If it were underwear it would be tighty whities

Yo, y'all, it's my first real assignment as a guest blogger for the crew at Ask & Ye Shall Receive. I feel like Cinderella being shagged by the prince at her first ball. Woot!

When I received the link for review, I must confess to a wicked hangover and/or severe sleep deprivation. I'd turned the lights down in my office and drawn the shades so I could *work* (finger quotes). I'd been surfing in relative peace, checking my e-mails and perusing a few blog must-reads. And, then, what to my wondering eyes should appear but an e-mail from the hotties at AAYSR. I couldn't wait to click through to the link and see what ticket I'd drawn in the AAYSR lottery.

Holy fucking blinding whiteness. WTF is FOMA? I still don't get the connection between Foma* and this blog, so I read through the current posts, along with the best of 2006 and 2005 for clues. Still in the dark. Could be way too much hard liquor over a 4 day period has killed off a significant percentage of my brain cells, but I still think it would be nice if the author would build a bridge to clue the rest of us in to his metaphysical thinking. How is the concept of FOMA relevant to your blog?

The format is non-offensive. That's the best I can offer. It's beyond plain. It's white, white, white, white. It's white-out conditions at the ski resort. It's buggering up the copy machine and being buried in reams of paper. It's screwing an irishman. Anyway, I digress. There are three different blogrolls. The blog author even goes to the trouble of defining blogroll for us (clearly, he's a techie). However, he doesn't define The Achenblog Boodle (wtvr the hell that means). The third roll is entitled "blogs I'm sucking up to." If I had a penis, that might work, but sorry, sucking me off isn't going to keep me from bending you over and paddling you like the evil sadistic dominatrix I am. It's for your own good, though.

A few technical suggestions: The spacing inside the sidebar is too narrow on the left border. Decide whether your sidebar text and titles will be left aligned or center aligned, and stick with one or the other. I personally vote for left alignment on the titles, next to the little star, as the centered text is often so long it has awkward line breaks.

The header image is way too small for the area assigned to it inside that humongous box. It either needs a smaller box or a larger image. It also isn't aligned correctly, falling about 30% too far to the left from the center. Anyway, it just looks wrong.

Mainly, blogs aren't about what they look like, they are about what they say. The appearance of a blog is only important to me when it DISTRACTS from what the author is saying. In this case, a few minimal changes and this template would be perfectly serviceable, albeit very spare. And very, very white. If this blog were a person, it would be Laura Bush.

Now, about the content. Meh. This guy is a pretty prolific writer, and he turns out about a blog post every day. Most of them are long. The first post on the page is about his 20th anniversary. Very sweet post, and I throw major mad props to anyone who can make a marriage work for 20 years. I read perhaps 30 posts to try and get an accurate sense of what is happening on this blog. My main criticism is that it, for the most part, doesn't stick to the FOMA theme (which has potential, now that I think about it). Further, it's often a longer regurgitation of news blurbs. I don't read blogs like that, though i'm sure many people do.

I prefer blogs that give me a little more of an inside look into a person's head, blogs that tell me a story I can sink my teeth into, or that make me think. With the exception of the series on the DC metro Ph.D. prostitute, there wasn't much about this blog that stuck with me. It was like eating chinese food in a sense, it took a long fucking time to get through a meal, but I felt empty 30 minutes later. Now that I think about it, some pieces of the content are so soulless that, like the template, they remind me of Laura Bush. Smiley and well-groomed, but vacant.

I give it a and a for thinking you're so damn smart and soulful, but showing us your tighty whities instead of your naughty bits.

As a bonus with your paddling, here's a link to a site that will help you do expandable post summaries (because DAMN your posts are longer than the last dick I sucked), and to hide the search bar at the top of the page on blogspot (thus cleaning up the look a bit more to keep with your spare white theme).

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