Thursday, September 24, 2009

Introduction to Arithmetic

Okay kids. Instead of sitting at your desks with me at the front of the class and you looking at me with blank, depressing stares waiting for me to enlighten you, let's do something different. Let's move our desks out of the way and all sit around in a circle, mkay?

As you can see, I am an open minded educator and I like to think outside the box and apply unorthodox learning models in an effort to steer my pupils away from douchebagification. I'm an envelope pushing maverick. And, based on some inspiration from our latest reviewee, Maggie, I've decided to do things a bit differently today.

My source of inspiration was the following sentence she wrote here:

"Whatever--everyone knows bloggers are so busy furiously expressing themselves that they can't be bothered with editing or proofing."

When I saw this sentence, I hadn't even had the chance to finish lacing up my asshole-annihilating boots and was caught off guard. Remembering my non-traditional approach to instruction, I decided to take a deep breath, count to ten and come up with an alternative to telling Maggie to go get fingerbanged without further ado. So I decided to give her an a priori grade on fucking principle, dammit, for explicitly condoning everything that is wrong about the blogging world.

So here you go, Maggie; you're initial score:





At that point, I made a deal in my mind with our Maggie for the prolongation of my reading -- which may be very short-lived if she sucks as bad as she promises to. The deal is that for every post she gives me that doesn't in some way make me want to shove my TI-84 calculator forcibly into the first puckered brown eye I see, a flaming finger will be subtracted from the score; and we will go from there. It was up to Maggie to solve this word problem and work her shitty rating off before I cried for mercy.

So let's see her progress at contesting her initial suckedness.

First of all, this lifeless, pea green, failure of a template is more overused than the school custodian's right hand when he thinks about me handcuffing him to the monkey bars. Her sidebar is unnecessarily crammed full of crap. As to the content, my findings indicate that there are some main themes visited throughout the blog and they include the following:

1). Posts about not blogging; a metric shit ton of them, infecting her entire blog with the disease of superfluity.

2). Repeated statements on her lack of inspiration, general boredom, and inability to think of anything to say. Her blog is corroded with this shit. She actually titles her posts things like "Tired", "Not feeling it" and "Not feeling it" (Yes, she has two posts titled that way).

3). Mention of her other blog, which according to her, is more interesting than this blog. I cannot see how that's possible since a) it is written by the same person and b) on her other blog she ONLY writes about Twitter and Facebook. (I didn't check out the other blog because I only have time for one trainwreck at a time, and frankly, I can only handle so much WTFuckery in one day).

4). More Twitter and Facebook talk as if dedicating an entire other blog to it weren't enough.

5). Posts about other bloggers, mainly in the form of criticism, leaving a nasty taste in my mouth (I may be one to talk, but she did solicit this criticism, and I consider it community service).

6). Posts recapping books she's reading, rendering completely redundant the bookshelf widgetry bullshit in her sidebar irritating my corneas.

7). Other media she consumes in a dead stare from her colorless couch in the pictureless, windowless living room of her uneventful life.

Before completely giving up, and nearly becoming infected by Maggies' outlook on life (namely that there is nothing to say and that life is boring), I read her most recent post. While hardly poetic, it at least turns one of the flaming fingers into a MEH. If I can even give this blogger a clue as to a starting point to reformulate her conceptual notion of what a blog should be, it would begin with this haphazardly written and moth-eaten post.

Maggie has the toolbox to be able to write. There were no major problems with spelling, punctuation or grammar. She even occasionally throws in some funny one liners. But I reckon that she has never once looked back at her content before hitting publish and asked herself if anyone on god's green earth would give a flying thumb fuck about what she's writing. Indeed she has been "so busy furiously expressing" the square root of sweet blubbering nothing to be "bothered with editing or proofing."

Maggie, if you are not as bored with life as you portray yourself to be, you should ask yourself why you blog like you are. If you are actually that bored, wake the fuck up, cause you only get one shot at life, and contrary to what you may believe, life is hilarious and ironic and agonizing and tender and twisted and fascinating and seductive and everywhere you look there is a tale to be told. And if we don't agree at least on that, you will never, ever capture me as a reader.

Alright, class. Can we help Maggie with some arithmetic?











Class dismissed for recess. Just stay away from the monkey bars please; they're going to be, um, occupied all afternoon.

23 comments:

  1. You're good, you know that, Madame? Real good.

    I'm not blogging right now. Why? Because I can't figure out what to say. Isn't it nice of me not to subject the masses to my nihilistic and ennui-spackled bullshit? Yes. Yes, it is. Wish others would do the same.

    And as Vivian is forever telling me, only boring people get bored.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I have that written on a card in my wallet.

    ReplyDelete
  3. "only boring people get bored"

    So did anyone else click through all those links and find that article on shared parenting, which is probably the biggest waste of an article ever, because all I can think when I read it is, "Fucking duh."

    ReplyDelete
  4. Madame, I love your reviews. Well written and entertaining, I'm happy to see you contributing here on a regular basis. Thank you.

    ReplyDelete
  5. It is so fucking confusing for me to see Maggie and Dammit together so many times when you're not talking about me. I'm short circuiting over here. (It doesn't take much.)

    ReplyDelete
  6. Twitter updates. I hate people who blog about their stupid twitter time. But I do have to say one thing. This blog is actually better than her other blog, which is not saying much.

    Hit her again. She deserves it.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Oh dear god, the-one-and-only-Maggie,Dammit, your blog and this blog are beyond light years apart - like not even in the same universe, space time continuum, insert any other huge spatial place here.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Madame, your arithmetic lesson at the end had me rollin'.

    Maggie, Dammit - you're still on my mind to talk to about all you do. Your blog is one that I would actually (and do actually) read once in a while.

    ReplyDelete
  9. The more of your reviews I read, the more I realise how lightly I got off.

    Nice one Madame B.

    ReplyDelete
  10. 1. Madame, your reviews are knocking my proverbial socks off.
    2. Perhaps I've been living under a rock, but who in the crap is Penelope Trunk, and why is this blogger so obsessed with her?
    3. There is always, ALWAYS time for proofreading. For fuck's sakes.

    ReplyDelete
  11. another kick-ass review from Madame.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Maggie, Dammit - in this Maggie's case it's more like "Dammit, Maggie".

    ReplyDelete
  13. Jesus, the images on this thing are not looking how I had planned, but I guess I'm completely retarded. So I bribed the custodian into doing fixing it for me, but it is still rather tweeked.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Cal, you know the same thing happens to me. I'm lucky if I can pump out a post per week, but apologizing for not posting is pretty presumptuous and assumes that people are distraught at your lack of posts. Plus why would I reiterate that I have nothing to say, which is already obvious seeing as though I haven't posted anything?

    If you're instincts are telling you to apologize for not posting, it's probably best to apologize that you ARE posting.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Did you invent "WTFuckery?" Because I'd like to co-opt it. It made me laugh so loud on my train that people turned around and looked at me.

    This is, perhaps, the first time I didn't bother to click over and check out the blog being reviewed. You're that good.

    ReplyDelete
  16. She dissed Wally Lamb in the first paragraph I read so that was enough for me. Madame...thank you for making me love arithmetic.

    ReplyDelete
  17. Unbearable - I've never heard WTFuckery used before, but I googled it and am not the first one to have thought of it, so it's free game. I think that might be my noun of the week, too.

    ReplyDelete
  18. My problem with her is that she says she's reading "Dr." Laura Schlessinger's book about two sentences in, which makes me immediately think - stupid right wing (insert favorite gender specific noun here).

    ReplyDelete
  19. Cass - I haven't sucked any of the dicks around here. Although, some of them I would like to, metaphorically speaking.

    The only people that get their blogs ripped on around here are the ones that have submitted their blogs specifically to that purpose. If you had taken a moment to learn about the site you are commenting on, you would already know that.

    ReplyDelete
  20. Yet Another Grammar Nazi9/27/2009 9:55 PM

    YOUR initial score, not YOU'RE.

    [Insert line about stones and glass houses]

    ReplyDelete
  21. Chrisss and Casssy sitting in a tree....k i s s i n g. Just a thought...they might actually make a good team...of marsupials.

    ReplyDelete
  22. From basic operations to fundamental principles, it equips learners with a powerful toolkit, VPN Improve Gaming fostering numerical fluency and preparing them for deeper mathematical exploration.

    ReplyDelete

Grow a pair.