PAULA NEAL MOONEY

by Paula Neal Mooney TMZ and Juicy-News are reporting Tyra Banks' plan to answer her fat critics by wearing a swimsuit on the Tyra Banks Show tomorrow. Not just any swimsuit , but the self-same swimsuit that paparazzi caught her lolling around the Australian surf wearing looking, as some anorexic-inducing critics claim, so much larger than her Swimsuit Illustrated days. It's the same one-piece swimsuit that bloggers and writers quickly pounced on and attacked Tyra with headlines like these (and we wonder why supermodels are dying from starving themselves, all the while the new size double-zero is all the rage...just waiting on the minus one, two and three sizes): "THIGH-RA BANKS!" "AMERICA'S NEXT TOP WADDLE!" "TYRA PORK CHOPS!" "TYRA TOPS 200LBS!" "Tyra Banks shows the world why she retired from the runway" Headlines like that are just rude, crude, and not worth the pixels they are written with. And I for one am glad Tyra...

by Paula Neal Mooney I love my blog's readers. The ones that don't cuss at me, that is. Like Scott Nance over at Life, The Universe... My e-conversations with Scott have inspired a couple of posts thus far, including the How to Get People to Read Your Blog one. And now here's another. Yesterday Scott unknowingly got me to thinking about the advantages to reading the ads on other people's blogs -- not your own. (Never, ever, blogging newbies, click on your own Google Adsense ads! This could spell doom.) It helps prevent ad blindness - I was so used to not clicking on the ads displayed on my own blog that I realized I was letting this fear translate to other websites I read daily. Lo and behold I had almost developed a case of ad blindness , an affliction that content writers try hard to cure their customers of, trying all sorts of tricks like placing topical pics near their Google Adsense link ads. (Which, by the by, the jury is still out on whether this is okay or not...

by Paula Neal Mooney ThePhink.com has broken a crazy and sad story that other news organizations are picking up on now too: Clemson University's MLK Day Party -- a "theme" party held by a few students. While some thoughtful Clemson University students were no doubt reflecting on the uplifting speeches of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., during the most-recent holiday weekend celebrating his life, select students at Clemson University were allegedly throwing an MLK Day Party in his honor...or, dishonor. Missing seemed to be reverence for the man and how far we as a nation have come with race relations at this Clemson MLK Day party . In its place were allegedly some of the other things (like forty ounces of beer taped to hands) seen at earlier parties like this one: backsides stuffed with tissue to emulate the ample behinds of black women, gold grills on teeth and not just a man in black face, but in black body! "It couldn't have been that bad," said...

by Paula Neal Mooney Today was an amazing episode of The View , with the whole show dedicated to issues of autism. Toni Braxton co-hosted with the other women, but she wasn't discussing her latest Las Vegas appearance, nor some scandalous barely-there dress. Toni Braxton spoke of her youngest son, Diezel, 3, and his recent diagnosis of autism. And like any mother reeling from the shock of an only 4-month-old diagnosis, Toni Braxton broke down and cried when describing the symptoms that clued her in that something was wrong. "I'm sorry," Toni Braxton wept, dropping her face into her palms. "I get all emotional." "That's okay," Rosie comforted. I, too, wept along with Toni Braxton , empathizing with the raw and real pain a parent can feel when coming to the realization that their child might not be "normal" in the eyes of the world. Thankfully, there were other parents of autistic children on The View that shared how they deal with au...

by Paula Neal Mooney Every once and a while it's good to stop blogging like a madperson, take a breather and analyze your stats to see what's worked in the past so that you can duplicate that effort in order to increase your pageviews in the future. That's what I did this morning when I took a look at my Google Analytics stats (which though it says 7/1/2006, only reflects the top pageviews since I added the tracking code to my blog 2 or 3 months ago...StatCounter reflects a higher count) to see what story my blog posts with the highest number of pageviews had to tell me. So here's a quick screenshot (big ups to that site that showed me how to hit PrintScreen then paste the screenshot into Microsoft's Paint -- under Accessories -- then save as pic file) and analysis of my top blog posts and what I've learned about getting high pageviews: 1 - Lil Wayne and Baby Kissing Photo…Rapper Admits it is Real - Ah...the infamous Lil Wayne and Baby kissing photo. I didn...

by Paula Neal Mooney Now that my blessed friend Bonnie Calhoun over at Bonnie Writes showed me that my blog value is in fact increasing -- and not stuck on the $24k I thought it was worth -- by encouraging me to click on the "How Much is Your Blog Worth?" doohickey over there to the left in my sidebar, I've been wondering: How do you sell a blog? (By the way, I had to type in www.paulamooney.blogspot.com to get the highest value, so try different variations of your correct URL with and without the "http:" in front to get your highest blog value.) Googling stuff like "sell my blog," "blogs for sale," "sell your blog," and "blog for sale" will get you enough good tips. But I think these BloggerTalk guidelines in this thread is a good start: 1. This forum is for the listing of blogs which are for sale. Not domain names and not normal web sites (with the exception of domains which have the word "blog" in them an...

by Paula Neal Mooney Sometimes the truth hits you like a ton of bricks. Sometimes, like an express-mailed pack of books. You may remember my previous post, " You never know who could be reading your blog ," wherein I clued-in readers that mine was chosen as the 10th blog on a 10-blog tour for the new book Babyproofing Your Marriage: How to Laugh More, Argue Less, and Communicate Better as Your Family Grows . Sure as shootin' a few days later I received a big pack of books from a HarperCollins publicist, or, as I'm thinking of it today, manna from heaven. Hello, my name is Paula... ...and I'm a truth-aholic. So here goes: Aside from one scary night spent in the emergency room together, my husband and I haven't spent a night alone without our kids in nearly six years. Whew. That's a load off. The reasons vary, part of it due to being corporate nomads with no family nearby, part of it parent paranoia, part of it the vicissitudes of life that keep us hustling...

by Paula Neal Mooney Again I was catching up with my TiVo'd shows whilst putting teeny-tiny microbraids in my hair and was caught by surprise when The View interviewed Grey's Anatomy hottie Justin Chambers, and they flashed a picture of his wife, Keisha, on the screen. Is she black? I asked myself, cause no one else was asking. Sure I knew all about Justin Chambers and his five kids, but I naturally assumed his wife would be a beautiful blonde named Becky or something, not a beautiful black woman named Keisha Chambers . Justin Chambers has a black wife . Wow. There, I said it. Or wrote it, actually. I wrote the thing that many folks are skirting around on the message boards and avoiding writing. They seem to be avoiding a mention of the interracial factor like the black plague. (Yes, I'm trying to work the words "Justin Chambers" and "black wife" into this post as many times as editorially possible.) "She's not what I expected," is t...

by Paula Neal Mooney I see you winding and grinding up on the floor I know you see me looking at you when you already know I want to love you, love you, you already know I want to love you, love you, you already know Akon's lovely and whining and beautiful and nasally voice just filled my minivan as soon as I turned on the ignition. Yeah , I grooved along for nanoseconds to the hypnotic beat, glancing to read the screen display of "Wanna Love You" by Akon - featuring Snoop Dogg. Of course I just learned that this is the clean version of the song. The dirty version, probably played on those XL (which my husband taught me stands for "explicit" not "extra large") XM Stations I usually breeze right past these days, admits that Akon's euphemism for "love" is a lot farther away from the "agape" type of love definition. Too early in the morning for this sinful stuff , I thought, flipping back to my trusty The Spirit channel on XM 33. R...

by Paula Neal Mooney Back when I received my very first comment on one of my blog postings , I responded...eventually...once I got the post a comment deal down pat. I had a lot fewer writing assignments back then and was green to blogging. These days I'm so blessedly busy with writing work that I've turned off my comment moderation and let people post their comments right away. I read thru them via email as soon as I can get to them. Sometimes I respond to my blog's comments right away and right below the other person's comments on my blog. Other times I go to their blogs and read their postings, and work my response into my comments about their work. A lot of times I do neither. But the benefits to responding to your own blog comments are many fold. And I need to do a lot more of it to gain more of this good "Google juice" and other blessings: Comments keep your blog pages fresh . Instead of having static blog pages that rarely change, it's a good idea to...