LONDON, ON (The Skwib) — Yesterday the writer of the popular blog, Prawned! was found draped across his keyboard, unconscious.

Patrick Jones, aka Dedred S., was pronounced dead at the scene by the medical examiner.

Jones was known as an insightful and amusing commentator on the gaming and shrimping industries, and appeared as a regular commentator on many television and radio programs. He was also quoted extensively in Shrimper’s Times, the magazine of the shrimping industry.

Sorrowful family and friends are still trying to understand what happened to Jones. The blogger quit his full-time job as a successful lawyer to follow his blogging passion less than a year ago and everyone said he seemed “incredibly happy.”

“His blog was doing so well,” his sister Bethany Jones told The Skwib. “It was getting tons of hits.”

More than hits. According to the web experts, Prawned! was in the top 100,000 sites on Alexa (a website that tracks traffic on the web.) It received hundreds of comments on a regular basis, and had an inbound link score of more than 1,000.

“How could he die? I mean, he appeared on CNN!” his baffled sister asked.

“I was worried about him,” Felicia Jones, his mother said. “He seemed to be getting thinner and thinner, and his color looked terrible. ”

In his report, the medical examiner cited the cause of death as “blogging exposure”, though he noted that the physical cause of death was starvation.

Note: this post was originally published in June, 2009 BEFORE I saw District 9. Alltop and humor-blogs.com have been cleared of any wrong-doing in the death. Photo by Adi Setiawan.

Win a walk on role in my next novel, one of ten free copies of my new book Marvellous Hairy or take home a mystery item from my desk.

All you have to do is either:

1. join my Facebook fan page, or
2. join my mailing list, the MonkeySphere.

I promise not to spam you relentlessly, and in exchange, I’m going to give away ten copies of Marvellous Hairy, a THING from the contents of my desk, and a chance to appear in my next novel.

That’s the Tuck(erize) part. Worried about what Tuckerization is all about? Simply put, Tuckerization is taking a person’s name, and making them a part of the story. I’m describing it as a walk-on roll, but you might like to think of it as a cameo. I’ll chat with you about what how you’d like your name to be presented, and what characteristics you’d like this person to have in my book. You can even decide which book you’d like to be in! (I’m working on two separate manuscripts right now.)

You can read more about Tuckerization at Wikipedia.

Join my Facebook page here.

Join my mailing list, the MonkeySphere, here.

Contest ends on October 16, 2009.

Here are the prizes again:

• walk on role in my next book (1 prize)
• mystery item from my desk (1 prize)
• copy of Marvellous Hairy (10 prizes)*

*Note: if you’ve already purchased a copy of Marvellous Hairy, first of all thanks. Secondly, I can send you either a copy of my first novel, The Amadeus Net or if you’ve got that, we’ll figure something out.

Join my Facebook page here. Join my mailing list, the MonkeySphere, here.

Alltop and humor-blogs.com are both tucked too.

Cute. Funny.

Click here if the embedded video doesn’t work.

Alltop and humor-blogs.com don’t know what it means either.

It was probably his imagination, but it seemed to the Don of Prancy Fairy College, Dennis Travesty, that admittance standards had been slipping of late. Just last term he’d had several complaints of werewolves, and then there was the vampire debacle at Convocation. (They were still cleaning up Poncy Hall.) No, he thought, it was just a bad run of luck. Could happen to anyone.

Maknor the Face Collector was just wondering what he was dancing with, and how it would taste later.

Alltop and humor-blogs.com both enjoy fletching. Photo via Retrozone.

From the Book of iChronicles

And in this time the People shall become like unto the creatures that live in the Earth. The people shall share Tubes and they shall be intertwined, and lo, many will call them the Inter-Tubes and it shall please the people, though they are caught in a Web.

They will forget the Lord and instead, worship the Screen, and the Digit, and they shall share their wantonness thusly.

It shall pass that many of the People shall worship a False Prophet called Blue Bird. And they will be pleased by this Blue Bird, and they shall have the attention span of the newt, and share their brief and simple thoughts in characters of a gross less four. And some will say, lo! here is the Prophet of Blue Bird and its value is a thousand times a million talents!

And the Whale shall visit these Worshippers of the False Prophet, and there will be lamentation, and anxiety, and a great clicking.

The newsy proof is at the Wall Street Journal. Alltop and humor-blogs.com are also worried about Satanic valuations.

In the years before the Great Striping, the common people had a champion. Whenever injustice reared its linear head, Pokadot Joe was there to thump it with his curly-cue cudgel of curvy vengeance.

Mounted on his mighty steed, Dosage Twelve, Pokadot Joe made his meandering way across the land (always avoid straight stretches of road), keeping the Euclidean Overlords in a parabola of fear.

Nobody could keep him in line. Until his tragic end at the brick wall.

Alltop and humor-blogs.com think that all-in-all, it’s just another brick… Photo via Strange Ink.

Here’s a bit more podcasting goofiness. Over at Podioracket, a site that promotes books and authors who are podcasting their writing at Podiobooks.com, they are holding a promotional contest, in which authors are invited to write and record … promos.

Being the branding whore that I am, I decided to make my entry flow with the whole Marvellous Hairy monkey aesthetic. You can listen here, if the embedded player doesn’t work for some reason.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Alltop and humor-blogs.com are living proof of this theorem

Video of animals. Funny British voices. What’s not to like?

You can find it here if the embedded video doesn’t work.

Alltop and humor-blogs.com are Allen and Steve. Thanks to Andy Poole for posting this to his Facebook page.

So let’s be clear about this. A hundred world leaders gather at the UN to discuss climate change, and our PM decides to meet with the mayor of New York instead?

Lest you have any trouble deciphering the hidden message, Harper is saying: “I don’t give a shit about this so-called climate change thing.” He’s not even going through the motions.

And yes, the magnetic Environment Minister Jim Prentice attended all day, and Harper went to the dinner, but that’s kind of like sending Forrest Gump to take notes at the Mensa meeting, and then coming for the post-chess whiskey tasting. It might be more fun, but it certainly isn’t taking the endeavour very seriously.

(Obviously, I have no idea what happens at Mensa meetings, though I’m sure they’re more interesting than climate change conferences held at the UN. Even so: Shame, Stephen Harper. Shame!)

At least one journalist took notice:

If the embedded video craps out worse than Harper, you can find the story here: Bob Fife calls out Stephen Harper for not showing up to UN climate change meetings. Also, you might want to check out this page, which has another report by Fife linked under the video screen.

A special thanks to Scott for alerting me to this one.

Alltop and humor-blogs.com have no idea where Canada is.

In the annals of unintended consequences, few are as baffling as this new finding that suggests alcohol helps protect the brain from head injuries.

A study of 38,000 people with noggin’ trauma discovered that for every 100 people who died when sober, only 88 died when they had a little liquor in their limbic system.

According to Lead researcher Ali Salim of the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles: “We need a better understanding of the exact mechanism, the appropriate dose and specific timing of treatment before we can embark on clinical trials.”

Woo! Sign me up! Free booze.

Oh wait, I’ll probably have to get whacked on the head too, won’t I?

Ah, it’s just another Saturday night down at the pub.

Lest we get too excited about all this, you should know Salim also warns us that alcohol actually causes half of all head injuries. We shall call this the Irony Factor.

Alltop and humor-blogs.com enjoy a little skull play with their suds. You can read the less goofy coverage at the New Scientist.