The Rock Art Brewery in Vermont is being sued by some big arse company who don’t want them to use the name Vermonster for their beer. Now the company doing the suing doesn’t even make beer, they make energy drinks. How fucked up is that? Rock Art Brewery is a small business built up from nothing – started in his basement.

America it’s time to support the little guy.

Read a little more about this over at Griz’s Monster Energy Drink vs Vermonster Beer
or head on over to Monster Energy Drink Sucks The Life Out of Small Businesses, or even Monster Energy Drink And Hansen Have Forgotten America
Monster Energy Drink Vs Rock Art Brewery and Vermonster Beer, Round #2 from Allyn Hane – I like Allyn ’cause he swears and drinks beer on video!

Damnit I could link this up all over the place, but I’ll stop there.

Nothing else really happened. It was all a little bit of a let down really. No blood, no other violence. The police turned up (actually rather a lot of police turned up) and broke the whole thing up….a domestic of some sorts (I can’t possibly fathom what about though amidst the screams of “you dirty slut” and other such profanities). A young lady with far too many children got in a car and drove away, leaving Mr No Shirt growling. I presume it was his lass. Hopefully now his ex-lass.

In other news Joshua Goodwin has released a rather nice looking wordpress theme called Old Popular Yolk. I think you should use it. I know I would if this blog let me. Yes, it is yellow, even though his blog is not.

I’m starting to subscribe to Kilgore Trout’s theory that every neighborhood should have a bazooka and a responsible adult should know where it is………

Cynical? Me? Never!

Anway, now that my blog is back from purgatory, at least google is indexing it properly again, so I can get a little traffic my way. Not that it matters much, like an underdog chasing a bus, I wouldn’t know what to do with it once I’ve caught it. Pish posh.

Today’s music of choice is Tycho which to me sounds a bit like nostalgia. The track of choice is called “Past is Prologue”. While I’m listening to this, I’ll be watching Hannah Solo’s blog. Partly because I’m curious, partly because I don’t really believe she is a real person. But hey, for all you know, neither am I, I could just be a big scam of an underdog.

Actually, I was surprised to find how many of my pages were cached by a few of the larger search engines. So I cut and paste a bunch of my posts into notepad and saved them to my harddrive…..thank you google. thank you yahoo.

Of course, my blog is no longer suspended. I managed to stage a little get out of jail by sending off a nice email or two to wordpress. They released my blog from purgatory on the condition that I removed a few links from my blogroll. Oh well. I wasn’t really in a position to bargain, since they had all my writing and all, so I did. And now I’m back. With the proviso that I don’t try and make money from this blog. Fair enough. The blogroll links that I had were to other mmo sites that I don’t control, which I did point out, and I guess that’s why my blog was released. Now I’m not sure if I’m on some sort of wordpress watch list, but I guessing I should tread a little carefully on who and what I link to. See, even if you have no control over other sites you link to, you will still be tarred with the same brush as they are to a certain extent. I’m not even sure how my blog came under scrutiny – I don’t get much traffic. I don’t get much attention. And wordpress has a ton of other blogs out there. But lightening does strike somewhere

And that got me thinking about WordPress and Blogger again. Google/Blogger allows complete freedom on their hosted platform because their ideal sollution the internet is to have every page on the internet slathered with adsense ads. That would make google much more money. They shot themselves in the foot a little when they made their adsense page matching algorithm too clever and now they’ve got the old interest based advertising going so that even if you visit a page outside your normal sphere of interest, you’ll still get ads relevant to what you like to do/see. So they get more clickthroughs and they get more money. Blogger is built on the idea that google really just wants to own every piece of internet real estate.

I’m not sure what wordpress wants to accomplish, but I think, on the wordpress hosted side of things anyway, they really just want people to write good content. Heck, it doesn’t even need to be good. But it does need to play a little bit by their rules. Fair enough, it’s their house.

My god are you still reading this. I’ve rambled on and on and on with a bunch of not very coherent thoughts. I wanted to post something about technology. I guess I’ll have to do it another time.

Take backups kiddies.

See, Blogger isn’t like this. The free blogger service lets you completely customise it if you want. You can slap up your own templates to your heart’s content, and showcase your awesome design skills. Oh well. Sure is a pity, ’cause I’ve designed such a nice wordpress template and everything. And how the hell am I going to sell it if I can’t showcase it? meh. Suppose I could give it away instead of selling wordpress templates.

I know that blogger is owned by google, who, let’s face it, have money to throw around. But really, wordpress could take some notes here. On the other hand, wordpress don’t really have a monetisation model like blogger er I mean google. So, maybe they’re stuck with having to charge people for custom upgrades.

Either way, the underdog blog will always be free. If you want a free wordpress template, email me. put the words underdogblogger and gmail into some sort of semblance of an email address….don’t forget the @ sign or the .com and you should be good to go!