All About the Bling*

A couple years ago I befriended a co-worker, a 21-year-old "woman" who was married to a 40-year-old "man". The quotes are an implication about their maturity levels, rather than their genders.

After I picked the wife up from the side of the road at 3am one night, she asked me to drive her to the hospital. She felt like the only way to get away from her physically and mentally abusive husband was by killing herself. She wanted to be admitted to the hospital to be put on suicide watch. I stayed with her there until her husband figured out where she was and texted that he was coming to get her. At that point, she told me to leave, "so he won't get angry that I'm spreading our business all over the place".

This was the start of my involvement in their dysfunctional relationship. She'd call me crying about once a week, stoned out of her gourd on opiates, to bitch about some new shit he'd pulled. I'd tell her to leave his ass and move back home to her parents. But she wouldn't leave him. "It's different when you're married," she told me. "You wouldn't know what that's like."

Several weeks later she called me in tears, because her husband had stolen the inheritance money she'd received from her late uncle for her education. She didn't know what he'd spent it on until several weeks after that, when he ended up in jail for possession of crack cocaine and solicitation of a prostitute. She still didn't leave him.

After the crack and whores bit (possibly crackwhores), I was done. I couldn't invest any more of myself in the situation without wanting to smack her around myself. I avoided her calls and avoided talking to her at work. In the end, she showed up to work (with a black eye) to tell the managers that she was finally moving back to her parents.

Am I a bad friend because I refused to enable her dysfunction and self-destruction? Am I hyper-judgmental and overly opinionated, to the detriment of most of my friendships?

Possibly yes, but that's also probably why I was asked to review for this site.

The Blog O' the Day is "Long Distance Love Affair". Do not click this link if your computer is more than a year old -OR- you're using internet that is slower than fiber optic. It's not worth crashing your computer.

I say that because I counted no less than 13 widgets and doodads. It's like accidentally stumbling onto someone's Myspace profile circa 2004, complete with that fucking music player smack dab in the middle of the blog, those awful flashing blingy things people used to leave as comments and an extensive use of text and chat speak, with different font colors and sizes.

How many fucking times do we have to bitch about people not reading the FAQ before submitting? Shit.

I'm not even gonna get into the grammar and spelling because "Miss Innocent's" first language is not English. If you've gambled and clicked the link, you can see a blatant affront in the sub-title.

Now onto the content. Miss Innocent is a spoiled Filipina princess, "on vacation" in California because she's followed her boyfriend from Manila. She's still not living in the same town as "her future husband", hence "a long distance love affair".

She spends the majority of her blogging time obsessing about her controlling boyfriend who's most likely cheating on her, and throwing temper tantrums over trivial matters. Randomly interspersed blog entries include her repeated use of her daddy's credit card to go on shopping sprees, and her adoption of desirable American traits, like eating shitty, unhealthy food.

I've already told a story about how I give the fuck up on people who bitch about their dysfunctional and abusive relationships but don't do anything to change the situation. Why the hell would I read a blog about one?

There's only one post in the whole blog where Miss Innocent gets down to the nitty gritty and actually does SOME self-reflection. I don't know if I kind of liked this post because of my current situation and the fact I've been having a quarter-life crisis for the past 5 years, but I did. I would have liked to see more of this.

My suggestion for Miss Innocent is to start a whole new blog, where the main focus ISN'T her fucked up relationship with her boyfriend. She says she's on a mission to find herself. That would be WAY more interesting to her readers than the shit going on now.

But for a co-dependent person, finding oneself sometimes requires one to be single. Unfortunately, I think that's easier said than done for Little Miss Innocent.

For the WORST blog template I've ever seen and the asinine blog subject:







For wanting to be reviewed, even after the site admin asked you if you were being serious:







* Since we'd already traveled back in time to 2004 and all.

Your Shit Is Bananas

If you don't fucking fix your fucking template, I'm going to bribe one of those twelve-year olds that sells pot down the street to kickstart your labia with his rusty hockey blades.

I understand you're a "simple girl whose hair is messy," which insinuates you're above such menial worries as physical appearance. Admirable enough, but you don't need to prove it to us by shitting out a template that looks like a crappy toy from a vending machine, with that fuckjumble of widgetry. You want a conglomerate of widgets? Fine. You don't even have that many, you wannabee widget collector. Some people collect ceramic chickens, but at least they commit and organize their compilations like the respectable foaming obsessives they are.

I cannot focus on your entries because of your failed photobucket background image. Your title is a grammatical tragedy that reminds me of Sheryl Crow, and not throaty, folksy Sheryl Crow that can pass for good music but pitchy, strained, eye-gouge-y Sheryl Crow. Thank god you stopped that whole rainbow of font colors thing, because I was two posts away from John Wayne Gacying your ass.

Listen Sameera, I'm glad you're so thankful for everything in your life, because honest appreciation is a rarity. Keep it up. I sincerely hope you don't change that, I hope the cynics of the world feel shame in the face of your sunshine.

But here is what you are missing: reason. You love nature, you love sandals, you love itineraries, you love putting shit into categories, you love conversations, you love loving things. I would demand you prove it, but I believe you. There are so many goddamn enthusiastic exclamation points, you have to mean fucking business.

But I don't give a shit that you love them, because I don't know why. What's so fucking great about nature? Do you tag your memories with seasons? When you smell the chill of the air, do you imagine your dog shoveling his nose in a snowdrift and plowing his way towards you, sneezing and flinging snow in his wake? He smashes his nose into your knees and barks, demanding you join him on the ground. He spins and ducks under himself, falls and rolls and grabs your pantleg with his teeth, dragging you down to his level because he loves the snow; it reminds him of being alive.

That's what I love about nature: it demands a reaction by always existing and changing every single day. If you have nothing to talk about, there's always the weather. Everyone has an opinion about the weather, and everyone has an opinion about whether the weather is a topic worthy of discussion at all. It is brilliant.

So let's hear it. Tell me why. This is a good start, this is better. But do it, please, without so many exclamation points and ellipses and ill-placed commas. Please, please, please pleasepleasepleaseplease, prettyshiny please, sack those fucking exclamation points. Lose them. Ima gonna string your exclamation points into a noose and fucking strangle you with it if you keep that shit up.

As an aside, just a little gripe, but "Serial killers!!!" is a fucking enthusiastically terrifying title for a post. It conjures visions of a messy-haired girl sitting cross-legged in a room with tree frog corpses tacked to the walls named Bill! and Spot! and Mr. Slimey Face! She's meticulously filing the fingerprints off her collection of severed hands, each one fated for painting and stenciling the outlines of turkeys for nefarious handmade blog award widgets. She raises her head and grins. "I love it when my fellow bloggers lend a helping hand!!!!!" she squeals, giggling into her shadow. That girl, by the way, is you.

Until then you start giving me a reason to give a shit, you fall short of, well, everything except being exceedingly creepy sometimes.

Ball and Chain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes You Feel Like the Only One Laughing

I don't know if this is a picture of Jacob or not, but it's on his blog so I'm just going to go ahead and pretend it's him. He was kind enough to do a lovely little guest post for us, which is excellent, because (a) getting people to write reviews is harder than I thought, and (b) I like Jacob. Plus he keeps chickens in his backyard, so you know this guy's got shit to do that is way more lucrative than reviewing a blog with "Poo" in its title.


You know, when I was given a list of blogs to choose from, I didn't even bother to look at a single post before making my choice. The URL: Midgetmanofsteel.com. It was just too good to pass up. I just knew this would be a blog that would either be awesome or I could at least work up a good rant about it not living up to the potential of the title.

It turns out that the real name of the blog is Mental Poo, and I'm going to go ahead and establish a rule that blogs with titles referencing solid human waste are going to suck. Plus now, instead of imagining a tiny little Superman or the Bloodhound Gang's bodybuilding elf, I'm left wondering if "Midget Man of Steel" isn't a metaphor for the guy's penis. I've got nothing against genital references technically. In fact, a very long time ago the name of my blog was a veiled reference to masturbation, so I can't really make fun of those names. The name hasn't changed; I'm just lucky I veiled that shit so well that it could basically refer to anything I wanted. It'd be a little embarrassing to have a blog named after self-love at my age.

Getting back to Mental Poo, I'm not even trying to accuse the writer of having a small penis. That's not my style, at least not when I'm not trying to be ironic, and I'm not feeling very ironic at the moment. The guy's actually a better writer than "Mental Poo" would suggest. He's clear, concise and uses interesting word choice. This guy probably passed a few English classes in high school. He may have even earned an A in his freshman composition class in college if he was able to keep it serious long enough to churn out a good essay, but that's his problem. The guy is obviously going for the humor blog thing. I respect that. Sticking to a theme is hard and comedy is a risky endeavor. Believe me. I understand this. It's easier to build a following when the readers know exactly what to expect, but it really limits what you can write about. When you're successful, the result is beautiful. When you're not, the result is, well...

I'm not even going to say that this blog is all bad, it's just that he tries too hard. He's putting up a lot of posts, averaging about 20 a month for the past three years. That's a lot of stuff to write, and when you're always trying to make it funny, you're going to have a lot of flops unless you're some sort of idiot savant of original comedy. There's a reason a guy like Jay Leno gets stale and hackneyed after years of doing a comedy show five nights a week. I mean come on. Ruben Studdard Spider?

Basically, the writer reminds me of a guy I lived with for a while in college. He seemed to live on a diet of Papa John's pizza and was a nearly constant font of cheesy jokes. In person, I'm okay with this, but in a blog it's not exactly going to earn a spot in my Google Reader list.

As for the design aspects of the blog, that's not my cup of tea, exactly. I'm a writer, not a designer. My own blog design is rather utilitarian. Mental Poo's format is one of Blogger's generic templates with some moderate customization. I do have enough of a designbackground to know that the stuff in the side bar is just excessive. A lot of it could just be taken out and either trashed entirely or just moved somewhere else on the site. The archives could be collapsed into a drop down box to clean up that area, but honestly, I'd read the ugliest blog in the world (as long as it was legible) if the posts were worth reading. My biggest piece of advice is to just slow your roll. Cut down on the frequency of your posting, take a little time to polish your pieces, and only post when the work deserves it. The shotgun approach works for some things, but in a blog it makes the reader sift through too much crap to be able to enjoy the stuff you actually get right.

Rating: A meh because I just don't want to read your posts and a Dirty Jay Leno because I think you make Conan O'Brien cry.











(Hey, it's Shiner. So Jacob asked for a "Dirty Jay Leno" but I only have MS Paint here at work, so he just kind of looks like the guy on the Pringles cans. Sor.)

Blame Humor Bloggers

A review from People in the Sun:

So last week I got this nice review done, and most people thought it was alright. Hell, it even had a Nazi joke! And here, so soon, is the review that will banish me forever from this community.

Because what we have here is a Humor Blogger. And I don't hate it.

Now, I understand the hatred for Humor Bloggers. They're bubbly. They're constrained by the need to tell jokes. They're like a bubbly community of monstrous sad clowns. They're my supervisor in the call center 5 years ago. She smiled her stupid smile even when she told me 5 minutes late is still late, and that at 8am I'm already expected to be ready by the phone. Because she had to smile all the time or else she would have exploded with self-pity and self-loathing and self-delusion.

So I understand the instinctive hatred for Humor Bloggers.

But beyond that, what do we have here?

First of all, I hate original Blogger templates. Find a blog you like, find the template link at the bottom, and get yourself a new template. I mean, that "Just hangin' out" line in the description is invisible, for Canadian Christ's sake.

Oh yea, he's Canadian. Whatever the hell that is.

Now let's go down that sidebar:

Humor Bloggers button. A Christmas pun. Links to his Canadian Politics blog. His chatting-about-music blog (why do all his blogs start with these dots? What am I missing here?). His awards-other-bloggers-have-given-him blog. His blogroll blog. Another Humor Bloggers button. A picture of Elvis ironing. It's moving endlessly. Because it's a GIF. Who gives a fuck. It's the most annoying thing I've ever seen. Two more Humor Bloggers buttons. God I'm getting annoyed. And Friendfeed, and Tweets, and Followers, and something called LOL BLIPS Rating, and this thing that tells you where traffic is coming from because as a reader I'm supposed to give a fuck? And some stickers, which are these horrible one liners you find at that call center supervisor's cubicle, and of course: yet another Humor Bloggers button.

Man... And there are more buttons at the bottom? Shit!

OK. I feel this review is already too long, so I'm just going to go through the content quickly.

It's not horrible, see? And that's the tragedy of it all. I mean, it's not really for me, and I don't think I'd wake up and say, "I wonder if there's a new post up?" But I also wouldn't kick this guy out of my Google Reader. Most of the stuff is original and not annoying at all, considering the Humor Bloggers connection. In other words, ever met anyone involved in improv theater or stand-up, and you know they're testing material on you while they're supposedly having a regular conversation, and it's the most annoying feeling in the world? So this blog isn't like that. It's genuine, and even with all the buttons, you don't get the feelings that he's trying hard to make you laugh. He's doing whatever the hell he wants, really, and that's good, in principal.

But it also means that for every original Christmas Song post and for every genuine post about his health, you also have a couple of posts about US politics, which don't really go anywhere, a collection of cut-and-pasted editorial cartoons, and some posts about nothing, that you finish reading and feel like Will Smith just erased your memory with his Men in Black gadget.

And captions contests.

Now, whatever I think about captions contests is irrelevant. The commenters are genuinely having fun, so who am I to judge? And that's what it's about, really. Humor Bloggers are not monstrous sad clowns at all. They're not my call center supervisor. It's just a bunch of people who like to make each other laugh, and what's wrong with that? Knowing the Internet is full of shitty motivational posters, isn't a community of bloggers actually the best part of the internet? Congratulations, Internet, you're using your powers for good this time.

So at the risk of being the Paula Abdul of this site, I will say again that I didn't hate this blog, and I can't give him the fiery finger. But I can't praise it either.

The Dufus needs to make drastic changes to his design. Dufus, if Humor Bloggers forces you to put 10 buttons on your sidebar, you should join forces with other members and protest. This is YOUR corner of the Internet. How much traffic are you getting from LOL Blips? Do they deserve room on your sidebar? I bet even your most loyal readers can't stand this Elvis anymore. Put some Goddamn thought into what you have on your sidebar. And change your template. Your writing is original--so make the whole package look more personal. And get rid of those dots.

Unless its a Canadian thing. In which case, power to you, eh?

The latest in our series of guest reviewers....

Keywork here. I'm going to play nice.

At first glance, I was excited when I visited Cave of Wonders. Because, well, I like clouds. And there's a shitload of clouds on this blog. This excitement turned into something else rather quickly: confusion. Harshal, the man behind the clouds, has a few things to work on.

The sidebar, it bothers me. Way too much shit going on here. Really. I don't know where to start, honestly. It's a veritable widget orgy. I understand the charm of the widget. Now, I believe I also understand the widget's attitude toward reproduction: fuck like bunnies. I think that's what happened to your sidebar. Harshal, you can't leave widgets to their own devices. Please purchase contraceptives or learn how to perform vasectomies. Please. No more widgets.

Before I got eyefucked by the widgetry, I was greeted with "Cave of Wonders: Where fantasy meets reality." After careful consideration, I am one to believe that the two will never meet.

Harshal, it doesn't fit the overall content found on your blog. It just doesn't. I didn't find much fantasy on your blog. To be fair, most of the fantasy I did find, I almost enjoyed. Only because it all involved killing/maiming your roommate. I can relate to this fantasy, so I'm giving you the green light on more 'death to the roommate' posts. So, yeah, change your headliner and write more about killing your roommate. Fuck it, kill your roommate and write about it. That's a post I would like to see in the future on your blog. Don't make the reader dig for it, I could have done without the filler that exists between death threats.

I understand that you study biomedical engineering. What that is exactly, I don't understand. I don't need to. That's another thing I enjoyed, from the posts I read: you didn't try to explain that shit to me. Thank you for that.

So, in short, here's my advice: unless some really crazy shit happens to you, focus solely on demeaning your roommate. That shit was funny. Not hilarious, but much more high speed than your musings on the 'scare factor' of Eddie Murphy. Yes, readers, you will dig for that as well.

I found bits of interest, but I see a creative writing class in your future, Harshal. That would help you out I think. I'm not going to get into your sentence structure, grammatical errors, or misuse of the English language; I think that would be unfair. English is obviously not your first language and your understanding of it is something you can improve. All I can really say is, well, keep at it. I like to encourage people to write. I also encourage honesty, so you're getting one star on this, for making an attempt:



p.s. Want to guest review?