While Maggie is still a long, long way from becoming a teenager, I still read with baited breath when clues for keeping her hanging out around the house and, you know, near me in fifteen years are being carelessly (or carefully) thrown about the Internet for anybody to see.

The Redneck Mommy provided just such a hint the other day. Lunch meat. Who knew?

I now have to hope that Maggie doesn’t become a vegetarian. Because if she abhors the lunch meat, who knows where she’ll end up hanging out?

Photo by Robert Longo. Found at The Lumberjack Special.
Webcomic is Guinea Something Good by Jeff Mumm.

Christmas is over, New Year’s fast approaching, and that means one thing here at the Big Bad Blog: it’s time to count down our top five posts of the year.

5: Feeding Baby

You may see a wee bit of Maggie-content here in the top five this year. Apparently we here in the Topp household were not the only ones to get excited about the prospect of a little Topp.

Karen spent most of the year pregnant, and we both read (voraciously) whatever we could find regarding pregnancy and newborn babies. When I learned that the baby could taste what Karen was eating while pregnant, and that this would influence her food choices later in life … well, I had to write about it, and let the whole of the Internet know.

4: Little Buddha

The only entry in the photoblog section of the blog — which is too often neglected in favour of using Flickr — is the post Little Buddha.

I was on a work trip in Sofia, Bulgaria, and staying in a little apartment. In the apartment was a tiny statue of a Buddha. My mind immediately jumped to the idea of a self-portrait, in a yoga pose, with the Buddha balanced on me.

I’m not sure why I do not get more creative photographic ideas. But when I do get such an idea, they tend to be pulled off well. I love this photo, and am quite happy that it made the top five of the year:

3: Heartbeat/Drumroll, please

These were actually number three and four on the list, neck-and-neck, but I have decided to combine them here, as they are so similar in nature.

In Heartbeat, I announced to the world that Karen was pregnant. In Drumroll, please … I announced to the world that the baby was a girl.

In both instances, there was much rejoicing.

2: Party Briefing: The Conservatives

There was an election in the UK earlier this year, and in the run-up I did some background reading on the three major parties, and shared my findings (and opinions) with the Internet at large.

The article on the Conservative party was far and away the most popular of the three, garnering over ten times the number of views for either the Liberal Democrats or the Labour party.

Here at the Big Bad Blog, we do not know what to make of this. Can hits to our little blog help to predict election outcomes? Or were many of those who voted Tory less sure of how to cast their votes than those who voted for Labour or the Lib Dems, and spent more time researching the party?

While a single election is surely not statistically significant, we here at the Big Bad Blog like to believe that we can see into the future.

1: Tattoos: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Once again, the top post of the year at the Big Bad Blog has far outstripped the others on the list in terms of views. While it certainly cannot compare to last year’s number one, which still holds down all our blog records, this look at lovely and hideous tattoos has simply generated steady traffic since being posted in March — as opposed to the sudden spike generated by the Marshmallow Man that had me worried that the site might go down.

But not until we have told you what to eat.

Today we have lots of images presented without comment. Click them to find out where they came from.

Do you like picnics? Then this is the suitcase for you.

(Mustache Mugs by Peter Bruegger)

So … how much energy worth of oil was lost in that Gulf of Mexico oil spill? Far less than the energy wasted by throwing out food.

Finally … dumpster converted into pools? Awesome.