We're here, we're queer, get used to it

One of the things that amazed me, when I started reading Lori Hahn's blog, lo these many moons ago, was how normal she was.

I mean, not normal in the bad, boring sense, but normal in the good sense: down to earth, funny, wise, basic. The kind of girl you'd want to get together with and drink red wine and talk about dating and work and teen woes and vaginas with. The kind of girl you'd want to cozy up to in a chic restaurant and share dessert with. Cool normal. The fact that she'd be talking about dating girls, and I'd be talking about dating men wouldn't matter, because in our essence, we'd be sharing the same struggles...balancing work/lovelife/motheroood...growing into our own as women...finding work we love to do...finding people we can work to love.

So, last month, when Lori closed her blog, I was sad. But like so many bloggers do, she closed a door, and opened a window: Our Big Gayborhood.

And, like most things, it's a mix of goods and bads.

The good:

I like most of the writers, and I find the topics they select, for the most part, interesting. I like the header image, the fact that the blog uses tabs, and most of the content. In an overall sense, the blog experience is more positive than negative.

But, I think it could be improved. So, that's what I'm going to focus on:

1. Some stuff has gotten lost.

Blogs are primarily a vehicle for telling stories, unless you're Glenn Reynolds or something (and who really wants to be him?). The blog is too newsy and not storied enough...for me. Way too many of the posts read like a fifth grade report on being a lesbian.

If you're going to out politicians, I want juicy details. TELL THE STORY. Tell it in a way that sucks me in. This story is full of juicy, schadenfreudian details, and THEY AREN'T TOLD in this post. Instead, the author jumps directly into lecture mode.

Beyond that, the organization of a post is crucial, and subjects need to flow into one another. The post could have started with the idea of people turning colors based upon sexual identity (great visual), and then have segwayed into the fall of the Republican hypocrite, who's clearly magenta on the color scale. Then, move into a discussion of public figures, and the issue of outing themselves or being outted. The organization of the post is the main problem that keeps the reader from being fully engaged. I'd urge, for political commentary, some reading of Leonard Pitts, Jr., who does an excellent job of merging story telling with political commentary. For instance, here's a good example: Jihad Jane. Pitts uses Jihad Jane's story to make a point, but first he has to humanize her...let people in...help them understand her. He tells her story to make his point. He doesn't make his point to tell her story. That never works.

You can't just stand on your soapbox and yell, people will avert their eyes and walk on by. Instead, you have to expose your humanity and vulnerability, and show people why they should care. You have to make them WANT to care. Jihad Jane's story is compelling not because she is so different from all of us, but because she is the same. It's our sameness that brings us together, not our differences.

2. I'm not sure who this blog is written for. I'm a straight girl, and this is a pretty queer blog. There are a lot of subjects here that appear to be written primarily for queer audience, and frankly, I don't get them and/or have a lot of interest the subjects. So, who is your target audience? If it's me, you need to do things differently.

Lori's blog was compelling because she was so very human, so very much like me....middle-aged, looking for love, raising kids. I could relate to her and thus enjoyed the gift of looking at life through her queer eyes. But, this blog doesn't connect to the average reader as well, probably because it feels much less personal and revealing.

The difference is like reading a term paper written by a high school student, and reading that kid's secret journal. The one is always going to be more compelling than the other.

3. Gayborhood needs editing up to some consistent standard. It's awesome to have a diverse pool of writers, but you need to tighten things up.

Some posts are conversational, others read like a college term paper:

When the United States Army announced the creation of a Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps in 1942 not everyone was happy. A writer for the Miami News spoke for many of his fellow Americans when he decried the plan, saying women who would be interested in enlisting were “the naked Amazons and the queer damozels of the isle of Lesbos.”

Well, he wasn’t entirely wrong. Of course women who weren’t stereotypically feminine and who loved the company of other women would have been especially likely to get excited about serving in the military during World War II. Other young women may have signed up assuming they were heterosexual, but once they enlisted, the military was to many of them like a poor woman’s Wellesley or Bryn Mawr: Like students in early twentieth-century women’s colleges (those wonderful hotbeds of lesbianism), women who joined the military now found themselves in an environment where females worked together in important pursuits, and where they could become heroes to one another without the constant distraction of male measuring sticks. It’s not surprising that many women discovered lesbian feelings through their military experiences in World War II.

Wow, that's a fucking wall of text that will knock the blocks outta your brain. Break some of those sentences up into smaller pieces, remove the redundancy, and clean that shit up. Y'all need an editor, BADLY.

For instance, this piece could be incredibly poignant, if it had told the story, instead of turning into a "my summer vacation as a transsexual" report. TELL THE SMALLER STORY, instead of trying to turn the post into something larger. If you tell the small story properly, the larger point will be made.

4. The blog template, itself, isn't particularly user-friendly. You have tabs, you just need to use them more wisely. A lot of what is in the sidebar should really be behind a tab. Put the Author blog links behind a tab, use the label function and put a list of topics on another tab, etc. etc. For a multi-writer blog, I'd recommend something more like what Gawker does, because you're really becoming more of an online zine and less of a blog. And, the focus should be on the content, and not on the sidebar.

So, there are the cons.

But then, there are jewels like this that are the whole reason that I blog, and read blogs, and review blogs.

So, my candid advice is: do more of this, and less of this. Stop throwing words and labels at people--feminist, homophobe, patriarchal, heterosexual, queer--and focus on being HUMAN. Your best posts do that, your worst posts use words like walls.

I'm saying that selfishly, of course, because some parts of the gayborhood are just too preachy to engage me. I received all the preaching I ever needed during the first 22 years of my life, growing up Southern Baptist. The baptists have their own dogma and special words of the faith, too, and they are turn-offs to anyone outside the clique.

When in doubt, Hedon is always right:

I guess what I’m recommending is to simply live your life. When you find the right person, grab on and make the commitments between yourselves that will make your lives a joy.

For now, I give you one star, with the promise of more if things get better.

Way Way Bad

This review courtesy of guest reviewer, Lolita LeBruise.

Okay, kids, I had a kind of popular lesbian/parenting/middle-age miasma blog for a few years and just shut it down. Love Bites, who sadly is not a lesbian, but a slutty little man-magnet, apparently felt I’d have a little time on my hands. So, she handed me my first assignment: The Way Way Up Blog.

Okay, let me put on my best Salmonberries parka and get started. The template is boring blue Blogger. Anyone who has requested a blog review here ought to know better – I mean did you read the rules? Even I knew better when I was reviewed a few years ago. But, I failed miserably. The next day, I got down on my knees before LB offering her anything to look at my blog again only to find she is strictly a slutty little man-magnet and I could continue to kneel to no avail or just rebuild my damn blog. I did.

This blogger is a young man who has made his career teaching in the uppermost reaches of northern Canada in the newest territory, Nunavut, which is the least populated and geographically the largest. Thanks Wikipedia - because even after reading this for quite some time, I had no idea beyond the random ice berg photo, where he might be blogging from. We could chalk it up to my geographic ignorance of an obscure Canadian territory, or we could just blame the blogger who can’t be bothered to draw new readers by letting us know why we’d ever want to know where he is or who he is. I vote blame the blogger.

While reading this blog, I just kept shaking my head saying, “Has he actually met any of the people in his life?” What had the potential to be a poignant “To Sir, With Love” or “Stand and Deliver” kind of blog is merely a litany of questionably studied opinions and the mundane day-to-day tasks that are his life. What could have been an exciting National Geographic adventure is a bunch of lifeless photography. What could have been an adventure in discovering the Inuit people and the descendents of the original European settlers through their stories and lore is post after post of soulless, dry lessons in history and culture with no connection to the people who actually lived it. Even his stories about his family, whom I would assume he knows fairly well, come across with all the flavor of cardboard.

The only times I detected the faintest heartbeat was when he defends seal hunting. His rant against Sarah MacLachlan sure told her. Uh, huh – take that Sarah – and may your musical dry spell continue! Yeah! My personal favorite is his Nazi/seal hunt comparison – um, don’t know if he thought of this, but we might actually formulate the thought that some people might think both are bad. It’s a complicated issue, seal hunting by indigenous peoples, but his trite rants do nothing to advance his case. Logic and reason aren’t his strong suits. Hopefully, he doesn’t teach math.

I finally gratefully tumbled headlong down the iceberg into the hungry polar-bear filled waters after reading the most recent post on the need for social workers in the area. His solution? Parents need to do a better job. He opines that some parents suck and some children might be better off on the street. Alert the media. I wanted to pick him up and slap some emotion into him. We’ve all heard it, but why do you feel this way? What have you seen? Who have you met? Give it some soul to illustrate the point without the banal conclusion.

The Inuit have many sociological and economic challenges and a rich and vibrant history and hearing about them and the European descendants in the area could have made for fascinating reading.

Summary: Blog template sucks, stories have no life, blog has no direction. It’s not a travel blog, a study in culture, a look at education, or a place of personal introspection.

He wants to take his posts and write a book. Heh. Yeah, this is the next Julie & Julia. But, good news; he has a new blog and a new job posting in yet another place that he will totally miss. Oh, and he’s a new dad. It’s got the best of the worst of daddy blogging written all over it with his scintillating post on contemplating the greater unpleasantness of baby poop over baby pee.

I give him a big:

But I'm a Cheerleader

Miss Missives ponders converting;
to be or not to be a lesbian,
that is the question.




Pros
1.Girls smell better, kiss better.
2.Save money,share resources like clothes, makeup; buy Midol and Tampons in bulk.
3.Never ending supply of drama.
4.No baby batter=no accidental pregnancy.
5.Lowest STD rate = super clean vag.

Cons
1. Convergent menstrual cycles, twice the hormones does not equal twice the fun.
2. Crying is largely ineffective.
3. Latex a poor substitute for the real thing.
4. Early bed death.
5. Entirely too much talking.

Geekporngirl is a forty-something, Bay-area lesbian with a penchant for popular culture and a noticeably romantic bent. The "geek porn" here refers less to the boom chicka wah wah and more to the trivial egg-head details that interest this outside the stereotypes woman. The site is a mix of sapphicentric news items, news links, videos, opinion pieces, and fiction that come together to form a sort of e-zine for the tipping the velvet crowd.

On the plus side, I like the look of the site. The Header is visually appealing and curiosity-sparking. Miss Missives has found that you can never go wrong with pert nipples peeking through a wife-beater. Geekporngirl has a nice About in terms of information about the feel and intent of the site. Still, since the site though magazine-style, is produced by and large by one person, I would like to know a little bit about the girl behind the geek, especially with regard to the fiction.

There are moments of borrowed though salient humor. Geekporngirl is both sex-positive and eco-friendly. Her categories are good, not too many, not too few. There is a great deal of borrowed video and news items but they are germane to lesbians, the greater LGBT community and egg-heads alike. Though Geekporngirl sports a long-ass side bar, the links appear to be relevant to the intent of the site. Were I a lesbian dropping buy for the latest Prop 8 controversy or cool graphic t-shirt, these links would interest me. Though the word cloud and the most recent comments could be cast off and a few of the listings condensed to further streamline the site's feel.

On the con side, I found the site difficult to navigate. The Home and Frontpage tabs appear to be the same, therefore redundant. When you meander through the posts from either Home or Frontpage, the posts appear undated. I don't like undated posts as a general rule but especially when you are posting news items. If you look at these same posts under the Latest Posts tab, the dates magically appear. This might just be a glitch of how the web pages are set up but do us all a favor and add dates to all of the posts. Geekporngirl posts frequently enough that she doesn't need to obscure the date.

Adding to the difficulty navigating is the fact that Home and Frontpage are set up with no older posts button and no archives. When you go to Latest Posts tab, you can click on older entries but there are still no archives to search through. Additionally, the site is very lesbian specific and therefore lacks broad appeal but if you are a smarty pants lesbian, this site would be right up your man-free, girl zone.

With regard to the fiction, bookish lesbians can find anything from erotic Haiku, to Drabbles to longer pieces of Harliquinesque romantic fiction. Yes, geekporngirl is a hopeful romantic. There are links on her sidebar to the really hot stuff but her fiction, while it dips it's toe in the lake of naughty tends to be more the stuff of longing and the trials of romantic love. Romance novellas have never been Miss Missive's thing but I can guess that there is a dearth of the more genteel lesbian romances. Geekporngirl is no doubt filling a niche with her tales of woe and pleasure.

Although Miss Missives does not hail from the Island of Lesbos, much of the info here is interesting to me. Still, it's unlikely I'll be back because the whole thing feels very detached. I know many bloggers need some distance between their real selves and their sites, and that's understandable. Still, I tend to read people most consistently when I get a feel for them and their life. Geekporngirl, I want to root for you, I want to support your efforts for equality and self-awareness. I want to find the common ground that we as women all share but the emotion and expression here, even in the fiction feels very restrained. Take off the figurative corset, shake the girls free and be yourself.

You can do it your way, and maybe you are trying to hedge the neutral ground for fear of becoming too editorial but there are tons of LGBT publications and only one you. Prop 8, tell me why it makes you angry. Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon--tell me why they inspire you. There are a whole bunch of people waiting on the sidelines with their pom-poms and their megaphones just waiting for your stories to grab them--invite them in.

If there's one thing I can't stand about sleeping with women, it's all the fucking mind-reading*

A college friend once told me that I was the most heterosexual woman she'd ever met. She said this because I was -- and am -- entirely boy crazy. At the time I was recently heartbroken and out of a monogamous relationship and I was on the prowl. Utterly. Every male was scrutinized and measured and evaluated on fuckability. Would I or wouldn't I? Mostly I would.

So, in some ways her comment was apt. But in others? Not so much. My first fumbling forays into sexual experience were with neighborhood girls. And I was always the instigator. Come over and let's play girlfriend/boyfriend, wink wink, nudge nudge. Being the aggressor, I was almost always the "boy." It wasn't so much that girls attracted me; it was more that boys were not as accessible, and my horniness knew (knows) no bounds. And now I am not at all averse to appreciation of the female form, and I suffer from no vaginaphobia. In speaking with Duck (who is a gorgeous lesbian with the mind and charisma and flair of a gay man and all the showtunes and glitter that entails) about levels of gaydom, scales of lesbiosity, I'm pretty sure that on that scale I could never have a relationship with a woman, I couldn't be all squishy lovey sweetheart with a woman, but I could probably get all up in her business.

Which brings me to today's reviewee (what, I'm just revealing my inner lesbian tendencies for nothing?), Honey, a somewhat misleading nom de plume for a butch(ish) lesbian. Honey talks, among other things, about gender identity and being gay and her own scale of butch to femme, gay to straight.

The blog is nicely designed, organized, clean, and clutter-free. The archives could be better served by monthly organization rather than just a list, although it's nice to have it in a separate tab. And speaking of tabs, she does a good job with those, too. The design is basic, simple, and attractive, with very little decoration or adornment aside from her own photos and art, all in their appropriate places. I don't usually care about other people's pictures online, especially people I don't know. But for some reason Honey's pictures bring me in. There's an honesty and appreciation about them.

Honey gets her stride with her blogging mission/comfort zone/voice about November of 2007. Most of the blog before that is scattered, inconsistent, and lacking. Example:

I’ll get home and take another very nice shower, drink some very delicious tea, have excellent conversation with my wonderful girlfriend, and go to bed. I’ll be asleep within a minute.

La, la, la... and I'm bored.

But later on she settles into this very zen, calm, introspective vibe that works for her. She writes some good, self-aware stuff. There's a lot of questioning, looking inward, and figuring out going on. A little back and forth of am I this, or am I this other thing, or, no, I'm both.

And speaking of who she is, Honey is completely unconcerned about sharing her identity online, where she went to school, her girlfriend's identity, where she works, and her entire working resume. She's a stalker's wet dream. Which brings me back to the discussion on anonymity and does the lack of it hinder your ability to express yourself online. In some ways I think Honey breaks this trend, because she lives, at least as it appears from her blog, honestly and fully and openly and with great gratitude. And I really admire that because I probably don't. And when she discusses her experiences with queer and straight communities, with self-identification, it is fascinating and insightful. And though I like the rest of Honey's blog -- her commentary on Portland and biking and yoga and her friends and work and whatnot -- it's these revelatory posts that really suck a reader in.

Honey speaks in superlatives. A Christmas tree is not a tree, it's the most wonderful tree. Her girlfriend is the most excellent. Portland is the most perfect. It's obvious that she feels things deeply, loves people wholly, and is not at all afraid to embrace that most feminine of characteristics: emotion.

And one emotion that is revealed most often is her deep love for Agent, her girlfriend. It is a beautiful thing to see. Agent pops up with a post every now and again, which can interrupt the flow. I did a double-take at the change in tone. I knew right away it couldn't be Honey writing, which speaks volumes about Honey's voice. Although, when Agent said this, I melted: "I am acutely aware of my needs. And I don’t hesitate to meet them. So I rarely find myself in unpleasant situations, which is like succeeding in small ways all the time."

When Honey submitted herself for our review, she said, "I am very much looking forward to a good ass reaming. Let me have it - I can take it." But I can't give her a butt bruising because I liked this blog, and I liked Honey. She writes that some of her blogging rules are never to whine and not to share intimate details about her relationships and to avoid the offensive. And this is where that anonymity thing bites her in the ass. Because, god, how much better the blog might be if there were a few more dimensions to it. If we got to see Honey on bad days more often; if we heard about her friends and lover in more detail, with less gloss and happy joy-joy, with more layers peeled back; if we heard her rant or bitch or be something less than centered and grateful. Peaceful happiness is nice and admirable and all that, but we could use a little more humanity, a little more grit. Because Honey, I believe you're good, but sometimes I have trouble believing you're that good. And if you are, I've just reached a whole new low in my evaluation of my own self-worth.

Also, some girl-on-girl action would not go amiss.






*Bound

Thank God for Lesbians

And here it is, Friday once again, and no, I didn't die. I was just on the road, traveling, for work, and doing shit in real life, like I have one for a change. Oh, and having sex. Not enough sex, mind you, but real, mind-blowing, hollaring loud enough to wake the neighbors sex.

You'd think that might put me in a good frame of mind to review a blog, but apparently not. I just ripped the shit out of a so-called humor blog, only to realize that someone else had just reviewed it. Mother of god...that is so the kind of week I'm having.

So, today, the lucky cool kids (and recipients of my unfulfilled need to drip loathing contempt all over some hapless internet commentator) are The Highway Hags. The Highway Hags are two lesbian truckers. Yes, you heard me correctly.

You know, reading Stace and Hedon's posts, I wonder to myself: Are lesbians smarter than the rest of us, generically speaking? I think it's possible. Is there something about avoiding cock addiction that makes women smarter? I have to at least ponder it. Which means that I may have to either learn to live with being a second-rate intelligence, or dive face-first into the pussy. I'm thinking for me at least, it's going to be the former. But, I will say this: I think the lesbians may singlehandedly save the blogosphere from the fucked up things that straight people are currently doing to it.

I seriously love everything about this blog. I mean, every fucking thing. I love the template, although there is something grammatically incorrect about this line:

Our World. Seen through a bug-splattered windshield.

Theoretically, though I am not the red pen wielding grammar nazi here (that falls to Calamity), I think this sentence should read: "Our world, seen through a bug-splattered windshield."

Something to think about.

On the template, here are my thoughts: clean up your sidebar, we don't need to know who has recently posted comments, I'd put my links/blogroll underneath another tab, and damn that advertisement is big. But, I like it, overall. I like it A LOT.

The content is fucking awesome. It's thoughtful, funny, cool, hilarious, and it is INTERESTING. I love the perspective offered here, it's totally unique, and it makes me want to ride along on the journey, in the back seat with Maggie.

Go read it. You'll fall in love, too. Who knows? The lesbians may end up converting us all.

My own worst nightmare

It's the luck of the draw around here. The often imitated but never duplicated Love Bites reaches into her bag of tricks, shoves aside the tubes of lube, lipstick, and Lifesavers, and pulls out the blogs for us to review. It's completely random.

But this time, I think the Flying Spaghetti Monster had something to do with it. Because my hapless little reviewee got me -- a pro-choice agnostic with pagan tendencies who is a queer friendly, pro-gay marriage, anti-religious establishment, foul-mouthed sex fiend feminist liberal elitist.

Angi from Sleep for Dreaming, on the other hand, is not. Way not.

Let me just get the design critique out of the way, as it's about the only part of this site that didn't make me want to spit nails. It's actually very easy on the eyes. I can dig the gray and red. It's uncluttered and well-organized. There is, however, a section for Who's Who with nothing in it and you could stand to beef up your About page with more details.

Now, for the rest of the blog: I have absolutely nothing in common with this person. Nada. She is the antithesis of me, and it was often physically painful for me to read her blog. She's religious in the "first and foremost" sense. There's a lot of God talk, which I get enough of from my mother the priest, thank you very much. She's a conservative cat person; I'm a liberal dog person. And fuck me sideways she links to Ann Coulter.

There are a glut of posts of the pointless, interesting to no one variety, like this. And this. And, holy lord, this. Otherwise, she's got issues. There are acres and acres of angsty, self-discovery posts that really should be relegated to her bedside devotional journal. She thinks that lesbians are icky, women over 50 should pack it in, and red lipstick is from the devil (ok, I made that last part up). Oh, and side note? Scaramouche is a character, not a thing. Angi doesn't like swearing, which makes me wonder (for the zillionth time since beginning this review) why she decided to submit her site to a bunch of foul-mouthed little bastards like us.

The writing is often naive, unfocused, bland, and frankly boring but at least well-punctuated and generally grammatically correct. For me, it lacked humor, style, an engaging voice, and, of course, an author I could relate to. This post about sums it up for me: "I’ve dabbled and chicken-scratched a bit since then, but haven’t really written anything of any significance." Nothing in this blog resonated with me. But that's probably my liberal elitism showing. I always forget to tuck that in like a nice girl.

Look, I try to be objective. I try to find common ground, and I look for the magic mushrooms in the piles of dung. I tried not to let my politics -- or the influx of my family's right wing propaganda in my inbox -- cloud my reviewing sensibilities. I am, after all, the "nice one." But this blog? Sigh. She's probably a nice person. I bet she helps little old ladies down the street and lets people cut in front of her in line if they have just one thing to buy. It's just, nothing on her blog makes me want to sit next to her on a long road trip while we hash out our differences or engage in philosophical debate. I pretty much just want to close the window and walk away. And that's probably ok with Angi, because I'm decidedly not her audience.

Finally, because I try to give constructive criticism even when my dander is up and I'm all kinds of huffy, some tips:

1. Angi, you imply some knowledge of hard times and difficulties and challenges surmounted but you never share that information. If it's too personal, I understand, but that was where you got me a little interested in your story. It might help readers get to know you (and not knee-jerk react to your politics, like me) if you give us more insight into who you are. Other than your politics and religious views and your love for song lyrics and photography, I feel like I don't know that much about you. Even though I cringed at your reasons, the Why I Could Never Be Friends With... posts revealed more about you than many others.

2. Lay off the "I did this, then I did this" weekend roundups. Unless something interesting happened, leave it out.

3. There are no revelations about relationships with anyone, romantic or otherwise. Who are the people in your life? Write about them.

And I'm spent.

My first inclination is to give you about eleventy-nine million of these.






But, in retrospect, that might be letting the terrorists win.

Instead you get this, because I suspect I might be a little biased:

Once bitten...well, I'm not sure you can recover from the first time.

Oh, Jillie, Jillie, Jillie, where to begin?

First off, your template. I don't hate it, I like blue. And that's good, because there is a lot of blue. Okay, I don't grok the vox. WTF is a vox anyway? Vox apparently gives you a lot of widgets to use, and I don't grok widgets, either. Here is what I think you need more of:

1) About you. Please give me more. Are you really a widowed lesbian? C'mon, girl. You know you're going to be doing nekkid twirls on trikes at burning man, and you can't give us more than this? I'm very put out with you.

Speaking of putting out, try it. You might like it. (insert salacious leer here)

2) I don't think you need: Neighbors, links, recent comments, maps and videos on your sidebar. All of these can be accessed through the buttons at the top of your blog, which kind of defeats the purpose of putting them neatly behind a button, if you let them sprawl all over your sidebar like that.

So, clean that shit up.

3) Effing? Seriously? You're going to Burning Man, and you write fuck as effing? Do I even need to raise my eyebrows at you, meaningfully?

Okay, content. I like the photos. I like your mad gardening skillz. You know these are zucchinis or yellow squash, right? And, this is very pretty.

But, you need to write more. With, frankly, more depth. Like, I think it's awesome that you're going to Burning Man, I totally want to go myself, at some point, but how dare you throw that tasty little morsel there and then stop short without all the good juicy bits? Why did you decide to go? What do you hope to do/see/experience there? Have you been before? More details, sweetie.

Often, we tell people to remove about 2/3 of their words and trim their content down. In your case, you need to bolster it up. Your content needs to eat more fiber. I want more, goddamn it!


When you do write, you have a charming, self-deprecating voice.

You just don't do it enough.

So, Jilly, I give you . I like you, but you need to stop being such a goddamn tease.

Insert Clever Title Here

Let's see, what have we learned collectively this week? Apparently mommy-bloggers aren't our cup of tea. Yep, that's the lesson for the week.

So, how to approach this one? Hmm.

Straight-forward, no snark? Probably not a bad idea.

Loaded with sarcasm, dripping with venom? Nah, probably not. I'm too mellow on Fridays.

Let's let the coin decide, shall we? Heads, it's straight-forward, tails, it's snarky bitchiness.

It's heads.

Today's blog is Hahn at Home. It's being viewed in Internet Explorer at 1152 x 864. My first thought is that the top part of the blog, including header, is a bit of a mess. The blog isn't centered on the page, and while I don't mind the header graphic, it's quite distracting to have a blinky button directly below it. Apparently, she's up for the Lesbian Blog of the Year, so good luck with that. She's got some category links on the left-hand side, which are nice, and well-put together if you click on the links. However, the archives are in the right sidebar, and again, distract. It would be nice to have an Archives button, with this template, as opposed to this mess. And then, horror of horrors, the end of the Earth arrives and about halfway down the page, the grey columns cease to be, and we fall into white nothingness. Wow, this template is a piece of crapola.

Redeeming this blog totally, however, is the content, which is quite good. The posts are well written, and although the mommy posts aren't my cuppa, she intersperses enough posts about her life and the various goings-on that they don't make me cringe too much. Although it seems lately EVERYONE is writing about their sick kids. I know it's Winter, I know we all get ill, but for the love of Pete, don't tell me about your sick kid. I don't want to know. I do recommend the post of January 17th for some comedic goodness, as I do enjoy the look into someone's dating disaster. This one ranks right up there with the best that I've ever read. It's in the white abyss at the bottom, in case you get lost in the wilderness.

So, where do we stand on Hahn at Home? Well, clearly, this template is god-awful. I mean, seriously, it's horrendous. You're a wonderful storyteller, give yourself a pallette to craft your art that looks better than this. The white abyss of nothingness at the bottom is just poor. I love the buttons at the top, and the header image isn't bad, but move that blinky button, and get those archives out of the content area, and...oh, the hell with it. Get a new template. Now.

Content-wise, I enjoyed it, I liked it, and I would come back to it. She has an interesting life, three adopted sons, a dating life, etc. and she doesn't seem to stick to "I'm a mommy" or "I'm a lesbian" or any particular theme. This pleases me, because slice-of-life blogs that are original, funny and clever ARE my cuppa.

Content:


Template: I don't usually give these out, but wow.

PS: I'd suggest either asking Kitty, or visiting Nello for some template assistance.