Ending with entry #666. Not even his genius could save him. Merry Christmas, D., wherever you are.

God I love the expression “pie hole”, and not only because Elise used it in a recent post. Other languages have similar expressions. Here are three possibilities, guess which one is real and which two I made up:

Puerto de taco (taco door, Spanish)
Suppenschlitz (soup slit, German)
Aperture du fromage (cheese opening, French)
What is your favorite funny expression for “mouth”, in any language?

Also: Merry Christmas in advance. I’m going to take a day or two off and hang out with my family. See you soon.

The sudden fatigue and loss of cerebral functioning suffered when attending a social function involving ones partner’s family.

Alpha’s aunt celebrated her 60th birthday at a local restaurant last night and we all went even though Alpha still has a bad case of bronchitis. It began fiveish and we stayed until Alpha started hacking out her lungs at 8.00 sharp from the smoke and drafty air in the large room.

Guests sat facing each other along both sides of long tables. Food was good, we had chicken breast schnitzels and french fries.

My tinnitus was pretty bad, and the acoustics weren’t good to begin with so it was hard to hear the nice old woman opposite me who was trying to make conversation; the background noise of other people’s conversation and the elderly entertainer on stage with his keyboard, synthesizer and rhythm machine singing hits from the past five decades didn’t help either.

I quickly felt the creeping paralysis of in-legal narcolepsy setting in but this time tried several things to fight it, all of which helped. They all involved various strategies to concentrate on what was happening rather than withdrawing from events, which would have been my natural feral, semi-autistic reaction.

First of all I tried the old standby of giving everyone nicknames. The small man with the huge muttonchop sideburns at the end of the table was Bilbo Baggins. The thick black wig with the little elderly man underneath was The Toupee. Leather Girl wore leather pants one size too tight.

I also took part in several conversations despite my hearing problems. Most rewarding was the interaction with a man we will call The Boy, about 10 years my senior, grey hair, with a face younger than his years and a smartass attitude to match. Since I have myself recently gotten in touch with my own Inner Smartass, we got along well and made each other laugh.

After that, I worked on getting Beta to be silly, and succeeded, which is an achievement. She is normally the serious achiever type, but we ended up having toothpick swordfights, beating each other up, etc. At one point, we even convinced Alpha that Mr. Chunky-Combover across the table had stolen her dessert when she went to the restroom.

You know the clownish type of man, the middle-aged guy, in his forties or fifties who dances with little girls at big family parties? Turns out he’s having a lot of fun. I danced with Gamma, anyway, and enjoyed myself.

And so on. As irritating as families and their gatherings are, we were still glad we went. I was glad to see who’s looking old and frail and who hasn’t changed a bit, whose kids are growing up and who’s still shrimpy. Alpha’s aunt and uncle made sentimental speeches and made each other cry. My sister-in-law’s husband who hates us was growing a goatee and looks pathetic with it, which killed my plans to grow one myself over Christmas, just as well.

The gent on stage played Felice Navidad, Gamma recognized it and ran around announcing the fact to everyone, even after he started playing something else. Alpha started hacking her bronchial passages onto the table, and we went home.

Dreamt last night I was reading marydellisanti’s blog. She had a redesign and lost 15 pounds and looked real happy.

Welcome to the re-design. This is the final design. The real one.

Trust me.

I’ll go into more detail about all this on a separate page. I have made the occasional smartass post at Feral Living, a hoax or two, nothing big, just small stuff like The Wino Scandal, The Shoe Project, or The 100% Miguel Test. Most recently in this same vein there has been the “If The Kilt-Lift on MouseOver Doesn’t Work Try Reloading” hoax, which did result in more page loads. One visitor, for example, racked up 20 page views in 6 minutes.

The Great Opinebovine Design Theft Hoax was slightly different than those.

Look, it was all D.’s idea. I really, really wish that I could take credit for this one, but D. thought of it. He was kind enough to offer to do a new design for Feral Living. We were discussing possible jokes to combine with the move, and he suggested this. Elise was nice enough to give her permission. [I would like to mention that I have been a great admirer of hers since I began reading blogs back in the days of Swallowing Tacks.]

Knowing how suspicious my readers have become, we figured it would get a couple laughs, and if we were lucky someone would fall for it and leave a nasty comment. After Elise was kind enough to link Feral Living (for the third time in a single month!) I also suspected traffic would increase for a while.

We thought Feral Living might make it onto Blogdex, from everyone updating their links to reflect the new URL (the old site is still at http://feralliving.blogspot.com; it will be left up indefinitely for the sake of the archives and the Shoe Project, at least until a new home is found for them). We did not suspect that The Great Opinebovine Design Theft Hoax would reach #7 on the daypop top 40, #9 at blogdex and, ultimately, be featured at pirated-sites.com, making it an official internet scandal.

All that wasn’t bad for traffic either. Here is a screenshot of Feral Living’s statistics (visits and page views) for the month of December up to the 22nd (careful, all screenshots are over 100KB). The first spike resulted from the 100% Miguel Test hoax, the second is the Opinebovine Design Theft Scandal.

Here are some more screenshots: Feral Living on Blogdex. Daypop Top 40. Pirated-Sites.com. Opinebovine. Fake Feral Living design.

A word about this design, the real one: I am thrilled with it. D. is brilliant, a great artist and designer and a real funny person. It’s an inspiration and a wonderful Christmas present. Working with him is great fun, and I must repeat my warmest and most sincere thanks to him and to Ann for all their help.

I would also like to thank Elise for her support of this project. Elise rocks. She is really, really cool. But you know that already. Thanks also to kd for hosting Feral Living at surreally.com. She is cool as well and also rocks. Go there now if you haven’t already. Finally, thanks to everyone who played along, thanks to every one who linked and commented, and most of all, thanks to those few of you who fell for it.

Happy Holidays. God bless us everyone.

Several of you have kindly inquired as to the state of Gamma’s health. She seems to be over her second bout with scarlet fever, is off antibiotics and house arrest is gradually being loosened. She went grocery shopping with me this morning, for example, and after lunch we fed bread to the ducks.

Currently, she is drawing constantly and making amazing progress in her artistic development. She is an artist, she also told me this morning that she is Dad’s girl. Most importnat for her self image, however, is this: “Ich bin ein Discomaedchen.”

She is a disco girl. Although she admits she is still too young at the moment to go to discos.

And we danced the morning away.

AIM + Neil Gaiman book + cats + kid = 2 hours sleep last night.