Fuck.

There are people in the world who have time to write like, every f__ing day.  I have barely enough time on my hands to scratch up one post a month, having chosen a career that makes data entry look like the f___ing Superbowl.  Also, how can I expect other reviewers to finish their posts when I don't even have time to pretend I'm going to write one?

The main reason it took me so f___ing long to write this f___ing review was this: JennyMac is a mommyblogger (she would probably write a response to this that says, "NO, I am a MOM who BLOGS) who likes "cocktails" and has well over a million bajillion entries.  She also has a million bajillion fans, who would probably rush to her aid at the slightest criticism because they don't like being told they have generic taste. 

Mac, when you've been blogging long enough to have over 300 entries:  consider creating a "best of" page. Are you proud you wrote this?  Do you wish more people would read a particular entry?  Because sifting through over 500 of them is no easy task. Your header image almost fits into my screen...ahp, nope.  No it doesn't.  It leaks sideways because it's huge and full of water martinis and thin, chic, casually-leaning models. Fix it.

Whatever, Jenny Mac seems very nice and cute and should probably have her own Chuck Lorre sitcom where hilarity strikes with a stressful moving day or a naive misunderstanding, where taking the Lord's name in vain (so bad!) and covering it up quickly with a well-placed pun results in uproarious laugh tracks and stray giggles, but I'm afraid I just don't have the skill to pretend that I find that s__t funny.  It's too formulaic.  She takes small events with the idea of turning them into something bombasticly hilarious, but it's just set-up, punchline.  Set-up.  Punchline.  Set-up.  Punchline. 

Rarely does the punchline have any relevance to the set up, it's just a little snappy comeback she's proud of slapping on the end of a sentence in a random situation.  These things don't add any human quality to the mix, because she's only showing us her self-approved quirks, not hopes and blood and secrets and fear which becomes hilarious because it has to be, because if it's not funny then it's sad and sad is bad.  Ideally we want all honest knuckles and laughter...but no, that's not what JennyMac is. 

From a technical standpoint, JennyMac is nonpareil. Her spelling is impeccable, her grammar has improved greatly since the beginning of the blog (there were so many unsatisfying run-on sentences I almost quit reading it and flame-fingered her a__), she uses good words and gets her point across.  Sometimes she's super cheese, but I like that.  Sometimes.  When it works. 

For the most part, though, it reads like cartoon bubbles between disembodied Jennifer Aniston and Kate Hudson, adorable and relatable because of they are "real women" with "flaws" just like "you and me."  She tries to describe awkward and embarassing situations, but I'm never embarrassed for her.  I never get that, "Oh s__t, no f____ing way, dude.  No.  F___ing.  Way." And sometimes I feel awful. I feel awful because this made me feel nothing.  I feel awful because she doesn't want to share her fears and desires, or she has no fears and desires and I can't tell which, and I feel awful because I don't give a s__t about her fears and desires because she doesn't seem like a real person. 

But it's fine, right?  It's all fine.  JennyMac, your blog is fine, moderately enjoyable, and you seem like a nice, genuine person.  Genuinely nice people are hard to review.  Like most nice people, you claim to have a bitchy side every once in awhile but I honestly don't think you do, and that pisses me off, too, because it means you're either a liar (not nice) or delusional (most likely) and that is always frustrating.

Maybe it's because in the grand scheme of crazy and ridiculous, you aren't.  I just can't get all giggly over a walk of shame, because bitch?  I did that last night.  The only good part about that story was the note from Action Jackson, and that's just because I've put bike locks around drunk people before and it's hilarious.  Once I duct-taped two people together in a lawn chair and threw them in a river.

Don't get all butt-hurt, it wasn't a very deep river.

But one of my biggest pet peeves is getting cheated out of a good, well-deserved fuck.  What the fuck?  Just fucking say fuck, you fuck. Not saying fuck is fucking annoying as fuck.  Either you mean fuck or you mean something else, and if you mean something else THEN FUCKING SAY SOMETHING ELSE.

Fuck.




and

because I am awesome at irony.


Also?  Sorry about the wait.

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.

As deep as any ocean, as sweet as any harmony.

I am a big fan of science. Big fan. I was all up in 3-2-1 Contact back in the day, except for when they had all those French people on there. French people aren't sciencey, everyone knows that. (Oh, PBS, you goose! Humor is your strongest asset. I'll bet you just sit around all day and listen to Weird Al; that's why you're such a honk at dinner parties.)

People here in the colonies usually only watch the Public Broadcasting Service because of Rick Steves' travel tips, Ken Burns self-congratulatory documentaries on the awesomeness of our country, and Neil deGrasse Tyson's knack of finding wonder in our universal insignificance. Right now I would like to thank all of my employers who paid me too little: without your efforts to safeguard my poverty, I could have afforded cable, and who picks PBS over HBO?

It's easy to ignore programming like that with so much "comedy" and "satire" shoving its nose in your junk and demanding to be stroked. The earnest and educational get fucked over.

The same is true for blogs. And that is unfortunate, because then you miss out on people like Julie.

Julie is a Scientific Chick who received her PhD in Neuroscience just two weeks ago (work it). Her blog is driven by research and science, mostly consisting of regurgitated studies decoded for greenhorns. It's very impersonal, although she does offer her interpretations at the end of each entry, but overall I found it fascinating.

She's colloquial in tone and well-acquainted with her subject matter, she questions the studies appropriately and asks for the readers questions in return. This blog is thoughtful and thorough. I didn't skip an entry, even though I disagree with some of her assessments. For example, I think this shows that the subjects are swayed by the opinions of others, which affirms what I've always felt: it takes just one opinion to influence your perception before conceiving your own, so ignore other opinions until you've formed one yourself. Hypocrisy owns me.

But the most important thing this tells me is that I want to start a dialogue with her, and that, friends, is happy territory. Some of the entries didn't grab me so much, but that's more of a matter of personal interest, like choosing articles in National Geographic.

A clean, readable template that's easy to navigate is hard to find. Because of the nature of your blog, Julie, think about trimming your labels down to more specific topics rather than references, but definitely keep them in your sidebar.

I feel like such a pushover, seriously, because I really want to fucking tear someone apart, but I just cannot, here. I love her. I don't fucking love her, but I love her just the same.

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.

So only the first 15 minutes is free then?

I don't have long as I've got to be back at work soon, so I'm going to grab a quick sandwich and tell you that simply put, 15 minute lunch is tight.

What's the difference between this humour blog and a lot of the rest?

He spends his time being funny instead of telling us he's funny.

Johnny Virgil tells us some good funny stories from his own day to day, he picks some of the more obscure stuff from the net and world news, and sometimes he just lets the imagination run.

Consistent, thorough, carefully crafted, and most often, quite amusing.

You could dip into this blog at any time and find a post that tickles your fancy. His unassuming tone, and just on the right side of self deprecating voice, is a nice read, and you chuckle along with him because he doesn't hit you over the head with the 'I'm so funny' rubber mallet.

There really isn't much more to say, it's a tight ship, it promises and delivers.

If I'm going to be picky, and it's my party, so I will be, there are a few things you should do.

A better template, there's nothing really wrong with the one you have, but blue isn't funny is it? and as your posts tend to be quite long, a wider writing space would suit. You're good enough to deserve a nicer stage.

Your archive is crap, that list of yearless months is just dumb.

Those long posts, I admire your dedication and thoroughness but as someone who had to, and wanted to, read your archives it became heavy going, for a light hearted blog. I'm sure you plan posts in advance, mix it up a little, break up the flow a bit and throw out some short sharp shocks of funny once in a while.

Too much scrolling. Far too much, long posts plus a front page that goes back to August is no
good. 3, maybe 5 per page is enough for what you have there.

All in all, this is just nitpicking at what is a very well written humour blog, no clown shoes, no pie in the face, just original humour.

Mommy Blogs, Attack

So. Another mommy blog. Another STAY AT HOME Mommy blog.

What to do, what to do? Do I rip her to shreds or love her to pieces?

Let's take wagers, shall we?

Ah, I can't postpone the agony anymore...Are you ready for it?

Whenever I see another mommyblog in the queue, I sigh. I think about rocking mommyblogs we've had in the past, like Here in Idaho or Drunken Housewife. Then, I psych myself up to wade through another morass of boredom, because 9 times out of 10, mommyblogs hoover harder than a hooker on a deadline. [damn! alliteration!]

But not today, bitches. The Immoral Matriarch is what a mommy blog SHOULD be, if there have to be mommyblogs. This is the standard against which all other mommy blogs are measured, and against which 99.9% of them fall short. This blog, in short, rocks me like a hurricane. I'm in the midst of developing a major girl crush, here.

There are boobs! There is lactation! There is gratuitous use of the fuck word! There is multisyllabic writing! There is a woman with thoughts, and strong opinions, and a kick-ass FAQ! There is a fantabulous template! There is dark sarcasm and motherfucking HAIKU, bitches! There is a little too much shit in the sidebar, but after the week I've had, I'm so not in the mood to bitch about a few minor twinkly thingamajigs.

This is blogging, as it should be.

You know, mommybloggers of the world, they didn't remove your brain or your guts or your heart when they took the bun out of the oven. Nor did those organs, hopefully, stop functioning in some kind of frankensteinian chemical reaction to lactation. So, maybe, when you blog about the precociousness of your offspring, you could throw in some of the real shit (like Maria does), and thus, stop sucking.

That would be, like, fucking awesome, ya know.

Maria, I'm sorry to hear that your computer has broken right when I'm about to tell you that I fucking love you.

But I do. I fucking love you, and possibly, I want to have cute multi-ethnic babies with you. I'll even do all the lactating, bitch. ;) You're that awesome.



p.s. Dear readers, if you go there, please plan on spending an hour, minimum. Start with the prologue and work your way through the background before you even hit the posts. It's that good. You are going to want to get this chick drunk on cheap-ass wine and pillage through her brain before you're done...shouting vociferously about immunizations and breasticles all the while.

Marking Time on the 409

She's got her own domain name. Her name is Miss Britt.

And it's another Fireballs Monday.

Why is it that I'm feeling particularly unsatisfied lately? I can't quite put my finger on it, really. Nor any other part of me.

I'm just not having any fucking FUN lately. It's all so convoluted and impossible to explain, suffice it to say if you see a drunk Irishman screaming about how shitty everything is in your local pub, it just could be me.

With that in mind, Miss Britt does have quite a good read. I'm not in love with the blogads on the side, but I'm getting close to not really giving a shit about the clutter and chaos they cause, because honestly, they don't detract a whit from enjoying this blog. It's content is quite good. She's recently into Harry Potter, so I'm totally behind that. She's working on the "100 things about me" thing that seems to permeate certain blogs, but her stuff, again, is good. I have no complaints about the writing, at all, and that's saying something because I'm quite the stickler for grammar, spelling and all that rubbish.

The template itself is decent although I wouldn't go apeshit over it. It's well organized, and her tag stuff at the bottom of each post is small-fonted, so it's not so overwhelming to see what she's up to. She certainly has quite an audience, which is lovely, and obviously she's not getting reviewed here to generate traffic. In truth, anyone who can start a post with the following sentence is aces in my book: "I don’t know if you know this about me, but I am awesome."

So, here's the thing. I cannot go the full monty here with 4 stars. Since this is just an opinion, I'm not down with blog ads, and the template, while quite good, isn't among the best I've ever seen. However, everything else about this blog IS really good, so she gets three stars AND the "I Love You" icon.





Now, I'm off to the pub, and Patron shots are on me. Step up. Peace. Oh, and happy birthday Miss Britt's adorable daughter. Uncle Fireballs will drink a shot in your honor tonight!

Who's a lazy slacker?

Oh...yeah. Me.

I just counted up and realized that I spent fewer than 10 nights at home in July. Hopefully, this homebody will be able to stay home for a bit during August and I won't fall so far behind on my reviews.

Our victim today? Little White Liar. I must say that I was pleased I got to review a blog this time that didn't completely suck. That was nice. Thanks, Kitty.

Love the template. Love it. It's clean, elegant, easy to maneuver around in, and thank heavens doesn't distract from the content. In short, it is everything a template should be. If LWL designed it herself, big props and kudos. If not, her designer should be commended.

The content...I enjoyed it. LWL has recently moved from the big apple to the land down under, and is cataloguing her adventures for our delectation. Yummy. I am enjoying reading it, and will probably blogroll her on my personal blog so I can keep up.

Plus, she's doing what I think every girl in her age group should do, something I did when I was her age: She's moved outside her comfort zone to a place where she is a stranger, learning to conquer homesickness, and making a new city her own. I commend that. Of all the choices I've made in my life, that was by far the most spontaneously wise decision I ever made (looking back almost 20 years in hindsight). I was one of very few of my peers to do the same: load my few belongings up and move a thousand plus miles from home. That road less traveled made all the difference for me, and I hope it will for her, as well.

That's what being young is for, in my opinion, accumulating as many experiences as possible before becoming settled and rooted by mortgages and children and marriages and debt.

The only criticism I have of her blog is that it gets a bit self-important and abercrombieish at times. She is a SERIOUS WRITER people, meant for great things as we all were at that age, but who can mock this, really, from the wise old age of 40+ looking back in time at 25?

Certainly not me.

I give it 4 stars:

And a lest all this sweetness and light go to your young little head.

Ahoy. Intestines Floating Ahead!

Anyone who lived with me in college, which is pretty much no one I talk to anymore and yes I do feel there is a correlation there, knows that little people scare me. Oh yes, midgets freak me out. I stare, I gawk, I get this sour stomach taste in my mouth like I'm about to puke, and then I have to find something else to occupy my eyes or I'll most likely go into convulsions from the over stimulation of all my disgusting censors.

Comes as no surprise that the blog I have to review today is gnomespeak, the blog of what appears to be an aspiring circus midget. Now, here's my issue with the blog thus far: what does a wannabe circus midget have to do with gnomes? The vertically challenged are dwarfs whereas gnomes are little mythical short old dudes, not to mention nothing says "awesome garden accessory" like a little gnome. Taking the cute little travelocity gnome [which I swear is a total rip-off of the gnome Amelie uses to convince her father to leave his home and see the world..err, well at least a rip-off of the idea of the whole traveling gnome thing] and putting him in the same category as the vertically challenged is just cruel! Is there gnome porn? Nope. I rest my case that they are mutually exclusively in the definition department.

The template sucks. Yea, I said it. There's no sugarcoating it. There's so much potential that comes with being an aspiring circus midget that I just expect more than plain old baby blue and white, and nothing else. Everything is really nice, organized, and simple, and I really like the whole "read more" gig she's got going on for longer posts, even though the javascript is fucked up and not working, but that's not enough to save this template. There are so many blogs out there that you need something to grab your reader, and all the things a good title used to do way back when now requires a little somethin' somethin' extra on the template front to signal to your reader that this isn't just another advertisement blog/porn blog/Spanish blog/Asian student who swears he's fluent in English blog/insert any other annoying type of blog here.

If I just stumbled onto this blog one day, I would quickly stumble elsewhere, which is a shame because I really like the content. She's funny, she calls herself Captain Steve, and who doesn't absolutely adore someone who references the movie Dodgeball in any way? She's also a Chuck Pahlaniuk Fan, so naturally, I want to dive into her muff and make a cozy home. I do have to wonder if there's something wrong with me because I really didn't find the particular passage where the guys internal organs are sucked out while he's enjoying pool suction on his bung hole that gross, or graphic. I'm kind of fucked in the head though.

She's a movie buff, she says the word "dude" like it's her job, and I'm willing to guess that she may be as tall as me and almost as cynical. Yea, she's the type of girl I'd willingly and openly be friends with.

I give her for the content. Unfortunately I couldn't read that much of it on account of the javascript error.

She also gets a for the template. I know you can do better.

I recommend she read, if she hasn't, Monica Drake's Clown Girl. I think she'll like it.

And, 'cause I still love these lil bitches, enjoy some dancing men:

This is your blog on acid

This is what your blog would be if Hunter S. Thompson wrote it.

I should say right here that I'm not a huge fan of Mr. Thompson. I get high on life (and an occasional infusion of ska or Jane's Addiction). Drug-addled pop culture observers don't do much for me.

And yet, after a steady diet of mommy bloggers and "dear diary, my dog failed her literacy classes today," Ry's blog was kind of like a breath of a gently pot-laced breeze wafting over my poor wretched nose, a nose that has been breathing too goddamn much sterile corporate air of late.

The template is aight. I can't find much to pick holes in, looks-wise, and I like the title. On the other hand, reading too much of his blog makes me feel like I've been smoking crack. Though, this isn't entirely a bad sensation, I suppose, since crackheads around the world seem to love it.

But he isn't boring. I think he may be nuts. And he really needs to put the thesaurus down and walk away from it. He verges over into "pretensious pseudo-intellectual I haven't been out of literature courses long enough" mode at times.

But he isn't boring.

I rate him:



However, I do think he occasionally believes in his own mythology a little too often, so to keep his ego in check, I'm also passing along this little reminder to keep him out of poseur-dom:

.

And I'd like to extend an invitation to move south and be my boy toy for a month or so. I don't know what he's like in bed (I suspect he has bad ADD), but I don't think he'd be boring.

Why Don't We Get Drunk And Screw? Because I'm Hideous, That's Why

The Drunken Housewife. I'm so excited to review this I can hardly stand it.

Fireballs here with your Friday fun. Sometimes I'm a little horrified that my horrific review sits here all weekend, then I realize that we don't get too much traffic, so it's not a big deal. So, if you're stopping by, do two things for me. One, comment. Two, spread the word. And three (okay, three things, sue me), submit your blog for review. Thanks. Commercial over.

The Drunken Housewife is pretty sweet, actually. I'm not the biggest fan of the template, but the content is the shiz. Not fucking kidding, either, read this. It's quite good.

The template is plain. White background, purple header, black text. Nothing to write home about, however, when the content is this good, I don't need a template to make my life complete. Now, this is a mommy blog, and she clearly enjoys the role, but she can really spin a tale, and she's got a wonderful snarky sense of humor. I really enjoy it. When I first read it, I was like, oh well, another mommy blog, but I followed along leading up to this review, and I'm impressed.



Keep up the good work, and happy belated Mother's Day.

Oh, and on a personal note. Fireballs has a new blog-crush. Guess who? Yeah, you. You with the straight hair, not wavy.

Have a great weekend, monkeys. Behave.