For today’s Friday fun, I decided to provide another mad lib based on a weird news story out of California. If you want to know the original story, click here. Otherwise, enjoy.

An Orange County ___________ (noun) was sentenced to a year in jail for ___________ (verb ending in “ing”) hundreds of threatening _____________ (noun) — to _____________ (celebrity). The defendant told police a former _____________ (noun) and ___________ (person in the room) were behind the threats.

The defendant was convicted in May of three felony counts of false imprisonment by fraud or deceit and two misdemeanor counts of making a false police report.

Prosecutors said the defendant started sending the threatening messages after a relationship with _____________ (noun) stopped dating in 2008.

The defendant was also placed on three years probation and ordered to pay about 50,000 ______________ (noun) in restitution.

I understand the need to protect children from all types of predators. I think the best preventative is a diligent parent, in addition to safeguards from the rest of the society. It should be a joint effort. With Facebook developing an application designed to protect younger members, I say, “Good job.” Now to parents of internet using children, I say, “Now it’s your turn. Step up and deliver.”

I love free, and I think it’s safe to say you do to. But when it comes to free, you get what you pay for. This particular blog theme feels too much like a cut and paste operation. The content has a clearly marked box and the background is a background. But that’s the problem. There is no connection from the background to the content, so it’s almost as if the background image could be changed to anything else and the theme would still work.

If you’re looking for the most current and most popular topics on the internet, this is the place to go. Alltop is the equivalent of an online magazine rack, but the best part of this is you can browse for free. These guys take the best of all the stories in the news and post a link with a short synopsis.

I never realized that there was a conference for bloggers. It makes sense, though, most every other field, profession and even hobby has some kind of conference. I don’t think I would be able to attend this since its way out in Las Vegas, but the idea sounds intriguing.

I don’t know if there are any more Benny Hill fans out there, but he was a modern day charlie Chaplin with his show. He would do silent movies with the film sped up to resemble the old comedy shorts of the early days. Some people gave him flak for objectifying women, but usually Hill’s character was justly punished for his sexist acts.

While most people seem to be moving to WordPress blogs, there are still many people out there using blogger to get their message out. And to service that particular demographic is a site called Blogger Themes. Blogger users will find designs with unique colors and designs for free on this site. This one in particular caught my attention. I like the dark background, the colored bubbles and the layout keeps the content from being lost.

It’s nice to know that social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook are being used for such productive activities. Facebook has become a forum for everyone to complain or let whatever game their playing mention some obscure achievement. Twitter, on the other hand, is starting to become a pointless mess of people posting on certain topics just to increase the number of posts. Whatever happened to sharing information or announcing the positive events in your life?

1. You can easily tell where the new posts are.
2. I have the Facebook, Twitter and RSS icons clearly visible the second you get to the site.
3. You can see who has left recent comments and where the discussion is at.
4. If you want to check out an earlier post, the archive is easily located.

That’s why I like my blog design.

If you want to know what it takes to build a blog, I suggest reading this post. I know I’ve mentioned various aspects of these two steps the author discusses, but it’s always good to hear it from someone else. We all process information differently, and what connects with someone might need more explanation for someone else.