Bunny Gets Bad.

I do keep an eye out for the victims that I review, and I want to tell you that the author of Law and Motherhood has done an incredible job of cleaning up her template and making her blog much more readable. I would like to commend her and offer her the coveted:



that she deserves for making an effort to work on her template, which is a far cry from what most bloggers do when they have been spanked. Good work Mom, every blog is a work in progress. I also love that you have not whined about your review and that shows some chutzpa. Good work and keep at it.

You can always roll the dice and resubmit your blog in the future if you feel you want to have us look at the content again.

A picture paints a thousand words so STFU

Words and Stuff should be some kind of nominee for worst blog name of the year. That was the best you could do? Yeah, Matt, you're not so good with the words and stuff.

But, give Matt a camera, and damn. I mean, seriously, DAMN.

I'm not a huge fan of photobloggers, and I'm not sure that I would link this blog. BUT, having said that, his photography is WONDERFUL.

He has used a simple black basic layout, but I think that it could be revved up or tightened up with something like this, this, this or this.

The writing is another story. One post, formatted as a letter to his grandma, is a political rant. Meh. If you REALLY write letters like this to your grandma, your family is even more strange and fucked up than mine is, and that's saying a goddamn lot. Nothing better than getting a three-paragraph political lecture from your grandkid. If my grandkids do this to me at some point in my life, they're going to be receiving a box of dog turds in their mailbox as a rebuttal.

Another post ponders the order of colors in a news article. Are you fucking kidding me? A post about the colors in your underwear drawer, and boxers versus briefs would have been more entertaining. And, your critique of Riley Tuff? Dude...you claiming that ANYONE can't tell a story properly is rich in irony because you are a wordy, boring fuck.

Who would read this shit you write? You are still stuck in journalism school, and I bet you haven't improved a bit since leaving. God damn. I'm flabbergasted, to tell you the truth. You may love words, but you do not know how to use them. It's a fucking crime against the dictionary.

From looking at your comments, NO ONE is reading. I bet it's because you put your initial readers into a brain dead state within seconds. Dude...if you're going to navel gaze or poli-rant, you can't kill off your readers with teh boring. They aren't self-replicating.

Your posts are THE WORST I'VE EVER SEEN. And that is seriously saying something. I'd read about an entitled Indian princess wannabe mommyblogger's drippy diseased vagina before I'd read this shit. Your posts are boring, pretentious, self-absorbed, and awful. I will admit that at least you know how to place a comma and use proper grammar. But, your posts ain't writing. They're a drug-free replacement for lunesta.

I guarantee that you are under 25. For god's sake, is this "Pompous Self-obsessed Bloggers Under 25" week or something? And no one told me. For shame. I'd have bought you and Drizitche a new set of razors or something to celebrate.

I give the photos:


They're gorgeous.

I give the writing:
and

Usually, we tell bloggers to write more, edit themselves, and hone their art. You? Please just shut the fuck up and look pretty. The good thing is: men your age do this very well. Just don't open your mouth. I can almost guarantee that following this advice will help your dating life. Which, might actually give you something to write about. Sadly, though, I bet you can put people into a coma describing sex.

Fantasy Review

Last week I was forced to kick fuzzy bunny butt. It wasn't fun. OK, it was a little fun. But I was not looking forward to trashing another poor mommy blog this week.

Imagine my relief when my assignment took me to Prefers Her Fantasy Life. I read FM's (Fantasy Mom) tag line, “I used to care, but now I take a pill for that." Love it. I can so relate. FM's banner took me right back to my childhood, because I had that Cher doll as a kid. I cut all of her hair off, my doll looked more like Sonny than Cher. She and my Bionic Woman doll shared my bed for years. Get your mind out of the gutter.

Her side bar has ads, which I hate. She also has a lot of useless widgets that really could go, but they didn't bother me - much. That's because my eye caught the sweet jewelry that she makes. My review could have been bought for the little blue bracelet that she crafted, but that's the price that we pay for being anonymous - upcoming victims don’t know where to send the payoff money. Bummer.

I forgot about the somewhat ugly sidebar once I started reading her stuff, I laughed my well-padded butt off at her bit about leaving food in the car. I once left two chickens and a gallon of milk in the trunk for two days in July. I nearly had to junk the car. I kept reading and at one point, had to have my husband come listen to the song about how a man’s gonna lie to his kids about doing drugs and having premarital sex. See, I am not even off the front page and I am already laughing and wanting to share her stuff.

Her photo of the beer bottles beats to death the endless parade of adorable kiddie photos that we typically see on mommy blogs. Kids are cute, but beer bottles on a mommy blog just makes a statement.

It was startling and a little unnerving to see her Danny Bonaduce photo, which looked like someone photoshopped Alfred E. Neuman's head on Arnold Schwarzenegger's body. It’s just unexpected, and isn’t that what makes it worth the second look?

This blogger is new, only a couple of months out, but I think she has promise. Here are my recommendations:

1. Move the archives up on your sidebar, people want to read deeper and this is your only way for them to get to it. Change your archives to a drop down format.
   


2. I love your writing, but you sometimes roll on a bit much. Before you publish, read it over and see if there's anything you can trim. Less can be more.


3. I would lose the ads or at least keep them under control. Cutting grass or taking in laundry are better ways to make a buck.


4. Move that jewelry widget up and move the other stuff way down.
   
5. There are too many posts on the front page, you could limit that to four or five, max.

I can say that there’s a reason that this blogger is ranking on the humor blog lists. I like her, in fact, if she got rid of the ads I might love her, but as it is, she gets:



Mutha doesn't click with everyone, Rubber Duckies. Personally, I like to stumble around the web, and when I find myself in a bad, ugly or just plain boring blog, the red X is my friend. If I am reviewing your blog at the time, every blinky, crappy widget that you have is going to get my fingers flying on the keyboard as I spew out my venom. It's up to you, but if you're in the crosshairs queue for the Mutha, I suggest you start cleaning out your drawers, I won't be this nice all the time.

Isn't Dancing A Sin?

Arulba, the author of Dance of the Mind, really drew the short straw this week when it came to reviewers. I like to think that I'm usually pretty fair-minded and objective as a critic. This week, however, I find myself in a stupid-ass blogument with some of my more religious readers over at my personal site. Therefore, the ice on which the God squad can skate is pretty thin in my neighborhood. When I saw the sea gulls that festoon DoMs header, they did not elicit the serenity that I'm sure they're designed to.

Now I need to be honest. I didn't read a lot of DoM. I went deep into the archives but the problem is that the vast majority of the posts are lessons from "A Course In Miracles". I didn't know anything about ACIM, as it's apparently known, and Arulba's description is far too verbose and jargon heavy. A quick Wikipedia search later and I found out that ACIM was a book "divinely penned" by two American psychologists in the 1970's. Great - disco era self-help meets Christianity. It's developed quite a following over the years much to the consternation of a lot of the more established Christian denominations.

I don't know what ACIM preaches, but if it's brought to you by the same people who want to make homosexuality, abortion, birth control and teaching evolution illegal then I'm not really interested. Even if it's brought to you be the more liberal theologians that had me singing "Kum-bay-fucking-ya" at summer camp in my formative years, I'm pretty happy with my spiritual life as is. Thank you very much.

But, even if I were more open minded to what DoM is selling, I would find it a difficult read. Arulba's posts are long-winded and are written with the assumption that the reader is already well versed in ACIM. It looks fine - clean, simple and well organized. But even the posts that aren't about ACIM aren't all that compelling. DoM is a blog for a very specific audience.

Which brings me to the real question for Arulba - why did you submit your site? If you're really after a review, then fine - far too wordy, a bit single-minded, but nice clean template. Verdict - "Meh".

But I get the creeping feeling that you're not really after our opinion. You've seen the goth avatars, you've read the foul-mouthed critiques, I wonder if your not here to proselytize. I know that the way a lot of these religious movements work is by conversion. Call me paranoid, but I can't fathom why someone who essentially writes a religious blog would submit here. If that's the case, if you're in the market for converts, then in the words of Jack Nicholson as Melvin Udall "sell crazy someplace else, we're all stocked up here." That being said, your site will no doubt get an increase in traffic from this review. Maybe you've got what you wanted after all. You know what else you've got- a new rating, the Melvin*. Congrats!

* I hope I haven't exceeded my authority as fuckin' new guy. But I feel that we need a rating for blogs that, like a Jehovah's Witness, we'd just like to shut the front door on and hope that they go away. The Melvin.

UPDATE:
There is every indication to suggest that Arulba did not submit her site to be reviewed. That being the case, then I'm sorry for comparing her to a Jehovah's Witness.

Now, to the malicious ass monkey who did submit her site: knock it the fuck off. It's not funny, it's juvenile - like volunteering someone to be bathroom monitor in junior high school. If it happens again, I'm coming over to your house and pissing on your PC.

That is all.

Like Olives

A lot of you may know Drizitche from his frequent comments here at Ask, and those who do also know that a little Driz goes a long way. As desensitized to conflict as I am, I still suck air in through my teeth when he plops down a particularly spite-filled comment, waiting inevitably for others to tear into him like barncats surrounding a bag of milk.

Good times.

On his own, he’s not "accessible" or "user-friendly", but he is clever...he’s also, at times, both poetic and extremely emotive; the blackness of his template reflects the blackity-blackness of his black, black heart, and this blackness expresses itself with a tremendous amount of wordiness.

Hell, calling Driz "wordy" is like calling an international jewel-thief "sneaky": neither description fully conveys the true nature of the beast. Some of these posts are long enough to unfurl and let roll from the top of a building with enough left over to pool in a rumpled mess on the sidewalk. I, though, can’t fault him for his loquaciousness; I was guilty of many of the same things when I submitted my own blog for review: over-intellectualized (in my case, though, it was pseudo-intellectualized) writing that had to be more RIGHT than readable, a need to not just find the proper word but also the least recognizable one, and a problem wherein I was taking life just a little too seriously.

Once I had figured out what I was writing for, I figured out how to write what I wanted, and this only came in retrospect; at the time, I believed that I was a god among men, writing REAL works of art with unmatched sincerity and leaving footprints of patronization and elitism whenever I posted. I would say that Driz feels the same way if I wanted to speak for him, which I don’t, and that the similarities I personally see in our writing might just be my own solipsistic leanings sashaying out into the light. What I DO know is that once I got a bunch of those I-don’t-give-a-flying-fuck-whether-you-like-me-or-not posts out of my system, I moved on and found that my writing had become looser, freer, better.

This is going to look patronizing now matter which way I try to spin it, but Driz has a bucketload of talent - I think he just needs to figure out who he wants to read his work, and how he wants to hold the attention of those readers. To alienate an audience of any kind is one of the more enjoyable aspects of writing, strangely, and though sometimes the wheat does indeed need to be cleared from the chaff, an unrelenting onslaught of slight punches to the gut isn’t quite as effective as one well-aimed hammer-crack to the sternum.

Driz can rankle, oh yes, but he’s sincere, and his misery seems to stem from longing rather than just grouchiness; he wants things to be right, and writes from a hole of contempt because they aren’t. And it’s not like he isn’t funny; I just wish he was funny more.

I’m going with on this one because, on top of everything I’ve mentioned in that mixed-bag of compliments above, he is in possession of a gorgeous header...but knowing that the above-rating might make him next-to-insufferable on our comment-boards, I’m also adding an ‘cause, you know, tough love, brainiac.

If it's a piece of shit, you must convict

I’m suing Law and Motherhood for misrepresentation. There isn’t anything that I could find about the law in this blog, except a violation of the law of common sense. She posts under a pseudonym, but directly below her photo, she lists her real name, occupation and a few past jobs on her Linked In profile. Get rid of that, tout de suite. All this information, coupled with the photos of your little ones and your profession just screams, “I have money, please abduct my kids and here is a way to google a map to our house.” I was able to get your town and address in less than ten minutes and I am not even a stalker – OK, I’m a nice stalker. A little anonymity goes a long way when you are posting your kiddos on the web.

I like her banner; it’s interesting and novel. I thought we might get to hear some great dirt about what it’s like to be a mom and a lawyer. But I didn’t find any stories of day old coffee; the rush to prepare interrogatories at three AM to beat filing dates; no tidbits about run-ins with other jurists. Nada. Maybe she’s just respecting confidentiality, but man, that’s boring, don’t tease us. We want dirt.

When I scrolled downward, my eye caught the horrid, triple pane of death, which is her template. I am not a fan of triptych style blogs, they are visually confusing, unless it’s done well and this one just ain’t. She’s got more useless crap than I have in my kitchen junk drawer. Blog banners, ads out the wazoo (I counted twelve), awards, political statements, meme lists. Kill me now. Then she has a little congratulatory blurb on the bottom giving credit for the blog design. At least that tells us where NOT to shop for our site workup. Go look, then tell me if your head doesn’t feel like it’s going to explode.

The perpetrator writes mainly about her family life; some overlong, but cute haikus about barfing in the back seat, and a lot of information about attachment parenting. I love attachment parenting, but yawn. Slap me awake, Love Bites, you know how I love that!

Lawyer momma, pick a topic and stick with it. You jump all over the place. You grab me with a witty little bit about shelf paper, and then, you’re off topic in the same post about how tired you are and your kid’s tantrum. You had me and you lost me within seconds. Fighting with sticky shelf paper is just weird enough to be potentially interesting, but you blew it. You’re writing poorly organized letters home and frankly, there’s not much worth reading or reviewing here.

Now, there have been blogs that I have read, where I have just really clicked with the writers, their topics and have subscribed to right away and stayed for years. This wasn’t one of them. Apparently I am not alone; she only has one subscriber, which is probably her husband.

Here's your rating:


You want fries with that?

Living in a Mommy Blog Paradise

Some of you have the fucked up idea that I hate all mommies, especially stay at home mommies, and that I wish they would drop off a cliff into the Grand Canyon and never blog again. That is so harsh, y'all. And you people are judgemental weenies.

For the record, I AM a mommy. True, I don't like a lot of the former junior leaguer mommies with their ugly ass purses who go screaming through my neighborhood like they're trying out for NASCAR, with cellphones glued to their ears and cutesy stickers that make me throw up a little on the backs of their oversized SUVs. I hate those mommies, with a passion. And, when I spot them in blogland, I do tend to give them the equivalent of the gangsta's 187. Yo, that bk stands for pretentious bitch killa.

Just keepin' it real, y'all.

Anyway. I don't hate all mommies. I like the cool ones who drink too much and need lots of coffee in the morning and make fun of Kelly Ripa:

She’s blonde. She’s skinny. She’s so perpetually happy that if I worked for ABC, I’d be making her pee in a cup on a weekly basis. She is as close to perfect as I’ve been led to believe a person can come.

Looking at her makes me feel like crap.

Word, yo.

Best of all...the ones who don't do anything that I hate. Nothing this blogger does gets on my last good nerve. Can I get an Amen about how long it's been since that has happened for me? It's like the first time my boyfriend and I had sex. At this point in my life, the simple fact that he didn't have a pathetically undersized penis, and that he didn't try to rip off my girly parts with aggressive thrusting motions his index finger, AND the fact that he waited until I was ready? He was like a fucking rock star in my eyes. My expectations are that low.

It's basically the same for my blog reviewing "career," such as it is. A blog that doesn't look like shit, that doesn't have ten million gadgets, and where there is an "about me" page, and where I can easily navigate to read more? Oh, yeah.

And, the fact that this chick writes well AND she's funny and snarky in THE RIGHT WAY (god, I'm sick of posers)?

Oh, hell yeah. Give it to me baby. Harder! Deeper!!!

It's basically like that. She's funny, I like her, and I'm blogrolling her. And, she isn't fucking up. Whee! These days? Huge.

Unfunny people with an inflated view of your own skillz as a writer? Take a lesson. You know who you are. Oh, wait. NVM. You aren't that self-aware. People with ugly/boring blog templates? Take a lesson. I'm talking to you.

Anyway...Ginny? Don't change. Just keep on doing what you're doing, as well as you're currently doing it. If you fuck anything up, I'll have to go all gangsta on your ass, and nobody wants that.

Coming up short

The natural complement to the Mommy Blogger is the Daddy Blogger. Due to those pesky lingering gender roles, the Daddy Blogger is a rarer beast than it's feminine counterpart. Like Mommy Bloggers there are some fantastic Daddy Bloggers (check out Dutch, Jim and Ray) and some truly crap Daddy Bloggers (come on, I'm not that nasty). If you'll indulge the Professor a little secret, come a little closer, I'd really like to be as good as one of the great ones. Maybe it's because I yearn to be one of the fraternity, but I love a good Daddy Blog and was thrilled to see that the Lady Bites had sent one my way this week.

I really wanted to like Greg, the author of Dissonance. His story, from what I can glean, is a great one. He's a single Dad raising his teenage daughter Gabby in Houston, Texas - a difficult gig. I get the impression that he and his wife didn't part on the most amicable of terms. It's a great back story for a Daddy Blog and enough to give it the potential to stand apart from the crowd. Problem is that Dissonance doesn't live up to its potential.

Sometimes Greg is fantastic. This post, which at it's root is just the story of a bad day, is so good that it's almost painful to read. I can relate on almost every level to the frustration of a modern civilized man who has to deal with the reality that there are more choices than just flight or fight. When Greg is honest and bare about his struggles and questions about raising a teenage girl Dissonance is dynamite. The problem is that there are more duds than there is dynamite. Greg falls in to that trap that so many of us do - posting far too much of far too little. In other words, too many posts with nothing that people really want to read. I include in this category things like which American accent you speak with (don't care), whether or not the new Wordpress dashboard works (test it and keep it to yourself) and all manner of life's minutiae that you can't turn into a humorous, heart-rending or just interesting story.

You've got template problems as well, Greg, it's dead dull. And a pretty ugly shade of dull. Liven things up a bit, or if you're a fan of clean (bland) then go for a nice simple black and white. Chris Pearson does some wonderfully simple Wordpress themes. I like that you post pictures on your blog, but play with them a bit and they'll shine. You also have a bad habit of posting the link to videos or images rather than just posting the video or image. Call me lazy, you wouldn't be the first, but I can't be assed to click. I want to see it in full color in front of me.

I'm not trying to go all harsh on you, Greg, because I do dig your site. I spent a fair bit of time wandering through the archives and did enjoy myself. I want to help you make it better. Here's one idea. I trolled through your site for ages (add a search feature) looking for more about what happened to get you to where you are in life now. I found little teases and snippets but not the whole story. How about instead of going for the pithy one-liner About, tell your story. Tell it in a humorous way or an emotional way, that's your chance to get my attention as a new reader and to suck me in. Tell me about your wife-turned-violent-shrew, tell me what happened for you to get custody of your daughter, tell it to me in a way that tears my heart open and makes me yearn to know more about you. Make me want to read more.

As I said at the start, I really wanted to like you. In a lot of ways I do and not just because of empathy. When you're at your best, Greg, your on par with any of the best of the genre. But there is far too much filler. My suggestion - don't write just for the sake of the exercise. Write when you have something to say. For now, I'm going to give you three stars and a sincere hope that you take this review in the spirit it was given. Live long and prosper.*



*I am not now, nor have I ever been, a Trekkie. But "Godspeed" sounded suspiciously religious.

The male of the species

Here's where I admit a personal bias: I don't read a lot of blogs by men. Time was I had almost nothing but male friends, and I couldn't relate to women at all, catty, competitive, mercurial creatures that we are. But times change, and I changed, and eventually I forgot about most men in favor of one man with his magic hands and silly laugh and grumpiness. I kind of forgot you all existed outside of eye candy and literature. Then Jubblies and Booty came along and I realized I'd been missing out.

When I landed on People in the Sun, I thought, "Great. A dude. I'm so not going to get him." But I'm a total idiot because I started reading and I couldn't stop. I turned around and went right back to the beginning and read pretty much every post. Because this guy is, above all things, interesting. The writing is evocative and thoughtful and some of it is pretty gorgeous. He says things like, "My grandfather had this big white beard that made words disappear" and "I want Jon Stewart to try to understand my world view in five minutes."And he's funny. Really funny.

I did find myself skimming the political bits (even though I mostly agree with him), which disappoints me. Once upon a time I'd have dug right in. Is this what apathy looks like?

He owns the cutest damn dogs (aside from my own four mutts). And he lives in Baltimore, a strange little microcosm of bizarre dialects and eclectic weirdness that I know all too well. Man, is there a lot to blog about in Baltimore, or what?

As for the design, roll up archives, please. The template makes my eyes hurt what with all the overlapping text. I could go for some black or dark type on a light background. And there's that odd switch in text size Blogger seems to do willy-nilly. Maybe include the graphic of "People in the Sun" toward the top since that's, you know, the blog title. Right now it's hanging out down there at the bottom being all reclusive and shy and purposeless. The tag cloud bugs me for no good reason. Can't you just give us categories and roll those up? And I'm partial to an "About Me" page. Otherwise, at least there are no blinkies or blings.

I get that you're a new dad and there's lots going on and you're not going to load us up with filler in your blog. I respect that. Hell, I applaud it. But I still want more. If you posted more than once a week (and if you tarted up your design a bit) I'd fucking love you. As it is

This week's voluntary masochists

Bah, y'all, I am in the midst of my busy time of year at work and home. Sorry I seem to be chasing my tail on here with stuff and am so behind schedule. Here is this week's list:

Fluxographia
People in the Sun
Dissonanced
Law and Motherhood
Praying to Darwin

Also, we have a new full-time reviewer, Mutha, who is going to be joining us from this week forward.

11

Dear Fluxgraphia,

Hello. My name is Nutjobber, and I’m a blog-reviewer over at Ask and Ye Shall Receive.

In my short but dazzling career as such, the complaint I’ve heard that irritates me the most is that I don’t read entire blogs before jotting-down my review, as though the shittiness of a blog is indeterminable because I didn’t catch that one post from Nov. 2005 that the author seems to think is Pulitzer-prize-worthy. If I’m not even remotely interested by the end of the second page, being as easy to entertain as I am, why would I keep digging through the shit?

Your blog, though, your blog has one "older posts" link, and a whopping ELEVEN posts overall. From my point of view, this is fabulous - I read the entire blog twice in about four-and-a-half minutes. While this is good for me, it is bad for you, Ms. Fluxgraphia, because I have nothing really to work with, no real sense of what you’re trying to do because of the extremely-small sample-size.

Look, here’s your mission-statement: you tell me all the things the blog will be, and though there is no evidence to support that your blog will actually be many of these things, there is also not enough to make me believe that it won’t, eventually. For a reviewer, this is both stifling and frustrating.

Three of the remaining posts are veritable place-holders, and these two, while more readable than place-holders, are in a different font than the rest; this, also, is frustrating.

It’s almost as if you’ve just played a single note on the piano and asked me if that note would make a good song; it might, but there are many more notes yet to be played before a song can even be considered viable.

I like the swirling, off-balanced background-image on the page, but you need to tinker with the header, maybe scoot over here to play with some fonts, see what you like. Most of all, you need more content. Don’t force it, just think through what you want to accomplish with each post, publish, and see how you feel about it after a week or two; you’ll eventually find your niche, your voice, and then resubmit.

Until then, sincerely,

Nutjobber

Some stories shouldn't be told

Once upon a time, there was a boy who lived in India who fancied himself a writer. He was a dark and tortured soul, but he wanted to reach out to the world from the vast alone inside him. He created a suitably dark framework for his words to inhabit, and he sent his words out to the world. Woe is us.


This blog has three major strikes against it.

1) Indian emo kid.
2) Writes nothing but fiction.
3) The fiction sucks.

I could stop there, but I won't. He's young, and he wants to write. It's hard for me to hate on the young. They're just so...young. And I remember when I was young, before life beat most of my pretensions of being a serious writer out of me, and so, I will be merciful.

Yes, the impossible is true. This week, Calamity is the mean one, and I'm claiming the honor of "the nice once."

Template-wise, i like this blog. The template is great. I love dark/gothy things, and this template is definitely that. I especially love the little navigation bar at the top with the little moons. I give you kudos just for that.

However, Setu, you've ruined your simple black design with a bunch of crap and gadgets in the sidebar. Purge them from your existence, post haste. They are a major distraction. Add a links box to your navigation bar and put the links elsewhere. Add a drop-down box for your archives. Simplify, simplify, simplify. NOthing is more classically elegant and gothic than black with no flourish. These gadgets are like a string of gaudy plastic beads around the neck of an elegant dark temptress dressed in velvet. Lose the tacky.

The writing...it's overly contrived, far too wordy, and you're trying too hard. Write less, with more feeling. Got it? Do more, with less.

Take this post.

You write:

As I entered the room I saw she had already flat-lined and the doctors were winding up. Now I felt terrible; not for my unanswered questions but for her. I thought I should see her one last time as I didn’t get to do so ever since I crashed in the cab. So, I slowly removed the white cloth from her face. The moment her face was revealed...

See how stilted and awkward the flow is in these sentences? Let me show you what a good editor/writer might do with this.

I walked in, and saw she was dead. The doctors were winding up. Suddenly, the horror [sorrow, tragedy] of her death was real. I wanted to see her one last time, so I slowly removed the white cloth, revealing her face.

When you write, Setu, go back over your work. Try to remove any extraneous words that clutter it up. Make it as clean and to-the-point as you can. Be sparse. You need to do what I've done to every single post.

That's ironic, coming from a wordy fuck like me, but more is NOT better. You don't want your readers tripping over sentences that are as awkward as a thirteen-year-old boy at his first school dance. Your writing should feel, to the reader, as graceful and effortless as ballet. They shouldn't see the work, the craft, behind it. If they do, it spoils the magic.

So, here's my advice to a young writer:

Write your ass off. Do it every day, even if it is just two sentences. Edit, edit, edit. Polish those sentences until they gleam. But mostly? WRITE. Write, and write, and write. Because really? Good writing is mostly about effort and practice.

That's all.

I give you .

Did I say that out loud?

I promised y'all last week that, regardless of merit, I was gonna hate on my reviewee this week. Now, chances are I'm a liar, because I'm pretty much going to review with my gut, and if it happens that I like a blog, I'm going to say so. But dagnabit, I do like it when I'm able to get all vitriolic because y'all tend to comment more that way. And bloggers are all comment whores. Leave the money on the dresser.

It's come to my attention that I've gotten a reputation as "the nice one." This is perhaps deserved, insofar as I'm not one for conflict, I don't like to stir up shit, and I tend to go a little easy on the flaming fingers. I'm fairly even-tempered, and I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. I'm a glass-is-half-full (of wine) kind of girl.

But I'm nothing compared to this chick: Thinking Out Loud.

People, it is pretty much sunshine and lollipops over there. Problem is, I'm not entirely sure what "over there" is. Is this a blog or a self-help site? What is the purpose? The header says, "My rants or ramblings about life," but I don't believe her because there are all these posts about money (35 posts) and blogging (21 posts) and such. If it's a finance blog, say so. If it's self-help, say so. And why all the posts about blogging? Are you trying to be a resource for bloggers? What the hell is the purpose of this blog? Your "Meet the Blogger" page doesn't say. You're all over the place. There seems to be a website. And a blog. And a weightloss blog. Why? I'm so lost. Hold me?

About the design, I don't mind the colors, and it's clean and easy to read (barring having to click to read more -- HATE! Unless there's something spoilery after the jump, just leave it all out there, don't make us work more to get to the goods), but ultimately what you've got here looks like a corporate blog. It looks like somewhere I'd go to find out about mortgage rates or human resources seminars.

Who is this cartoon person following my cursor? I want to smack a bitch.

What's the difference between "flash back" and "recent posts"? You really don't need more than maybe the last 4 posts, and you've already got an archive page at the top, so watch the overkill. You've got the recent comments dealio, but there aren't any actual comments there, just the names of the people who commented and the post they commented on. Who cares? If you want to spotlight your commenters (which, why?), actually include the text of their comment. Otherwise you're just creating more and more filler. Filler that makes me, the nice one, want to get out the birch rods.

Jesus, archives AND a calendar? No. Just no.

Otherwise, the writing is... chipper (Look, people: I used ellipses! Correctly!). It's very Good Housekeeping-ish, chatty, "studies show," rah-rah. There are some chuckles. Chippy, cheerful chuckles. No one's cackling with glee here.

And holy lord, there's some shameless blog promotion (at least she admits it). Advertising? Your blog? That feels dirty. She's a very different blogger from me and those whose blogs I enjoy most. It seems like she approaches this like a job, like a way to break into something. It's all marketing and spit-shine and I want to hate it because it's gutless. Yes, gutless. There's nothing on the line here, there's nothing revealed. We don't get to see who Valerie really is beyond helpful saving suggestions and surface twaddle. There are no relationships explored, no real memories shared, no meat, no dimension, no sexiness. And I don't mean it's gotta be raunchy (although that'd be great, please) -- I mean sexy like interesting, piquing, engrossing, bulging, tightening... ooops, got carried away there.

Also, I've seen Rodin's Thinker in situ, and you're not doing him justice. Art, girl, ART! Be lyrical, be emotional, be thoughtful, be meditative, be exposed.

Look, Valerie, you're a nice person. I can tell that. You're even an interesting person (Stuck in an elevator in Cartagena? Locking people out of bathrooms? Yes! More of that!), but it all gets lost in the acres and acres of self-helpy "I'm a personal organizer. Ask me how!"-type crap. I don't want to discourage you because you've obviously put some effort into this, you write consistently and not terribly, and I don't hate you. But for the love of Shamwow, find some focus, figure out why you're blogging, what you want to gain, and who your audience is. If it's a general blog about your life, be that and leave out all the money-saving crap. If you're trying to break into the self-help or financial consultant field, put that out there. But don't go all infomercial on us and expect me to like it.

You knew it wasn't going to be pretty. You knew you were sticking your neck out. Because of that, and because you're nice and devoted and eager and you smile like you really mean it, I'm giving you







But because you lack focus, I feel like you're selling me something, and you haven't broken the surface, I'm giving you










I say these things because I care. And it hurts me more than it hurts you.

Nah, it doesn't. Use some ointment for the sting.

Tell me, sister morphine, how long have I been lying here?

After a hiatus that has gone on far too long, the Professor is back. I’ve missed you, my little askers and receivers, but some unforeseen personal relocation trauma kept me all tangled up. Hopefully I’m back for the long haul now, so let’s get on to business.

When I read the name of my assigned site for the week, Peanut Butter & Pickles, I cringed in anticipation of yet another mommy blog. So, it was a pleasant surprise to click over and find that I had a whole different sort of animal in my sights. That sense of relief didn’t last long, I’m afraid to report.

The author of Peanut Butter & Pickles uses the pseudonym Marvin the Martian. This conceit of author as alien observer is a bit dopey and doesn’t really make Peanut Butter & Pickles stand apart from the legion of personal blogs out there. It doesn’t add anything to the blog and it occasionally takes away from it. Everyone needs a good pen name and if Marvin the Martian does it for you, that’s fine, but when you go all sci-fi for a couple of sentences in the middle of a post about spurious law suits it just sort of shoots your credibility to shit. There's a fair bit of wing nut brand politics and a sense of morality that makes my skin crawl a bit - who knew Martians were such reactionaries.

Template is standard Blah-ger, in fact I’m pretty sure it’s the default. Why so many people see this template, with it’s shades of dull green and say to themselves “This is what I want to represent my personality to the whole interwebs” is just beyond me. Marvin doesn't junk it up too much with tat, so it's nice and clean if a little bland.

The writing. Marvin says that he writes for a living but that it’s pretty boring writing. That sounds about right. The writing on Peanut Butter & Pickles is kind of like recreational morphine use – sedative, numbing and not as much fun as you thought it would be. Marvin seems to have a strange and probably unhealthy attraction to death, which comes off as less cutting edge than creepy. There's a fair bit of wing nut brand politics and a sense of morality that makes my skin crawl a bit - who knew Martians were such reactionaries.

Now, Peanut Butter & Pickles is not all bad. I like the eclecticism of the site; Marvin covers music, politics and family minutiae without coming off as all scatterfucked. I don’t like his politics and find his music taste erratic, but that’s not my business here. It comes off as a healthy mix. He also posts some quite nice images, but they’re far too small. I don’t know if it’s a Blogger size limit thang or you just doesn’t know what you’re doing. But big them up and edit what you’re posting and Peanut Butter & Pickles will pop despite the shit template.

But, it’s the writing that makes the blog and the writing here falls well short. The longer I read PB&P the more numb and vaguely irritated. Reading Peanut Butter & Pickles is a little like coming down - the very essence of “Meh”.

Some Mommies Need a Punch in Their Uterus

I signed up with Ask and Ye Shall Receive to guest-review mommy blogs. I am a mother, a mommy blogger and I know what I like in a good mommy blog. Easy, huh?

I got cocky on my first gig last month, that one was a real peach. Not so with The Bean, the Brat and Bedlam. Heck, it was hard just to keep from slamming my browser shut after the first five minutes, out of sheer frustration. I wanted to find something great in this blog, but I didn’t find anything that flipped my switches. I sat at my computer for three hours picking this babe apart and came up nearly empty.

See, I am a mom a half dozen times over and even I, The Queen Mutha, got sick to death reading about the Bean and the Brat. I love kids, and yours are cute, but MAN, isn’t there something – anything else in your life but the running dialogue of the cute stuff your children have done/said?

Let the ranting begin:

Did you really say that you left your sleeping children alone to go out to a pot party? Or did I misread, please tell me you had a sitter, please? I bet the kids just loved Mom coming home smelling like pot.

[Note: I read later in the comments that you didn’t leave them alone, you have live-in help. Now, I am so completely envious of any help at all, let alone live-in help that I have to hate you all the more just on behalf of those of us who have to do it all alone.]

About those passive aggressive fights with the father of your kiddos, here’s a hint: the kids know. It’s fucking them up. Stop it now. Yell, scream, cry, but don’t use sarcasm and the silent treatment thinking that the kids are oblivious. They know.

Generally, it’s not great to label our kids – even in cyberspace – with titles like "Brat," unless you want them to be a brat. Wasn’t there anything a tad less negative that you could call him – maybe, "Little Shit or "Complete Waste of Sperm"? Do you call him Brat at home, even under your breath? He knows. Brat’s reading at three, Brat knows.

Still, there must be something going on here, she has 300,000 hits on her site and she’s not even showing her sweater puppies or saying naughty words. She’s a self-proclaimed journalist from India. The English is ok, not bad, but I knew from the start that English wasn’t her first language, maybe it was the long strings of Indian words with no translation listed that clued me in on that one. It adds a bit of flavor, but in the end, it wasn’t a flavor that particularly appealed to me. Funny, because I just love Kofta Curry.

Specific Ass Ripping, better known as, "let’s get into her template":

1. The banner was a photo of her kid, and then while I was reviewing it, she changed it to a plate, a red blob of yarn and a bright yellow circle (maybe a beer in a highball glass?). Bring back the kid. This one is meaningless and it sucks.

2. Oh, bloody hell! The posts are so goddamned long! I scrolled down to see what else there was on the front page. Tons of little kid photos, I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled. Then, just so that I could be a smart-ass, I went back up and started scrolling again, this time I counted how many turns of my mouse wheel it took to actually get to the bottom – you know, as in "how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop" – It took 96 friggin' scrolls!

Come on! This represented 10 posts. My God....diarrhea of the mouth. You may think you’re a journalist, but in the real world of print/blogging, no one has the space or time for what you're writing. Cutting your verbosity would certainly improve this blog. Cut back your front page to about four posts and let the people who don't die of boredom delve into your archives.

3. Roll up your archives - and pick one – the calendar or the archives, we don’t need both. No one's going there anyway, they all died of boredom on the front page. Seriously, you have 300,000 hits and 34 subscribers who want you to punch this thing up.

I give it:
&



Note from Love Bites: If the incredibly nice Mutha ripped this blog a new one, just imagine what the rest of us would have done.

Gragh!

There’s been far too much reality invading your not-so-humble reviewer’s life as of late, readers, including, but not limited to, a monstrous, king-hell virus that laid my computer up but good. Like a lasso-less cowboy tryin’ to rustle up some cattle, I’ve had work to do but not the tools to do so...and, on top of that, I’m a lazy, lazy man.

As such, I Do Things So You Don’t Have To seems, theoretically, like it’d be directly up my alley.

Eh.

I’ll tell you what: it’s actually pretty clever, I Do Things is, oftentimes escalating into the really well done. I Scattered My Dad’s Ashes So You Don’t Have To, I Have Scoliosis So You Don’t Have To, and an almost obsessive exhibitionist-streak that manifests in her many posts about nude beaches, are not what I was expecting after reading such things as Pimp My Dessert or whatever the fuck other fluffy bits of fluffity-fluff-fluff that fluttered fluffily over my head as I tried to read them.

JD’s having herself some fun, and her writing is accessible if not, for lack of a better word, vanilla. As in life, it all comes down to taste: some people like Dave Barry, some like the idea of Dave Barry suffocating on his own tongue. To me, he’s a goober, and JD’s in possession of an equally goobersome style of writing. It’s not bad, at all, and I’m sure there are many who will enjoy it thoroughly, but it’s not my thing.

So, writing? Solid. Template?

Jesus fucking Christ.

The header looks like a jellyfish-attack during an acid-flashback, or how an apocalyptic merry-go-round would look with the liquor-spins - I feel nauseous, gagging back morning coffee and reminding myself that the nightmare I had last night about the woman who screamingly pulled her own psychotic eyes out of her head with her fingers was just a dream, even though the images just came back vividly from staring at this godawful header.

It is, absolutely, the worst, most incongruous header for a blog imaginable, and even excepting the disgusting abomination at the top, mixing bright-blue and swamp-green throughout makes for an appetite-alienating experience. Perhaps that was the plan, to distract the eye from the atrocious colour-combination by assaulting the senses with that header?

Whatever the rationale, I’ve seen raccoon road-kill with a better sense of decorum.

In short, keep the writing, change the template...like, immediately. Post-haste. NOW.

I might’ve been three- or even four-star swayed had I been in the right mood, and had the template not jolted me into remembering my own horrific nightmares, but almost entirely based on the travesty that is this template, here is your rating:



I want to hunt down, torture, and eat that header; unless you’re comfortable prompting bloodlust, JD, please destroy that template.

For the greater good.

List of impending dismemberment

I Do Things

Thinking Out Loud

Peanut Butter and Pickles

The Brat, the Bean and the Bedlam

The Void

muah.

I have a bad case of the on wee

So, how much do I suck this week? Apparently, Jobber's e-mail has started rejecting anything I send him as spam. Booty is offline until Monday. And, I was in Alabama all week. Wait, isn't spending a week in Alabama enough, as far as punishment goes? I think it is.

Okay, so. How can you not like a blog entitled "It's Hard Work Being This Easy"? Personally, I work damned hard to be easy, and I know the same holds true for Calamity, as well.

The boys, do we even need to get started on them?

I have no real issues with the template for this blog. I don't think it fits SWF42 perfectly, (I'd prefer to see her go with a classic pinup girl as she has in her avatar), but it's clean, neat, and easy to navigate. Get rid of that fugly google ad in your sidebar at the top, it distracts from your design. Also, there is a problem with the meta tags for your blog, and you need to look at those. You have at least one extra break code in there, so when I pull up your blog, the tab at the bottom of IE looks strange. I also think you could limit your posts per page at 5 or so, you don't really need the page to extend for miles and miles of scrolling.

That shit gets old.

Now, the content. I love it and hate it. First off, I fucking hate memes. Hate them with the burning passion of ten million tanning bulbs. I only wish that the person who invented Thursday Thirteen would have had her fingers lopped off in a horrific cake decorating accident before she was able to spread this particularly virulent virus around teh interwebs. (And I know for a fact this was a woman, no guy would ever have an idea this dumb which requires a weekly recitation of a set number of items on a particular day of the week--bah).

Beyond Thursday Thirteen, we have Weenie Wednesday, and TMI Tuesday. Okay, SWF42. You're allowed one meme a month. MAYBE one a week. But this is fucking meme overkill, and I hates it. You're too smart and literate to take this crappy way out of actually having to craft a post. So, knock that shit off.

Next, would it kill you to give us more goddamn sex? Here are topics you should focus in on, SW: Sex. Basketball. More sex. Maybe some more basketball. Definitely, more sex. Also, I loved this post.

When you actually write, you write well. Also, your life philosophy, particularly in regard to sex, interests me. But stop with the fucking memes, sweetie. You're so not a meme girl. I wish you'd put up a list of your favorite posts on either your sidebar or in a post that you link to your sidebar so that a new reader can get a quick (and hopefully, dirty) introduction to who you are and what(who) you do. That wouold fucking help with hooking in new readers. Okay, so that's the big thing you can do today that would help with this clusterfuck of memeage.

Here's my best advice: Like me, you're a dirty, dirty slut. We both need to focus in on what we're good at. More fucking, less fucking memes.

I give you

But for all the damn memes? C'mon now. You can do better than that.