How I Know What Preserved Frog Guts Taste Like -- My Embarrassing Moment

I place all the blame for this squarely at the feet of one of four women -- Kari Lynn Dell, Tawna Fenske, Susan Adrian, or Linda Grimes.

So, Tawna and Susan today posted on their blogs about some of their most embarrassing moments. Tawna's moment about throwing up in her underwear was pleasantly hysterical, and Susan's rapid-fire embarrassing stories had me fairly well laughing the whole way through. Since Kari Lynn Dell suggested we make it a blog tour, I figured "what the heck? I have no shame left anyway."

Picture, if you will, me in seventh-grade science class. That was the year that we did our first dissections -- Life Sciences was the intro to Biology, which we took sophomore year -- and one of the assignments was to dissect a preserved frog.

Well, yours truly being the awkward smarty-pants 13-year-old that he was, was plugging along with his group pinning back and cutting free the pieces of the frog. I've always loved doing dissections (kind of morbid, I know, but this me we're talking about).

So there I am, awkward, trying to impress the girls in my group (Again: I was 13), and we get assigned by the teacher to blow air into the frog's lungs so we can see them inflate. We were to insert an eye-dropper down the frog's throat and blow. My team chooses me to blow into the eye-dropper, and so we shove the eye-dropper down the frog's gullet.

I take a deep breath and blow, only to have nothing happen. What did I do next you might ask? Take my mouth away, inhale another deep breath and try again, right?

Weeell ... you're half right.

I did take another deep breath. But I ... umm ... kind of forgot to take my mouth off the end of the eye-dropper.

Lo and behold, I get a full-on mouthful of preserved frog guts. Two things happened next -- I hear an "ewwww" from the girls, and I run out of the room to scrub my tongue clean of frog guts. Then I had to go back to class and well, yeah, suffice to say that if the girls in my class already thought me a dweeb they now also thought me a gross dweeb.

And that's just my favorite embarrassing moment out of the myriad in my repertoire.

Loyal Friend and Visitor Award-Winner

I had a different post idea for today -- it was going to discuss cyborgs in a steampunk setting and how science fiction/fantasy can bend science fact -- but yesterday Natalie Bahm gifted me with the Loyal Friend and Visitor Award. Of course that threw everything completely off, and required me to make today's post about that instead of my original plan. Ah well, such is the life of a blogger.

If you haven't checked out Natalie's blog yet, by the way, you should really make your way over there. Go ahead ... I'll wait. Are you back? OK then.

Unlike the other blog awards I've gotten, this one didn't have any rules, strictly speaking, so Natalie passed it along to 15 blogs she enjoyed reading.

Well, here's my list:

L.T. Host at Quest:Published is always worth a read, especially for her MadLib Fridays feature, where she chooses the top NY Times article of the day and inserts our suggested words. With hilarious results. She's also good for stories about her evilly adorable cats, horses, and as an abiding love for wallabies. Yes, wallabies.

Bane of Anubis maintains Bane's Blogging Blues which is, according to him, "A self-proclaimed realist's musings about whatever strikes his nerve." Be forewarned though, milk might shoot out your nose from the unabashedly smartass commentary he makes on everything from what hoop earrings mean to the meaning of having your own picture as your Blogger avatar.

I hesitate to call Rick Daley, of My Daley Rant and Public Query Slushpile fame, one of the busiest commenters on the internet, but he certainly manages to share his insightful (and sarcastic) thoughts with a whole lot of people. And some hysterical anecdotes about his sons too.

The next honoree is a blog team -- The Literary Lab's Davin Malasarn, Lady Glamis, and Scott G.F. Bailey. Davin and Glam are occasional posters here (we haven't managed to get Scott visiting yet, but I think it's only a matter of time). If you haven't read their always erudite posts on characterization, plot, and a mess of other topics, then it's well worth your time to do so. I know I've become a more thoughtful writer because of them. And you will too.

K. Marie Criddle's "drawgs" at C'MERE are easily one of the most innovative ways to blog I've ever seen. She was a friend-of-the-blog before there was a blog, and has a sense of humor bordering on sheer ridiculousness that makes our critique group meetings entertaining in the extreme. Oh, and she's a good writer too.

Next on the list is one Adam Heine and Author's Echo, particularly for his Positive Waves Week, but because he's an all-around cool person. Especially when you consider he and his wife are Americans living in Thailand and taking care of four children. And, oh yeah, he's a fellow steampunk aficionado. Which is always a plus, of course.

Stephanie Thornton at Hatshepsut: The Writing of a Novel is an Alaskan history teacher who writes historical fiction set in Ancient Egypt, and loves sharing the off-the-wall analogies and metaphors students include in their essays. She's also an evil Alaskan idea-generating dictator-for-life.

You can always count on Renee Pinner for a pick-me-up when you need it. Many of her posts deal with motivating yourself in the face of the odds, and staying on track in this writing game of ours.

Steph Damore is a new discovery, but she's already proven herself a talented wordsmith and a semi-regular commenter. Oh, and she loves Star Trek. So she gets points for that too. ;)

Anita Saxena at Anita's Edge relates her love of ice skating and the perils therein to the perils we all face as writers. Even though she's a Steelers fan, I love reading her thoughts on the process and her Gossip Time posts about all the books she's read.

Guess I only found 10 blogs to pass the award along to. Ah well. That's the problem with getting these awards though ... a lot of times the people you want to give them to already have it. Which is of course my problem because Susan R. Mills and Natalie herself are also thoughtful blog-friends, and I can't very well pass the award back to them now can I?

EDIT: Though I suppose I could double-award Susan, since Natalie gave her the same award yesterday. But that's just silly. :)

SECOND EDIT: Remember to enter the Ten-Word Novel Contest!

A Sunday Post??? Wha??

As you can see, I changed my Blogger template to one with more of a steampunk feel than the plain white I had before. I'm interested in your opinions, thoughts, offers to make a better one -- anything really.

So let me know in the comments, fellow travelers, or shoot me an email. Either way works.

Like the Logo?

You might have noticed the logo this here blog's now sporting on the right side of the screen. Weeelll it just so happens that I was reading Quest:Published, and noticed that L.T. Host regularly calls her readers the Alliterati. I then got really, really, really bored at my part-time job one night and decided I was going to create an Alliterati logo (interesting things happen when Matthew gets bored).

So I used Adobe Illustrator and my mad skillz (not really) taken from spending two years as a page designer for a daily newspaper company to throw a logo together for "The Society of the Alliterati." Hence the logo goodness.

Oh, and check out L.T.'s site. She has a Mad-Libs recurring feature using news stories as the base paragraphs. The results are entertaining to say the least.