Thing #8 - out of control RSS feeds and Dog Vomit Slime

I'm supposed to blog about RSS feeds here but instead of more whining about not having enough time to subject myself to more "technological advances" I've decided to share some information about scary, natural, real-world creatures in Texas. My friend Szarka and her daughter Tera came up to Spokane recently for Okanagon Barter Faire and ended up crashing on my sofas for a night. Earlier this summer Sz moved down to Texas - during this visit she informed me that her family now has a daily "WT*?!" moment with the local wild life. (Yes, I meant wild life in two distinct words.) Spiders so big that you can hear their feet clicking across the floor at night. Constantly checking shoes and sheets for scorpions. Wasps the size of your thumb. Giant cockroaches dropping into your hair from the ceiling as you sit in the bathroom stall of a restaurant under a sudden infestation. Troops of Daddy-Long-Legs that swarm attack if you look at them too long as they crawl en masse by the hundreds on the tree out back. Near invisible parasites called Chiggers that only eat 3 skin cells a piece but tunnel under your skin to lay eggs inside your flesh. Basically, Sz described a hundred and one reasons why I will never want to visit Texas, thank you very much.

But what just brought to my mind Sz's tales of Texas size horror was the Dog Vomit Slime and its similarity to RSS feeds. Initially the slime (which looks like yellow dog vomit) appeared on her screen door. As the hours passed she realized it was slowly moving across the screen! She took the hose to the creeping stuff but that only succeeded in spreading the slime all over her yard. The next day she woke to hundreds of slimes slowly crawling around out back, under the shrubberies, up the trees, hanging from the rafters, etc. Eventually some ugly black stems sprouted on its back and then exploded clouds of nasty spores, causing the slime to multiply even more. I don't remember how/if she got rid of the stuff. I do remember there was some talk of burning everything... my husband later offered a napalm solution, but I declined to pass his suggestion along. (According to Sz, the Dog Vomit Slime inspired the movie "The Blob"!)

Anyway, this RSS stuff reminds me a bit of that Dog Vomit Slime. The number of feeds that you can explore and/or add to your list are endless and if you don't get a handle on it right away your list of feeds could potentially grow into an out of control batch... very similar to the Dog Vomit Slime. I don't have time to keep up with one or two feeds but I have to have at least TEN on my bloglines account?! I am seriously tempted to "clean house" and spray my RSS list with bleach... or better yet napalm.

BTW, Szarka is an amazing bead artiste - her jewelry is some of the most beautiful I have ever seen. You can see her creations at: http://www.szarka.blogspot.com/