First off, let me say this: I’m SOOOOOOOOOOOOO excited. Those of you who know me will probably know that I like to occasionally grow out my beard, just to see how long my wife will let it get before she changes my name from “Babe” to “Hey, homeless!” I was able to go from Thanksgiving of last year until around mid-January this year before she made me lose it.

This year, however, I’m growing it again, and for good reason. I’m a huge hockey fan, and I’m participating in the NHL’s “Beard-A-Thon,” where I’m growing my beard in order to raise money through sponsors (like you!) with all the proceeds going to benefit the Mario Lemieux Foundation.

The Mario Lemieux Foundation is an organization whose mission is “to fund promising research projects being conducted by the most talented scientists in the field.” What’s that? You want to help out? How can you do it? Glad you asked.

1. You can sponsor me! All you have to do is visit this link to donate: http://bit.ly/b7hrac Remember – every penny goes to the Foundation’s research.
2. Even if you decide not to sponsor me, you can still spread the news about what I’m doing! Use the messages below as your Facebook and Twitter updates!

• FACEBOOK: Support Jon Lloyd as he grows his beard for cancer research! Post this as your status, and click here: http://bit.ly/b7hrac
• TWITTER: Support @notjohnllyod as he grows his beard for cancer research! http://bit.ly/b7hrac Please RT!

So there you have it.You can track my progress at http://bit.ly/b7hrac as well, as I (hopefully) travel up the leaderboards by raising some serious moolah for such a worthwhile cause!

Thanks in advance!

-Jon

One of the reasons I’m such a proponent of Twitter is that I’m oddly interested in what people are doing. It helps me evaluate the current state of culture. Before there was Twitter, though, I was using Facebook, mainly to just check the status updates of my friends. I’ve noticed that there are several categories of Facebook status messages, and I’d like to outline them for you here. There are good ways and boring ways to use these, and I’m going to let you in on those as well in an attempt to give you everything you need to write eye-catching updates.

1. The “everything I do” update. This is most like me, I think. It’s the update that lets the reader know exactly what the person is doing as often as possible. Boring way: “Ate chicken for dinner.” Exciting way: “Ate a chicken for dinner.”
2. The song lyric update. I think the idea behind this is to find a song that only you and one other person have ever heard of and then post a lyric so that the other person will in turn finish the lyric with a comment to said status update. The boring way would be to use something everyone knows, or anything by Kenny Chesney: “Back in high school, things were cool, I met this girl, we sat on the hood my car and I dropped barbecue sauce on my boots.” Instead, use the opportunity to write your own song. For example: “Ice cream college for me, for me, buttercream icing for me, for me.” The more random, the better.
3. The “update on the person no one has ever heard of” update. So my mailman’s first cousin who lives in Antarctica doing research on polar bears has overcome his torn cuticle. Thanks for that. Instead, use something like, “Over the weekend, I grew a second head. And for some reason, it was wearing a Storm Trooper helmet. But I took some medicine and got better.”
4. The “whew, I’m exhausted” update. So stop Facebooking and go to bed.
5. The once-in-a-blue-moon golden update. I have a few friends like this. They update very rarely, and when they do, it’s worth the wait. It might just be a funny one-liner, or something that makes you laugh to the point of crying, but it’s impact is felt long into the wait for the next one.
6. The run-on update. Remember English class in the, oh, second grade? Tell me what’s wrong with this sentence: “watching green acres with the fam tomorrow i’m going to my old school can i have some cookies.”
7. The shorthand update. ROFL LOL OMG
8. The Bible verse. Nothing more, nothing less.
9. The messed-up and then retyped update. You’ve all seen it. Someone misspells something and thinks they’ll be clever and redo it, only to never delete the original, thus making it twice as bad.

Go look through your friends’ status updates right now, and I’ll bet you can fit them into one of these categories. If not, what other categories are there? Have you come across a gem lately? Let me know! Maybe I’ll write a book on it someday.

Awesome video, especially the ending. This is a video of a hawk with a camera attached to it – it’s amazing, and slightly surreal, to watch.