Insert Tagline Here

Monday, February 14th, 2005
Filed Under: Site/ 9 Comments

I’ve always appreciated memorable taglines. The “best tagline” award at the Bloggies is usually one of the more interesting categories. Sites that find a way to incorporate phrases like “saucy wench” deserve special recognition. You may have noticed that the tagline for this site is “disinformation, spread liberally”. Before I added a comma after “disinformation”, Nicole used to ask if it meant that the site content was disinformation that readers should spread liberally, or if I was spreading the disinformation liberally. I’m not sure it has to be one way or the other.

I’ve mentioned it on the About page, but I ran a very short lived political site before Second Negative was born into the world. It didn’t take long before I realized that talking about politics all the time was too much like real work, so I scrapped the whole enterprise. But lucky for you, some of the original documents have recently been declassified.

Around the time the political site was coming together, I decided that it should have a clever tagline, so I asked Nicole to help me brainstorm a few ideas. The results were incredibly bad. I mean, just awful. The site was called Armadillo Politics, a name inspired by the fact that I live in Texas, and I wanted to write about politics. I only mention it because the awful taglines we came up with were often directly related to the site title.

A few of my embarrassing attempts to write something both catchy and humorous:

  • “Ain’t nothin’ in the middle of the road but yellow stripes & dead armadillos” (actually a quote from Jim Hightower)
  • “Counting on not being counted for several years now”
  • “Corrupted by even the thought of power”
  • “Nothing but left turns all the way home”
  • “Lying, cheating…and bad stuff too”
  • “Easier to read than the Presidential Daily Briefing”

And several of Nicole’s (apparent) attempts to redneck it up:

  • “Didn’t find any weapons of mass destruction under my ten gallon hat neither”
  • “We don’t elect movie stars for governor; we put carpet bagging idiots into the Oval Office”
  • “Heel to toe along the yellow line, boots optional”
  • “Making a right’ll land you in a hole faster than diggin’ a ditch”

Ah, instant classics, aren’t they? Hey, I warned you. Now go and gouge out your eyes.