Thursday 13 from the Wayback Machine

I used to be silly.

I used to have real mojo in the silly department.  When I first started posting to message boards, I was the Sultan of Silly.

But that kind of silly really doesn't lend itself to blogging.  I don't really write comedy, although I do admit that I have written things that have been kind of funny.  But I'm not a joke teller or a comedian.  I'm certainly no satirist.

I do have a sense of humor.  And I just want to have a few silly moments.

There are a few of my Soul Patrol brothers and sisters who remain here in our blogging community.  Talk about silly?  Oh man!  We were all about the silly on the American Idol message boards way back in 2006 for Season 5.  We supported our gray haired Soul Man Taylor Hicks, and we came up with some off the wall crazy silly stuff.

So, as American Idol returns for Season 10, I want to relive some of the silly things I enjoyed with my SP pals on the message boards and in chat rooms.  Most of it won't mean anything to many of you, but that's OK because there's non-specific silly stuff too.

Anyway, indulge me.  I'm feeling a little nostalgic for some good times I recall.  Step into the Wayback Machine with me.  I've added some clarifying words to the original post, just for, well, for clarity.  These are in italics and parentheses.  Everything else is from the original post.

Thursday 13 - 100th Post, originally posted here at Trav's Thoughts on 8 February 2007.

Well gang, today is my 100th post.  YAY ME!  (Editor's note:  I just checked my dashboard and found that I recently posted #1400.)

In honor of this milestone occasion, my 13 today is a little different.  I met many of you over on the American Idol boards, specifically on the Taylor Hicks board.  We had great times and lots of fun.

And we celebrated milestone posts.  We celebrated with post parties and silliness.  We did some goofy stuff y'all.

For my 13 today, I present 13 of my favorite ways to celebrate a milestone post.  Don't worry if you have no idea what any of this means.  It's all about the silly!

1. **tosses confetti and walnuts**
2. **tosses flaming walnuts while juggling mittened kittens**  Note:  The mittens are so I don't get scratched.  (Editor's note:  I get that it doesn't make any sense.  How could I toss something while juggling something else?  Don't try to work it out.  Just go with the silly.)
3. **does a hop jig, a soul twitch, and a left leg swing with extra thigh action while juggling leprechauns and singing in the rain**  Note:  Regrettably, sometimes a kitten gets dropped.  That's normally no big deal, 'cause kitties land on their feet.  But, see, the mittens make kitty feet very slippery.  Thus the move to leprechauns.
4. **hops in the T-bird, screeches donuts in the driveway of the Original Soul Patrol place, breaks out in random song**  (Editor's note:  The Original Soul Patrol place was a thread that the moderators would constantly delete because it didn't really conform to the AI message board rules.  So we would restart it and continue to break the rules until they deleted it again.  It was one of those "run back home" threads, like a safe house where we congregated for conversation about anything.  That's what broke the rules...we were "off topic" in terms of not posting news or thoughts about our Idol.  But it was the way our community operated, before we discovered chat rooms.)
5. **takes a quick running start, does a round off into successive back hand springs, followed by a punch front into a full twisting triple back somersault in pike position, sticks the landing without stepping out of bounds, vaults forward into a hand stand**  (Editor's note:  In my message board youth, I was a master gymnast and quite the amazing acrobat.)
6. **plants feet, takes firm grasp of one wrist and one ankle, gets a good three spin wind-up, and tosses Gary Coleman with enough force to launch him into orbit**  Note:  Now you have to be careful with this particular celebration.  Most of the time we fail to heave Mr Coleman with sufficient trajectory and force to actually achieve stable orbit.  On those occasions we have special ships at sea to track his orbital decay on highly sophisticated radar.  Unfortunately, the radar has glitches and we inevitably lose track of Mr Coleman's re-entry.  Once, he actually crashed down in the OSP backyard and nearly killed the pool boy!  (Editor's note:  Clearly this is not so silly since Mr Coleman's death in May last year and there is no disrespect intended to his loved ones.)
7. **see above, only substitute Emmanuel Lewis**  Note:  The diminutive star of the program Webster has a much higher success rate in achieving stable orbit.  Unfortunately, we tend to forget he's up there.
8. No milestone celebration is complete without an open bar.  I'm a Gentleman Jack man myself, but we have a wide variety of spirits to satisfy the most diverse pallets.  For our Canadian Soul Patrollers, we have plenty of watered down American brews...wait...no, I've got that one mixed up.  We have all the best Canadian brews for our friends from north of the border.  Yeah - that's what I meant to say.  Oh yeah, for those non-drinkers we provide bottomless pitchers of ice cold milk and sweet tea - 2 of our man Taylor's favorite drinks. 
9. We've had celebrations disrupted many times when someone forgot to shut the barn door and lock up the corral.  The cow gets a little crazy, llamas chase the ducks from thread to threat, while the twins Madness and Mayhem wreak havoc.  And then the Damm Duck breaks the thread and we all end up in banned camp.  (Editor's note:  This is one of those where you kind of had to be there.  I wish I had saved some of the threads to show you the sheer wackiness of the things people wrote.)
10. Water balloons!  I almost forgot water balloons!  And whipped cream drawings of Onions and Ears and Tatas oh my!
11. A favored spectacle during any milestone post celebration is the appearance of thread hoppers and the occasional flasher.  Sometimes all it takes is a little of this - (.)(.) - and you don't need a reason to celebrate.  Stare at 'em long enough...you'll figure out what they are.
12. The party really gets hopping when the TK's show up.  TK stands for Thread Killers, but it's not what you think.  See, sometimes our board would be invaded by the dreaded trolls whose mission was to ruin all the fun and get people all ripped up and mad at each other. TK's started off as a thread for peeps who thought they were death to any thread they joined. Turns out, they are just about the sweetest group. They feel so bad about killing threads, that they just can't seem to let anyone be the last to post!! And when those dreadful trolls appear, TK's zoom into the thread and hi-jack it so fast, the troll has no choice but to begone!! And then the party is back on baby!!
13. (Editor's note:  This last one is me being a flirt.  It pulls together the things that Soul Patrol gals love about Taylor's performances and was usually written out line by line in a chat or on a message board, as a tease with pauses in between to let people post their hoots and hollars.)  **puts on leather jacket, whips out harmonica, tilts head, batts eyelashes, wails Taylor-style on Tobbaco Road, bends knees, shakes tail with sexy mambo hip swivels, leather jacket flapping about the onion, numerous left leg swings with extra hip and thigh action, finishing with a fast and furious Taylor-go-round that makes me so dizzy I fall on the floor for one last fuzzy belly shot**

Now some of that stuff I didn't come up with.  I took what others had posted and made it my own...put my own silly spin on it, if you will.  The great thing about that Taylor Hicks message board and the Soul Patrollers who posted there was the sense of community.  We were fiercely devoted to voting our guy through every week.  We were dead serious about his talent and that drew us together.


In between working hard to bring in fans and votes, and to rebut the critics whenever and wherever we found them, we were outrageously silly.  The message boards, and later the chat rooms we ultimately established after Season 5 ended, always felt like we were actually in the room with each other.  Although we couldn't see or hear each other, the way we wrote in post after post made us feel as if we were.


It's hard to explain.  The boards felt real.  So when somebody wrote something like **tosses confetti**, it felt like a physical thing that had just been done.  And so we all piled in to write the things that we would do if we were all gathered together in a room actually tossing confetti.


Of course, if we'd really been together we probably wouldn't have been throwing flaming walnuts or juggling kittens...


At least, I don't think we would.

Good times.