Category: News Not

2010 in review (according to WordPress)

This was sent to us by the wonderful folks at WordPress who provide us with a free platform to spread our flavor of fun. This is blogwhoring at its best, especially because it’s done by someone else.
[Whoa. Something ain’t right here: “The busiest day of the year was June 28th with 4 views.” Bigass FAIL there, WP! 2,081 is a tad closer!]

Check it out:

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The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Healthy blog!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

Featured image

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 240,000 times in 2010. If it were an exhibit at The Louvre Museum, it would take 10 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, there were 395 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 1443 posts. There were 794 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 314mb. That’s about 2 pictures per day.

The busiest day of the year was June 28th with 4 views. The most popular post that day was The .Gif Friday Post No. 129 – Compound Pendulum, Nematode, Catslide.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were stumbleupon.com, en.wordpress.com, mentalfloss.com, ogdaa.blogspot.com, and nodwick.humor.gamespy.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for ferret, motivational poster, science fair projects, gif animation, and steampunk.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

The .Gif Friday Post No. 129 – Compound Pendulum, Nematode, Catslide May 2010
11 comments

2

Amy’s Motivational Poster Collection June 2009
7 comments

3

LOL FERRET: Episode 1 November 2007
24 comments

4

Giant Woolly Bear Caterpillar Discovered Near Las Cruces, NM, Predicts Global Warming for Decades to Come December 2007
82 comments

5

How to REALLY piss off a golden retriever January 2010
4 comments

The Alpacas Are Sprouting

With all the recent rains here, our spring alpacas are already poking their heads up through the southwestern tundra. Very endurable and self-fertilizing, alpacas are the new cash crop. It’s too late to plant this season, but plow them in around late March to early May and you’ll be glad you did.

[Found here.]

Frank Tends The Machine

For those of you who have never run across the artwork of Jim Woodring, you’re missing out on some of the most surreal (and sometimes disturbing) pen and inkwork that I’ve seen. Woodring based a lot of his subject matter on hallucinations he had as a child, and decided to record them on paper.

His most recognizable character is Frank, a good guy who goes on bizarre adventures, often accompanied by Madame Pupshaw (sort of a cat) and Pushpaw (sort of a dog). None of the characters speak.

We’ve posted some of Woodring’s work previously. He did me a nice favor once, so I don’t mind suggesting that you visit his store for unusual gifts for the hard to get folk.

[Crossposted here.]

Another Great Gift Idea: Pure Class

[For the sake of anonymity, we’ve blunked out the eyes in a very amateurish fashion so you don’t accuse us of photoshopoopage… and no, that’s not me.]

Let’s compare these two photos.

The guy on the left is despondent, bummed out about everything in his miserable little life. Stuck with a wardrobe full of green and gray, the person who took the photo had such little respect for him that she deliberately offset the negative karma with her thumb.

Contrast that with the photo on the right.

The guy on the right is obviously very successful and satisfied with his lot in life, and enjoys it immensely. And he has an adult beverage camouflaged as coffee when it’s intuitively obvious to the casual observer that it’s a cup full o’ jack.

Why are we posting such an incredible story of success here? Because you too can become successful, and it’s also the start of the holiday season.

Click on either of the images above and they’ll take you to a CafePress store where you can purchase lots of wonderful things. We don’t make any money on the sales, but a percentage of the sales price goes directly to charity.

When you place your orders, tell Christopher Y. that Bunk sent you, and I bet you’ll get a discount.

If you don’t see what you want, lemme know in the comments and we’ll respond. If  you need a custom design, we can do it with short notice.

And there was something else I was gonna say about being an amateur blogwhore, but I lost my train of thought…

[Update– Czech out Amy’s Store, too.]

Brick’s Spider

Bugs I can do…spiders…not so much.

Damn near wrecked my car once on I-81. Flipped down the sun visor and a big-ass spider, about the size of a manhole cover drops down about 6 inches in front of my face and just hangs there swinging ever so slightly on his 200 lb. shock cord, about as thick as my thumb. We were eye-to-eye and even with my sun-glasses on, he had me outnumbered 2 to 1. It was so big it completely blocked my view through the windshield. I think I blacked out for a moment because the next thing I remember I was off the side of the road, trying to get out of my car, with my seat-belt still hooked in.

I noticed my sunroof was open, and off to the side of the road something caught my eye. I saw what I thought looked like a deer being dragged through heavy brush with a similar colored shock cord with 2 big puncture wounds on his neck…and a hairy leg as big around as a telephone pole disappearing into the thickets.

It’s a good thing too, because if I’d have gotten out of my seat belt, that spider would have got a whoopin’ to end all whoopins.

[Image from here. Awesome story via Brick. Crossposted here.]

A Call for Entries

After a lot of head scratching, tooth grinding and butt itching, we’ve decided to conduct a joke contest.

This is a competition for all loyal visitors to Tacky Raccoons. There is a nice award to be had at no cost to you, but we can’t tell you what it is. All we can say is you’ll like it, because the winner gets to choose from a wide variety of awesome prizes (and that’s a big ‘ol honkin’ hint right there.)

Here’s the deal:

Submit your best one-line joke in the comments on this thread.

Originality is a definite plus, so claim credit; but if it’s not yours, at least quote the source. Post your best one-liner here, on this thread, and we’ll choose our favorites for a greatest hits poll vote next week.

Keep it clean. –Bunk

[Update– This is a cool dealie. Added a button on upper right that shows visitors from all over the world. Click here.]
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[Update 27 September: The prize is being sponsored by CafePress, and as part of the deal, we agreed to post this advert:

You can find millions of personalized gifts, hooded sweatshirts and 2011 wall calendars at CafePress – for any topic, interest or brand!

There you go. The wiener gets to choose their own prize up to $30!]

[THE CONTEST ENTRY WINDOW IS NOW CLOSED.  THE WIENER SHALL BE DETERMINED BY A POLL TO BE POSTED SOON. —Bunk]

700,000 PLUS!

WOOHOO!

Just took a peek at the stats and noticed that we’ve surpassed 700,000 hits since Tacky Raccoons done been borned! Thanks to everyone for stopping by.

[Update 24 September: Planetross offered his excellent technical advice for blogwhoring boosting traffic in the comments below, so we added a Justin Bieber .gif from here. Gag city.]


Nose Harp

[Found in Strider’s awesome collection of crap.]

1,292 Posts = 3rd Year Blogoversary!

Wow. Didn’t think we’d still be around this long. Mostly, we didn’t think at all, just got up did it, starting on 3 August 2007, and we’ve since passed 671,000 views!

The year certainly had its highlights. We had our busiest day, 18 October 2009, with over 20,500 hits. I was invited to post on both AmyOops and The Blogmocracy. Amy’s site is kind of a cornocopia of oddness, and The Blogmocracy is more about current events where I provide innocuous fodder for the Overnight Open Thread. It’s all a lot of fun.

We opened up The Tacky Raccoons Store for TR paraphernalia. Our new FaceBook page was hacked and deleted, but it’ll be up again soon. Thanks to all who logged in.

This post is a retrospective of our past year, listing the Top 10 greatest hits of Tacky Raccoons from August 2009 to August 2010. Previous years’ greatest hits are here and here.

So here are the Top 10 of the past twelve months, with last year’s rankings separated by an appropriate slash. NR = no rating,  indicating that the post either didn’t make rank or wasn’t posted last year. Click on the images to see the original posts.

Hey Ho! Let’s go!


No 10/NR: Steampunk Rabbit Hunt


No. 9/NR: The .Gif Friday Post No. 129 – Compound Pendulum, Nematode, Cat Slide


No. 8/6: Southern California Fires –  October 2007


No. 7/NR: Bloody Mushrooms With Teeth


No. 6/NR: How to REALLY piss off a golden retriever


No. 5/9: Lesbian Amputee Dwarf Porn
[The title of this one was pure blogwhoring at its best, and it’s still paying off.]


No. 4/1: Lol Ferret Episode 1
[This was the 2nd most popular post since this blog done be borned, with over 30,6oo hits since 8 November 2007.]


No. 3/3: Giant Woolly Bear Caterpillar Discovered Near Las Cruces, NM, Predicts Global Warming for Decades to Come
[Don’t miss the comments on this one.]


No. 2/NR: Amy’s Motivational Poster Collection

AND THE NUMBER ONE POST OF THE YEAR IS:

No. 1/NR: An Expensive Ignosecond
This post got close to 21,000 hits before we realized that the pictures didn’t show an accident. Those guys knew exactly what they were doing, and they did it with precision.

Thanks gobs to all of you who joined up and stayed with us these past years, keep on clicking on. Let’s hope and pray that the results of this year’s November elections bring us all back to prosperity.  –Bunk

[Tip o’ the tarboosh to this site that produced the top image.]

Necessity is a mother.

 

Once upon a time in a land of opportunity someone realized that there was a market for pig machines. Sitting for weeks on end, he pondered the problem before he went to the drafting board and came up with this excellent solution to a puzzle that had been bothering mankind since the first porkers were domesticated: how to adorn a sow with lipstick.

Obviously distraction was a key part of the resulting product, and once the animal was oblivious to its surroundings, one could also measure and weigh it. This data greatly reduced the amount of guessing that coopers required, allowing them to expand their trade, and thus pork barrel spending turned into a booming industry that survives to this day.

True story.

[Image from here, crossposted here.]