Hey, hey! Chickenmonkeydog is four years old today! Can you believe how the time flies?

As we celebrate another successful year, we wanted to take this opportunity to give our readers some birthday gifts. All you need to do to enter is to leave us a comment wishing us a happy birthday!

(1) For people who have not commented here before, we’re giving away a FREE t-shirt to the first four who wish us a happy birthday. So, if you have never left a comment on our blog, simply be one of the first four to share your birthday wishes with us via the comments, and we will send you a FREE t-shirt. Yep … anywhere you live!

(2) For our wonderfully loyal and consistent commenters, we’re offering the chance to win a FREE coffee mug. If you’ve left a comment on our blog before, simply leave us a birthday comment and we’ll enter your name in our drawing to win a big chickenmonkeydog coffee mug. This part of the competition will close at midnight EST on Friday, 20 January 2012.

Thank you all for sharing in our quirky adventure for another year!

Today marks the publication of our 1000th post here on chickenmonkeydog. As we take a few moments to thank our wonderful and loyal readers for their supportive and often hilarious comments, we pose a question to you as well:

What activities or items, other than CMD posts, do you enjoy by the thousands?

As you’ve come to expect from us over the years, we welcome your thoughts and answers as comments.

Following a recent trend of unnamed bloggers being outed as perhaps the exact opposite of their online identity — a straight man instead of a gay woman, for example — there has been yet another shocking blogger news story. The Lead Code Breaker for chickenmonkeydog has just confessed to being much more weird than he comes across on the blog!

“I am sorry for misleading our readers for so many years. I know it was wrong to pretend that I was just this normal guy living in American suburbia,” the Editor tearfully admitted in a recent interview with NPR. “I really am odd. I say silly things to strangers, I wear silly hats in public, I shout random names at the top of voice in the grocery store. I certainly am not a mild-mannered, quiet, every day kind of guy.”

Last Friday we finished collecting pictures of the chickens, monkeys and dogs that are part of all of our daily lives.

Thanks to the diligent focus, attention to detail and rapid camera-reaction time of our readers, we were able to locate quite a number of wild and free chickens, monkeys and dogs.

We’ve posted all the entries in an album over on our chickenmonkeydog facebook page!

How about ambling on over to take a look at the entries.  Feel free to Like and Comment on the photos to your heart’s content.

We’ll be announcing the winners of the t-shirts and the occasionally coveted chickenmonkeydog mug next Friday!

Happy Birthday to chickenmonkeydog.com!

This quirky little blog is celebrating its third year and we want you to come celebrate with us!

To celebrate, let’s all find the chickens, monkeys and dogs that share our daily lives!

(1) Find a chicken, monkey, dog, or some combination of the three (Can be real, metaphorical, drawn, in a photograph, on TV, whatever! Get creative!)

(2) Snap a picture of it*

(3) Submit that picture to us before January 21st at chickenmonkeydog @ gmail dot com

* Bonus points if you manage to work a chickenmonkeydog postcard into the picture as well!

What’s more? There are prizes involved!

Whoever sends in the BEST PICTURE (according to our editors) will receive a FREE chickenmonkeydog mug and t-shirt.

Additionally, the people who submit the first five pictures we receive of a chicken, monkey, or dog will also receive a free chickenmonkeydog t-shirt!

All submissions we receive in the next week will be published at a later date.

In all the holiday excitement that comes with the end of the Gregorian Calendar year, the editors of chickenmonkeydog.com forgot to thank our newest editor for all his quirky contributions over the past year. We’re hoping to remedy that oversight by posting an image of our young editor on his recent travels to Kampala, Uganda. Apparently, when you take pictures in places south of the equator, the images come out upside down.

We’ll also use this post to remind you that chickenmonkeydog is happy to send our postcards to anywhere in the world. There’s still time to get one on the Christmas tree, if holiday ornaments are your thing. Get in touch with your details and we’ll do the rest.

… because turkey-monkey-dog just wouldn’t work.

Earlier this morning, I awoke a few minutes before my alarm was due to sound. There wasn’t enough time to go back to sleep, so I just lay there quietly, waking up. As I lay there, an idea popped into my head — an idea that I thought might work as a blog post for today. Over the course of several minutes, and as my bedroom grew slowly but steadily lighter with the rising sun, I developed this idea in my head. I asked myself questions about the idea, pondered various aspects about it and began to formulate opinions and beliefs about this idea. I delved into an engrossing mental exploration.

Suddenly the alarm clock sounded! The disorienting noise crashed into my train of thought and, before I knew what was I doing, I was out of bed and heading towards the washroom to prepare for the day.

It wasn’t until later, when I was in the kitchen making coffee that I realized that I was right in the middle of an interesting thought exercise when the alarm went off. What was I thinking about?!? Really … what was I thinking? For the life of me, I cannot remember any of the details of the mental conversation I was having. I certainly remembered having a specific chat with myself, but I had absolutely no idea about the topic of that thought process.

And so, instead of blogging about whatever was on my mind in the wee hours of today, I am discussing with you just how easily my brain is disturbed by an unexpected intrusion.

The mind sure is a quirky thing, isn’t it?

<begin conversation>

Technical Editor: So, what’s the post gonna be for today? Do you have anything in particular you want to publish?

Creative Editor: Nope. Hope ’bout you? Anything you want to see on there today?

Technical Editor: Well, let’s look at our drafts. Have you looked through those? Any jump out at you?

Creative Editor: Um … nothing seemed brilliant. Probably why they are still drafts.

Technical Editor: Ok. Well, let’s see. Maybe we should do something different today. Out of the ordinary. Unexpected. Quirky.

Creative Editor: (sounding skeptical) Like what?

Technical Editor: Me, Technical Editor. You, Creative Editor.

Creative Editor: Hmm … back to me then. So much for my punt.

Technical Editor: (interrupting) Hey!

Creative Editor: What?

Technical Editor: Never mind. Silly idea.

Creative Editor: Ok …

(Long pause)

Creative Editor: Got it!

Technical Editor: What?

Creative Editor: An idea! I have an idea for today’s post.

Technical Editor: Great! Let’s hear it.

Creative Editor: We ask our readers to tell us what to talk about today. We ask then an open-ended question and they reply in the comments. We open the doors to a conversation … and just wait to see where it goes.

Technical Editor: (sounding incredulous) Um … think it will work? I mean, really, will it start a conversation?

Creative Editor: I think so. Can’t hurt to try. Right?

Technical Editor: Ok. I guess I’ll get that ready for today.

</ end conversation>

So, Dear Readers, what topic would you like to talk about as we gather ’round the office water cooler that is chickenmonkeydog?

So, here we go …

We hope we are not the only source of reliable information:

• what are the risk assessment for an escalator?
• a 737 plane
• escalator myth busters
• eyjafjallajökull

In the good/reasonable advice column:

• avoid big crotch

Looking for social advice/guidance:

• urinating in lifts in singapore

Questions for the commuter:

• camel is one hump more comfortable?

We can only guess for what they were really searching:

• dog and crotch and jump -smell -sniff -s
• the family pees together
• roman dog likes boys crotch
• rapeseed deer
• stuffed bactrian