Fwd: fwd: fwd: fwd: cut that out, already

Hey kids! Ginny of Praying to Darwin here. Madame Bellicose asked me to fill in, do a review, post SOMETHING for the love of god. She sends her regrets, and will be back as soon as she can. I'm not at liberty to give any details; suffice it to say that when you are picking a "safe" word for the evening, maybe avoid citrus fruits, because in the heat of the moment, it's hard to remember whether it was "tangerine" or "clementine" that meant stop. And by the time you remember which was which, or even which one has seeds, enough time has elapsed for some really freaky shit to go down.

But I digress.

If you were to hack into my email, right now (don't though, please, because I am far too busy/lazy to change my passwords), you'd find a metric butt load of forwards. Forwards from well-meaning folks. Folks who think that by forwarding mildly racist jokes and kookily captioned pictures, they are making my day. And maybe making me think that they, by association, are funny. But they don't make me laugh. They make me sad. Sad that I wasted my time. Sad that although these (mostly semi-elderly) people have figured out the gull-durned interwebs, they're only using it to spam me with this crap.

I read blogs to get away from that.

And then I get to review Venom, Secrets, & Lies.

Uh oh.

Because Venom doesn't just let these high-LARIOUS forwards sit in her inbox. Nope. She turns 'em into posts. A lot. Of posts.

And when she's not posting tired email forwards, she's flogging the living shit out of something called HumorBloggers.com. To the point where I wonder what these people have on her. (In a post where she contemplates shutting the blog down, she second guesses herself based solely on the idea that changing her blog will get her punted by these people. That scares me.)

So it would be easy to dismiss her.

But I can't.

Because when she just lets loose and tells you what's going on in her life, tells you a bit about herself, or sets up her very own, original joke, she's easy to like. When she just talks to you, and stops trying so hard, she's all potential. Her writing style makes me feel like we're having a conversation at her kitchen table, over coffee laced with not-cream. And I like it.

So Venom, here's my two cents (and since we're both Canadian, there's no pesky exchange rate to get in the way): break free. This whole HumorBloggers thing you've gotten yourself into is hemming you in, restricting you, and not in a fun, S&M kind of way. I think there's someone in there, worth reading. When you get her out, on a regular basis, I'll want to read regularly.

The email forward/HumorBlogger stuff gets you a flaming finger.

But damned if I can't stop myself from giving you a star,

because I want to come to Manitoba and talk to you and not hear jokes my grandpa already forwarded me.

P.S.: Please don't think I'm hating on HumorBloggers.com. I understand the idea of community building as a reason to blog. I really do. I just don't like what it's doing to this particular blogger. So there.