Don't be silly, John! We all know that politicians are too wet to burn!

Competing in our Inane Remark category is Sean Hackbarth of The American Mind who informs us that the head of the NBA is an InstaPundit reader. Or that someone who isn't the head of the NBA is an IsntaPundit reader. Or something.

In our Put not thy faith in weathermen category we have Kiril Kundurazieff of Sneakeasy's Joint complaining that sometimes it will rain even if the guy on TV said it wouldn't!! We all hate that, right? Right! Into the flames with it, Kiril!

Michael Friedman of Fried Man regretfully informs us that Kevin Drum has SOLD OUT! and is now pimping for the Global Sorority Conspiracy! Hey, Michael, how come we never get invited to those parties? Oh, never mind. Burn, baby, burn!

Can't keep up with what's going on in the sports world any more? Don't worry! Beth Donovan of She Who Will Be Obeyed Or Else Dammit is here to fill us all in on the latest news from, um, Augusta, maybe? I dunno. One of those places.

Andrew Ian Dodge of Dodgeblogium has - Aah! My eyes! Ze goggles, they do nothing!

And while you're recovering from that, we have a competitor in the Non-Sequitur category. Meet Jim from Snoozebutton Dreams who tells us about a show that he cannot describe and therefore, doesn't.

Into the fire with him! Oops, no, just the post... Oh well.

The inimitable Harvey of Bad Money looks for blogging inspiration to Bad Dog Jake - who is, alas, an actual dog and so inspires only more fodder for the bonfire...

Not that that is a bad thing.

Photon Courier, apparently mistaking the Bonfire for the Carnival, sends us a fine post noting the similarities between idiots now and sixty years ago. Let's toss it in the flames anyway!

Alex of Hypocrisy and Hypotheses explains to us the difference between a buffalo's fingers and a buddy... Or possibly not. Burn it anyway! Bwahahahahahahaah - cough!

Ah... Has anyone been putting any, mmm, substances, in the fire? If so, see me after the show stop it right now!

Goldie the Drama Queen has let herself grow addicted to frogs balls. But she tells us she's doing just fine in therapy and will be out in no time!

Meanwhile, Comrade Dave of Blogo Slovo makes it known that he does not want to turn into a giant Iguana. At least, not a small-town giant Iguana. A big city giant Iguana, that's different.

Burn it! Burn it!

Bryan of Spare Change watches The Bachelor. But he tells us he's doing just fine in therapy and will be out in no time!

Is it hot in here, or is it just me? Why did we build the Bonfire indoors, by the way?

Nathan of The Argus manages to link Turkmenistan (which he claims is a real country) and the Cavity Creeps (who we know are real) together in a single post, endangering the very existence of Reality unless we take swift action by throwing it into the fire!

Always works, that. Reality endangered? Into the fire!

...

The Gleeful Extremist recommends that we all see Cheaper by the Dozen. Uh, and that's about it. Sure burns well, though. Flames, so pretty...

Brian takes time out from his musings to tell us that he is outraged! Absolutely outraged! And if you act now, he'll throw in a free set of steak knives!

Heather, perhaps you could have a quiet word with your husband?

Eric of Classical Values is decapitating chocolate bunnies for peace! And something about Ishtar and Indymedia, but it's already burnt, so we won't worry about that.

The Interested Participant attempts to convince us that snakes evolved from lawyers, when we all know that snakes really evolved from insurance salesmen. Nice try, IP, but it's into the flames you go!

Crackle crackle burn burn...

The Princess of Fools, from the Kingdom of Fools has some very insightful commentary for us, so daddy decides to offer it up for the Bonfire. Just you wait, your Kingness!

In the It seemed amusing at the time category we have contestent Kevin of Wizbang who tells us that Arnold rescued a struggling swimmer. And, well, that's basically it. Arnold rescued a struggling swimmer.

Bill Bulldog, posting from Beyond the Black Hole, explains the Olympics to us. At least, I think he explained the Olympics to us. Not always easy to tell.

And, finally, we have Chapomatic who tells us that he has, indeed, seen everything.

Oh look! The nice gentlemen in the shiny red trucks have arrived! If anyone wants me, I'll be 'round the back!

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