*

Laura doesn’t want to look like she’s using any little piece of news or information as an excuse to brant, but on Friday she got a really nice short email from Darryln Leikauskas, the VP of Marketing at Brigham’s:

Laura,

I just checked your link below and I’m sitting here laughing! I am a woman, so your assumption was correct.

Darryln

Laura was thrilled both because she has now developed an actual correspondence with Brigham’s — !! –and because her instincts about gender assignment were correct regarding the nebulous name of “Darryln.”

Anyway, Laura is finally starting to feel the positive effects of branting! The main one being: If you brant, they will respond!!

*

As usual, Laura isn’t able to do anything half-way. So she spent the morning organizing her brants into categories (see right of brant for complete listing). This should take a normal person an hour or so, but as we all know by now, Laura is not a normal person. It’s taken her two and a half hours and she’s still not finished! Why? Well, see for yourself. Laura just can’t resist the enormous potential for extensive list humor* right on her very own brant!

(*List Humor: This is a touchy phrase for Laura since it was once used in a rejection letter from The New Yorker referring to a piece of hers — “The International House of Hunan Pancake” — they were at that very moment rejecting. The aforementioned alleged “list-humor piece” was a parody of the ubiquitous Chinese Take-Out menus that were constantly getting slipped under Laura’s apartment door or into the foyer of Laura’s apartment building and the International House of Panckes menu with which Laura was intimately acquainted (not to be a tease yet again, but more about her “Resume of Failure” later). The complete phrasing of the rejection letter was:

“Sorry, but we’re not taking list humor right now.”

Laura was deeply annoyed by that phrase since she had no idea what it meant. I mean, obviously she knew that her piece contained a list and was humorous. But she certainly wasn’t aware of any Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory of List Humorists creating massive amounts of derivatively unpublishable list-humor pieces.

Laura’s going to try to brant a lot today, since there’s lots of things to report on and talk about. Therefore, it’s going to be a day full of brantlettes — a potpourri of short little newsy items and perhaps even some longer “thought” pieces. As always, Laura loves to hear from her brant readers and hopes she continues to get lots and lots of interesting comments from them.

Laura can’t believe how many people visited her website yesterday and read her brant. This morning, when she checked the website company’s traffic stats, she was shocked and amazed to see that 1795 people visited yesterday! Laura was overjoyed about this even though her feelings were bittersweet — she knows that almost everyone who followed the link from “Ask Amy’s” column were probably going to only be one-time visitors never to return again. Laura understands this completely — after all, why would 1795 strangers start reading her brant everyday on a regular basis? — but wishes even a few new readers stay.

One thing that completely surprised her was how many people love Brigham’s Ice Cream as much as she does. Many of the people who wrote used to live here and still dream about the Jimmies. Laura was glad (relieved) to hear this since she thought she was crazy the only one who dreamt about Jimmies. She wishes there was a way to harness all the enthusiasm for Jimmies in general and Brigham’s in particular to form a grassroots movement that would persuade Brigham’s to sell its ice cream outside of Massachusetts. But Laura doesn’t have time to organize that sort of movement. She is far too busy branting.

But enough about Laura The Nationally Recognized Breast Branter; Laura The Fluke-ish Overnight Success For Only One Day; Laura The Attempter of Non-Fiction. Laura knows that if she has any chance of maintaining — and building — a readership for her website she’s going to have to continue branting every day. So check back here for more of Laura’s thoughts on everything from her new book Failure to small home appliances.

*

Laura is thrilled to see that the nationally syndicated column “Ask Amy” has mentioned Laura’s website and brant after running a letter about breast cancer. Laura is already getting lots and lots of really positive comments about her “Breast Brants” and about her new book on Failure, and, oddly enough, about her “Just Jimmies” post (who knew there were so many rabid Brigham’s Ice Cream fans out there who still remember the days of yore?)

To all her new readers — Welcome! And please bookmark the brant! Or, if you’re just here for the day, thanks for passing through! For her regular readers, click here for the link to the “Ask Amy” column:

*

Laura would like to apologize for and explain her lack of branting this week.

After last year’s outrageously expensive first winter in their new house, Laura finally made an appointment with an HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, & Air Conditioning) company to try to solve the mystery of why, despite how low they kept the thermostat, their natural gas bills had been so ridiculously high last year and why their bills were probably going to be just as high this year too.

Within two hours of the arrival of Andy, The HVAC guy, on Monday morning, he discovered that the boiler was cracked. Laura had always assumed this was some sort of idiom, or figure of speech (“What a cracked boiler he is!” “You want a cracked boiler? I’ll give you a cracked boiler!”), but when Andy stuck a hand-mirror into the maw of the raging boiler’s open belly to show her what he was talking about, she saw the jagged scar he was pointing to and suddenly realized that a cracked boiler actually means that the inside chamber of the boiler is cracked!

Even if Laura wasn’t one of those egregiously dumb homeowners who had no idea where the electrical box was (OK, that’s an exaggeration) or how to flip a circuit breaker (but that’s not), she would have been smart enough to figure out that the San Andreas fault line in her boiler (which she had just been introduced to minutes before by Andy himself — she’d always gotten it confused with the water heater) was a bad thing, though she didn’t think it was an incredibly bad thing since at least it was still working! But just as Andy got up from the floor, the boiler suddenly sputtered and then stopped making any sound at all.

Andy shook his head, then explained in a hushed reverent tone that the crackling-hissing noise the boiler had just expelled like a covert belch was the sound of the boiler cracking completely. Andy tried to explain to Laura that a completely cracked boiler had something to do with steam and water coming through the crack and dousing out the flame for good, but of course Laura didn’t understand what he was talking about because 1) she not good at homeowner stuff and 2) she had already detached from herself like a space capsule off a flaming hot rocket.

Laura could barely believe what was happening and was having a hard time processing what incredibly bad luck she was continuing to have into the new year! She suddenly felt incredibly depressed and defeated, not just because she knew the house was going to get freezing cold — they were, after all, facing their first cold snap of the entire winter! and even some possible snow! what perfect timing!– in the absence of a working boiler, but because she knew in her bones that replacing the boiler was going to cost almost as much as she earned last year.*

(*This is meant to imply that Laura didn’t earn much last year; not that she earned a lot. She just felt the need to clarify that just in case people thought she was complaining unduly.)

By the afternoon, two other HVAC guys — Tom and Mike — came into her house and stared at the now quiet cold boiler. And the more they took measurements and talked in hushed tones about steam heat and radiant heat and water pipes and water heaters, the more Laura wanted to crawl away and into her bed so that she would be frozen solid by the time they were ready with their “estimate.”

When Tom finally did give her the bad news, Laura truly did take to her bed for much of Tuesday and Wednesday (not to mention part of Thursday and most of today, as necessary recovery from the incredibly stressful and depressing week). She also took to her bed because it happened to be warm under the covers, right next to one of the six space heaters that the HVAC guys had lent Laura and Brendan and Benji until the boiler was replaced and up and running by Wednesday evening.

For two nights, the three of them slept together in the big bed, huddling together for warmth against the cold while the space heater glowed red beside them. Drifting off to sleep, Laura wondered if this was what it felt like to be a chicken on a rotisserie. Anything to take her mind off of the check she was going to have to write the next day….

Laura got terrified yesterday after realizing that she can’t just go on “Google Images” and cut and paste anything she wants into her brant. She got even more terrified when she tried to understand why she can’t do that and failed (she understands the concept of Public Domain but not it’s application to the world of blogging). So Laura was so nervous about getting sued that she has stopped trolling the Internet for visual enhancements to her brant despite her deep love of visual brant enhancements (”brant-hancements”). Unless she can get a hold of “Copyright Infringement For Dummies, the only brant-hancements her brant will have are photos she herself has taken.

Laura wants to assure those out there who are deeply confused about her brant-reader-counter that she, too, is confused, and is trying to get to the bottom of the meaning behind the oddly low numbers. Laura knows these numbers are low because she and others have read and re-read brants yesterday to test the counter and yet the numbers haven’t changed. Please stay tuned for more information on how this problem is being corrected….

Laura feels the need to explain why there is suddenly something at the end of each brant post that shows the number of people up until that particular point who have read that particular brant post.

As Laura confessed in an earlier brant (or, in several earlier brants), she was deeply concerned that (almost) no one was reading her brant and the fact that she thought that (almost) no one was reading her brant made it very hard for her to feel motivated to continue branting. A circular conundrum certainly, but one nonetheless Laura felt compelled to at least try to fix.

And so she badgered and begged and cajoled her amazing web guy to install a “plug-in” to her brant that would then count how many readers each post was getting. As she was busy branting last night, Laura suddenly realized that the “counting plug-in” was actually installed and she couldn’t wait to start getting the feedback she so desperately needed.

However, (due to ego-sparing reasons) Laura also feels compelled to explain that because the counting plug-in was just installed last night, the count-per-post doesn’t take into account all the months of past post-readings that Laura’s brant certainly had. And so, if and when you see a “0″ or a “1″ or a “2″ beneath a post telling you that that was the number of readers who had read that post before you, Laura implores you to understand that there were indeed previous readers of that post whose “reading” was not counted.

One of Laura’s guilty pleasures is going on blogniscient.com to see if her name pops up in any of the gazillion blogs “published” every day on the World Wide Web. This is different from checking her name on google.com, since the idea of someone blogging about her (or mentioning her in their blog) is so much more, well, personal, in a way. Laura isn’t mentioned in too many blogs, of course, so when her name shows up in one she always goes right to the blog and reads all about herself. Sometimes it’s just a passing mention; sometimes it’s a longer entry (she has some wonderfully rabid fans, she’s proud to admit). But long or short, Laura is usually grateful for whatever kind of mention she gets.

Except when it’s one like this.

Tonight, after Laura came home from a lovely party in her neighborhood (hosted by Jean and Charlie Mixer to celebrate Charlie’s birthday [isn’t that the perfect name for people who hosted a party? The Mixers?!], she checked in with blogniscient.com (she’s bookmarked it) and found this. Laura is posting the highlights below, just so everyone who reads her brant can see how (incredibly depressing and ego-killing) fun it is for Laura to eavesdrop on what some readers are saying about her and her book:

This from the blog called “The Incurable Disease of Writing: A Writer’s Journey to Publication — Hopefully.” (Irrelevant sections omitted.)

By the Blogger afflicted with The Incurable Disease of Writing:

“I’m halfway through Laura Zigman’s Piece of Work. It is holding my interest while I read and has some interesting characters but truthfully, if I never picked it up again I probably wouldn’t give it another thought. Have you ever read a book like that? I love to get engrossed with the characters and their stories to a degree that I think about them between reading times. This one just isn’t doing that for me. I will finish it though. The only books I never finish are those that I just can’t get interested in.”

A comment left by a reader of “The Incurable Disease of Writing”:

“I hate those waste of time books. I end up reading them if I foolishly wasted too much money on them.”

The response from the blogger afflicted with The Incurable Disease of Writing:

“As for the waste of time books, I don’t think Piece of Work is really a complete waste of time, it’s just not a completely satisfying read. At least I picked it up at the library and didn’t buy it.”

Laura is tempted to annotate these sections for maximum reading pleasure, but she knows she doesn’t have to: they speak for themselves. Which brings Laura to one of her many blogisophical questions:

Is it fair for Laura to expose bloggers who say negative things about her, or should she just suffer in silence?

It also brings her to another blogisophical question:

Is omniblogniscience really such a good thing?