Pulling up the cushions

Ever get the feeling you're standing in a room full of people who share some kind of inside joke and you're the only one not in on it? Or, you're the only sober one -- thanks to some strange twist of designated driver fate, perhaps -- at a party where everyone is smoking some seriously great shit and you're entirely left out?

After spending a considerable amount of time sitting on Bond's Big Leather Couch, I still haven't a clue what's going on.

Listen, I take this stuff seriously. I spend time investigating the blogs I review, I click around, I take notes, for fuck's sake. I try to bring you sassy commentary and helpful insight. But this time? I'm stumped. It's obvious the guy's got readers, but I'm at a loss as to why.

The design, quite frankly, is a train wreck. Red text on a bright (glaring!) blue background for the sidebars, and the posts have various words in bold and different colors and sizes and it just makes me want to gauge my eyes out with a paperclip. It looks like there's been a snafu with Blogger because there seems to be some double postage going on. And the posts themselves? Interminable. And chock-a-block full of joke-y pictures the likes of which my grandmother sends me from version 1.2 of AOL. If I'm not mistaken, he uses the royal "we," which is just... I can't even... Please? Don't do that.

There's way too much stuff going on here, too. The sidebars are far too long, and Jesus Lord there are like eleventy-five-hundred badges and doohickeys and ribbons and links and save the freakin' malarial children in Africa (Look, I'm not insensitive. I care about suffering children in Africa. But I think this guy's plea for help would be more effective if it were at all possible to look at his nightmare of a page!). Roll that crap up, put your badges on a separate page if they mean that much to you, and give the rest of us a break.

Above all, I have no idea who this guy is. I don't mean his name and rank, I mean who he is, why I should care, what's the purpose of the blog, and why in blazes I'd want to read a single thing he says. An "About" page might help narrow it down and give readers a clue. From my bewildered clicking and reading, it seems to me this blog has lots to do with American Idol (couldn't care less), baseball (hate it), music retrospectives (fine) and random snippets of pop culture that I read about from other (less cluttered, more witty) sources.

Look, I don't want to hate on this. He's an older guy with a new fangled technology, and he's building a community and doing something he obviously enjoys. And it's clear others enjoy his perspective, too. They get it; I don't. So, don't stop. But for the love of cascading style sheets, find a new template, get some focus, ditch the acres and acres of corny pictures, streamline this steaming pile, and stop using your blog as a repository for internet flotsam and jetsam. There may be roses among the thorns here, but they're too everloving hard to get to.

You get a "meh" for the content and a whole slew of flaming fingers for your template.