Similarities Between Paste-Up and a Kegger

Teenagers consume ridiculous quantities of illegal drugs.
Outlookers consume ridiculous quantities of over-the-counter drugs.

Ugly girls look better as the night progresses, due to increasing levels of intoxication.
Horrible stories look better as the night progresses, due to increasing levels of intoxication.

People begin passing out on couches early in the evening.
Outlookers pass out under desks throughout the evening.

You have to sneak out to get to any good party.
Outlookers' parents think they sneaked out to go to a party.

Slurred speech and droopy eyelids -- 'nough said.

People are more likely to take their clothes off after a good deal of alcohol.
My co-editor is more likely to take his clothes off after a good deal of paste-up.

Fame and Glory

Blog-readers: I call upon you now to obey me, your lord eternal.
When you find something funny, you share it with your friends. Thus, you will spread the word of this blog to the corners of the Earth. I call upon all true Linguisticists to obey this mandate.

You might ask, "Why, oh Great One? Why should I publicize one of the Internet's best kept secrets?" The answer is as simple as Louisiana. I want to be famous. Rich and famous. I want every kid to read this blog and to aspire to be just like me, and go to their kindergarten class on Future Career Day and say, "I want to be a copy editor like Loren Johnson!"

You might wonder why YOU should help ME. It's simple. I'm just a regular person, like you, only a lot cooler and a lot funnier. This isn't about making one person famous; it's about helping your fellow man; it's about celebrating the underdogs; it's about lifting your equal onto your shoulders so he or she can taste a tidbit of sweet fame. Plus, if I become super rich when I'm famous, I'll give everyone I like gift baskets of things made out of money, like little oragami Ferraris.

Now you might say, "Loren, you've convinced me. I see why I should become your mindless drone and do what you say, but how can I help?" The answer, my simple friend, is this: go forth and spread the word of this blog to all of your friends. The more readers I have, the funnier my content will be, and the closer you will be to money Ferraris.

When you tell a friend about this blog, force them at gunpoint to click the little button that says "follow" to the right of the posts. The more followers this blog has, the more famous it is. My goal for now is 100. Then it will be 1,000. Then so on until I have taken over the world.

Blog readers, I pray that you will not just ignore my call. Try to see yourself in me; I'm just an honest man trying to take over the world.



Then we can finally live in a world with no split infinitives.

Bacon Grilled Onion Day

Henceforth, Linguisticists will all refer to March 3 as Bacon Grilled Onion Day. Why? Because of my holy sandwich. The story goes like this:

I, the pope of Linguisticism, was hungry and saddened by the linguistic sin of the world. I resolved to cure my wretched anguish through my expertise of the culinary arts. As I roamed the kitchen halls, though, nothing in my stately pantry could appease my divine hunger. I truly ached for something out of this world. Bacon flashed through my mind. I didn't feel like breakfast though; the usual side of eggs seemed like only a half-meat. I was in the mood for something juicy: a meal worthy of three animals' deaths. That's when the epiphany erupted in my head: Club sandwich. Ultimate club sandwich. Yes. With divine speed, I rushed to the refrigerator.

I whipped out some turkey, thinly sliced, and threw it onto a holy cutting board next to some dripping ham, also thinly sliced. The meats have to be thinly sliced. That way you can fit more slices in the sandwich. The logic of that last sentence makes perfect sense to real men.

I threw on the sacrificial veggies: a ripe, red, bulging tomato; a perfectly green lettuce head, harvested from the holy lettuce fields where it is believed that Reno once trod; and finally, the secret weapon: the onion.

I grabbed the condiments, threw three slices of white potato bread in the holy toaster, and stopped to pray. I was about to combine two gods of the food world: Grilled onions and bacon. I didn't know if it would work, but I carefully laid three strips of perfect bacon in a pan and began to cook them, covered. (They cook faster and more evenly that way. I know that because I'm also the pope of a culinary religion.)

Then mighty Webster possessed my hands to perfectly slice the onion while the bacon prepared to begin its holy sizzling. Empowered by the essence of might Webster, I threw three ultra-sharp knives twirling violently into the air and caught them all with precision, one in each hand and one in my mouth, by the blade, all while doing a triple backflip and singing the National Anthem. (I hit the high note even with the knife in my mouth, but my mouth wasn't possessed. I'm just talented.) I spit out the third knife and threw the one in my left hand away; I really only needed one, but there was no way I wasn't going to be all ninja while a god had possessed my hands.

Anyway, I proceeded to slice the onion and laid three slices atop the bacon. By now, it had started sizzling. With my bare hands, I grabbed all three strips of bacon and turned them over so the onion slices were beneath them, absorbing the succulent bacon juice. When the onions had caramelized, they were a new, hybrid form of unmatched deliciousness. I felt the presence of Webster leave me, but my religious experience wasn't over.

I whipped out some pepperonchinis and threw all the ingredients together on my three slices of blessed bread. The sandwich sat atop a white, Roman column for a while (just because it was that badass), and I just looked at it admiringly. Suddenly, I was overwhelmed with a surging strength! I felt the whole world in me, and there it remained! I understood the fabric of the universe, and everything was clear to me; by making this sandwich, I had brought something so awesome into the world that I achieved the status of god!

That's why we celebrate Bacon Grilled Onion Day. I'm going to eat my sandwich now.

The true garbage of the Internet

I'm not talking about spam or junk mail. I'm talking about you.

Everyone with an opinion on something thinks they can write a blog. You can't. No one will read it, and you will be lucky if you update it once a month. Still, this doesn't stop a few million morons from making a quick blogger page and never updating it. I know. I never update this crappy page. I fill it with random pictures, and I'm my own biggest fan. I comment my own entries.

You don't want to be like me, do you? No. Of course not. So don't go out and start a blog. I know that won't stop you, so here are a few tips:

Firstly, no one cares what you think. A talking kidney stone's opinion would be worth way more than yours. With this in mind, you should be able to avoid making the worst mistake possible: caring. No one else cares what you think, so why should you? The best way you could argue for any point you're trying to make is to make fun of it. My most popular blog entry was about what I do in the shower. I have others about actually relevant things, but those don't generate nearly as much readership. Don't take off and write about your own bath-time adventures though; you aren't nearly as interesting as I am.

Secondly, remember this fundamental rule of blog posting: Be concise.

Thirdly, expect to have only eight followers after six months of posting. It will usually only be your friends. This goes back to the whole no-one-care's-about-you thing. Everyone tells me my blogs are hilarious, yet rarely do they think my blogs are funny enough to leave comments on them. I will tell you how, blog reader, because I actually believe it's just because you haven't found the comment button yet. It's right below the article. It will say something like "5 comments" on it (more likely "0 comments"). Just go ahead and click that li'l baby and type away. Be sure also to tell your friends about this blog, and be sure to list mine as a blog you follow. You know you want to.

Fourthly, always threaten the reader, or I'll find you and kill you.

Fifthly, never, ever make an error. Someone will be on your ass faster than you can say "Oops, I made an error. I hope no one notices, but not enough to change it right now."

Sixthly, use a considerable amount of jargon that no one understands, because it'll configate the reader into a state of aposiopses, and because it's fun.

Seventhly, never, ever conclude an entry. No one ever gets to the end anyway. The best way to end a blog post is to just sort of trail off. Like this one entry a little farther down where I....

The Purest Form of Writing

The single most pure, awesome type of written word is undoubtedly the rant. I will employ this ancient writing technique to explain its sheer awesomeness, because it really is just that awesome.

Normally, a structured essay would begin with a clear definition explaining clearly and exactly what a rant is, but that’s the beauty part of a rant. It has no structure. You just write whatever the hell you feel like! Peanut butter! Sounds good, doesn’t it?

It doesn’t stop there. A rant is the most pure form of writing because it perfectly captures the stream of thought that we go through. It’s an emotional photograph. It’s like you took all your feelings and bottled them up together, but then they started fighting until one ate the others. Then, as punishment, you threw the winner in a high-priced blender and shredded that little ho (figure 23). Yes. That’s what a rant is like.


Figure 23: An expensive blender, just 'cause. In a rant, the visuals should be unsurpassed in terms of irrelevance, except by the metaphors.

A rant should never take more than five minutes per page. That’s ridiculous. It defeats the whole purpose. My rants take me about 10 minutes max, and if I don’t like them I just go back and add some cool stuff about cactuses and blenders. Don’t worry about staying on topic. A true rant doesn’t really have a topic. One minute it could be a “how to,” and the next it could be a biography. This is the idea; in fact, if you can confuse the reader by quickly diverging from one central theme to the next, that’s 40 bonus points.

My whole blog is themed around the idea of a rant. Before we came to high school, we just wrote whatever we felt like — and some of us were damned good at it. Yeah, our eighth grade teacher told us to make outlines, but we just wrote our papers and threw some stupid sentences together next to some roman numerals and scribbled “outline” on it. Why? Because screw her! Outlines suck! Rants are where it’s at.

There’s nothing like the type of writing that doesn’t correspond from paragraph to paragraph; the pleasure derived from stringing together random sentences with no significance is unmatched; there’s simply no greater feeling for a writer than creating a conclusion with no pertinence to the rest of the essay.

That’s what I think I’ll do.

In conclusion, manila folders are more valuable than gold, and copy editing pens are the most valuable things on the planet. All problems could easily be solved with a duel with meter sticks. Cactuses are cool, and that’s my blog post, so suck it.

The Importance of Cynicism

I’ve decided to open this blog entry with a list of synonyms for “cynical,” in the adjective form, going from short and simple to long and then to unnecessarily, annoyingly long.

Cynical. Caustic. Ironic. Sarcastic. Sardonic. Critical. Satirical. Dark-humored. Sharp-witted. Lightly acerbic. Mean in a funny way. Funny at others’ expenses. Comical in a way that causes only one person in the room to laugh and draws glares from everyone else.

As a copy editor, I realize the importance of being cynical.

It might seem like a strange topic, but think about it. How many copy editors do you know who are cute and cuddly? None? OF COURSE NONE! If — by some cataclysmic error — there is a copy editor out there who can form a smile that stretches to both corners of the mouth out of any thoughts other than those of pure scorn, it won’t be long before they, too, are reduced to beings of poor posture and comical malcontent. It is one of the fundamental laws of nature that all copy editors should be offensive and disgusting people, and today — purely because I feel like it — I’m going to tell you why.

The first reason is because no one gets our jokes. We spend our whole day correcting grammatical errors that most people either wouldn’t notice or wouldn’t care to notice because of the insignificance of said errors. Occasionally, we are driven to make a snide comment about a writer’s stupid mistakes. Sadly, if there are no other copy editors in the room (which is likely because none of us likes the others), no one else will see the irony of our comments, and we will have to laugh out loud just to convince ourselves that what we said was actually funny (which it probably was not). After a while, we have to laugh louder and louder to truly convince ourselves of our comic own ability; and the result is one person laughing maniacally in a room while everyone else shoots them the kind of look normally reserved for insane people.

Another reason is probably the fact that reading and rereading articles long into the night is kind of like standing in line all day. You have to talk yourself into thinking it’s worth it, and eventually you forget why you’re standing there anyway. Then your editor comes up and reminds you and cuts you in line, taunting you while she does it. Some people really love copy editing and/or waiting in line, but generally no one wants to be around those people because they’re offensive and disgusting.

The next reason is because it’s just fun to be mean. You might see a copy editor laugh when you look at him or her, and then you might think, “Did that copy editor just laugh at me?” and you’ll continue to ask yourself that same question all day. The only time, in fact, you won’t be worried that the copy editor might be making fun behind your back is when you turn around and they flat out tell you, “Yes. I am making fun of you.” See how fun it is? If you answered, “Yes,” congratulations — you’re a copy editor (or probably just a jerk).

I actually don’t really know the reason copy editors are so sardonic. It’s probably the same reason the sky is blue — something science-y like that. I’ll just tell you this, blog-reader: if you had to read and correct your writing, then write a headline for it, then take the fall if there was something wrong with it after its publication, you’d be a sarcastic jerk too.

I hate you.

Errors Haunt Me Night and Day

In my "Twilight" blog, I misspelled Stephenie Meyer's name twice.

I later repented and looked up "forgiveness" in the dictionary.