Not Quite D.O.A.

There's a scene in the 1988 movie D.O.A. in which Dennis Quaid's character regains consciousness after a rowdy night and tries to get his bearings. As he looks around at his surroundings, it becomes increasingly clear that he is not in his own home. Nor his own bed. Going from memory here, as I haven't seen that movie on over a decade (Fortunately. I don't actually recommend it unless you have a serious thing for a young Dennis Quaid or a young Meg Ryan.), it seems to me that he looks around and sees pink fluffy bunnies and shit like that. Shit that starts sending his early warning system into overload. And in his case, that warning is warranted. It seems, he is waking up in the bedroom of a young lady. A very young lady. Fortunately not twisted and sick young, but clearly too young for him.

And for some reason, my first impression of today's blog brought that scene to mind. The template is decorated just like a fourteen year old girl's bedroom. It's cute, and watercolor-y/pastel-ly with big loopy looking sans serif text. So imagine my surprise to find out that this is a blog of a male physician/med-student who describes himself as "Vampire doc" who is "67% evil."

Guess what pal. You aren't fooling anyone.

The template also includes an inane "Wibiya" bar at the bottom that provides no advantage to me, the reader, and instead presents a significant disadvantage in that it slows page loads down. A lot. Annoyingly so.

A template isn't everything. I can forgive a lot of bad decisions in the template if the execution is Very Good or better.

Which in this case, it isn't so much.

I had high hopes, based on a quick scan of a few posts. Certainly that vampire/67% evil thing had me intrigued, but then I started reading. And I learned that, while Ramanathan Kannan does have some amusing stories or insights on occasion, he frequently doesn't seem very clear on what is amusing to an outside reader as opposed to someone who was in on the joke.

And like many Saturday Night Live skits, his posts continue much longer than the content warrants. (In this example, I very much wanted to get to the heart of the matter with him, but the frequent detailed tangents derailed me. I still don't know if that was even a good story or not.)

I mean, a list of 49 things that are different from going to school back home and going to school away from home? Forty nine? This would have been significantly better had you chosen ten or fifteen and focused only on the best ones.

Too often I found myself in the middle of a post asking myself how much longer this was going to go on. And, I confess, I almost always skipped to the next, having exhausted my patience with the post at hand.

Don't get me wrong. It's not all bad. There are a few like this that I came across. And there were some that were interesting to me personally that I wished were written better so I could reach the end before getting an embolism.

In the end, I have to conclude that I like this Ramanathan guy, but I really wish his writing would be more focused and concentrated. Not this rambling on and on. I am reminded of a quote I heard once, I think attributable to Churchill. After spending an evening at a dinner party next to a rather loquacious woman, he apparently quipped something to the effect of "She talks a lot, but doesn't say anything."

Ramanathan, my advice to you: Trim the fat and say something.

That said, your potential gets one star. Live up to it, and come back to get more. If you can.