Ball and Chain

I get a lot of questions about my profession. Well, I haven't published my email address, so I don't, but shut the hell up and pretend I do. If we had jobs, Raptors would probably be bankers - human suffering is goddamned funny. That, and draining tax payers' blood. But as it happens, we've eschewed commerce in favour of mental peace, and spend our time discussing the merits of chill-filtration (look it up). Somewhere in between honing predatory skills and evolving a brain larger than a peanut, my ancestors spent time locked up in small enclosures called "Cubicles" and wasted their time with inane rituals called "team meetings". Today's reviewee comes from that era in human devolution and writes at "Workforced."

When faced with a reviewing writing on a self proclaimed "Comedy" blog, one that claims to be wildly popular, we're essentially tasked with stroking someone's ego and are expected to hand out 5 stars and a handshake just for showing up. So "Don Joe" (sigh), if you were expecting giddy praise - "nice shoes old chap!" - close the tab now.

Office comedy is a tried and tested formula, to the extent that Scott Adams' silly blog doesn't even go there anymore. Gervais and Carell carried their shows, and are tolerable in bursts. So armed with all this cynicism I set off to explore the workplace.

It's bleedingly obvious the persona behind the blog is someone extremely pissed off with work. Some people change jobs, some others blog. The design is clean and minimal, I'm tired of harping about the side-bars, so whatever. Workforced (oh, you made a funny!) is wrapping up "The Jargon Dictionary". Some of it is funny, but most of the time, it's just forced. I kept waiting for the rimshot as a cue to laugh. Look big guy, lists are funny, but when in moderation. Sure this was "Jargon month", but that's like saying "I'll call this rape month and skull fuck my neighbors all August". If the lists are forced, your pictures are overkill. If I was cynical before, I'm angry now.

Can't say I haven't seen this stuff before, but I'm sure someone will chuckle. Ah never mind, you had to use a bleeding picture.

"I have no problem selling my soul, its just that I thought it would have fetched a higher price."

I liked that a little, and in the context it was in. But most of your posts look like a collection of punchlines. Stop cramming so many "jokes" into 1 post Don, whatever happened to setting up the funnies? Sometimes, I'm not even sure what you're going on about. Halfway through the review I had the feeling I was reading the ramblings of a twat on coke. Sure, you share my hatred for younglings and the attention they generate, but there you go again, squeezing a joke in every line. Hang on, what's this? Jargonization again? In fact language from this post forms the backbone for for other posts. You thought I wouldn't notice?

Look Don, you have some ideas, and plenty of scope to explore them. There's not a lot of "material" that hasn't been explored in your domain (ha! Jargon?), but it's how you present the jokes that count. Here at Ask, stories give us a chubbie (or a moistie), and this is the closest we get from you. I see you have a book on the way, good luck with that.

If you're still around Don, take it easy and mix it up. There's no need to be funny in every fuckin' line. Toy with your readers a bit, set up that damn joke, use deadpan humour more often. But for now, don't quit your day-job. A star for being somewhat funny.

A Lighter Side Order of Pseudo Tween Angst

Is it just me or has there been a distinct whiff of curry about the place lately? Sorry, not appropriate? Well too bloody bad - RedPen Reaper is here. I may be an Ask and Ye Shall Receive reviewing virgin but being an asshole? I popped that cherry a long time ago. Now that the pleasantries are out of the way; my pen is uncapped so let us begin.

Today I am reviewing a blog from India belonging to a young lady by the name of Matangi Mawley who purports to be part of the technology industry. Since I am new here I am just going find my feet and lay it all out, starting with the thing that whacks you in the face first - the template. If a manga inspired tramp-stamp hippie vibe is your thing, it isn’t bad. But it isn’t mine so this, along with the font-fuckery, does my head in. This ‘prettiness’ is especially distracting when the colours chosen engage in a passive aggressive tango with the fading blue to white background.

Squinting at all of the lovely colours made me feel a bit drunk, which inspired me to invent a game with Ms. Mawley’s punctuation. I named it RedPen-must-take-a-lengthy-sip-of-the-alcoholic-beverage-at-hand-every-time -Ms.-Mawley-uses-an-exclamation-mark. She is not a heavy poster yet in a 2 post month there are enough exclamation marks to put me into a coma. I won’t put in a link – just go and pick any month in any year and you too can play. Just keep a spew bucket handy and don’t say I didn’t warn you.

This exclamation mark orgy flows into her poetry. Yes. The P word. Though dare I say it, it isn’t all awful. This is cute but spoiled with too! many! of! these! There is also an overuse of the recently fashionable ellipsis. Why use them when a colon, a comma or even a colon of the semi variety will do? Ms. Mawley is only 22; definitely not crusty enough to have her sentences rambling into unfinished dotage.

Before I dig into the actual content I have one more whinge regarding her functional literacy. (Ha! Look at me pretending to be all expert-like. You buying it yet?) Potentially interesting stories are spoiled with an inability to format dialogue correctly which looks lazy. I am not getting too pedantic here (bugger it if I can remember if the punctuation goes on the inside or the outside of the quotation mark) but for the love of baby cheeses put each new speaker on a new line.

The content consists of the aforementioned poetry as well as short stories and soul searching. Most of it, while noble in intent, is airy-fairy. Ms. Mawley asks questions that are too big, and to my cluttered, uncultured and unenlightened mind, mean nothing. Often it is the minutiae of life that connects people but I can’t connect with her if I don’t know what the hell she is on about. What is going on here? Goddess of Sin? Goddess of What Drugs Are You On? But I can’t even take that jibe and stick with it because although she says she is 22, it is the most innocent 22 I have seen. It may be a cultural difference but even then couldn’t we get an angsty arranged marriage or something out of it?

Ms. Mawley needs to know that she is allowed to tell a story straight. While I applaud her experiments with format, her style verges on 10th grade academic emo. I did that course too. In 10th grade. This story was too choppy and didn’t get the time it needed to be meaningful and while this was quite nice, it started off vague and irritating. I want her to delve, get dirty and get that everything doesn’t have to end with a big tragic cliché. Is this a Bollywood plot device type deal? She says she is not a good daughter but offers no details. We need a pervy snapshot of this bad girl rather than all the grass is green, the sky is blue malarkey – although here she gives a little more oomph to the ‘big’ questions.

I don’t want to totally bash Ms. Mawley’s earnest spirit – she is due some props. She wrote some stuff that I was tempted to google to see if she had whacked it from somewhere else. This story was lyrical and lovely, and with a bit more work, this post could be masterful. I started to think ‘by god she has it in her!’ ... and then this happened. A talking table? This post caused me to ponder that while her English is generally faultless, there are some odd phrasings that hint at a lexicon that Western readers may find twee and trite. Regardless, that post received a nostril spraying of caffeine 39 comments. Oh, that sound you hear? That’s my blogging alter-ego surfacing its comment starved head. It has green eyes and is a monster.

In perusing her blog, Ms. Mawley took me on a journey which is inevitable for a thorough reviewer. From the ages of 18-22 this should have been a real, live bildungsroman. However there was no growth or dawning realisation; her journey is a meandering one, spending too much time inspecting belly-button fluff and looking at the unobtainable stars from start to unforeseeable finish. But I do appreciate a blog that gets me thinking and Ms Mawley did do that. I mulled over my shallow Westernised values and wondered if her subject matter and style is a new wave that I haven’t been exposed to; pseudo-tween? Perhaps her vision is purer and loftier than us Ask and Ye Shall Receiver muck-rakers are used to. Or it could be complete crap. Who am I to say from my culturally imperialist vantage point?

Call me a soft touch, but I am feeling more pokey red crayon than stabby red pen for my first review. I give Ms. Mawley 1 star for just being so darned idealistic! There you go. That exclamation mark was on the house.

Hating you would be more satisfying than this

It’s summertime. Do you know what summertime means for an educator like myself? If I'm lucky, it means I get to experience the great outdoors for a few weeks and drink ridiculous amounts of wine and lay in the sun for hours enjoying a world with people who sit up straight, who don't mouth breathe all over me, who do things in a timely manner and who have sex rather than giggle about it. It means I get to watch the complete series of The Wire without any fucking half-assed distractions. Shit is getting intense up in Baltimore and my television NEEDS me today.

If I'm unlucky, I get dragged by my bleeding toenails back to summer session to put up with all the bored flunkees and the annoying overachievers mixed into one giant hell of braces, baggy pants and jolly ranchers. And that brings us to today. Look, there are beers to be drunk, tanning oil to be rubbed on me, pages to be turned with sand filled fingers and blissful naps to be had. I need to know if Avon is gonna find out the shit that Stringer pulled like I need food. I need to show up here, give you some condensed learning, give out a flaming finger or two, or an IFLY for being so goddamn clever and get the hell out of here and get back to my cooler and my janitor twined to a pine tree, you read me?

I am not in the mood for something in between. I don't need to be distracted with brain-sucking ambivalence right now. It's painful.

I’m not in the mood for someone full of potential to time and time again fail to engage me. Lazy, really fucking lazy, well I expected that; but at the same time likeable? I don’t know what to do with that. Not in summer session, I don’t. I don’t want to straddle things I want to read and things that make me so bored I want to start forest fires. I don’t want to read posts that start off good but then lose rhythm or finish with a paintball to the face of MEH. I don’t want to read something almost lovely and then read something that sounds like the tender scribbles of a pretentious tenth grader. I don’t want to read something so utterly satisfying and telling because it intimately acquaints the reader with the writer's person and culture to then read posts with titles like "A rather nice stew" or "What I did last weekend".

Bitch, please.

I don’t want to be teased with developed descriptive abilities to then be rioted and looted by exclamation points. Which, let me tell you all a little something about the exclamation point, in case you didn’t gather it last time: she’s a cheap fucking whore. She’s disgustingly easy and she’ll hump you behind a dumpster, but if you are looking for long lasting emotional depth, she’s out. She’s off giving tail to any other sentence with the same easy, predictable, stupid climax.

Chicu, I like you. I like what you stand for and I love how you see beauty in the darndest places. But please stop making me ask myself why the shit I'm reading your blog instead of playing Adam and Eve and stuffing my face with s'mores right now. Quit writing so your friends and family know what you're up to and start writing for YOU.

For dragging me out of my summer bliss to read something I don't know how I feel about, I give you a blank emotionless stare, twinkling with indifference.

For being genuinely likeable with some actual talent, you get a couple of stars.

Most of us have jobs that are too small for our spirits.*

Oh, I’m going to get shit for this one, readers. I can feel it. Your frustration is inevitably palpable. So before we go crazily into details on today's reviewee, I am going to give you a blurb about the kinds of blogs that keep me engaged.

As far as individual entries go, I prefer blog posts with high tension and distinct personal energy. Sometimes they're sonnets, entries that flow around like a Midgard serpent, sometimes they're brief and ironic. But each of them have one very, very distinguishing characteristic that carries on throughout their whole blog: these people tell fucking stories with that incorporeal business that the collective They refers to as Voice.

Voice is hard to come by. It takes fuckloads of character to swing properly without resorting to cheap gimmicky tricks that you play for the clicks (that means memes, you a-holes). When someone has Voice, you don't need bullets for family members or fucking TMI days or favorite things to masturbate to on a Saturday, because you can glean the personality the writers want to portray distinctly based upon their writing. Voice does not require a colossal vocabulary, it does not require a battalion of metaphor. It's fueled by spirit. Or spirits. Whatever.

Sure, sometimes the blog itself is a gimmick. Perhaps it's one that may spiral into something more personal someday. But for now, Confessions of a Cashier is exactly what it says on the tin, and I love it.

Our Cashier has a voice that is effortlessly plain and snarky and completely effective at painting a life working at a gas station convenience store. This woman is...how do I put this? It's like she's an alert but lazy Scottish Terrier who aspires to be a hardcore Doberman, and ends up doing the job of a dumbass bulldog. And she knows it, and plays up to it on a level she established herself, without "Awesome Sauce" and "I'm just sayin" and all those other fucking ridiculous idioms. She doesn't say "I'm crazy, but you love me!" or "I'm a bitch, deal with it!" or make any unjustified claims. In fact, there are limited claims and exclamations throughout the entire blog. Thank you, from depths of my guts thank you, I loveyousomuch.

She goes on power trips and exacts meager revenge on annoying-ass customers. She's passive aggressive and resigned to the inevitable, she plays mind games with idiots and invents words that I am totally going to start using in everyday life. I am obsessed with her.

Sure, there are, very few, extraneous commas, and perhaps, a poor word choice, sometimes. But fuck if I don’t give a shit. There's that generic feminine template with those girly swirls that look like tramp stamps. I'd like to see something that's a bit more laminate and drab, with like, a popping header. Maybe I'll try to dig something up. Oohhh, but maybe the tramp stamp look is perfect...okay, same template, but stick with just black and white.

She's been blogging since the beginning of the year, and at first things were a little bit clunky and formal, but since then she's loosened and softened. I found myself copying the links to entries and typing little notes like, "relay that conversation or tell those stories you mention and throw away like pizza crust - bitch, pizza ain't pizza without effing crust" and then, like I fucking incepted the idea in her brain or something, because I totally did, there it is: she has the conversation instead of saying she had a conversation, and I had to grab my totem to make sure I wasn't dreaming, because I love it when people listen to me without me telling them to do so.

So get out your vexation with me now, haters. I love me a solid, lucid blog, one that's not trying to be someone else. She gets it done.








* title courtesy of Studs Terkel.

A "Schneider" Might Have Made It Better

Ladies, Gentlemen, Raptors, and Vermin -- you are getting the Abbreviated Edition of the Woperchild Review this week. It isn't that you aren't worthy of a more insightful, thought provoking set up and review and all of that. I've just spent the last couple of weeks trying to jam ten pounds of shit into a five pound bag, and am just plum tuckered. But I will not disappoint Shiner. I have committed to this, to her, to you, so I am giving you my best effort possible. (No, I am not 'phoning it in.' Stop saying that.)

Notes on a Blog: One Day at a Time, by Tabor.

Template: Clean, unassuming, pleasant. A fairly long list of crap that I don't care about in the sidebar, but most of the unimportant stuff is below the important crap (archives, about me, etc) and didn’t seem to slow down the page load, so it didn’t bother me. Some reviewers here might ask that the blogroll and followers and labels list be moved to a new page, one accessed via tabs or some links in the sidebar, but I’m not one of them. Especially since I appreciate that Blogger isn’t as easy to create new tabs with than Wordpress is. And the tags were pretty helpful in finding samples for linking. All I need is what you've done -- keep the ones I don't want out of my way.

About the Author: Tabor is in her sixties and is documenting transition to retirement, and all that comes with that -- visits with kids and grandkids, filling one's days with hobbies and activities and such.

She comes across as well-educated and intelligent, if occasionally a bit pretentious. Case in point -- her template has been modified to refer to Comments as "Elements of Repartee,"  (Well, lah dee dah.) and she uses a "Zen" label. She seems like a nice person, a helpful person, one who goes with the flow. Generally calm and non-disruptive. Introspective, free-spirited, having a fondness for nature. (Okay, maybe not always.)

But I’m not sure that makes for the most compelling blog fodder to someone who doesn't know you.

Content: Well written and consistent, but based on the subset I read, a bit mundane. It comes across a lot of the time like the opening paragraphs of a novel, but doesn’t really ever get to any of the crisis or inciting incident or rising action or any of that. I suspect that if I knew Tabor in real life and considered her a friend, this would all be much more interesting, as it would probably be pretty enlightening about what goes on inside that head. But I don’t know her. So I found myself getting halfway through a post and wanting to skip ahead to start the next one far too often.

I should clarify -- it wasn’t that she writes poorly or anything. It isn’t even that she’s necessarily boring. It’s just that that slow-paced, ‘today-I-worked-in-my-garden’ approach is just simply not where I am right now, or even anything I can get my head around. Accuse me of having ADD, call me impatient, whatever. The fact is that those things that are fascinating and appealing to a sixty something year old woman with lots of time on her hands do not always appeal to me.

Now I need to issue a caveat -- as I alluded to above, my schedule over the last few weeks has been a bit brutal, so I did not have a chance to read as much of this as maybe I should have, (I read early posts, late posts, and spot-checked in between) so it is very possible that there was a ton of drama that I just plain missed. With six years’ worth of content, anything is possible. So often, when I turn in a review that summarizes the content the way I see it, someone responds "Well, if you’d read the whole thing, you’d have seen a lot of posts that were very different." To which I’d respond -- "I’d have loved to have read the whole thing, but I have this whole ‘life’ experiment going on the side, so I have to just do the best I can with the time I have." This mindset does apply here.

But here's the thing -- I did find some pretty cool shit. I just had to go pretty far before I found it. So, I am willing to bet that there's more of that there. And you sure as hell could do worse than to spend a few hours digging for the odd gem or two here.

What to do to Improve: Sometimes I hate this category because I feel like the only way I would suggest to improve is to write more like me, and I am empathic enough to realize that variety is the spice of life, and some people don't want to read Hunter S. Thompson all the time, and sometimes want a little Eat, Pray, Love or something. The fact is, Tabor's not doing anything wrong, per se. Just because I didn't find it hilarious or cathartic, which is often what I look for in reading material, doesn't mean it's bad or needs improvement. And it's clear that I'm not in her target demographic, so I guess I can't in good conscience tell her to pander more to former Romanian circus trapeze artists or CIA operatives or what have you.

The Verdict: After all of this, I'm going to go with two stars.



For those of you wondering about the title, who might be younger than me, One Day at a Time was a sitcom in the 70's. Schneider was the wise-cracking building super with a heart of gold and a brain of lead.

I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now

Trillian,

I realize you're only 16. That makes it easier for me to forgive some of your more angsty or boycrazy moments, since we've all been at "that age".

But you presumptuously call yourself a writer and you've submitted your blog to be critiqued here, so I'm going to attempt to treat you like an adult and be bluntly honest because I genuinely like you and think you deserve that.

Have you noticed that as soon as you were diagnosed with bipolar disorder (over a year ago), you have written about little else and your blog has become super emo? I'm not trying to discount your illness, but do you have anything else going on in your life that you could possibly write about?

UN Peace Mission to Bombay but never write about it. You do the same thing with a school trip to Singapore. You actually write about a school trip to Malaysia, but it ends up coming across as a journal entry where you literally talked about cute boys and what you bought when you went shopping at the mall. Where are the hilarious stories involving the people you met? Where are the descriptions of the things you saw on your trips, written so I can imagine being there?

Hell, you even spent some time locked up in an institution of sorts, and all you could do is give us a description of the people who were there with you. You've given me a cast of characters, but no actual play. I feel gypped.

I'm frustrated, because I know you can write. You use correct spelling and grammar, which is amazing when most of the reviewers get stuck with the blogs of grown-ass adults who have no fucking clue. You write about things other people are scared to. You can turn a phrase beautifully and take pride in your writing when you take the time. I want more of this.

But 80% of the time, you only talk about your current mental state or write pretentious pseudo-artist crap. I'm not sure if you've noticed, but we don't have a lot of patience for people who think writing about their angst makes them deep, introspective and unique.

Here's some big-sisterly advice from someone who's dealt with depression herself: if you wallow in shit, your cuts are only gonna get infected.

I'm not telling you to repress what you're feeling, but just to avoid things that trigger your depression and anxiety. Yes, writing about pain sometimes helps one deal with it, but there's a difference between that and relishing the pain to the extent that you end up defining yourself by it. And you really have much more potential than just a fucking definition, chica.

While we're on the subject of immersing yourself in your drama, why aren't your comments set to be moderated? Since you have an ongoing problem with trolls, it makes me think you enjoy the antagonism.

The problem is . . . I actually agree with the trolls half the time. I don't agree with how abusive they are, but I can see where they're coming from. You mention your maids, your tailor, spending a shit ton of money on shopping, and your FIVE expensive cameras. True, you have a mental illness and abusive/emotionally distant parents, but nonchalantly acting like a rich bitch makes it hard for me to feel that much sympathy for you.

Some more big-sister advice: I really think you should do some volunteer work for people less fortunate than yourself. It'll help put things into perspective, give you something to do other than think about your drama and provide blog fodder that will probably be more interesting to your readers.

And PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, take your fucking pills. Who gives a shit if you get fat? Imagine all the mentally ill people who can't afford their medication. You being flippant about your pills is completely offensive and makes you look like a self-indulgent princess.

Anyway . . . because I actually, truly, love it when you quote a relevant song, book, or poem at the end of your posts, these are for you:


You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all a part of the same compost pile.






That I must be their scourge and minister.
I will bestow him, and will answer well
The death I gave him. So again good night.
I must be cruel only to be kind.
Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.

It's time to grow up, in your blog and your life.

Just a few years ago I was a broke-ass twenty-four year old girl working at a bar. I don't know how many of you have worked at bars, but believe me: after hours, our waitstaff partied like fucking rock stars. An hour after close people are snorting coke off the bar, fucking in the manager's office and bitching about having no money (irony, bitches). Industry people all have successful life plans that begin with "when." When they own their own bar or when their band makes it big or when they move to Austin or when their boyfriend gets out of the army and proposes their lives will be so much better, the whole thing is very MTV. Their lives are so much harder than everyone else's, their problems are more relevant and colossal, and nothing is ever their fault.

So when I initially started reading Out of the Ordinary, which has since evolved into Sweet Indiscreet, I was totally looking forward to archives full of sex, drugs, hyperbole and zero accountability.

SusieQ (needs to update her "About" page), recently swapped her life as a barmaid for life in a cubicle, which is one of the most asinine transitions a human being will ever have to encounter--almost as asinine as moving from Finland to Scotland. Office politics are all gossipy "did you hear that Barbara left early yesterday?" Instead of "You cocksmoking bag of whores, why didn't you fucking text me last night? I was waiting for you at the bar. And then I drank a bottle Wild Turkey and totally blew Vinnie in the server's alley, and the floor was all wet and I slipped and choked a little, it was so weird. Omigod, don't tell Brian. And...I'm sorry, I know you like Vinnie, but just trust me, he's not worth it...bitch, you know not to leave me alone like that."

But SusieQ gave me nothing nearly as juicy as coke parties and exhibitionism. What the hell kind of bar did she work at? Sure, she’s a bit of a slut and a drunk and an overall hot mess with dramatic, backstabbing friends who accuse her of dramatic backstabbery, and it's all very fun. She seems to have a great deal of ex-friends. It's an industry thing. Even though she isn't the best writer or the best storyteller, the stories themselves are compelling enough.

Unfortunately after the first few months, most of her entries are about being bored, and then we just stop hearing about cool industry drama altogether, and I love industry drama. She gets a second job as a shopgirl selling cigarettes and porn, continues life as a barmaid, and does all of this while studying accountancy and talking about make-up and money and boredom and taking responsibility for nothing and you know what? It's fucking boring.

She plays the just the tip game all the goddamn time, promising to write about something eventually. She starts telling stories that could prove fascinating with no follow through, a blogging habit that appears to leak into her life at school and work. It's infuriating.

If I were to pick one post to sum up Susie's blog, and her life, it would be this one. Random thoughts squeezed together, lots of saying and no doing. You think you deserve a good grade in class? DO THE WORK ON TIME. No one will hire you? DO NOT BE LAZY.

You say you have fantastic stories? TELL THEM. And tell them well, don't fuck around with lethargy and procrastination. Now, let that same kind of dedication carry on over into your personal life.

Sure, she's a brave runaway. I can't imagine what it was like to move to a foreign land at the age of eighteen and cut off myself from my family and friends, emotionally and financially. I can't fathom that. But I am very familiar with broke and in debt, I am familiar with pulling 70-hour weeks in the thankless service industry, I am familiar with student loans, I am familiar with late payments and asking for extensions on rent.

If SusieQ wants to change her life around, she needs to stop spending money on make up and $4 cups of coffee when she is SIX MONTHS BEHIND ON HER BILLS. To save money and get off the couch to lose the weight she complains about, she needs to walk to the store instead of paying to have her groceries delivered. She recently gave up smoking (good girl, cigarettes eat wallets for breakfast), and she found herself a full time job, and those are good steps in the right direction. Still, she's going into accountancy but does not account for herself.

Wake up, SusieQ. It is time to be a fucking grown-up, about your blog and your life. It sucks. But along with it comes some personal clarity that I hear gets better every year, and along with that personal clarity comes better blogging. Tell your stories with self-awareness and responsibility, these things are actually good to have. Don't be afraid of it. You are a frustrating individual with interesting secrets, but you're honest. For some reason I care about you and I want you to do well, as boring as your blog can be. But for that reason alone I'm not going to flaming finger your ass. Probably because I identify. A little.

Clown Wars

We’re going to dive straight in this time, my loves. We have a lot to discuss and the air here is curdling. A storm is coming and I must send Fanny out for emergency supplies. We are all out of Ovaltine and the goose fat dwindles. So.

This week’s lucky sausage calls himself the Counter Culture Clown (his name is Bob) and promises us ‘Seltzer Water, Flying Pies, and Social Resentment’. He’s a cheeky stripling from Minneapolis who would dearly like to become a stand-up comedian. His shtick is something called ‘Rant Therapy’, a reasonably self-explanatory pastime that involves what in my neck of the woods we would call ‘going off on one’ about various gripes in an ostensibly hilarious manner. He has a photo of himself sporting beard and cap and wry half-smile. So far, so eminently punchable.

Received wisdom has it that blogs purporting to be humorous seldom are, in much the same way as a man wearing a T-shirt proclaiming himself to be the ‘World’s Greatest Lover’ will be a let-down between the sheets and a ‘Family Fun Night’ will be as much fun as an impacted bowel. The statement of intent inherent in a blog title such as ‘Funny in Shadows’ gets my hackles up straight away. You should never say you are funny, just as you should never say you are pretty. It is tacky.

Normally, when I review a blog, I start at the first post and read backwards until either it ends or Fanny has to fetch the defibrillator. With Bob, I took a different approach and started with what he terms his ‘best of’. I read on and on and I am afraid to say that I did not laugh. This kind of comedy is not for me. It is observational humour of the ‘hey, have you ever noticed that microwave dinners are kind of gross?’ variety, with lots of smutty language and sixth-form iconoclasm and very little in the way of original ideas.

But comedy is subjective, to spank a tired donkey. And Bob has an audience who, although small, are appreciative. And he came in the top 25 in the ‘Funniest People in the Twin Cities’ competition. And he is only twenty-two (just as well – if he were thirty-two, I may well have wept, and my tear ducts have lain dormant for several decades now). He is just practising, picking topics seemingly at random and ‘riffing’ on them, usually at great and trying length. I have no doubt that he will get better and that he will get his own ideas and that my opinion matters not a jot to the tastemakers of Minneapolis. I still found him to be an objectionable little bugger, though.

Now, my usual rule of thumb here is to review the blog that was submitted and ignore all subsidiary works. However, I could not help but notice that Mr Bob keeps another blog, called ‘Disassemble the Universe’, on which he posts his poems and short stories. I couldn’t resist taking a quick squizz. I wish he had submitted that blog instead of the comedy one. Not that I think he is Saki reincarnate or anything, but he can tell a tale. If Bob were here with me now, tucked up on the love seat with a gin-and-Bovril in hand and my Fanny curled about his feet, I might give him some highly presumptuous advice. I might say Bob, why not combine your ranty style of comedy, your scatological surrealism and your talent for story-telling and push things as far as you can to write some truly deranged stories? I believe there is a genre called Bizarro that you might find quite droll. Fiction could be the key to transforming your comedy, injecting it with some much-needed originality. Everyone has already observed your observations. I think it might also be larks to explore the clown motif a little more. A spot of research into sacred and ceremonial clowning might prove particularly fruitful. Your blog hints at something dark, but to me you are as sinister as a bright May morn.

Now the sky sounds like my stomach after a night on the clams and it is time to go. In summation I would suggest that Bob is a far better story-teller than he is a gag-man, and I would dearly love to see him striving for bleeding-edge ideas. I would like to go back to Bob’s blog in a year and find him with a list of publishing credits as long as Fanny’s arm (she does have preternaturally long arms. We always thought the rest of her would catch up, but we were so very wrong) and a reputation for clever as clogs live shows that leave his audience in stitches both metaphorical and not.

Overall, however, I’m afraid it’s a finger.

Word is the bird. No, that can't be right...

Before, when I first started this gig, I was trying to avoid putting up a preview of the list of blogs for the week because inevitably, as the last two weeks have proven, once I make it official a reviewer has a crisis and cannot post. Which is lame.

If done properly, reviewing take a whole lot of time and can be pretty stressful. This shit ain't breezy. Not everyone is willing to just get blitzed and leak out whatever immediate reaction they have to a blog as "accurately" as possible, probably because they want to do a good job. Not like me, apparently.

So without putting this off any longer, and with hopes I'm not cursing any reviewers to drop out of the race this week due to currently unforseeable events, here are the blogs of the upcoming reviewees:


Funny in Shadows

Out of the Ordinary

Split Ends and Sob Stories

One Day at a Time


Word.

Immortally Insane

In a series of comedies, Spielberg portrayed us as vicious bloodthirsty predators bent upon carnage. I particularly liked the part when cousin Trevor pretended to be interested in that skinny kid, in an I-will-tear-from-limb-to-limb way. The human condition is pitiable as it is (No fangs? Enjoy spinach with those molars), but a lot of them seem to pile the crapfest on themselves. Primates revel in superlatives, even in situations that don't warrant them. I'm the most normal person, I'm RANDOM, I'm hilarious-really-hilarious and so on. You say you get antsy once a week? You must describe yourself as schizophrenic, then. Salaried, married with a kid? Clearly neurotic. I'm thrilled so many inmates in my neighbourhood mental institution are avid bloggers.

After digging through piles of blogs that try too hard, one can hardly be blamed for being cynical looking at "Crazy Mom Tats!" (thanks a lot Shiner). Crazy Friendly Mom? Implied spousal abuse? Joy. She's claims to have a "warped sense of humour" - but no tattoos. Super. James - scotch on the double, raw.

Easy stuff out of the way. Doesn't anyone read the goddamn FAQ anymore? Boring template, over-sized header, cluttered sidebar. Stop using that signature. I'm partial to the dropdown archives you sport, hang on to them. Here are some tutorials you (and oh-so-many-more) can use.

"Crazy Mom Tats!" started blogging less than a year ago. I like visiting the first post on a blog, it usually serves as a make-shift about me when a formal one is missing. I'm not a cat person (dogs are tastier), so I skipped right past that. Mommy blogger with 4 cats who lives in "La Maison du Psycho"? Must you make it so hard?

But what's this? CMT survived surgery on a non-malignant brain tumor. I guess when you get your cranium split open and brain tickled, your sense of humour changes for the better, and there's some evidence of that. There's more about her here. Southern Belle who can "drink, swear, tell dirty jokes, and play poker", and one of her kids is bi-polar. She's a doting mother, and I can see where she's coming from (Momma Raptor loves us a lot - the three she didn't feed on). CMT, combine that with your previous post, make it your "About me" and link it up.

There's a lot of posts about "tatting" and networking with other "tatters". Seeing as it is "psychotatter.blogspot", I can't say much about it. Not my blend of malt, but fun for your friends I'm sure. We're more interesting in writing in these parts, and lets talk about that. There are WAY too many full sized pictures in your posts. Spoken-style writing is not my thing. It gets annoying really fast, and can never be taken seriously.

For most part your blog reads like a day-to-day journal with the occasional "ha" moment. Paint a picture with words CMT, life's a lot more fun that way. Edit, edit and edit. Cut out dialogues, and the tiny unnecessary details. Stop using your blog as a picture wallet. I get it that you want to protect your kids' identities, but why bother with cropped photos at all? The only time I'll look at censored pictures is when they blur out the naughty bits in Japanese porn.

There are promising starts, but all those pictures make me think of you as that lady in the fast food line who won't stop yacking about her teenagers. Here's a thought experiment. Take any post, complete with pictures and captions. Cut the pictures, delete the captions and publish whatever's left. Voila, you just *wrote* your very first post!

Stop embedding pictures and videos of Mad men already, we get it that you like the show. Set yourself mental targets. If this post was half as long and twice as snarky, you'd move from the realm of mommy blogger with a hobby to family woman who writes. Stop indulging in memes, blog awards and other inane shit.

You have plenty to write about - that scar on your head, your creaking knees, diabetes, your job, your hobbies. Get cracking and concentrate on the writing. When you do, you're capable of stuff like this. I get the feeling you can write, and have great stories to share. You're a whole lot better than most mommy bloggers who turn up at I WILL FUCKING TEAR YOU APART.blogspot and expect 5 stars.

You could split what you have into two blogs. One for "tats" and that side of the world, and one for you. A brain-op survivor, family woman, southern gal - find that voice and write your ass off.

A purported "crazy mom" with hundreds of pictures on a cluttered blog would earn many a flaming finger. But for the odd redeeming tidbit, and for giving me some hope for mothers-who-blog I'll lower my claws and give you a "meh”

The Heart Has Reasons That Reason Does Not Understand

Reading blogs with this site reminds me of life drinking amongst amateur microbrewers, for obvious reasons. Some of them just taste good and get me appropriately but conversationally lost, without the Penn-State-battle-axe-jungle-juice-frat-party-in-your-brain hangover.

(I been chillin with this fucking conglomerate of microbrewers lately. If I were better at chemistry and had a developed palette ((that is the wrong version of that word, I can fucking feel it)), I might crack myself at that. Take a crack, if cracks were chances and places in need of plaster or slipping into. Into slipping. Someone gave me grape vodka, and I was like fuck you bitch, you don’t know me, but I drank it because hey. You know. There’s a phrase there that I forget. Sometimes there is slipping in regards to cracks, and as much as I try to avoid it, until very, very recently--basically until I started reviewing here, and even after--I felt like cracks and slipping into things against my will were slurping my life away.)

(I am drunkish.)

Literature is all the rage right now. Everyone’s all, “I’ve always wanted to be a librarian” and I’m all, “no, you’ve always wanted to read shit and tell people about it” and Bittery Books (sorry, it's BitterLY Books, but my typo is better) was has taken that world of drive and dry ambition, the fantasy one where librarians are sexy and work without lipsticked snaggleteeth and thumbsmudgy glasses, and ripened it into a blog.

It’s a good looking blog, sans snaggleteeth and thumbsmudery, although the header looks like trig homework without all the scratchy erasure marks. Still, trig made me bittery, so title? Well met. I super enjoy the booming categorical buttons on the sidebar, actually, because they’re all like, okay. You know when you’re at a bar and that one burly gorilla catches you eyeing his bald eagle denim vest, and he’s like, “WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT” and you’re like “nothing” and he’s all, “SO I’M NOTHING” and you’re all, “no, I mean, nice beard” and he’s all “FUCK YOU, SUGAR” and you’re all “make me” and then he swings his sirloin fist and you duck, and he smashes the wall and you buy him a shot of Wild Turkey he’s all, “You’re okay. So how do you feel about OUTER SPACE?” That’s how I feel about the sidebar.

So he tells you about shit he read on outer space, and you try to give an opinion but you haven’t read the same books as him, so it’s hard because you have no constructive background to contribute to the conversation. But he’s not really giving a formulated opinion either, he’s just quoting and regurgitating shit that he’s read, and although his memory is impressive and his topics are vast and his words are slightly poetic, it’s really a one-sided conversation and all you want to do is pull out and get back to your friends, where you have an actual say in things. You’re not there to get into a referential pissing contest, even though his cultural reference idioms are witty and relevant and surprisingly timeless (would you recommend this book to Mel Gibson?). If you're not paying veryclose attention, though, you'll miss them. Plus, you know. You're fucking drunk.

So you casually and politely try to jump in, but he just keeps the whiskey coming and it’s obvious he understands what he’s saying and your opinion is irrelevant, even if he doesn’t offer any thoughts of his own other than a summation of what he’s read and a short blip of, “you might like it, if you’re into that whole economic responsibility thing.” This tells me fucking nothing anyway about him other than the fact that he’s into reading fact-based, in-the-know shit, and he remembers everything.

The writing is informative and funny, if you can identify. Most entries are all the same informative summaries of usually interesting categorical non-fiction, but unless I’m actively scanning for it in the library, it’s kind of pointless. After awhile I just skipped over to the "would you recommend this book to so-and-so" portions of each entry. I don’t care how tasty the actual words are, how well-written they are, if you can't convince me to care about the topic-at-hand in the first place, if I can’t get drunk off of your words and feel anything...I wish I had another reason to stick around, but there’s more flavorful booze to be had.

Of course, this blog is supposed to be a guide to interesting non-fiction, and it excels at being a reference guide. But I feel like if you splooged a bit of yourself into descriptions, if you gave us a reason to read these books other than a basic description, you could be far more successful at it. I would come back more often. Seriously.

Howzat

And so, my little coddled eggs, we are off to India! It’s all very exciting, especially when certain delicate matters have prevented one leaving the island for longer than one cares to remember. I have taken the liberty of providing you all with a packed lunch, as it’s going to be an interminably long journey. My Fanny has filled the thermos and I believe we are ready to go.

Of course, at the moment one could fly to the barefaced moon and still find someone talking about the football, so I shouldn’t have been surprised that the first post I read on the blog of today’s little chum concerned the World Cup. Bit of a tender topic for an Englishman at the moment. Not that I was particularly invested – more of a petanque man myself – but Fanny was near suicidal. I had to stop her doing herself a mischief with her crocheted Bobby Robson. There’s a lot a cricket talk on this blog as well. I would like to suggest that Rohan just go ahead and marry Sachin Tendulkar. I have always suspected cricket to be a physical version of Mornington Crescent; they make it up as they go along and everybody apart from me is in on the joke. But we’ll ignore the sport and press on.

I would imagine that the first thing most people will think when they click over to Rohan’s blog is, ‘bugger me, these posts are long’. It would be appalling hypocritical of me to criticise verbosity - I have written postscripts that would put Proust to shame – but to the casual reader, Rohan’s vast scads of text might be a trifle off-putting. I would wager that, if polled, eight out of ten cats would as like as not advise Rohan to at least halve the length of his posts.

As I read on, though, I found myself growing increasingly fond of Rohan. I first had a feeling I was in good company when I read this. That tickled me, especially the bit about Grand Guignol violence and torrents of hot blood. It tickled me even further that he sympathises with Salieri and manages to reference Brian de Palma, Kimi Raikkonen and P.G. Wodehouse in the same post. I knew for certain that he was a good egg when I read his description of things he likes in films,

Noir. Mood pieces. Vivid colours and grand camera movements. Humour. Decadence. Amorality. Snappy dialogue. Candles flickering in old mansions. Sex and violence.

And realised it tallied pretty much exactly with what I want in life.

This raises an interesting question. Do we really give two hoots for the casual reader? Should we cut ourselves off mid-flow to satisfy those with such short attention spans that they find anything longer than 200 words intimidating? Do we want to appeal to those who do not find us appealing in our honest, natural state? Admittedly, the last person who saw me in my honest, natural state is still on some serious medication, but it’s only Fanny and so you can’t really tell the difference.

For every clowder of kitties sashaying away from Rohan’s writings with their tails in the air and their little bottoms pursed like disapproving mouths, there will be two throbbing felines eeling round his legs in appreciation. I think I will have to stop this cat metaphor right now. Cats make me uneasy. They have lizard eyes and would kill you in your sleep as soon as look at you.

Anyway, what I am trying to say is should we really give a tinker’s cuss how long his posts are, if he is an interesting man with a wide and eclectic frame of reference who can turn a phrase and likes to have a good old think about things? I have paddled in a lot of pap while wearing my reviewer’s cap (it’s a little feathered number – simply cunning) and I have to say that I would rather read 2,000 words of something that’s at least trying to be thoughtful and entertaining and chunkily nourishing than 200 words of some self-promoting mooncalf mooing about her tits (and I have read enough of that to be referring to nobody specific).

But Rohan has been through all this before. He knows who he is but the ether-flesh is weak and it bothers him that he doesn’t have more readers. Perhaps, Rohan old stick, you should try and vary things a little. I understand that sometimes nothing but a dissertation will do, but the elegant ramble is a tricky thing to pull off and can sometimes err towards the tedious, as I well know. People don’t always want to sit down to a twelve course meal. Sometimes we are equally as satisfied by a small yet perfect mouthful. Actually, that’s a terrible analogy, because if Fanny served me with a mere twelve courses I would send her back to the kitchen with a flea in her ear, or something considerably more uncomfortable, but you get the general idea. Maybe it would be more appropriate, given your love of films, to remind you that a short can be just as powerful as a feature.

You might also consider varying your style a little. You have an amusing, self-deprecating voice, but it can become a little monotonous over extended periods of time – it might be interesting if you stepped back a little, cut down on the gags and really showed me something. Remember, editing is your friend. It is my Moriarty, but it is your friend.

So, now that I have finished clarifying the colour of the kettle, I will leave this place of hot dust and head back to my cool and clammy native climes. If I must be forced to a conclusion, it would be that variety is the spice and conclusions are for the unimaginative.

Three stars, Rohan, and a firm handshake.

More Like Trans-Siberian DORKestra

You think any of these bloggers could embody neoclassical prog rock? Yeah, prolly not.

Bit every single one of them has posted in this fine month of July. They are living, breathing, consistently updated blogs.

The Blog Less Read

Bitterly Books

Uttarakhand and I

Crazy Mom Tats!

To A Blogger Quitting Young

Someone once wrote "Blogging is mostly like pissin' off the back porch. Unless you're a 'celebrity blogger' of some species or another the enthralled blog-o-masses generally speakin' haint much gonna be interested in watchin' you piss off your back porch." Despite the poor vernacular and grammar, there’s a lot to the general concept there. Blogging has become the embodiment of that age-old philosophical question about an infinite number of monkeys, an infinite number of typewriters, and an infinite amount of time. Click that Next Blog button in Blogger and 99 out of 100 times, you will be presented with a steaming pile of feces. Or a warm bowl of piss.

That probably sounds cynical, but then again, there’s a metric assload of dreck populating Wordpress and Blogger, interrupted only very occasionally by a small niblet of something that is not shit.  Sometimes you find that nugget of goodness because everyone and their brother has a link to it from their blogs (which happen to consist of no original content at all, by the way) or you just get lucky and find the rare undiscovered gem.

It must be like how it felt to be a gold miner and find a new untapped vein.

Why have I waxed rhapsodic about blogging like this? I hope the answer is somewhat obvious, but I think I may have discovered a rare untapped vein of a gold-like substance in the proverbial pile of shit-encrusted hay. It isn’t pure gold, but there is enough golden goodness in it to keep a jaded old pisspot like me entertained for a few hours.

Dana is a young woman from America who has chucked her conventional life in favor of backpacking around Australia for six months. And at first, I was prepared to beat her to death with the nearest blunt object I could find, as I was met immediately by advertisements, no "Who I Am", no overt "What is this blog about", not even a link to a Blogger profile. Just a dull been-used-a-thousand-times-already template and an archive. I decided to tackle Dana completely chronologically and was immediately put to sleep with the tedium of reading about trip packing and preparations, or the lack thereof.

I almost quit there, sure I was in for a bout of tedium tremens. If this was going to be a blog consisting of lists, I wasn’t going to make it. I don’t care how many snarky comments are made after each packed item, this was not writing. But I take my charge here seriously, so I persevered.

And I am sort of glad I did. Once Dana reached Australia and ultimately left the city of Sydney, something shifted in her tone. Suddenly I was a participant on this trip. I was in the small towns and backwaters with her, living in hostels, couchsurfing, working odd jobs for food money, scratching alien insect bites, worrying about creepy old men (an odd sensation that, since, by troth, I am a creepy old man myself).

In all fairness, she did not make me want to leave the comforts of my lovely witness-protection-program home in the suburbs and run off to Oz and live the life of the bohemian, and there were enough instances of trivialities that mattered not to me or most others that Mark Twain and Bill Bryson need not fear losing their dominance of the travel writing genre to her.

But in the pile of shit that is the blogosphere, she was a breath of not-smelling-like-shit air. She was funny and appropriately self-deprecating. Yet she used enough description and background info that I never felt lost or confused. She wasn’t the world’s greatest writer, but she was a hell of a lot better than most bloggerers I have read.

...

Did you see what I just did there? I used the past tense, and not the present tense. She WAS funny, not She IS funny. Although Dana’s trip was meant to last till right about now (mid-summer 2010), her last posting was in March. A bit of a cliffhanger too, as she was just relating how she took a job in a town that was cut off from everywhere else by a bunch of floods. Which has me wondering what happened? What happened next? Why did she abruptly stop writing about it? Did something happen to her? Or did she just get tired of pissing off her back porch without anyone watchin’?

No one commented on any of her posts, except for herself. One gets the impression that her only reader was her mother, as she kept apologizing to her mother about her foul language.

So, I am reviewing a dead blog, but a blog that once showed great promise. And I don’t know where that leaves me. Smart lass, to slip betimes away from fields where glory does not stay...

Two stars. Minus one for being a quitter.



Note: This review was not due till tomorrow, but I needed to get it off my plate. So you get it a day early. All complaints can be written on a piece of jagged glass and rammed up your ass.

Dick Move, Jargon Juggler.

I am an American. For the most part we are an English speaking country, but there is no amendment or law that explicitly states, “We speak English here, take your other worthless language and go suck on a dead dog’s nose.” Of course, this is a good thing, because other languages aren’t worthless at all, especially not to the people who speak them.

Similarly, there’s no official language of AAYSR. It’s not like we called together a reviewers gin rally and debated the semantics of our FAQ over bucks and Tom Collinses (Tom Collinseses?). Since the FAQ is written in English, we arrogantly assumed like the vainglorious dicks we are that all submissions would subsequently be in English.

Obviously, some asshole out there decided that he was entitled to a review, even with having less an a third of his posts written in a language I understand, as if he's testing me. You sonofabitch, I got a 34 on my ACT because I test so good. Pop quiz, jargon juggler: who's got two fists full of round bombs with fuses of scorn for bilingual bloggers testing my lexical patience? This girl. Dick move, jargon juggler. Dick move.

But I thought, you know, hey--this guy’s got to have some reason for doing this. Hopefully he'll reveal himself as some kind of pretentious fuck, and then we can set him on fire with leftover bottle rockets from this past weekend's patriotic debauchery. Maybe he'll be counterfeit and full of shit. Maybe he'll nearly plagiarize but not quite, and circumvent any accusations of plagiarism because of the nature of the concept he's addressing, thus brilliantly demonstrating the idea he's floating--but did he know that I've read that book? Does it matter?

Fine, so I didn't necessarily predict he would do that last bit, but motherfucker did itnonetheless.

And by golly, I fucking like him. He turned out to be feisty and hilarious and obnoxiously ostentatious because he is totally a Bombay hipster (which he would adamantly deny, true to hipster code), and I love that kind of unapologetic bastardization of self. Sure, some of this poetry crap is just nonsense, but I assure you: although it doesn't look like a standard poem, this blog is all poetry, even if a little wordy and rugged (the entry at the bottom), even if sometimes he comes across as a kind of drunken swan, where you can see how elegant he could be if he weren't such a flashy fuckdunce.

His template is horseshit, the navigation is a sterile, complicated hospital nightmare, sometimes the links lead to streams of shrapnel html and most of the writing is in fucking Hindi. Opening each quarter-monthly archive link is like passing around a live fucking hand grenade. There is no profile, no comments, no way to go back to a homepage, no way to click on an individual entry. He hasn't posted in a couple of months, which makes me believe he either joined Facebook or Twitter, where his brevity could be more immediately appreciated by his peers.

This guy is good. This guy is really, really good. And he fucking knows it. I'm guessing he's a professional (apparently he has already written some film scripts). He's above detailing his life or personality for any potential readers, because if they don't get it, if they cannot just deduce his dreams and self from his poetry, which "does not burnish on paper as much as it embers in the mind," why would he want them reading his blog?

So, Manish Fuckwad, you are a cocksucker.

I want you to take your superior word choice, your smooth, jerkface prose, and your aloof, cryptic layout back to Bombay's version of Brooklyn and dump it in a trash bin at the local ditchwater coffee shop.


Then I want you to straighten up your thick-rimmed emo glasses and start over with a simple template with a plain, classic header that's just your title and a drop-down archive. I want you to tag your posts with "English" or "Hindi" so people can just skip to whatever language they understand or feel like reading that day. And I want you to write more often, because I want it.

Hi My Name is Kori and I am a Memeoholic

Here is what I know about Kori. Kori is in recovery. She is intelligent and often thoughtful. Kori has a steady job she is good at. Kori has four kids by three different fathers. Kori has serious Baby Daddy Drama. Kori has a shitty man picker. Kori has a daughter that when the blog first started was going to purity soirees but is now a single, pregnant seventeen year old. Kori is a Dr. Phil guest waiting to happen.

I gave this blog a fair shake. I tried to like this blog. Miss Missives nearly always roots for the underdog but I never warmed up to Kori, her life or more importantly, her writing. On a personal note, I find it maddening when people do the same thing over and over again expecting different results. I find it perplexing when someone has a child with someone who turns out to be a, let's just say, less than stellar model of fatherhood or mate and then continues to procreate without getting a serious head-shrinker autopsy of what went wrong the first time. Miss Missive's very own mother got herself knocked up with the lil' Missives at the tender age of seventeen, married young and divorced young. But she didn't go ahead and repeat that judgement lapse three more times. Yes, I'm sure Kori loves her kids and it's not their fault she saddled them with suckfest fathers. So when she blogs about the problems these decisions have caused her over and over again, I can't shake the feeling that I need to buy Kori a copy of Smart Women Foolish Choices and read it aloud to her until she can recite it by memory.

As the title suggests, Kori Rants and sadly little else. Clearly she gets something out of her brain dump. Using a blog as a safe place to dump your internal rant to rob it of its power is a perfectly legitimate use of the space but not something other people will necessarily flock to. I know life is hard and we all make choices that bite us in the ass now and then, but Kori is intelligent and thoughtful and at least on the road to some level of self-awareness, so it's hard to watch her stumble over her own feet time and time again. She herself quotes,

I'm the piece of shit around which the world revolves.

The better part of the blog reeks of the self-abasement, self-pity and self-involvement that the quote suggests.

In 2008, Kori's friend April introduces Kori to her new drug of choice, the meme. Very quickly, See Kori Rant devolves into See Kori Meme. Kori, if you must meme then cut the verbose intros and jump right into the story. You can finish the piece with an epilogue crediting who gave you the idea. Put more simply Kori, you need to fuck the reader first and then take them out for dinner and banal convo.

Kori also gets caught up in all that is bad about blogging.

my ratings over at buzz are slipping, and I actually care

You must not care. Kori, forget the rating, clicks, hits, blogrolls and the like. You are not at the writing level where you have a shot to turn See Kori Rant into See Kori Reach Heights of Blogger Fame and Make A Dooce-Like Fortune While Brain Dumping on the Hapless Masses. Not that you couldn't someday, god help us all, but right now you have to focus on your writing as a craft not a popularity contest. Most of us have moments where we pine for comments and accolades but at the end of the day, you must be content that there are people reading, nodding their head or pulling for you.

Ok, now that your bum cheeks are all pink and stingy, would you like some good news? Once in awhile, when you are not ranting, you can actually write.

This is memorable. Now if you had cut the first two paragraphs and started with the third, it would be better, much better.

he would disappear and I wouldn't know where he was at all. The last time it happened, he and I had argued and he threw Sam’s stroller through the picture window and, literally, walked off into the night. I have a very clear memory of that August evening; he walked out of the house and I could clearly see him stroll across the yard nonchalantly, keys jingling (my keys, too, as I later discovered) and whistling. Then he stepped off of the curb into the street, and it was like something out of a movie; as soon as he stepped out of the light shed from the street lamp, he was immediately invisible, instantly gone from my life.

This is good, really good because it is solid, evocative. The way you describe it I can see it in my head, I can feel for a moment what it must have been like to have the person you should have been able to count on just disappear, leaving you alone and vulnerable with a young child.

This is the stream of consciousness stuff that Miss Missives abhors. Skip the mental To do/I did lists, slice of life stuff can be done well, like this,

So I thought I would get him fixed, thinking that at least then I would have to worry about any gross cat ejaculate on my blanket. Took him in, got him fixed, all was well until about two months LATER when one of his testicles grew back. Sure, sure, maybe the vet who had been practicing for 20 years made a mistake, but I am convinced that the fucker was just that special. For some reason, the fact that this guy loved me so much that he stubbornly grew back at least one testicle, well, it made me fall in love with him as well.

This has potential but needs ruthless editing. The purpose of your blog shouldn't be to just post, it should be to post something worth reading. Go back over a post like this and as I have said before, pretend you are on a word diet and cut out what you don't need. Your words should move the narrative forward, or add color to a story, evoke details, smells, feelings, not simply fill a page.

So Kori, since you are familiar with the Program, I'd like to give you Miss Missives Blog Recovery Twelve Step Program:

1. Admit that you are powerless over Memes. If you have to utilize them as a jumping off point, then at least jump right into your story(stop the relentless posturing intro and just tell us) and finish it off with the "blah blah blah thanks to Sookie at SookieSniffsSuperglue for this Thursday Theme blahhgity blah blah.

2. Come to believe in the power of ruthless editing. The backspace and delete buttons should become your two new besties. They are there to help you rid your writing of the minutiae that no one cares about and clogs your writing like a giant ball of hair in a shower drain.

3. Make a decision to focus on moments and feelings, words that evoke, not a laundry list of first I said this then I said that, then he left, now I'm scared and confused. You write like salt and pepper and I want more coriander and fenugreek dammit.

4. Make a searching and fearless inventory of your crimes against blogging.(see our FAQ or a good litany of gross missteps)

5. Fix them.

6. Don't stop believing that you can write, but work at it a little. Stretch yourself and be better. There are plenty of writing exercises to be found online or other writers you admire that you can use as a jumping off point. Don't be content to brain dump, you are better than that.

7. Check your work. Blogging doesn't require the relentless fact checking and editing of academia but errors like bow instead of now, typing mishaps and spelling errors are distracting.

8. Mix up the length and type of your posts more. People will be more likely to chug through a long post about your current man problems if you vary it a little.

9. Stop whining so much, you created this life you are living. Have a little cry, blow your nose and move on.

Well dearest Kori, the summer swelter threatens to put a little blush on Miss Missives alabaster visage so I will have to let the peanut gallery fill in the last few.

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In the meantime, you get one of these:







And one of these for forcing Miss Missives to step through so much shit to figure out that you CAN write.