The countdown to June 30 approaches. What is significant about June 30? Aside from being the tenth anniversary of when my braces were forcibly yanked off my teeth by the all-powerful orthodontist, it is also noteworthy because it marks the year’s halfway point. This is significant here at the Lucubus because back at the beginning of the year I made a resolution (which I am unlikely to repeat next year) to have 365 Daily Hey entries for 2002, even if it means doing tons and tons of catch-up on December 31.

In order to avoid the extra work I’m going to have to do at the end of the year, I am going to jump in and play Six-Month Catch Up. This will basically consist of dozens and dozens of short Daily Heys all posted within minutes of each other. I am unsure how far I am behind the 182.5 posts I’ll want to have when the clock strikes midnight on July 1, but I am sure one of you human computers out there can go in and take a look for me.

In addition, I am considering adding one or two more correspondents to the Lucubus team. And because there is no challenge like a needless one, I have another blog project in development.

“When do you have time to do all this?” is a question I am frequently asked. The answer, unfortunately, is not good advice on time management: it replaces several dozen perfectly good sleeping hours per week. But I think it’s worth it. Isn’t it?

Hi, everyone! Lucas here. You know, the guy who keeps posting all the excuses?

Well, I don’t have an excuse tonight. What I want tonight is to know whether you’ve posted to my forum lately. For most of you, the answer is surely: “No, Lucas. I have not posted to your forum lately. Neither have I ever at any point posted to your forum. So why should I start now?”

You’d have to be dancing around naked in a thunderstorm, wearing a blindfold, cupping your hands over your ears and yelling “LA LA LA LA LA” not to notice that this is a very exciting time for the Internet. The Lucubus Forum, as a bonafide component of the Internet, is, as well, an exciting place to be. Why, just the other day a girl posted who had links to naked photographs of herself. As a wholesome, clean-cut Christian with nice Christian values and a sharp Christian haircut, I can’t say I condone such behavior, but I’ll be danged if it isn’t exciting.

Also, if you haven’t been visiting my forum, you’ve missed out on my in-depth Survivor: Marquesas play-by-play. You’ve been missing out on Natalie Portman running around with guns, Billy Campbell and Bruce Campbell duking it out, and Jim Ellwanger’s soon-to-be-legendary “Ask a Closed Captioner”!

So what the fuck are you waiting for, you stupid piece of shit? Create a new account and start posting in my forum!

Some of the more astute amongst you may have noticed that I have not posted much in the previous week. Likely my regular readers, all five or six of you, have theorized that I have been taking a short break, or simply haven’t had time to write anything down, what with my recent hectic schedule.

I assure everyone that neither of these things are the case. The truth is that every night I sit down to write and can’t think of a blessed thing. I try to come up with a topic, an angle. It’s not that my mind goes blank, it’s just that I start to conceive things that I have already written.

I’ve been doing this blog thing for about a year and a half now, and in that time I think I’ve covered pretty much everything there is to possibly talk about. I have taken on politics with my uncanny predictions for the first few years of the Bush presidency. I’ve tackled the heartbreak of masculinity with two articles on facial hair, with myself as the subject. I have discussed the various positives and negatives of such famous festivals as Mardi Gras. I’ve offered up serious literary criticism. I’ve covered the sensitive issue of race on at least two different occasions. I’ve supplied my readership with sensitive fiction. I have skewered society’s adoration of reality television. I’ve given my take on that age-old macguffin, religion. I’ve told amusing personal anecdotes. Why, I even added Vince to the Lucubus team to stir things up.

The boys in BNL said it best: it’s all been done. The Lucubus has, as they say in the industry, “jumped the shark“. Oh, I’m sure I’ll keep plugging away, trying to come up with a clever phrase that I have not typed, or a mundane event in my life that I have not added a fancy fake surreal twist to, or an acquaintance whom I have not posted a picture of, or a link to some other more interesting site I have not yet advertised; but from here on out, I make no guarantees.

The Lucubus: it’s all downhill from here.

Recently the counter at the bottom of my page hit 3000. This means there are now over three thousand times that my webpage has been looked at since the middle of October. Roughly one third of that is me, and three fourths of the remaining two thirds are represented by hapless Google searchers who search for “policewoman lingerie party” or some such nonsense, only to find my page and look at it for a split second before deciding it was not what they were looking for.

Nevertheless, it is an important milestone. This puts my page up there with some of the most popular sites on the web, such as Suck.com, Pets.com, and, of course, PrimeNumberShittingBear.org. And I have been reaping the financial rewards of having one of the world’s most popular websites. The money has been rolling in. Soon, each Daily Hey I write will bring me one year closer to retirement.

Because I will take a year to write each of them.

Get it? I did a little play there, on what I said before.

Oh, the hell with ya’s!

In his just-begun and already half-hearted initiative to promote himself shamelessly wherever he can, and receive his justly unfair share of attention, this new guy will occasionally put appearances, words and pictures in this space.

–this new guy

I have updated my page of links. Most of the links I have added are things that I have mentioned in articles past, but there are a few goodies in there which I have found in my Favorites folder and have decided to pass on to you, the viewer.

Lately I have been looking at my web stats with much interest, primarily the referrals. It seems that a good deal of my hits are coming from Google searches for all sorts of crazy things. Perhaps the most popular searched for things leading to my page are anchors for the Chicago Fox affiliate’s various news programs. This is due to the fact that I have had a tendency to go on about them, but particularly the lovely weekend anchor Nancy Pender, who still has not responded to my open invitation to take her to dinner. I can only imagine she has used and discarded far better men than I. If it is so, than that is so it shall be, as I wish her nothing but happiness, and that’s about all a body can ask for in this harsh, cruel world, isn’t it?

Another popular and possibly related search has been “girls gone wild” or variations thereof. And yes, I am aware and amused by the fact that typing them here will only lead to my site showing up higher on the list of results for these queries. It makes me feel good inside.

The most curious recent Google search leading to my site would definitely be “story erotic Aunt bus”, which leads to some articles that I wrote last February. Sadly, the word “bus” only appears on the page as part of “Juke-U-Bus”, so its position in the search results has been somewhat inflated. Another interesting query was “fuck policewoman” – the list of which turns up my site as the third result, which is peculiar because I thought I’d score much higher, what with all the talking about fucking policewomen that I do.

Of course, the referral of which I am proudest continues to be the search for the phrase “I am a total slut” (the phrase, mind you, not just the words) which, as of this moment and for the last several weeks, turns up my site as the number-one non-sponsored link. Yes! I am a total slut! I am a total slut!

So. I have recently been made aware of the fact that the Blogger website was “hacked into” recently. For those of you not in the “know”, the term “hacking” is used when some hooligan or other is able to find his or her way past website security and does hilarious damage. For instance, a person “hacking” the Microsoft website might replace all the images with pictures of Bill Gates with a swastika drawn on his forehead, and replace all the text with “Macs Rule!”. A person “hacking” the Macintosh website… well, never mind, because no one would bother. Anyway, some people “hacked” into the Blogger website, and whatever hilarious and entertaining damage they caused had gone undocumented, at least to my eyes, which are all that’s really important in this scenario. One result of this “hacking”, however, is that the BlogBack feature, which I have affixed to the end of every post via the “Comment” link, is not at the moment working in a particularly reliable fashion. Many of my alert readers had readily alerted to me that the “Comments” link often does not appear, and asked me if I had finally gotten fed up with hoodlums who had been using my comments boards for their own ill-gotten gains. Or something like that. Nothing could be farther from the truth, however. I am still perfectly willing to roll over and let fictional characters run amok in my comments boards, despite my earlier protestations, because I would like to keep the comments areas and there is really nothing I can do about it. Except remove those links, which I would not do because I want to keep the comments. Get it? Anyway, the “Comments” link at the end of each post may come and go depending upon whether or not Blogger is currently being “hacked”. If the link is not there, then Blogger is being “hacked”. If this is the case, notify the police, and make no attempt to subdue the perpetrators on your own. These are dangerous men, and they are running OS X.

Hiya.

I have installed a feature called BlogBack, which allows users to add comments after each blog entry. It’s the “comment” link found at the bottom of each article. Use it! Abuse it! Start some flame wars and make me wish I hadn’t installed it! Also, my guestbook could use some more visitors.

The site in this form has now been up for about eight days, and at this writing the counter now shows that the site has 158 hits since 10/14/01. This is by no means acceptable – I intend to get out and whore this site like crazy once things have settled a bit – but I’m fairly certain that I’m getting more hits on average than I did during the page’s previous iteration. Granted, a good number of those hits are from me. But the fun part is I can now go through and see what service-providing domains people have been using to view my page. Right now nwu.edu (which is where I, and several of my friends, work) is in the lead with a whopping 41% share. A good 33% are IP addresses with no domain apparently attached, and in third at 7% is buckeye-express.net, which, I believe, would be my younger brother. Thanks, Tim! I also seem to be getting an unusually high number of hits from lilly.com, which as far as I can tell is not a service provider at all but is somehow involved in the production and/or distribution of psychotropic drugs. Which, while curious, is not entirely inappropriate.

I have also put up the site FAQ, or “Frequently Asked Questions” list, for those of you who are internet-initial impaired. I shall confess here that few, if any, of the questions in said list have actually been asked once, let alone often enough to constitute “frequently”. But the purpose of most FAQs is to be a preemptive strike, to put all the answers to the obvious questions in one place, where newbies can read them and hopefully get their questions answered. So, it is in the spirit of the preemptive strike nature of FAQs that my FAQ was written. Also, it inflates my sense of self-importance, which is always a good thing.

All that’s left to put up are the site map, my gallery of photos of myself which shall run the gamut from gorgeous to hideous, and a webcam image archive. After these are up I’ll be sending the big “Hey I’m Relaunching” email to everyone I know. If you’re already reading this, then obviously you know I’ve relaunched, but you’ll want to get the email anyway because I’m sure that it will be quite clever and entertaining. After all, it will be of the same quality you have come to know and expect from every aspect of the Lucubus!

No jokes, please.

Looks like the file upload went off without too many hitches. Any links to the old URL should be redirected here automatically, if I have set everything up right. A couple of the archives sections play serious hell with the graphics, but I’m sure minor tweaking will take care of that. Haven’t looked at it in Netscape yet – I’m sure it will look shitty. Everything looks shitty in Netscape, except for shit – Netscape is that bad. The webcam, site map, and site FAQ features have not been implemented yet, there are some links in the “Drawing Is Fun” section that haven’t been activated yet, and the photo gallery in the “About Lucas” section is still being worked on. The only major thing I need to do now is go back through the archives and change the URL for every image so that the image appears instead of a little red X. But I will not do that now. No, I will not do that tonight, because I have to be at work in seven hours, and I have to sleep. No, I will not do it tonight. I can do it at work tomorrow. Yes. Tomorrow. Sleep now. Not tonight. Tomorrow. Sleep.

Okay. The new page is just about ready to be put into place. There are just a few links that won’t be active yet, but pretty much everything is ready to go. In the next half hour or so, I will be putting the new files on the server, and taking the old files off. Which means you won’t be able to read this. But you will once the new files are back up, unless I fuck everything up. Wish me luck!

In the next few days, I’ll be uploading the new version of The Lucubus to this very server. Soon, navy blue backgrounds and wood panelling will give way to sexy mint green and gray drop shadows. Keep your eyes open.

In the meantime, explore memepool.com.

Cheers!