In lieu of a review...a game

Current movies, re-imagined as zombie porn.

Fear and Loathing in Upstate Washington

Mommybloggers love us. Is it wrong that I can't reciprocate their affection?

Let me just say it up front: I don't get it.

Today was my daughter's 16th birthday. I surrepticiously snuck off last night and planted a half dozen signs touting her birthday all along the road leading to her high school. She was embarrassed/thrilled.

Today, my son took a nosedive in the school cafeteria, beating the crap out of his face and permalocked his bike to a bike rack at school. I have to run to my boyfriend's house after work to borrow a bolt-cutter so I can rescue the bike tonight when I get home from my job, in between cooking dinner for four teens and celebrating a birthday.

This is basically a standard-issue day for Love Bites, Single Mom Extraordinaire.

But I don't blog about my kids very much. My blog is MY space. Most of my life is filled with kid activities (I do not exaggerate here, not even a little bit), but my blog is for me. That's not true of The Gonzo Mama, whose blog is primarily about her identity as a mother, interspersed with a few politically conservative posts.

Like I said, I don't get it. I love my kids, but I don't particularly want to read/write about them. So, when other moms spend all a significant percentage of their lives focusing on their mommyness, I find it...not annoying, not frustrating, but just fucking boring.

Also, there is something indefinable (for me, at least) about this blogger that just bugs me. I'm trying not to hold that against her, but still, the skin on the back of my neck spent the entire time I was reading Gonzo's blog trying to crawl its way up and over my head.

And, that's coming from the blog's resident conservamommy former Southern Baptist Sunday School teacher*. I snickered whilst imagining how some of you pinko commie heathens are going to recoil in horror, like vampires confronted by a garlic farm, from her defense of Glen Beck, complete with smarmy fat facial photo.

Gonzo Mama fancies herself a writer, and she's not bad. She's just not my thing. I don't believe there is anything she could do differently to make me care about her blog. We just move in different circles, and have different interests. VERY DIFFERENT.

The blog design is, frankly, hideous. The header color is pepto bismal pink and reminds me of my last horrid hangover. The background image looks like what I puked into the toilet during said alcoholic debacle. I can't help but think that perhaps that wasn't what Gonzo Mommy was shooting for, design wise, but since she named herself after Hunter Thompson, who the hell knows. At the least, she's confused.

I also find it difficult to muster the required enthusiasm for her politics, but I don't hate her. I just don't care. It's great that she's adopted all these children, but the fact that she then spends time online bitching about their mother's failure to pay for their back to school shopping, and that SHE TELLS THEM WHEN MOM FUCKS UP takes the shine off of her halo, for me at least.

My prescription to Gonzo Mommy is this: Girl, you need to watch a little Chris Rock. I want you to watch this entire episode. Taking care of children DOES NOT MAKE YOU SPECIAL. It makes you average.

You have this idea that you're St. Gonzo of the Rural Northwest, surrounded by evildoers, but you're AVERAGE. I am weary of self-righteous bible-thumping mommies parading themselves around rural and middle America these days, tea-bagging it up and patting themselves on the back as if they are the last residue of salt & light in this heathen world.

Goddamn. What WOULD Jesus do?

Would Jesus tell a kid that his/her mom didn't deliver on the back-to-school shopping money? Or would he just handle it?

Would Jesus listen to Glen Beck? Or would he change the channel post-haste on that slimey asshole?

Sometimes, I wish Jesus would hurry his sweet ass up and get back here so he could slap the shit out of some people. To be blunt, I'm not sure you know him like you think you do.

There are ten million snarky Jesus-and Glen-Beck worshipping mamas just like you polluting up the 'sphere right now, and most of us just don't care. In fact, I'd prefer it if y'all started up your own hen parties with warning signs so the rest of us could dodge them, and just clucked at each other incessantly.

Preferably, not online.

Lastly, when a woman who can't even bring herself to use the word "fuck" submits her blog here of all places, I have to assume that she was either dropped on her head at birth and is suffering from a TBI or is terminally stupid. Here's your rating:






*Nobody can deliver a jesus-smackdown like a recovering Southern Baptist.

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.

My skeertuig is vol palings*

The other day a friend and I went to see "Julie & Julia," a sweet little film about a culinary giant and some girl who turned her whiny little blog into a book (and then into a movie). During the film, my friend turns to me and says, "Someday I'll say I knew you when you had a blog." I scoffed, "It doesn't happen like that anymore." And it surely won't happen to me and my sorely neglected little exercise in self-indulgence. But the thing is, as Madame pointed out recently, everyone and their mother and sometimes their cat has a blog now. The field is saturated and glutted and just overrun with folks wanting to be heard above the din.

But what's worse than all those mind-numbing and misspelled and mordant (although I kind of like that bit) forays into blogging, those wastes of space, those narcissistic little microcosms, are the ones who could be so much better but just aren't. Stu strikes me as one such.

He has the ugliest template ever. I wanted to click away immediately. The ads are sucking my will to live. It looks like a spam nest run over by a train wreck with gobbets of banality strewn across the pavement of the blogosphere. I mean, look: He made me use the word "blogosphere." Jesus lord, there are no dates on the posts! Where am I? Also, the whole shebang sometimes gets all wonky with the archives and crap moving under the post.

Just scrap it. It's total crap. It is a hinderance to your writing. It couches your blog in the most off-putting way. Find something simple, roll up your archives, get organized, and for shit's sake put a date on your posts. Stu, you don't need a tab for "blogging." The whole blog should kind of be for that, right? And that header image? That's the header image of a total douchebag.

Stu, your title is so annoying I want to rips its wriggling little guts out. I mean, fuck me sideways, there are ellipses in the title. In the title! I hate it on principle. And merit. And anything else I can hate it on.

But go check out his "About" page, which is really just his Blogger profile (dude -- don't do that). He sounds interesting, right? Ninjas, the word "hogwash," Aston Martins? Well, you never would have guessed from looking at his shit storm of a blog.

Guess what? A "belter" is apparently a hot chick. Just FYI. Learn something new every day. I thought it had to do with people who can really belt out a song, like maybe Babs. But no. Hot chicks. How original. Although I'm pleased to report that the brunettes seem to outstrip (that might have been a poor choice of words -- or a perfect one) the blondes.

Something else I learned? South Africans say "y'all." I can't quite wrap my head around that.

Look, the guy's entertaining enough and he's kind of funny, but do I really need to read another site where a guy drools over hot girls, hot cars, and moderately funny things posted elsewhere on the web? No. No, I don't. And neither does the rest of the world. It's not until about three months into the blog that we get an actual post with more than a paragraph or two from Stu without a picture of a hot car or a bikinied babe or something pilfered from somewhere else. And, you know, aside from some sloppiness and ellipses overkill, it's actually amusing.

Stu, Stu, Stu... cut the crap. You're an amusing guy and your voice is engaging, but you lose me with all the extra nonsense you pepper into your blog. It's useless, overdone, and it completely undermines your genuinely likable writing. You can do better. Strip it down, tune it up, and get real. I stopped reading after about four months because I had to wade through all the flotsam and jetsam of Internet wreckage to get to YOU. And you're lucky I got that far.

You get a flaming finger because you are failing to live up to your potential and your template sucks hind tit. Clean it up, start actually writing, and I might reconsider. You've got something -- you're just hiding it. Stop.






*My hovercraft is full of eels. (Afrikaans)

Who needs reasons when you've got heroin?

A guest review from Gwynna Hurtja.

I remember the first time I experienced the artificial pleasure of opiates. I was 26, laid out in an uncomfortable hospital bed and catheterized after having kidney surgery. The nurse came in and said, "I'm going to give you something for the pain" and then he gave me a shot of Demerol in my (then) very skinny ass. Within seconds, pleasure I can only describe as uber-orgasmic coursed through my entire body. I sunk back in my pillow and said to the people that were at my bedside, "I've never felt so good in my whole life. It's like little pleasure explosions all over my body." And it was really a very accurate description of the experience. To this day, I will readily admit that I love opiates, for easing pain both physical and emotional. I'm lucky enough to have them prescribed to me and I know how to use the medication responsibly. But I realize that opiates have lead many people down some dangerous roads; Occasional enjoyment morphs into addiction and they're shooting heroin at 8 am just to get out of bed. I knew an addict who told me that she kept her stash in her night stand because she literally could not get out of bed without a fix. Yet, I've also known people that have used heroin occasionally on a recreational basis and never became dependent on the drug.

I wonder why it is that some people can use it here and there while others try the drug once and turn into junkies, willing to sacrifice their integrity and dignity over and over to get high? Is it about moral weakness? A lack of willpower? Is it a genetic predisposition? Parental failure? Mental illness? What is it?

The writer of Subdural Flow, who refers to herself as broken-hearted mom, has spent almost a decade trying to answer that. She is a mother watching her 26 year old son, Andrew, struggle with a debilitating and merciless heroin addiction. His addiction has been a decade long roller coaster of short recoveries followed by long relapses, rehabs, incarcerations, promises never kept, hopes ripped to shreds, OD's. Her situation is really quite depressing and it took me a while to read her blog all the way through. It's not that broken-hearted mom is humorless. (I thought this was pretty funny). It's that her pseudonym is apt - she is dealing with a heartbreaking situation. I can't help but feel after reading this blog, that our country's policy of criminalizing drug addiction has driven a deeply embedded knife even further into her heart. That's not to say that Andrew doesn't deserve to serve time for some of the acts he committed to feed his addiction. And it is obvious that being in the prison system is the only way Andrew seems to be able to stay clean for any length of time.

Broken-hearted mom is a competent writer. She tells her story with a beautiful candor, willing to admit she may have made some wrong turns as a mother, while also acknowledging her son's culpability in the mess he's made of his life. The writing itself isn't particularly imaginative or breath-taking. The strength is in its honesty and in the subject matter. It's written with the spirit of a person who has a lot of shit to get off her chest and probably not a lot of people in her personal life willing to listen to it anymore. Also, she's made it clear, especially in her earlier blogs, that having a junkie for a son is a source of shame for herself and her family. This is so sad to me and one of the many reasons I think our society's attitude towards drug addiction is in need of a serious overhaul. Her willingness to share the brutal details of this deep, dark family secret even under the veil of blog anonymity is very brave and I admire her for it. Despite all the grief Andrew has put her through, this woman loves her son. I find it so touching that she is still able to find reasons to be proud of him . It is those anecdotes about Andrew that really break my heart too, because they give glimpses into the really great person Andrew is beneath his addiction.

That being said, after reading blog after blog of essentially the same subject matter (Andrew, heroin addiction, Al-Anon, etc), I felt weary.

I get the impression that this blogger is content with an audience of just recovering/recovered addicts and/or those who love them.

If that is the case, then her blog is perfect as is. But if she wants to expand her audience, she will need to broaden her material. This shouldn't be difficult for her. Broken-hearted mom has led a fascinating life. The few glimpses I got into the lives of the other characters in this drama intrigued me and I longed to read more details about other aspects of their lives. The blog where she talked about trying to find her biological father felt like a breath of fresh air. Broken-Hearted Mom's "48 Things About Me " are pretty amazing and I would love for her to elaborate on some of those.

I won't be adding Subdural Flow blog to my already overflowing reader, but I will check back from time to time to see how Andrew is doing. And if a blogger can get me to care about a junkie I've never met, then I can't give her any less than


P.S. For any road-tripping junkies out there, this is a must read.

I brush my teeth everyday, therefore I blog

School is back in session, my little pretties, and believe me, I weep for my holidays too. I'm melancholy today as I stand in the corridor amidst the unbearable squealing chatter of the young with my arms folded, mourning the golden silence of summer that has ended. As I settle into the day to day, I'm beginning to wonder what the point of it all is.

The beginning of the school year always provokes déjà vu. A new batch of students arrive, their white tennis shoes like blinding fluorescent light bulbs, their eyes wide and hopeful. Crooked teeth jut out at me forming genuine smiles, but alas, their teeths' days of crooked originality with their charmingly overlapped incisors are numbered; soon they will be aligned with military orthodontic precision inside a shit-talking, ass-kissing mouth whose only language is cliche. Year after year, children unique in their artful ways are painfully shoved through the meat grinder of sameness, excreted out into the world of banality, mixed with all the other fat and protein, never to stand out as bright as they once had the potential to. A very few leave their mark on the world in some way, but most, even bright ones will end up settling for the shallow waters of life, never bothering to take off their stupid floaties to explore the deep end and see if there is anything below the surface that is worth the effort.

They will marry.

They will eat a buttload of junk food while watching T.V.

They will join a gym and lose all the weight they gained.

They will procreate, wherein the fact that they have made full use of their capacities as placental mammals and the fact that they have struggled with weight loss will completely hijack their entire sense of self, and they will think and talk about precious little else. They will start a mommy/exercise blog, and the only guiding principle for their posts will be that they must be made up, almost entirely, of the following words or phrases:

-vlog
-Wordless Wednesday
-mommy
-hubby
-baby
-potty
-contest
-giveaway
-meme
-blog radio
-twitter, tweet grid, tweets, twitter party, twinkling twitching twat (okay I threw that last one in to liven up this god awful list).

They will implode in their own redundancy and disappear from reality into a black hole of anti-art*

Which, now that I think of it, makes it nearly impossible for me to review this blog, because I cannot philosophically distinguish it from all of the trivial meaninglessness I see all around me. It cannot be separated from all the other gristle and tissue of homogenized mediocrity. It is one with the salmonella floating freely through this non-universe.

This blog is one of the many whose sole existence is justified on the basis of community engagement, encouragement (for getting through You-Name-Your-Crisis), and, I suspect, subconscious solace-seeking so as not to drown in the murky waters of nihilism. But I, for one, am annoyed with community engagement absent artful communication, I am discouraged by your empty encouragement that fails to connect with Me The Reader, and I feel depressed when I see how others find solace in your hackneyed anti-narrative.

I want more.

I want painfully beautiful sentences contained within a story that has a point. I want the writer to toy with words until they slither around my head and I savor their every nuance. I want the laugh sucked out of my throat, filling the space between me and my computer screen with audible delight. I want to jealously kick myself wishing it had been me who had thought to string those words together so eloquently. I want my mouth to gape open at talent, or at the bare minimum, effort. But mostly, I want utter generosity of self. I want the unhearthed innards of one's psyche, the best and worst of what is inside their mind. I'm greedy as fuck like that. I don't want the tedium of life regurgitated into my face with ready-made phrases while in the meantime having the shit hypnotized out of me by sidebars of blazing doom which attempt to distract me from the total and absolute lack of meaningful content.

Bookieboo -- I can honestly say that if I met you in real life and heard your amazing weight loss story, I would tell you that you look awesome and high five you for your hard work and congratulate you on your beautiful family. But here, on this turf, I'm going to dare you to take some of the travail that allowed you to give birth, make it through a difficult loss, and wake up everyday and get your ass to gym and put just an ounce of that sweat into crafting your blog posts into stories. I mean, what the shit is this? Tell some of those embarrassing tales from junior high school; don't just blog about how you talked about it on the blog radio. Don't talk to me about sex like I'm your next door neighbor's eight year old daughter; for christsake give me some substance. Knock it the hell off with the skin-deep twitter, radio and video bullshit, roll up your sleeves and get your write on and give me some art or get the fuck out of my face.

And would you please put your sidebar on a cabbage diet? At the moment it is gavaged with junk that stabs my eyeballs like pixelated syringes of poison and makes me hate humanity while simultaneously being thankful for being distracted from your annoying anti-posts.

No, Bookieboo, you don't get an B- on your report card for being a sweet mommy who lost a ton of weight. You made me question the metaphysical existence of your blog, and thus my computer, and thus the apple on my desk, and thus myself, and whether or not any of it has any meaning and I don't need that shit on a weekday in an environment where heavy binge drinking is frowned upon.

Run along to the mall now, I believe there is a sale at Abercrombie.




P.S. Your cartoon header sucks ballz, yo.


*I mean this literally and am not referencing the anti-art art movement, which actually has something to say.

Reluctant Reviewer Desperately Seeking... Anything

I have been remiss in my blog reviewing duties and for that I apologize, but I'm not going to lie. The conflict and drama involved in this process gets to me. Although the URL clearly shows that this is not a tea party hosted in your grandmother's lovely garden, folks still get all up in arms when a spanking is deservedly served. This is perplexing. Are you confused? Do you not know where it is that you have submitted your blog to be reviewed?

I think you and I both know that, yes, you do know whose hands you've placed your sweet little blog into. Your hope was that we would think that you are as awesome as YOU wholeheartedly believe you are. This causes you to be unjustifiably upset when you and your writing styles are ripped to pieces.

To further push me away, it seems that one of our lovely readers outed me and my identity to someone that I was to review. I hope that this was done with a purpose that was for good and not evil, because I found it disheartening.

So it is with all of this drama in my thoughts that I stepped away from AAYSR. And, it is here today that I step forward again to review, in hopes that the drama will stay within the level that is appropriate and intended. We love the drama, it's just that you all take it so darned personally. You can only imagine my hesitation when I was assigned today's blog. I think we all remember this.

Sigh.

But it is my promise and intention that I will not pull any punches or act as a puss cookie might while conducting this review. Integrity... I have it. Mostly.

So let's get down to business. I'll start with the "new first impression" that I got as I pushed past transgressions out of my mind, clicked onto The Reluctant Housewife and laid my eyes upon the design. Melanie has obviously put a lot into this design and I love the DIY blog designer. There is really good intention behind the design and she has it well organized. I like the look she was going for but somehow feel like it fell short. The font in the header is not going to be getting a fan club organized by little ol' me anytime soon. And while there is an extreme amount of organization in the navigation, the overall feel is still chaotic and cluttered.

I trust that this will fall into "personal preference" and this is mine. It just falls short of what I think you were trying to achieve, but I love the retro feel.

Melanie's writing feels all sorts of proper to me. I felt like I was wearing cardboard panties the entire time I read. Not entirely unpleasant, really, quite functional, but lacking in appeal and zest. However, I don't hate it. She writes well, it's just all very... meh.

You can stop groaning right now. Let me clarify. If Melanie was writing about something, anything that held my interest or that provoked my thoughts, then her style of writing would be fantastic. Her subject matter would do all the "excite me, thrill me" work. However, while I relate to her subject matter, I'm uninterested. Just as her title suggests, she is indeed a housewife and while she hates that title, she has wrapped her blog right around it.

In all honesty how am I supposed to get behind someone who spells out "shit" like this? Or comedic stylings such as this? And, isn't this all sorts of riveting?

What I'm saying here is that we have a perfectly lovely blog. There is nothing exciting, nothing that is going to crinkle up those cardboard panties. And quite honestly, I could have stuck my hand into the big ol' pot that is the internet and pulled out a blog just like this one hundreds, probably thousands of times over.

I guess what I'm saying is that your "meh" is polished is but, good lord, it's still just:








This is all sorts of really, we have to say this again? Because I know that we have told you again and again that you can be a mommy blogger, just be an interesting one, puhlease. Melanie, you've been reading here long enough to know better.

I should throw this in though. If you want to read about other people's kids and every little nuance of their farts and drooling, then Melanie isn't horrible. You know, minus the reviews.

I'm a bitch, I'm a lover, I'm a child, I'm a mother

My son is sick. He's sitting on the big olive green chair coughing as if to emphasize this fact.

I'm sick. I got sick on Tuesday while working in Orlando this week, and have stayed sick now for a full 7 days. Someone asked me today if it was swine flu. I haven't been tested, but if half of Orlando and another unnamed Florida city come down with h1n1, it may in fact be my fault.

My dog is needy. She's crammed all of her 40 pounds into an 18 inch wide section of couch so she can lay her head against my leg and sleep. I hope we haven't infected her.

My daughter is annoying. She's disappeared right when I needed her to unload the dishwasher and help me fix dinner, so I'm on mom-strike, and writing a blog review.

Today is the worst possible day for me to review a mommy blog, because I'm full up on mommying today. The last thing I want to read about is more mommying. But, here we go.

3 Bedroom Bungalow, written by ex-pat Kat, is an exposition of contemporary military mom life while overseas in England.

Kat, as kindly as possible, you're doing it wrong. Reading your blog was actually painful for me, and I don't think it's because of the cold pills.

Kat has whiny children. Kat, why are you raising whiny children? The world is full up on whiny children, and they are not, in the least, amusing. It's our job, as mothers, to remove the whiny from our kids.

I'm not going to take this job upon myself, and publicly slap your children for misbehaving, but I will say that when people encounter you and your offspring in the grocery store, restaurants, and other public places, their faces assume a look of annoyance and like me, they wish that you would do your damn job as a mom.

Just from reading a couple of blog posts, I certainly wish you would. And you are posting about it, for all the world to read, as if it's cute. It's not cute. It's so not cute.

Kat does a lot of memes. A LOT. In fact, most of Kat's blog consists of meme posts. Kat...you're doing it wrong. That isn't blogging.

This blog is not the foulest piece of excrement ever to pollute the blogosphere. I'm sure some people like it, just like I'm sure that there are lots of people out there who like Kanye West and don't think he's a complete douchebag. I'm sure there are plenty of other moms out there who absolutely adore Kat's blog.

But, in my view, it's poorly (and sloppily written) and improperly punctuated. I have no interest in it. In fact, I have no idea why she submitted to us, or thought we'd like this hot sloppy mess.

I can't even get started on the template and the busy sidebar and all of the unnecessary shit this blog has going on. It's as if Kat submitted here with literally no idea of what we generally think about these kinds of blogs, or any regard, at all, for cleaning up this blog and making it presentable for anyone.

I give her

And this:



Go here. Read. Get better. Stop doing it wrong.

Portrait of a Douchebag

Wow. Now we're getting whines from punk ass bitches that haven't even been reviewed:

Well, I hope that my blog wasn't one of the ones that got passed over, because it'a a shitload better than this boring ass blog you reviewed. Who gives a shit about a fucking German class? Wow, this blog is becoming soft. Fuck it, it's off my blogroll.

I'll just take the word of the readers that send me e-mails every day telling me what a great job I'm doing.

-Chris Mollo

Dude. Who in the fuck are you, and why do you think we give a shit?

Also, what prison were you in when you had that picture taken?

There's no sex in your violence

I have rules for myself but lately I've been breaking a lot of them. Normally, I take my blog from the queue in order. I don't skip around, and I don't pick and choose. I review good blogs and bad blogs, whatever is next on the list.

But lately, I've stopped caring so much about rules. I'm tired of reviewing crappy blogs, and I've started deleting some of the crappiest ones from our queue. I figure that if I don't even want to go to the trouble of reaming them a new asshole, because they're THAT bad, you probably don't want to read them. I also am tired of traffic mongering blogwhores who want us to send them hundreds of possible readers without actually doing the goddamn work of having a decent blog.

Fuck them. So, click, click, click. I deleted a half dozen blogs that I wasn't interested in having anyone review, including me, from the list this week.

This wasn't one of them. I briefly debated between this blog and a sex blog, called optimistically, "My OMFG Sex Blog," before deciding I just really wasn't up to reading about middle aged poon.

Instead, I opted for Textual Intercourse. Kevin's plan for this blog was, "I Write. You Read. You Respond. I Read." That hasn't happened exactly as he probably envisioned.

And that's a shame, because this is a really good blog. People should be reading this blog, and responding to it. Kevin needs comments and dialogue so he doesn't give up and stop writing.

I have no critiques of the posts, none at all. Some of them are provocative. Some, oddly enough, make me want to know more about the man who shit himself. Like, what happened the next night? Some leave me feeling wistful and sad, and remind me how easily childhood is broken. Some ask questions that probably should be asked, and aren't, like why men start out with a negative character reference when it comes to child abuse.

Some are meh, and I skipped over them pretty rapidly, but they might appeal to you.

This dude can write. He needs to do it more often. He needs to purge some of the dead wood on this blog. But, he can write. Really, when it's all said and done, that's all I require.

Kevin: Delete all the crap under "Other" in your sidebar. Look over some of your posts and decide if they're really finished. Write more.

Readers: Go do what you do.

I give him 3 stars.

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'!

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

So, um, hi? Miss me? Yeah, look, sorry about that. I kind of took an unintentional hiatus there. It's just, damn, there's this whole summer winding down thing and my rampant ennui and there was, like, stuff to do where I had to meet deadlines. And then I got this rager of a headache that totally incapacitated me and all. But, you know, sorry. Not your fault, guys. It's all me. Me and my excuses.

But I'm getting back into it, you know? Psyching myself up, getting pumped, giving myself a stern talking to about responsibilities and commitments and follow through and keeping my eye on the ball and strike first, strike hard, no mercy SIR!

And look! It's working. 'Cause here's my review.

Batspit. Bat spit? Bat's pit? Bats pit? I haven't a clue. I don't know what it means. I don't know why. Or how. The about page is short and sweet and doesn't tell me, so I'm left to my own devices, which means I think it's bat spit. But do bats even spit? If they do, is it venomous? Or is it rich in nutrients like their shit? Thoughts to think, stuff to ponder.

Whatever the hell it means, her site has a very minimalist design, and it's image-friendly, which is good because she posts a lot of her own photos. And they're pretty, with an interesting perspective.

The writing is much the same. Lea writes these poetic and nuanced and powerful posts about small things and big things. There are posts I can relate to, and her writing is spare and lovely. She's an anthropology student, which doesn't surprise me as her attention to detail is reverential and her interest in others palpable. Lea is a word nerd, and I have to love anyone who uses the word "skirr." I mean, honestly. Say it. Skirr. You want to roll the R, don't you? Lord knows I do.

I admit, I haven't read the whole thing yet. Yet, mind you. I fully intend to and I'm adding her to my reader. I started at the beginning and have worked my way up toward last November. I'm disappointed that she hasn't posted since August 13, but then who am I to talk, Miss Ennui Notbloggington herself? But Lea has captured the blogging crisis for academia, and for us. And she's so very, oh, what do I want to say... earthy and organic. There's nature and life and joy and detail, such pristine detail in her writing. It's like she's cupped the world in her hands and is examining it piece by piece as it comes along, taking its picture and putting it up close, close, close to her eye so she can see it and write about it and savor it just so.

So, what can I suggest for Lea? Just keep writing. I'll keep reading.