Hoochie Coochie Man

Christmas in the Raptor family is a low key affair. We nod politely at our neighbors who're desperate to inject some cheer in their lives since the only other attempt at family bonding is during turkey day, and is almost always a failure. I mean, imagine a herd of stegos staring quizzically staring at meat, not knowing where the grass is. Still, this season gives me the chance to empty whatever's left of my scotch inventory and stock up for the coming year.

This time of the year, I need all the help I get from inebriation, for there are more colors to behold than an acid trip in a 70s disco. Kind of like today's blog. Cogent Ascending is authored by someone who describes himself thus "My mind is the waste management facility of the gay intellectual". I must confess, that makes no sense to me, and would have made no difference if I wasn't this hungover. My pounding head aside, this review took a lot of hard work. Well, a lot of focus anyway. I use a battery of filters and blockers to keep my browser light and functional, and to blot out shit I can't be wasting my time with. So when I fired up cogent ascending, I was surprised to see large empty spaces and captions floating in the middle of whitespace. I turned the filters off, and lo behold, my eyes were subjected to more flesh and absurdities than a B-grade horror flick. And this review would have taken a lot less effort if EVERY FUCKING POST didn't look like it was printed on a pamphlet for a lame garage sale.

Jorge(?), your interests are listed as "writing, reading" but how the fuck do you expect your readers to appreciate any of that if you fuck up the presentation so bad? There's a reason every piece of prose is written in left-to-right orientation, and no "personal preference" justifies formatting otherwise. I deserve a fucking medal for braving on, for tolerating this assault on my senses. Jorge rips on creationists, homophobes and religious douches. These days any talentless schmuck can get a soapbox to to pick right wingers (hi Fallon!), so reading the blog bored me. Making fun of Palin is like tweeting. Everyone does it and no one brings  anything original to the table.

Look Jorge, don't get me wrong - it fills me with uncontrollable rage that a section of the society is still persecuted against. I cannot fathom why you puny humans need legistlation to deny basic happiness to your own kind. I see the need for debate, and can understand why someone in your position would be so cynical and bitter. What I don't get is why you try so hard. When things are this bad, a blog should write itself. It doesn't need to be supplemented by lousy pictures, bad formatting and histrionics. Fine, even if it is "your thing", it makes no sense cramming it down your readers' throats 3000 words per post.

You're an opinionated, educated, gay man living in Vegas. I see opportunity. I see you have a platform. I see you wasting it. Clean up your act already. Here's an exercise. Write 5 posts in a row with no pictures and a 200 word limit. Right now you're that out of control wierdo at the bar who won't shut the fuck up. I have a lousy hangover and your stupid blog sure didn't help. I'm going back to sleep.

For your terrible formatting and all those stupid pictures you get a solitary finger








For banal self indulgence you get a meh

Yellow Submarine

I've been terribly late (that's what she said? oh shut it) with this review, and I apologize. In fact, I still don't quite have the mental bandwidth for a big ass review, so read this post thrice if you feel it's too short.

I've mentioned before that we retreated to underground bunkers when life top-side got a tad predictable. Boy bands sealed the deal, we'd rather take lava pits than listen to Ronan Keating's soporific voice. No guitar solos? What the fuck were you humans getting into? Anyway, curiosity gets the better of us and we check on you cultured apes now and then. A great way to jump from shore to shore is reading, and blogs are a great way to get around. If they're written right. If they're not gaudy enough to make my retinas bleed. If the author doesn't peddle shit in lieu of writing. If no opportunity to tell a story is squandered. If opinions are brutally honest. Right.

Today we visit the exotic shores of India, where a billion people are apparently on the road trying to get somewhere (have you seen the blasted traffic there?). Jil Jil Ramamani is a blog maintained by a lady whose name is not Jil Jil Ramamani. I'm not sure what language the about me is in, and I sense a wall of culture I'm about to run into. There's something about why the blog is called what it is, it could probably be modified and used for your "prophyle". The design reeks of local pop-culture, and if that's your thing, sure. All that colour was a tad overwhelming, but I have a memo here that says no one gives a shit anymore. Navigation is piss-poor, I couldn't figure out how to get to the previous pages without using the archives. You do want your readers to linger, don't you?

The latest post is emo - so whoop-de-doo, "NEVER FORGET" (old inside joke Sindhu, never mind). You aspire to be a biker chick and I like that. Just wear some goddamn deo, ok? I get the feeling you're a college kid, and I guess life is exciting even when it's a fuckin' 120 degrees all year long. English isn't your first language (nor a Raptor's) so I won't nitpick about grammar and the like. I'm averse to blogging with lists, especially long ones, but yours' give me an insight into life on the other side of the globe, even if it isn't intentional. There's coming-of-age writing, some musing and other random shit I won't bother linking.

Thing is Sindhu, while I find your blog readable, your writing isn't always tolerable. Writing and talking are two separate things, and blogging like you're yammering about some female teenage shit I can't be arsed about makes me want to drink a gallon of bleach. I'm sure you like the loudmouth, constantly chattering you, but I can't be the only one who hates it. Knock that shit off, respect the medium you're on. I'm going backwards on your blog and since I'm hating it more and more by every post, you've probably gotten better over the years.


Since you like lists, here's one for you:

1) Edit, proof read and edit some more.
2) Use colloquialisms more sparingly, and with better context if you want international readership.
3) Don't write like you're cooing over the phone.
4) Write more often. And I'm not talking about "whee I'm back" posts.
5) Enough of the damned gtalk conversations.
6) More stories, more opinions.
7) Stop selling shit on your blog. If you must, use a separate website and link it up on your sidebar - it's shiny as it is.


Meh, back to my single malt.

What a Wonderful World it Would Be

Sam Cooke left one out. There should have been a line in there about “Don’t know much about philosophy…” but there wasn't. So here I am trying to spin a metaphor that quite frankly just isn't going to work.

Well, fuck and piss and vinegar!

To tell you the truth, I am having a lot of trouble with this review. Normally it is very easy for me to absorb, process, synthesize, and find fault with a collection of someone else’s personal idea of what makes for compelling writing. But this blog, Love of All Wisdom, penned by Professor of Philosophy Amod Lele, is somewhat more challenging to me. And here’s why: I don’t know if I can tell for sure whether he is doing a good job or not. Depends on what you mean by “good” or “job.” He comes across as intelligent. Deep. Consistent. True to his stated goal.

But it reads like a text book. And uses a lot of terms that are not familiar to the lay reader, which may be fine, as the lay reader may not be who this feller wants to talk to. I know for a fact that he does not intend for this to be a personal blog about who he’s dating, or how he feels about things, or any of the kinds of things that most people are polluting the Internet with. (You’ll notice, I deliberately left the “s” off the end of that term, as I have come to the conclusion that using the term “Internets” is an affectation. You may disagree. Discuss among yourselves. Just, if you are going to do so, do it over there where I can’t reach you with my taser.)

As an armchair philosopher who has grappled with concepts of morality, ‘God’/gods, ethics, etc., I found this to be a very compelling and very dense read. I want to read more. Then again, I want to read all the shit on my bookshelf that I bought because that’s what I thought educated, intelligent people should do – books like War and Peace, The Age of Reason, Ulysses… That doesn't mean that I have a hope in hell of ever doing so.

My biggest complaint is that in order to do a fair review, in order to fully process everything that he has written, about 20% of the content requires me to do ancillary research at Wikipedia or by buying and reading books I don’t intend to read because it assumes a prior knowledge that I just don’t possess. And I just don’t have enough hours in a day. As an example, here is a brief excerpt:

“This question of technique came up at least three times at the SACP. Peimin Ni – next year’s SACP president – argued that Mencius’s metaphysical theory of human nature is there not to justify his ethics, but to help provide practical guidance in shaping human conduct.”

This assumes that I know who Mencius is and what his/her metaphysical theory of human nature is. And that I know (clearly) what metaphysics is. And what is meant, philosophically, by the term “ethics.” Even the use of the word “technique” was a bit context-less for me until later on, when a context sort of grew up around the rest of the concepts being discussed.

My slightly smaller complaint is the template. Little white text on a black background. After reading for about an hour one day, I stepped away from the screen and my entire world had light and dark horizontal stripes running across it until my rods and cones in my eyes re-acclimated. This was a severe annoyance to me. My world should not be a zebra, even if just temporarily.

My smallest complaint is not really a complaint at all rather than an observation. In many cases, I just flat disagreed with him. And the beauty part is – in a philosophical discussion, we can disagree 100% and both be 100% right. For example:

“What a dream is, is an interior state. Of course physical changes occur in the brain when we dream; but a dream is necessarily more than that.” (emphasis mine)

(Really? Necessarily!? Not the way I understand the physiology of the brain, and memory, and consciousness.)

“To say a dream is nothing but those physical changes is to say not merely that the things we dream about do not exist, but even that the fact that we dreamt about them did not exist.” (emphasis his)

(The things we dream about MAY exist, but being in a dream doesn't make them so. I can dream of a rainbow colored unicorn, which may be simply automatic firing of certain memory and creative centers of my brain, but that doesn't make such a unicorn exist in the world of protoplasm. And I do not follow the logic that is employed to determine that this somehow makes the fact of the dream not exist. You've lost your firm footing here.)

He makes certain statements that I feel are unfounded. But, shit, he’s got a PhD in Philosophy (from Harvard! Oooooh!) – I took an Intro to Philosophy course in the 1980’s from a textbook that had been out of print for twenty years (yet had been written by the professor teaching the course, so of course, we had to use his text). And I feel more than a little bit intimidated by his assured tone and his credentials.

Still, one does not need an alphabet soup after one’s name to be able to apply logic. And I think that may be one of my biggest beefs with him – it seems he values intuition too much over logic (a deeper and more protracted read may prove this to be false), and I distrust intuition. I think that intuition can, and does, lie to you. It stands to reason that this may be one of the biggest separators of Eastern and Western philosophical approaches, and that I may simply not be “eastern” enough.

I don’t know.

What I do know is that this blog is an acquired taste. And won’t be to everyone’s liking. I also know that his template looks cool as shit until you have to start reading things. If you want to read him regularly, use a reader. His categorization is helpful, but only if you understand his classification system. Which I don’t know that I do. His writing is factual and unemotional, and will generally only appeal to philosophy dorks like me, but it is clear and well-edited.

Overall, I think that he is doing what he set out to do. I don't know why he submitted for a review here, but he did. So I have to give him a meaningful rating. Since he accomplishes that which he seems to set out to do, I'm giving him two stars.



But because he's unapproachable as hell and is flat out wrong in my opinion on occasion, I am also giving him a single flaming finger.



And finally, because his template made me see zebra stripes repeatedly, I am giving him two more flaming fingers.

Polypropylene Fete

Before I begin with reviewing World According 2 Lisa, I want to go on the record and say that this review almost did not happen at all. The simple explanation is that I found the template it is on to be such a challenge, it was nigh unreadable.

Light text on dark background, highly busy background, sidebar cluttered with pointlessness, buried archive navigation... If it weren't for Google reader, I would not have been able to read this at all. So, point number one, Lisa. If you want me as a reader, or people like me, you have to do something about that template. Post haste!

Anyway...

What is this blog all about? Well, it isn't so much the World According 2 Lisa as much as it is Lisa's Life. A blow by blow account of what she did today and what she's planning to do the next few days. Some days she tells us her opinion on things, but those things are very, very local to her. For some people, especially people that know Lisa, maybe that's okay.

But I was left ... wanting.

In my opinion, this blog is the online equivalent of a Tupperware Party. If you like Tupperware Parties (and some of my favorite people in the world do love Tupperware Parties, so it's cool with me if you do), then you will probably like this blog. If your idea of a good time runs more to the realm of jazz concerts or independent film, then maybe this isn't for you.

A few notes for Lisa on how I would go about improving, if including people like me in your readership is a goal, which it certainly doesn't have to be:

Some things are funny once in a while, but not all the time. For example:

1. In a month and a half's worth of posts you used the phrase "giddy in my giddy up" multiple times. In my humble opinion, once was just about enough.


2. Strikethrough text, when you type what you really want to say, and then format it as strikethrough text and then type a more politically correct thing -- yeah, that was hilarious the first time I saw it done ... ten years ago. Why not just type what you really want to say and leave it at that?

What else? I have a few pet peeves that you fed Red Bull to.

• Like, the pet peeve of using the wrong word in a common expression. "Allusions of grandeur" should be "delusions of grandeur." Unless you really are "alluding to" grandeur. This is just one example. There were others, but I am not being paid to be an editor.


• Or the pet peeve of misspelling "y'all." "Y'all" is a contraction of "you" and "all," and as such, the apostrophe falls between the "y" and the "all." Unless you can convince me that it is a contraction between "ya" and something that ends in "ll".


• Or the pet peeve of using text speak in written communication. Your blog title uses a "2" instead of writing out the word "to." Did that extra keystroke push you over the top? You're a teacher. You should, in my opinion, know better.

Tone down your template. Constantly switching font colors and typefaces doesn't do you any favors. Dark text on a light background is infinitely easier to read than light text on a dark background. And that background image may be the perfect image to tell the world who you are, but it's so busy that it makes me cross eyed.

My last advice may be the hardest to apply, but here you go. Write deeper. Writing about the superficial details of your day and your week are okay here and there, but when I read a blog, I want to be inspired to think about things differently, to have portions of my mind stimulated. And, sadly, for me, that did not happen. Hey, maybe that isn't your goal. Fine. What is your goal? Because the way it reads right now, it sounds like you are trying to be funny, and being funny -- really funny -- is almost impossible to do, even for the most brilliantly funny people in the world. Being real is so much easier, and ultimately for readers like me, more fulfilling.

If you want more than a "MEH" from me, you need to give me something more. Something real. Something not made of Tupperware plastic.

My skeertuig is vol palings*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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






*My hovercraft is full of eels. (Afrikaans)

All apologies

I'm sorry, Rachel, that the universe picked the one reviewer who loathes fluffy, empty-headed suburban chicks whose brains have apparently been hulu'ed by the hot Florida sun with a special passion verging on virulent nausea, for you.

I'm sorry that your blog suffers in comparison to that of a high school student's in terms of depth and creativity.

I'm sorry that I loathe pink polka dots with the icy hatred that Hilary Clinton's vagina reserves for Bill's wandering penis.

I'm sorry that I reserve a special disdain for women who can't cook, and in fact, don't even know what a clove of garlic is.

In short, I'm sorry you got me, because I FUCKING HATE YOUR BLOG.

Should you have received another reviewer, they might have been tempted to cut you some slack.

I am not so inclined.

Your blog is everything that is wrong with the blogosphere, in specific, and humanity, in general.

Who would read this hot mess? I can't find anything, at all, in your blog that makes me care about you or want to know you. It's all superficial nonsense, like what kind of shoes you want, or what you ate for dinner, or your daughter's vomit, without anything REAL.

I want you to do something. Read this post.

Then, read this:

The world is so much bigger than me. & in a way, it took me until just now, on july 13, 2007, at 1:10 in the morning to figure that out. I'm at my dad's apartment laying in bed and I start thinking about an article I read on myyearbook today. It was about a teen who had become a vegetarian. That isn't what made it so memorable. It was the part about how many fast food restaurants like Mcdonald's are paying to clear-cut the rainforest so they can graze cattle and other animals for their food products. That's terrible yes, but then a few minutes ago, i went onto google and searched for rainforest clearcutting. I came to a site, that even though it's information should be extremely reassuring, did not help my state of mind whatsoever. I'm not sure what to believe about global warming, and Clear Cutting, and Fossil Fuels. I want so much to believe that global warming is just a natural stage in the Earth's but what if it isn't? It just freaks me out. I mean, I'm 13, I'm confused, I'm not sure what to believe and i'm worried. Honestly, I cared more about finding a boyfriend and being with friends more than i cared about things going on across the world. I'm just a shallow teenager Lol. How depressing.

Guess what, Rachel? Your blog just had it's ass kicked by a teenaged blog. My teenager, for the record.

Sure, I'm filled with parental pride, but I also want you to see how your blog starts at mundane and never leaves it. There is never any point, there is never any growth, and there is never any introspection or reflection. You have less depth than a middle-schooler.

Your blog, in fact, reminds me of a conversation I eavesdropped on between two teenagers in my backseat this weekend.

Sarah: "I look around at life, and I have all these thoughts going on inside my head at once, and I feel like my head is hardly big enough to hold them all in. And, I look at Jessica, and I see that her life is incredibly simple. We're sitting down to eat, and inside her head, as clear as day, her brain is saying, 'Pull out the chair. Don't slip. Sit down.' And, I wonder what it would be like to only be thinking at one thing at a time, but maybe I will never know."

My daughter: "On the other hand, Jessica hardly ever falls off of chairs like we do."

Rachel: Your blog is Jessica's brain. I bet you never fall off of chairs. However, your blog sucks balls.

Here's my advice:

Go to facebook.
Create a profile.
Talk about shoes.
Give the blogosphere a rest.

That's all. I apologize for hating your blog and everything it stands for in my head, but I can't help myself.

Rollin With My Homies

There is something about people from the midwest. We rock, y'all. We are more blunt, more funny, more cool, more loyal, more bettah than people from anywhere else (except my homegirl, Cal, from the TLH).

Up today is The Friggin Cat House. Imagine my joy when I realized that she's from my hometown, the place where they know how to smoke a brisket, the place where the sports teams always break our hearts, the place where the muddy Mo flows. Hell yeah.

This is a blog that encompasses all of my favorite things: Sports, cats, smartassery, and voodoo poonanny. Sometimes, all in a single post.

I don't know if I'd say this is well-written. It probably isn't. I mean, the posts sometimes have no point at all, and really, they probably should. But I like her voice. It sounds, like most other voices of people from the midwest...GENUINE.

I would totally hang out with and be friends with this woman, if she relocated to Florida. I think she's funny. I also like her ethics.

What I don't like is her blog design. First, the title...I don't like it. You probably don't change things like that just for me, but damn the world would work better if people would just let me do what I'm best at and be the dictator of everything.

The template...meh. I think you need to clean up your sidebar and move most of that shit behind tabs, just like you've done with your about me and your cast of characters. You don't need a calendar AND a drop-down archives button. It's redundant. The pictures are fine, but the design itself is pretty meh. I swear I've seen at least 7,935 blogs with this same layout, at the very least.

Maybe Cal can give you some design tips since I think she uses wordpress, as well. Or go here or here and find something that smacks of personality. I like the pics of your cat, but the rest is simply too plain for words...like eating oatmeal with no milk or sugar.

I like this blog, and I like this blogger, and I'd like to get her drunk and see what I could dare her to do as long as neither of us got caught on film. I think the posts need a bit more polishing and the template needs work, but I definitely like her.

Widow's Walk

What do you say to a woman who has lost the love of her life? What do you say to a woman who is a widow at 39, with two young children to support? You say, "I'm sorry."

But what do you say to a woman who has lost the love of her life, is a widow at 39, and has two young children to support when she submits her blog for review on a site that consistently and with rapacious glee eviscerates hum-drum blogs with scathing commentary?

You say, "I'm sorry," and you dig in to the review even though all you want to do is give Sandi a big hug and then call your nearest and dearest and tell them you love them because life can be short and sharp.

When I saw that my blog to review this week was A Widow for One Year, I choked. Jesus, I said. This one is going to gut me. And I was right. I sat down and read this blog from start to finish. I'm not going to lie to protect Sandi's feelings -- I didn't read the entire thing because the writing was fantastic. It's not. It's raw and unvarnished and personal and sometimes inelegant. But the feeling in the writing, the story of what's happened to Sandi and her family, is, for me, impossible to turn away from. It's engrossing, and heartbreaking, and, unfortunately, more common than I knew.

This is an intensely personal blog that has far-reaching potential. The author has already been profiled in a local paper, and she's writing a book about her experiences. Sandi writes frequently and decently, and she comes across as forthright, ballsy, opinionated, and brave. And she's not afraid to get mad, to cry, to laugh. It's a blog where I care more about the author and her experiences than I do about grammar and engaging narrative and succinct phrasing.

But. Could it be better? Yes. And because she asked for it, here's my advice.

Get a new blog design. Stat. This one is boring, tired, and bland. You have important things to say. You'll be heard more clearly if you provide a little visual interest. Find something clean and engaging with some personality. I also think you really need a blog with some tabs for extra pages. All blogs need an "About" page, but yours especially could benefit. People should have the opportunity to read your story outright. Move those 25 items in the sidebar to that "About" page, too. There's no need for it in the sidebar; it's clutter. Also, it would be great to link a page with resources for pancreatic cancer research, support sites, etc.

What I really like is that you offer up these glimpses of your life with John and your life without John, there's holding on and moving on. These are meaningful, heartbreaking, instructive, and often inspiring. But there's some filler here, too. I hesitate to tell you to get rid of the filler because there's more to you than this grief, this experience of loss, and I like knowing that you, like me, hate the New Kids (maybe they should now be the Approaching Middle Age Losers Who've Peaked and Are Kidding Themselves). But beware of posting just to post.

As to your writing, it's solid if not always evocative or lyrical. But I feel like you have bigger things to worry about, so it didn't matter all that much to me, honestly. I know you can do better at crafting solid posts, but a part of me wonders if that's even the point. This is, after all, a release for you and a place where you can document and detail this year of widowhood (and hopefully further years). I know it's more therapeutic than artistic, at this point. If you're hoping to transcend that barrier, dust off that English degree and get a little more creative, a little more colorful, a little more polished. Right now, though, I understand that putting the thoughts out there is more important than putting them out there wrapped in pretty packaging.

For the design, you get the dreaded








For the writing, you get








For the content, which is meaningful, important, life-changing, gut-wrenching, brave, insightful, soul-baring, ballsy, compassionate, championing, nurturing, and universal, you get

Who's Got The Hairbrush?

So, in the latest health crisis in the land of Fireballs, my stomach decided late Saturday night that the time had come for open revolt. It marched into the streets, tossing rocks, yelling obscenities and starting fires. It reached a crescendo of anger, and declared it's open intention to start war.

Suffice it to say, Sunday and Monday were less than enjoyable.

But because I'm a slave to you all, and you need what I bring to the table, I'm soldiering on today in place of the lovely Mistress. It's what I do.

No Beaks is today's entry, and I can tell at first glance, just TOO MUCH CLUTTER. Three-column templates are not the way to go, honestly.

The content itself is gangbusters, all though I think you have to have been in on the joke from the get-go to understand the humor involved. Certainly, the About page lends itself to believing that this is a multi-author blog, but then it's possible that these Abouts are characters that pop up in the stories from time to time. Either way, I have no complaints about the content other than to say that picking up the thread of the frivolity isn't exactly easy.

Now, three column templates are about as easy to follow as LOST (premiering tomorrow night!) has been. It's just too much clutter. I'm not going to bitch about blog ads, because honestly, everyone most people I read are using them these days. Do they work? You fellas tell me. Personally, I think it looks cheap as hell. WeatherBug is fucking spyware, by the way. A few of your links are broken, too. Sloppy work, if you're trying to rock the three column template.

Here's how I've always pictured a good three-column: The About, Pics, Links, and Shout-outs on the left. A decently sized mid-section for content, say 550-650 pixels wide. The third column, for whatever bullshit you want to add, buttons and all that fooferall, should be small, and should NOT grab your eye when you first click over. This has none of that. I will say that the header intrigues me. Other than that, F triple minus for this template.

So, this is the classic half-and-half. I like the content, and the wit. I loathe the template. If it was the other way around, I'd give strong recommendation to ignore the shit out of this thing, but good-to-decent content usually draws me back in. So, today, you get a pass. I give it one star, because I cannot in good conscious go much higher. Come back with a rocking template, and watch that number increase.



My nuts itch just looking at it.

I need a spoon to gouge out my eyes

Good lord, this is beyond a shadow of the doubt the FUGLIEST template I've ever seen. God help us all. I'm not even sure I can get beyond this to evaluate the blog itself. May need more coffee.

....

Dear Lady Blogger:

Change this background IMMEDIATELY. If you can manage to create this visual atrocity, you can manage to fix it. The colors are HIDEOUS and not complementary.

Standard blogging rule: Light-colored background, dark text. Preferably (in my considered opinion) black on white or pale gray, tan, etc., for the content area at the VERY LEAST. See how the middle color in this example is the lightest of all? This is the color that should fall UNDERNEATH your main blog posts. Or, you can go in the opposite direction, and have a very dark background with EXTREMELY BRIGHT or WHITE lettering.

Links can be dark or bright colored, highly visul against whatever background you use. The most important thing is that they should COMPLEMENT the background and other colors. I.e., if you use any of these color scheme generators, you should use the VERY LIGHTEST color as the background, and only 2-3 of the other colors in the ENTIRE DESIGN. Four at the most.

Why don't you start here. Or here. See how in that last one, the link color matches the green of the header and stands out against the gray? very nice. Would match your doggy theme, too. See how clean and uncluttered it is, in comparison to your blog? Consider using it. I found it just for you.

Get rid of the large description of your blog (put it in the "about me" section). Get rid of all the pics in the sidebar (create a post and link to it in the sidebar). Get rid of all the extraneous crap that distracts from your words. The template is there to FRAME YOUR WORDS, to fit your voice, to add something to what you are doing. It isn't there to make your words impossible to read because of a horrid color clash.

Okay, content. Andrew Keen commented today that:

Enough of blogs and enough of bloggers! It's bad enough that there are 70 million of them out there, littering the Internet with fast breaking news about what their authors ate for breakfast. But blogs are just one piece in the digital media revolution. They are boring to write (yawn), boring to read (yawn) and boring to discuss (yawn).

(Irony, thy name is Andrew Keen--what is more boring than a blogger opining ad nauseum about how boring bloggers are?)

Nonetheless, more people who submit their blogs for review here should consider this particular paragraph. What are you hoping to accomplish by writing your blog? What is new or different that should compel people to read what you are writing? How are you *not-boring*? What does YOUR VOICE contribute to the blogosphere? WHO ARE YOU?

In short, why are you here, in this blogosphere? Why did you submit your blog to us? What is the fucking point of it all?

Your blog is inocuous but boring. And yet, I suspect your life is not boring at all. Why the juxtaposition? I don't hate your blog. It's hard to hate on someone who clearly seems like such a nice person and who has such adorable dogs. And yet your blog is lacking some indefinable zest that would make me want to read it often.

Think about it.

I give it no snaps.

A short bus for the template.

And a star for the dog.

Further, a required reading assignment:

Hahn at Home
Drunken Housewife
Some Pig

Don't post again until you've spent a couple of hours reading these blogs and fixed your template. Notice how each of these bloggers has her own distinctive voice? You need to find yours. And you need to purge the following words from your vocabulary: ramblings, musings, and collection. Those words are the words of doom.

p.s. because the reviewee thinks I'm a mean horrible man. And here I thought I was being so nice. :(

Imagine my chagrin

So I pull up this blog to review it, and lo and behold, the blogger is approximately my age, perhaps a year or three older, and he lives in the town where I spent my sluttiest years.

Yikes. This is almost as bad as finding out that the love of my life, the guy I had to break up with senior year because he had a seemingly permanent case of the summer snow sniffles, has been browsing my classmates profile (he has).

Anyway, back to the hip suburban white guy (nice matrix imitation, btw).

I love this blog.

Well, I mean the template is SHYTE. Complete and utter shyte. It is my least favorite basic blogger template, HANDS DOWN, and that's even considering the pepto bismal pink and the pond scum green. And the way he has done his sidebar? THE WORST...EVER. Please, dude...I cannot have slept with a guy whose template is this hideous. Go to freshblog, IMMEDIATELY, and learn to do drop down sidebars. Clean up your header (put all that text aside from your title into your profile, for starters). And while you're at it, get a hip suburban template. Your content deserves it. As it is now, your ugly template makes you look like everyone else out there. And you're way too cool for that, yer dudeness. What I would recommend is a template that actually has easy buttons on the top or side, so you can put your disclaimer, manifesto, etc. behind a button. It would be much cleaner, and I (or probably any of the other ask folks) would be happy to help you do that.

Speaking of content, the content rocks. It totally, totally rocks. I almost hope I might have slept with him because, although he is missing all his hair and sports some wrinkles in places I don't have them yet, he is smart, funny, profane, and never takes himself too seriously. Exactly the kind of guy I prefer.

Go read him. You won't regret it. And if the template and sidebar were brought up to speed, this blog would be totally fuckable. In the purely verbal sense, of course. ;)

I give the content

And the template? I had to come up with something new that was bad enough to fit a template this crappy juxtaposed behind content this good, and I think I found it:

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