Over at WordPressReworked, Eve is running a contest where the prize is a free basic customization of your Wordpress theme. I lamented in the early posts of this blog how I was both having trouble finding a theme I liked and one I could customize. I finally just went with this basic theme and forgot about trying to customize. I can design my own website, but someohow the coding for Wordpress just eludes me altogether.

Having my theme unique to me and my focus as a blogger would be wonderful, though. Check out her site if you use Wordpress and want to either enter the contest or hire her outright to help you get your themes and plugins straightened out.

Last night at the TONY awards, actor Liev Schreiber told Entertainment Tonight that he and Naomi Watts were married. ET ran with the story and quite literally hundreds of other press outlets carried it today.

Not that I don’t trust the press, but I did not see the ET clip and friends had told me that when Liev said it he had a twinkle in his eye, a wry look. They also said that after he said it, Naomi appeared to throw her head back and laugh.

So, I asked Liev. I couldn’t help myself. I like to hear news like that from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. His reply? He says they are NOT married.

It makes me wonder about misinformation and the press. If he really did just make the comment in an offhand, playful way and the media went with it, how easy would it be to insert false info into the press circuit on other levels? Not all that hard, apparently.

On the other hand, maybe hes just pulling MY leg? Either way I get a good chuckle out of the frenzy something like this creates in the media.

And, no matter their marital status, I’m still thrilled about the upcoming birth of their baby. They’re going to be amazingly cool parents.

When you are shopping for your Father’s Days gifts this year (you almost forgot, didn’t you?) don’t overlook Grandpa. Check out all of the products this image is available on at the Grumpy Grandpa Store.

Contests, comments and conversation…
I have found some amazing blogs lately that really focus on the basics of blogging and promoting a quality site. I think I know a lot, but I’m taken down a notch each time I see a new post that offers surprisingly simple wisdom. Take a look at Roberta’s blog and her article on Self Promotion. She digs in and gets past the surface of being part of the blogging community.

And beside this particular article, I think you’ll find Roberta’s blog a great regular read. I have no idea how I even found her blog, but I’m a loyal reader now.

I can always use good tips. As a former journalist, I know the value of using simple language and short paragraphs. But, one thing I have been neglecting when I blog is the overall readability of the post. I don’t mean if I made the text comprehendible. I mean, when the blog visitor looks at my post, do they stop and tread it or move on because it looks like too much of a chore?

Sometimes even the basics hit me with great poignancy. I was just reading Nate Whitehill’s blog (which I love) and he had an article on 5 Ways to Make Your Posts More Readable. It’s all about breaking things up and giving the reader small, visual chunks of information.

Look for me to give it my best shot to implement his 5 tips.

I’ve been following the story of Andrew Speaker, the insanely selfish man who traveled on commercial flights even though he has a drug-resistant forum of tuberculosis, since before it even hit the main headlines. I found the story in the beginning an obscure news feed service.

I’ve said a lot about how I feel on my other blogs and have held off ever since the fool stupidly released his name and face to the public. Perhaps he already knows he is destined to die of the TB and doesn’t care that a large portion of the American population wants to see him flayed alive.

Let’s Think
Think about this situation as though YOU were the one who had been told you have TB. Now, think about the conversation with the medical people who are telling you, in the very least, they suggest you not fly commercially and especially internationally. I am 100% sure I would not step foot on that airplane. Vacations, weddings, honeymoons and the like can be rescheduled. Risking the possibility that you could give an innocent person sitting close to you on the plane a life threatening disease is NOT something you can go back and undo.

And no matter how much Speaker weeps on television and attempts to sound humble and sorry, it still stands that he KNEW he had the disease and had known long enough to have ALREADY made plans to go to Colorado for top of the line treatment. Most people would have gone directly to treatment. Speaker chose to wait until he had selfishly jetted all over the world, breathing his dangerous disease on countless people.

Is Speaker a blithering idiot?
I’m going to assume he is not. He is an attorney, someone who successfully completed schooling that required all sorts of higher level thinking. He attended the Naval Academy. He passed the Bar exam. He has been practicing law (albeit personal injury and divorce, so he’s no shining star when it comes to working in law). He is no simpleton. What he is, though, is sublimely self centered and arrogant.

Speaker would have you feel sorry for him. He says that before he even flew out of the country, “I had one shot, and that was going to be in Denver,” at the National Jewish Medical and Research Center, which specializes in treating drug-resistant forms of TB. If he was somewhere else and was not given the exact right mixture of drugs, he said, “That was it, they blew my last shot.”

So why wait? Why put your personal desires to fly to Europe ahead of your own health, your bride’s health and the health of countless unwitting individuals?

What I’d Like To See
I hope he lives. Why? So he can be disbarred, sued and shamed for the rest of his life. Karma, baby. It always comes back to bite you in the rear end. His law firm is just him and his father. I am predicting that this fiasco will take them to their knees. Who in their right mind would hire a lawyer to give you advice on your divorce or child custody when he has displayed such a lack of common sense in his own life? If he cannot be bothered to do the right thing in everyday life, then he does not deserve to make a living telling other people what to do.