{"id":1155,"date":"2008-06-30T00:02:10","date_gmt":"2008-06-30T07:02:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/singlebarbed.com\/?p=1155"},"modified":"2008-06-30T00:26:11","modified_gmt":"2008-06-30T07:26:11","slug":"200-words-on-the-appearance-of-a-spoon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/singlebarbed.com\/2008\/06\/30\/200-words-on-the-appearance-of-a-spoon\/","title":{"rendered":"200 words on the appearance of a spoon"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/singlebarbed.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/06\/birthday.jpg\" alt=\"The thought was good, the execution a bit sloppy\" width=\"216\" height=\"231\" align=\"left\" \/>I&#8217;m guessing something is in<\/strong> order as Singlebarbed turns &#8220;one&#8221; today.<\/p>\n<p>Blogging is hellish enough and a niche subject like fly fishing reminds me of a High School English assignment, &#8220;write 200 words on the appearance of a spoon.&#8221; &#8220;Round and shiny&#8221; comes easily enough but there&#8217;s still 198 more words left and you&#8217;re dry.<\/p>\n<p>428 posts in 365 days is a lot of practice. I&#8217;d always been taught that writing is like a muscle and must be exercised to keep tone. The slow evolution of stilted, unfriendly prose to labored and ponderous &#8211; suggests something&#8217;s changing. It appears I require a lot more &#8220;reps&#8221;\u00a0 before the &#8220;Ghosts of English Teacher&#8217;s Past&#8221; will stop rattling those chains each night.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe cutting those classes <em>was<\/em> a bad idea..<\/p>\n<p>1000 valid comments and 4000 attempts to sell you Viagra. I&#8217;m not sure whether the fishing fraternity has a problem with tumescence, but the spam &#8216;bots think you do. This is strictly, &#8220;don&#8217;t ask, don&#8217;t tell&#8221; from my perspective, but if you&#8217;re interested in offshore Viagra made from Kitty litter and Agent Orange, I&#8217;ll send you some links.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Contest That Was Never Announced<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The winner of the Singlebarbed &#8220;<em>Contest That was Never Announced<\/em>&#8221; is Singlebarbed reader, <strong>San Mateo Joe<\/strong>. SMJ commented about twice as often as other readers, on 40 pieces total, and has earned his choice of 40 dozen trout flies &#8211; or a new Orvis T3 9&#8242; #4 rod (with a <em>prominent<\/em> &#8220;R&#8221; on the cork), and 20 dozen flies of his choosing.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/singlebarbed.com\/2008\/06\/17\/its-not-a-kiss-and-tell-more-like-a-curse-and-tell\/\">Knowing he sat on the last one<\/a> and may have nothing to wave in anger, requires us to assist. It should prove a sturdy backup should his arse get a taste for more graphite. Comments are as rare as 20&#8243; trout, and even bad writing is a lot of work, it&#8217;s nice to know someone reads this stuff besides <span style=\"text-decoration: line-through;\">my Mom<\/span> me.<\/p>\n<p>SMJ, you let me know what&#8217;s needed, but you can forget about the #18 married-wing Silver Doctor&#8217;s &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>My thanks to all of you for enduring the last 12 months of split infinitives, outright made up words, and dangling participles, and I&#8217;m looking forward to some serious misspellings, crazed hyphenation, and outright lies next year.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: line-through;\">Bare<\/span> <span style=\"text-decoration: line-through;\">Bear<\/span> Bayer with me.<\/p>\n<div id=\"scid:0767317B-992E-4b12-91E0-4F059A8CECA8:6d950c8f-0352-421e-bd8e-e2c844b637a2\" class=\"wlWriterSmartContent\" style=\"padding-right: 0px; display: inline; padding-left: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; margin: 0px; padding-top: 0px\">Technorati Tags: <a rel=\"tag\" href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/singlebarbed.com\">singlebarbed.com<\/a>, <a rel=\"tag\" href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/blogging\">blogging<\/a>, <a rel=\"tag\" href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/damn%20that%20was%20a%20lot%20of%20work\">damn that was a lot of work<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Singlebarbed.com turns &#8220;one&#8221; today, and after 428 articles, 1000 comments and a lot of spam, we ain&#8217;t much better than when we started. Practice makes perfect, and there&#8217;s plenty of english that I haven&#8217;t bent, warped, or misquoted. Stay tuned for next year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-web-site"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/singlebarbed.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/singlebarbed.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/singlebarbed.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/singlebarbed.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/singlebarbed.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/singlebarbed.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1155\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/singlebarbed.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/singlebarbed.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/singlebarbed.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}