Last night I saw one of those TV commercials where a couple of small children cutely try to find and unwrap their Christmas presents ahead of time. There always seems to be at least one of those at this time of year, not to mention a similarly-themed comic strip or two and a vintage sitcom episode or three.

I don't get it.

Back when I was a kid, the last thing in the world I wanted to do at Christmas time was open my Christmas presents beforehand. Now admittedly I was kind of a Hermione Grangeresque prig when I was younger. Still, this particular aversion had nothing to do with priggishness. I just didn't want to deny myself a single moment of delicious anticipation. My mom was a grandmaster present-wrapper, and far from being stashed in a far corner of the attic, most of our presents actually made their appearance under the tree several days in advance, after which we were allowed to gaze at and speculate about, but not to prod or shake them. It was great.

Decades later, when I was pregnant, I declined to find out the sex of my children ahead of time, too. And while the payoff of unwrapping those enticing Christmas presents often turned out to be pretty minimal in the end ("Oh, wow. Here I thought that box might hold something stupid like walky-talkies, when in fact it's a bathrobe. Thank goodness for that!"), those occasions when the midwife held up a little squally newborn and ended nine months of excited speculation were -- well -- gratifying.

So I'm looking at the stats for this journal, and I see that so far today, just today, I've had seven non-AW visitors. And since I started the journal two-and-a-half years ago, I've had upwards of 1,750 of them. How can this be? Who are these people? Why do they have so much time on their hands?

Let's face it, however fab and scintillating one's entries are -- and I make no claim to either -- they're almost certain to be of limited interest. I read my AW friends' journals, and sometimes I read the journal of someone I don't know at AW, hoping to get a sense of who they are and what they're interested in. But I cannot fathom what would lead a total stranger here. Not that you're not welcome, whoever you are. I'm just wondering...why?

Could it have something to do with search engines and keywords? If I bait this with a few choice allusions, such as "Britney Spears" and "underwear," will that crank up the hits? And if I salted this entry with, ohhhh, say, "Bill Clinton" and "anatomical," would I go supernova? Well, we'll see. If the journal goes platinum in the next couple of days, I'll let you know.

So it's Friday night and the other denizens hereabouts in RL are tucked up into bed and fast asleep. I'm playing around in 't'other, Ancient, mi-favorito-de-todos-oftentimes World, sampling the bits of the GoldFest I didn't have time to get to in the past few days of the work week, downloading this, taking the odd quiz, and you know, just chillin'.

I'm inserting a paragraph break here to signal that I will not, not coyly or cutely insert another apostrophe for the rest of this entry. OK, where was I?

Oh yeah, mulling on the ins and outs, dos and donts (sorry -- I said no more apostrophes, and I mean it, dangit) of participating in an online community where some folks obviously spend hours upon hours contributing for free to the manifest advantage of the rest of us, others pay a lot or a little and freeload or don't (dang...apostrophe...). Well. It gets complicated. I myself pay a little each month and get a tremendous, incalculable amount of good stuff back whenever I check back in and participate. I try to give some stuff back when I'm available and can do it, but it pales in comparison to what a lot of folks contribute.

I'd definitely like to do a whole lot more..But then again, who wouldn't? Will mull this over again and try to eliminate apostrophes whenever possible.

Whoa, I thought I was hung up on online quizzes as a time waster, but this name-generator stuff is pretty insidious too. The best ones have a quiz incorporated into them, giving you the illusion that how you answer the questions will actually make a difference as to which name you get. All bogus, of course, but it adds to the fun.

Unless it's too stupid and obvious, of course. For instance, in doing one of the many "what's your pirate name?" generators, I was irritated to discover that having identified my favorite color as red, I was promptly given the moniker Red Mary..something...O'Yarr...I dunno. A poor effort me hearties, in any case.

The more common kind of generator just basically cranks out a name or set of them from a list or set of them. Less fun, but still amusing. And wow, Rum and Monkey has a "name generator generator" that lets you, well, generate your own name generator.

I spent an inordinate amount of time this afternoon setting up a Roman name generator and trying to get it reasonably accurate historically, at least to the extent that you can ever be on solid ground in the weird and wonderful world of Roman names.

Since then, I've spent a truly unconscionable amount of time checking back to see how many hits it's gotten. Bear with me here, I've never had one of those "You are visitor number [whatever]" things on a website, so this is pretty new and exciting for me.

Is it always like this, I wonder, or do you eventually get jaded and evolve to the point where you don't give a flying tweet how many people have eyeballed your efforts today, or on any other day?

I'd write more, but it's been at least fifteen minutes since I checked...catch you later...

First of all, the whole point of a password is that it's something you know and no one else knows, or can deduce, or can guess. So that rules out obvious things like my birthday, my address, or my middle name. Okay, so you'd think maybe I could use the name of the dog I had when I was a kid? Noooo, because evidently there are Depraved Hackers out there who can run through every word in the dictionary and every name on the planet and hit on that exact combination of letters. So how about a calendar date that's significant to me but unguessable to anyone else? Well, but if your password is all numbers, the DHs might be able to stumble on that, too.

Computer security experts recommend a jolly mix of letters, numbers, and those symbols that run along the top of the number keys on the keyboard -- something that's so totally random as to make it unlikely that the DHs would ever hit on that exact combination. Something, in other words, that's totally meaningless (and in my case, that I have to look at my fingers when I type in, because I never managed to memorize that top line on the keyboard).

Well if it's totally meaningless, how the deuce am I supposed to remember it? I can't even retain one sequence like *78Teop34!@, let alone remember two dozen of them, let alone keep track of which dog's-dinner goes with which site. My computer offers something called a "Password Manager," but it seems to me that the Depraved Hackers could pop that sucker open like a, hmmm, like something that pops open really easily, and then they could log on to Consumer Reports in my place, so I don't use it. Yeah, and that's another thing. Truth be told, I don't much care if someone steals my password to Consumer Reports or to any of the other media websites that now require me to register. I would, though, very much care if somebody got into my online bank account or my child's student loan application. If I didn't have so many pointless passwords to remember, maybe I could concentrate on the few that actually seem justified, like the bank, the loan app, and my eBay account.

With passwords come cookies, and I assume that's why the whole registration thing has gotten so out of hand. If I want the convenience of checking movie listings in my local paper, I have to afford the paper the right to track my every move online. Sheesh.

When I speculate about life after death, as I occasionally do, here's what I think it will be like. I'm floating toward a bright light at the end of a long tunnel. As I get closer, I can see that it's a glowing computer display, with a pearly keyboard underneath. And on the screen, in shimmering letters, it says, "Welcome to the Afterlife! Please log in..."

The fact that I was, or eventually would be, an Olympian goddess was somehow a given back then, forty [koff]some-odd years ago. But yeah, which? Not Juno, because she was a meanie, and not Hestia, because she was a boring sap. And certainly not Venus, eeeeuuuwww. It all came down to either Diana or Athena, and I could never decide which mattered more, the whole wisdom/weaving/olive oil axis or the huntress/moon thing. At Girl Scout camp, I was definitely Diana; back at school I tended toward Athena.

In both cases, of course, I managed to gloss over the implications of being a maiden for life -- or in the case of Diana, to the point of death for both my suitors and some of my devotees. Somehow I interpreted the myths (and my future role in them) to mean that I could be a chaste huntress/wise virgin goddess for as long as that seemed like a good idea, and then jump the tracks for a cosier, more domestic (and dare I say, sexier) setup. All these many decades later, I still come out with insanely mixed results when I take those "Find Your Inner Goddess" online quizzes. Which, I have to confess, I do with depressing regularity. This is because I love taking that kind of quiz. Which Harry Potter character am I? Which female English writer? Which kind of poison dart frog? Which geometrical symbol? Doesn't matter, I want to take the damn quiz and find out ASAP, and if possible, post the result here on my home page.

Obviously I'm not the only one, or else why would there be a Q-zilla website? There seems to be some deep-rooted, atavistic human need for being sorted and classified. Those of us who free-float without strong ties to a place, a religion, an ethnic group, or anything else can flatter ourselves that we're multi-everything and mega-tolerant, which may or may not be true in the last analysis. Still...yeah...at some level, I must want to get sorted and labeled.

I would write more on the subject, but I hear there's a killer quiz on "Which tent peg are you?" and I need to go do that before I go to bed.

On another subject entirely, here's a cool factoid: I was all set to base the journal title on some form of the Latin adjective "bizarrus," which -- operating largely on my deep faith in Superman and Bizarro World -- I was sure must exist. Lo and behold, turns out there's no such word in the Latin dictionary. In any of several of them, in fact. So then my English dictionary told me that the English word "bizarre" derives, by way of Spanish and Portuguese, from the Basque word for "beard." What could be more exquisitely bizarre than that?

Now, although I myself don't have a beard (let me plunge another two-three years deeper into menopausal middle age and I may change my story), my husband does. Coincidence? I think not.

Not only that, I love mussels, and they have beards. I think this is all coming together beautifully, truth be told.