Scary murder ballad: if you don't pay the guys who work for you, bad things may happen

Lamkin is a wonderful old story song about a "Lord of the Manor" who gets a castle built and then stiffs the mason and sails away leaving his wife, daughter, and baby behind to face the piper, so to speak. I loved putting this song together out of three separate versions of the tune and I loved writing about it. The Celtic duo the Pratie Heads (me and Bob Vasile) recorded this a couple years ago on our album "We Did It! (Songs of People Behaving Badly). You can hear it free at our Bandcamp site:

Gift Ideas Social Marketing Community

Social Networking

Gift Ideas Community

A bunch of us from Squidoo and other places in the gift ideas niche have teamed up together to form a social marketing community to share our best gift ideas. Basically group HQ is our social hub that connects our outposts on G+, FB, Tumblr, Pinterest etc.

Because it's getting more and more difficult for the little guy to run with the big dogs online, there's more of a need than ever to form a tight active team to compete. Nowadays it's difficult to impossible for a single webmaster working on his/her own to rise to the top like cream.

Great gift ideas too!

Are you invested in the gift ideas niche? The Gift Metropolis Community just might be for you, and it's Squidoo friendly too! Join other good webmasters in getting more socially active and come share not only your resources but re-sharing, commenting on the best gift guides at the community from other members too, no schwag or spam please. Riff Raff spammers will be banned.

Once approved gift community members may share ideas with our gift ideas community on Google's new social network G+. Sharing gifts with the group may positively effect your Authorship authority at Google.  We also have an active gift ideas group community at Facebook and once approved for membership you can post your favorite gift ideas with the group. We also recommend sharing your gift ideas on our Tumblr featuring gifts for everybody. And of course we have a very nice gift ideas group over at Pinterest too.

Gift Ideas Community

Still reading? You must be interested, so please come over and take a look at our main base of operations which we call Gift Metropolis HQ. We have a nice gift ideas forum, cool social groups, and of course a gift ideas directory. I think your going to like it. If you decide you like it, and you agree to not only share your stuff but to generously share the gift ideas of other members also then please apply for membership, it's free.


Gift Metropolis

Romantic songs in Hebrew, Yiddish and Ladino for Valentine's Day

Even though it's barely January, and there may be a lot of nasty weather before we get there, Valentine's Day is only one turn of the calendar page away. My band Mappamundi plays for Jewish weddings and over the years we've accumulated a lot of gorgeous love songs from Israel, the Sephardic tradition, and Yiddish folk and theater songs.

I put together a handful of the songs we've recorded on a page called Yiddish Love Songs and it points you to our band's record label, Skylark Productions, where you can listen to the songs all the way through!

Finally! Our new cd of funny new Chanukah music is available at Amazon

You can preview it (or buy it) one track at a time or the whole thing: Mrs. Maccabee's Kitchen: New Hanukah Songs at Amazon.com

A funny new Hannukah cd: Mrs. Maccabee's Kitchen

If you're tired of the usual old Hanukkah songs, here are 17 new ones, in English, with many new perspectives on the old stories! Have a listen:



1. Ain't We Got Hanukah Fun?
2. Mrs. Maccabee's Kitchen
3. A Latke Tango
4. Nobody's Business What I Do
5. After We Get What We Want We Don't Want It
6. Pawn Shop Menorah
7. Doina on the Subject of Good & Bad Latkes
8. Rusishe Sher
9. Antiochus IV (You Crazy Coot) Tango
10. Yiddish Wisdom
11. Hanukah Cowboy-Style
12. Judith and Holofernes
13. Matathias Had a Camp in the Wilderness
14. I Have a Song to Sing, Oh!
15. Nes Gadol
16. Young Noah's Hanukah
17. Sour Cream and Hanukah Latkes
18. The Choliday Song

Best Flooring For Wheelchair Users

Many wheelchair users struggle with finding flooring which will stand up to their wheelchair. Wheelchairs are tough on floors. When they go outside, they get dirt, germs and other nasty stuff in their treads and spread them all over the floor. They can leave black tire marks on floors that can be difficult to get out. They can cause wear marks in floors. So getting the right kind of flooring is important for a wheelchair user. Read this article about getting the right kind of wheelchair flooring

Evolution of a Lens: Deli Sandwiches

When I was asked to make a food lens during my one RocketMoms experience, I went into a panic. I'd never made a food lens before. In fact, I have a very spotty relationship with cooking issues as one might detect from reading my fear of cooking lens.

Making a lens about food sounded frightening, at best.

At the time I'd recently lost a restaurant job - one I'd been at for eighteen months. Though cooking at home had been problematic for me, especially in my early youth, I loved cooking at the restaurant. One thing I loved was the opportunity to work on deli sandwich making.

I decided to make my lens on how to create a great deli sandwich.

I wasn't expecting much to come of it.

The lens looked good, I passed that part of the Rocket Moms challenge, and pretty much forgot about it.

Months later I noticed the deli sandwich lens was rising in popularity and lensrank.

Who would have guessed?

The lens went live in August 2009. By September the lensrank was 25,081. I expected it to stay there and be a non-prospering lens, but no... it has never gone that low since then. Only a year later it had its highest lensrank ever: 665.

Since then the lens has floated around in lower-first tier or second tier. Usually second. I've tried to backlink it but so far my efforts haven't succeeded in making it a steady first tier lens.

So far this month it has been in first tier two out of twenty-seven days. It is a borderline lens I very much want to see do better.

With lifetime earnings, so far, of $452, I'm very grateful that I took that Rocket Moms challenge on, and made my first food lens. That's more than I could earn writing an article about deli sandwiches for a major New York women's magazine!

...

LindaJM is a Squidoo lensmaster and owner of The Squid Grotto.