Thinking. . .Processing

Rene Descartes walks into a bar. The bartender recognizes him and says, “So, Rene, do you want a martini?”
“I think not,” Descartes replies.
POOF! He disappears.

The web is a funny place. For the last month the most popular website on WordPress has been I Can Has Cheezburger, a site to which people submit pictures of their pets, complete with funny captions. The captions are written in pet language. Yep.

What amazes me is not that the site exists, or that thousands of people caption and send in pictures of their pets, which, according to the site’s rules, become the property of the site’s owners who can do anything they want with it (including advertising their site or making money without royalties to the owner.)

Nope, what amazes me is that the rules for the pet language , which are not easily found on the site, are being followed by everyone who submits a picture. I am amazed. I haven’t seen so much strict rule following since I arrived at the airport in Berlin. You can’t get people to move out of their lane when a blaring fire engine is behind them and Cheezburger has ’em lined up speaking ‘kitteh’ and ‘lolcat’ fluently. Amazing.

Chris Brown, over at Branding & Marketing has awarded me a Thinking Blogger Award. That’s it, over this paragraph. (And it explains the joke at the beginning of this post.) I found out by accident because I am a compulsive blog stats checker, and saw people traveling from her site to mine. She reads my blog from time to time, and gave me the award.

It’s nice to get to know Chris in this “tag-you’re it” game, not because I love being honored, but because the rules of the game say you have to honor five other people similarly. Now, while I run from chain letters, hyper-circulated jokes and twee pictures, I find this challenge interesting. Because I’m passing on five sites that have good content. I can’t resist. There are 100 million websites in the world, and five good ones are hard to find.

Paul Lagasse’s blog at AV Writes is the thinking person’s writer. He writes in a clear and engaging style and is an amazing life hack.

Indexed by Jessica Hagy proves that you can make Venn diagrams interesting and funny. I would have taken bets on that before I came across her blog.

Heather Blakey runs The Soul Food Cafe–a fascinating spot for writers, artists, and others who want to share their work and creative ideas. (Truth in writing disclosure: I’m a member.)

A community blog, wikiHow will help you do almost anything, from learning how to make a tropical breakfast to How to Deal with an Existential Crisis.

Doug Johnson runs DIYPlanner, a guide for life hacks. If you need organizational tips that are also fun and inventive, it’s your place to visit.

Here are the participation rules for the Thinking Blogger Award:
1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think
2. Link to the original post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn’t fit your blog).

–Quinn McDonald is a writer, certified creativity coach, and journal writing teacher. See her work at QuinnCreative.com
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