I thawt I thaw a puddy tat

A guest review by Mister Crowley:

Before I launch into this review, I’d like to say that I don’t like cats. I don’t hate ‘em, but I feel that, in their eyes, I’m somewhat like an unwanted mother-in-law. You know she’s there. You know you should respond to her messages and phone calls and emails and her presence in general. But you close your eyes and ears, and secretly wish she’d go away. To Ouagadougou, perhaps. And in times of deep dudgeon, you secretly plot ways to snuff her out.

The fact that I’ve once almost had my eyes clawed out by a psychotic cat, while I was trying to sleep at a friend’s place, may or may not have influenced my apathy towards the feline race.

Our latest guest on the chopping block is Gap, who’s a fairly regular customer at AAYSR’s comments pages. She writes at ‘Barebacking Sanity’. She also has furballs on her mind. This is problematic, because when eight out of every ten posts are about cats, it’s fairly difficult for the non-cat loving reviewer to dig out non-cat posts to review.

So, does this barebacked blog rock?

It does. Completely. Even if you factor in the cats! Gap’s writing is lucid, yet random at the same time. It’s easy to read. Her posts are never overlong, and rarely suffer from bad grammar or an abuse of the English language. Her writing is amusing in the cool, indifferent manner that I really dig. It’s not whiny, it’s not hyperactively happy. It’s just so, which is exactly the way I like it. I’m not going to sit and dissect posts here, but I will leave links to some neat ones. Oh, and these ones too.

But, like all blogs, this one has its problems.

1. The posts, which I’ve linked to above, constitute the bulk of the non-cat posts on this blog. Gap, man, I love your writing, and I’m sure many of us here on Ask do too. BUT, why not try and write on topics other than cats? No offense, but I’m sure that at some level of consciousness, you do relate to things non-feline, so why not write about all of that? It makes your blog less-tedious for us dog lovers, y’see.

2. While a simple black blog template is always a safe bet, you don’t seem like someone who takes the safe and trusted route all the time, so why not spice up that template?

3. Speaking of your template, I spy, with my little eye, a lack of space for people to comment on your posts. Come on Gap, don’t be shy. A comments page is a great way to meet other cat lovers, if nothing else.

4. Another template snafu. Your archives open up as new tabs. That’s bloody irritating, y’hear? Consider yourself lucky that I read your blog on Chrome, and hence had to suffer new tabs as opposed to little Internet Explorer icons crowding my taskbar.

5. It’s ‘you are’ or ‘your’ or ‘you’re’, and NOT ‘ur’. Please, you seem like a mature, educated person. Ditch the ‘ur’, will you luv?

So, cat scratch fever aside, I give Gap:

3 stars for some interesting writing, of which there wasn’t enough to go around.



AND, for bombarding me with those cat photos:

Eh, tú pedazo de carne con patas! Como te atreves a hacerme esto'!