A new feature - you can now make entries and administer your own Blog (weblog) on SoWal.com! Click on the "Blogs" link in the navbar above.

Or click here

Post your travel reports, thoughts, poems, stories, etc...
Link to stuff on the internet
Link to threads on SoWal
Link to your photo gallery
Link to your blog from threads
Copy and paste posts by yourself or others you like and want to preserve
Link to your own website and back
Post photos
Others can comment on your blog entries
Use it to promote your business
Use it to keep up with friends and family

There's lots more you can do with it. Feel free to experiment and let us know what ideas you might have.

Click on the "FAQ" link in the navbar for more info on how to blog.

The emoticon celebrated it's 25th birthday on Sept. 25th of this year. The emoticon/smiley is a good thing within the internets. It gives the writer the ability to add feeling to what can be a pretty dry medium. Sarcasm is a great friend of the smiley. Many companies make many dollars selling "premium" smilies to the hapless. It's akin to buying porn. Although, if you have to, you really don't know your way around. "But they're fun and cute, and really let me show how cool I am when posting on bulletin boards", Not.

What gets me though, is those that feel that (almost)every sentence must be punctuated with an(as many as they can squeeze in) emoticon(s). Some even fall victim to actually using them as words. It is quite disturbing to watch this happen, and painful to read. Eventually, I just skip posts from the offender to save my sanity. But, as with any trainwreck, I can't turn away, it's too good not to watch. So, I spiral into a virtual catch-22 which I make every attempt to break away from. Luckily, most times it works.

So, if you think this may be describing you, it's probably true, and you must make every attempt to come back to reality and use actual words. Everyone who reads you will be silently praising you for doing so. If you think this is about you, and you take offense to these words, please feel free to embrace and use this one within your tirade back at me. ...

Oh my!! It seems that many of us Americans have forgotten what we were taught a few years ago with regard to common English. It is confusing to me how some think a sentence such as "Santa Rosa Beach Club isn't too much of an option, seeing as there brunch ends at 1pm." would be correct. That quote was lifted from these very pages, more as a convenience than anything(and not to put the poster in the spotlight, it's just one that I remember too well). But, this common mistake is repeated all over the internets.

So, just to set things back on course, let me state that in relation to the title subject:
they're means 'they are'. They, a group, are in the process of doing something.
their means that which they own, individual or group ownership. A family or a corporation owns their things.
there means simply, a place, such as over there.

I want to say here and now, that my writing is far from perfect. I'm a fan of not using caps on a regular basis, my spelling may be off from time to time(I do use www.merriam-webster.com more than I care to admit), and my punctuation may not always be accurate. But, the misuse of there, they're, and their just screams at me from the screen and has me wanting to shake the offender like you're not supposed to shake a baby.

There are even groups that have formed because of stuff like this:

"Your awesome."

"I'll meet you at they're house."...

I was so excited to return to SoWal for the Spring '07 Soiree! To have my daughter, Sunkist, with me for the funn was the icing on the cake. Of course it rained like a mofo on the way, but we didn't care--we were on our way to paradise. Sometime before our arrival, Miss Kitty called to say she and jdarg would like to take us to dinner our first night there. The rain had followed us all the way, but soon after we got settled in to our most wonderful accomodations, the clouds lifted and we got ready for a quiet dinner at B&A's. We were so surprised to see the quiet dinner plans had turned into a wench gathering...
Now, the next three hours or so are a little fuzzy, but I have photographic records of the evening to fill in the missing gaps. I do remember boobs and a butt making the rounds, and somewhere along the way, a SoWal thong became an object of innovative display.... MANY cosmos into the evening, I remember telling "someone"---maybe it was Toots--that "Hail yeah, I'd get a SoWal tattoo". Well, apparently, that's all Jfunn needed to hear and soon she was on her cell. She quickly announced that she had just the place! (Don't ask me what Kitty's doing in the pic...)After maneuvering the stairs at B&A's--no easy feat after a few--we made plans to follow Jfunn and Kitty to the tattoo parlor. We bid good evening to Toots, Jdarg, IBD, Franny, Punzy and Mango. I remember Toots saying something...

Kind of like the chicken and the egg, depending on what boards one frequents. There are those out there on the internets that have trolls follow them from board to board. Luckily for us there's really no other board like TheTM Sowal. But we definitely get our share of whackjobs. Either they're whacked before they get here and start stirring things up from the getgo, or they make some off the wall post that to them seems normal( the voices are telling them it's a rational post), and some poor schlub posts a response that sets them off, and it's all downhill from there, till being banned.

It goes something like this:
<1> Someone new arrives at Sowal and in short order gets into all manner of pissing contests, arguments, rantings, etc. with and/or targeted towards a broad variety of people

<2> The new arrival rants about individual Sowalers' intolerance, bigotry, etc., how the new arrival feels persecuted for simply voicing his/her opinion (never mind the oh-so-important how the new arrival voices his/her opinion)

<3> The new arrival blames all of Sowal, collectively, for the new arrival's poor experience here

<4> The new arrival refuses to accept any responsibility for contributing to the escalating pissing contests, arguments, relentless rantings, and general descension into the depths of asshattery, even though the only common denominator in -all- of these instances is (yes, you guessed it)...