Getting Ready for Blogging Season

As my annual transhumance is increasingly imminent, thought I'd dust off the blog and update its look a bit... While these days I Facebook and Twitter the links and brief observations I used to blog years ago when I first started *MMC*, I usually do more blogging in the summer when I'm overseas. See you on the flipside! ☺

Twitter!

Twitter is a great microblogging service which allows you to post updates, thoughts, links, etc. in less than 140 characters. It's great for posting interesting yet fleeting and still half-baked ideas, of which - you can readily see - I have many more than the fully-baked ones! ☺ Anyway, if you'd care to follow my posts, I'm at @misciel! You can also follow my posts in the sidebar at right.

I experimented with automatically posting my twitters to the blog, and it didn't work very well, but I'll get back to real blog posting as soon as I can.

Thanks!
Michelle

MMC's Greatest Hits, Volume 1: 2005-2008

With over 1000 posts in three years on "Michelle's Mental Clutter," how do you cut to the best?

Well, there's always the topic categories on the right sidebar, which picks up posts starting in 2006. Before that, Blogger didn't have the option built in to tag posts with subjects... So, I gerry-rigged the equivalent. So, for the multitude of posts between 2005 and 2006, the subject breakdown is as follows:

• 51 Art
• 27 Blogs
• 27 Books
• 4 del.icio.us
• 18 Dogs&Cats
• 36 Film
• 1 Films
• 37 Food
• 115 Fun&Games
• 57 History
• 132 Humor
• 100 Italy
• 32 Language
• 5 Lists
• 17 Maine
• 21 Music
• 10 NewEngland
• 8 Poetry
• 33 Quotations
• 14 Southern
• 9 Tests
• 6 Travel
• 84 Venice
• 75 WeirdScience

What's more, the footer at the bottom of every page highlights a past post! That's like two blog posts for the price of one!! :-)

Last but not least, the greatest hits! Of these, probably my post on Hieronymus Bosch Action Figures! has generated by far the most correspondence... Then, of the rest, I'd say that the following is a VERY quick (and completely unscientific!) "Top 15" just of my blog essays from the past 3 years of MMC, in no particular order! But please keep in mind they're nothing but the tip of the vast plethora that is the "Michelle's Mental Clutter" iceberg!!

1. Overheard at the Bookstore...

2. History Bloopers

3. First signs of summer at Land's End

4. Clutter!

5. A Night at the Opera

6. Venice Streetnames

7. A Venetian "Tail" of Cat & Dog:
   

   The "veci paroni" of Via Garibaldi

8. The Best of...: Capri (UPDATED!)

9. Baby Food?

10. Big Eye for the Smallest Alley

11. Love that "American Style"!

12. Grappa vs. Limoncello

13. Foreign Language Faux Pas!

14. Frank Lloyd Wright in Venice?

15. Venice on Ice

You say it's your blog birthday? It's my blog birthday too, yeah!

Earlier this week, medievalist blog Unlocked Wordhoard celebrated its 3rd year of existence. Today, June 18, marks three years of *Michelle's Mental Clutter* as well!

Back on June 18 2005, I started MMC as a tribute to the endearing peculiarities of life in Venice and Italy. Right away that first month, it quickly developed also into my own personal link filter, where I tried to keep on top of and share anything and everything from the net that interested me nearly as quickly as I could find it.

A quick review of the MMC archives in the sidebar tells the rest of the story... Within nine months, I was suffering from informational burnout, and had to find another blogging raison d'être!

Nowadays, MMC tends to be most active during the summer, when I'm off from teaching and/or have returned to Venice. What's more, as you can sample here, Michelle's Mental Clutter is now just the best of the things I love most to share: news from Venice; the funny and the curious or the interesting and the edifying links from the web; stuff about my hobbies, like photography and cooking; and my own pontifications (such as they are) on life, the universe and everything! I hope folks out there may come to enjoy them almost as much as I do!!

It's been a good three years... Thanks for your kind attention, best wishes, and hope to see you for years to come here at "Michelle's Mental Clutter"!

Sincerely,
Michelle

Thanks for the Review, Blogged!

The editors at the Blogged: Find Better Blogs site have reviewed "Michelle's Mental Clutter" and given it a rating of 8.6 out of 10, making it officially - in their words, not mine - "great"!

Thanks for the compliment!!!!

Sharing only the best from over 500 webposts read daily so you don't have to!

Next, I'd like to introduce you to Google Reader!

Google's "Reader" feature is what's called a "newsfeed aggregator," which is just a fancy name for a website that lets me boil down all the websites I like to follow into a friendly, portable text format that I can skim far more easily than if I tried to browse all-day-long all 66 websites I'm currently following! Sure, it's not nearly as pretty as the original webpages, but it is infinitely quicker to read, and is totally portable on ye olde new iPhone!

In the process, I even can point out the rare needles of particular interest from among those massive haystacks of information, and share them with you in the left sidebar on "Michelle's Mental Clutter." I hope you'll find this a great way not just to avoid information overclocking (since out of the over 4000 items I've eye-scanned over last week, I've only shared a total of NINE!) but also to discover for yourself the eclectic little nuggets o' fun 'n' knowledge that I've been only too glad to mine for you!

To give you an idea of the kinds of myriad things you'll be finding there, here's a review of what's resident in the sidebar RIGHT NOW at 2:53 pm on Wednesday, June 11:

• Gorgeous Images of the Sky, From 200+ Miles Above it: The clouds alone are AMAZING!

• The Suitcase Wont Close Day-saver!: A handy how-to from Instructables.
  

• The RiffTrax Blog: Do you miss "Mystery Science Theater 3000"? Well, miss no more!! Some of the usual suspects from the Satellite of Love are still, as they say, not making movies, but making them funny! Golden oldies but badies and new releases get the MST3K treatment through Rifftrax... "Meet the Spartans" should have just released their commentary of "300" instead! It makes the Battle of Thermopylae the knee-slapping romp it was always meant to be!! ("THIS... IS... SPART-... ... ... of a balanced breakfast!")

• No glove boning for me: If you're like me and read cookbooks as brain candy, what's your own personal "deal breaker" for trying a recipe? NY Times asks the question, and Lifehacker and Metafilter respond!

• Classic photographs done in LEGOs: Just what it says, but gorgeous! Clearly a labor of lego love!! (Pictured at left)

• Patching Old, Crumbling Walls with LEGO: Not only is it pretty (as you can see above right), but I love the idea of a modern, plastic simulacrum literally bolstering its ancestral reality!

More to come from the road all this summer! Enjoy!!

Twitter and Twinkle

Ah, summertime... and the bloggin' is easy!

Yes, another year, another gadget... And right now we're tweaking "Michelle's Mental Clutter" to get the most out of our new iPhone mobile blogging!

To wit, at left in the sidebar you'll see a couple of new additions...

First, there's Twitter! If you're familiar with the status updates on Facebook, then you already have an idea what Twitter is all about. If not, well... as the website says, "Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?"

According to the all-knowing Wikipedia, many prominent people and organizations have embraced this technology, "including the Los Angeles Fire Department who put it to use in situations such as the October 2007 California wildfires." (Not to mention that the great and august The Onion is, too!)

I first really experienced Twitter through what turned out to be a couple of its greatest uses ever... The incredibly plugged-in and insightful "microblogging" of Rex Sorgatz on Fimoculous and the raising of the legendary digital truisms (pictured at left) of contemporary artist Jenny Holzer to its logical, ubiquitious, and glorious Twittery conclusion!

Now, all this incoming informational minutia might seem a bit overwhelming. But there are a couple of fun ways to narrow it down...

• Favrd collects the best of Twitter.
• Twitstori is both a digital art project and "the first step in an ongoing social experiment based on twitter"... What does the world say that it loves, hates, believes, feels or wishes?
• Ever overhear something surreal, stupid, wise, etc. and want to share it with the world? Overheard.it is a fun site that pulls in all the fun things which people twittered, saying that they've overheard.
• The ultimate in citizen journalism is TweetWire.com, which tries to build a newspaper out of Twitter posts.

I am personally twittering mostly through the iPhone app Twinkle, which sorta guestimates location by trianangulating with cell towers, plus can let you add pictures (both of which can only be seen on the iPhone, so hope to see you on one soon!)

Gearing Up for Summer... (Literally!)

Ah, summer... Where the days are longer, the nights are stronger than moonshine!

It's nearly time for my annual transhumance from Maine to Venice! That can only mean one thing... that "Michelle's Mental Clutter" is about to leap out of its usual 9 month-long semi-hibernation into vibrant blogurial life, and I will again be pontificating on the adventures, life, the universe and everything of an American abroad in Italy.

To celebrate, we're adding some zippy features to MMC before the event! I'll be introducing them to you one-by-one over the course of the day...

The first of course is Michelle's swank new iPhone (unlocked, jailbroken, first gen!) Finally, I hope to bring true (laptop-less, so to speak!) mobile blogging to MMC... The trial in the last post was a great success, and I'm looking forward to bringing you field updates from your woman on the scene in Venice. Hopefully, you'll find them more pithy and original than the ironic and oft-copied telegram sent by absurdist humorist and journalist Robert Benchley over half a century ago, that is, "Streets flooded. Please advise."

My "Footnote to History" on MetaFilter

Poor "Michelle's Mental Clutter"! It has been a bit neglected recently... not because I have no more mental clutter, but instead cuz I've got more places I'm spreading it all around!

These days, most of my history posts are going directly up on my Facebook page (in the vain hope that my students might actually read some of them that way!) Anything super-major important I go ahead and post first on Metafilter, which is a community weblog that ranks around 50 in the world's top-read blogs (whereas my blog, ahem, is not quite that well-read!)

That just leaves my more idiosyncratic musings for MMC, usually involving strange news about Venice and Italy that filter through to me while I'm stateside... And that's why my previous blogstorm has slowed down to a trickle!

Still, I'm not ready to join the multitudes of ex-bloggers... It's just a question of there being a place for everything and everything in its place, even if it is ultimately just mental clutter!!

So, today I'm sharing here the link for my most recent post on MeFi about original historical documents available for free through "Footnote"... Footnote to History on MetaFilter. Enjoy!!

Different ways for bloggers to say "Sorry, I haven't posted in a while..."

(via grow-a-brain)

Oh, BTW, "sorry I haven't posted in a while..."

(My brain must not have been overflowing with "mental clutter"!)

:-)