Let me tell you about a stupid book: The Weblog Handbook by Rebecca Blood. It's a book! About weblogs! It's treacly and
inane!
But before I tell you about that, let me tell you about this other dumb book I
saw. Visual
Quickstart Guide: iPhoto for Mac OS X. When I showed this book around the
Pigdog staff room the other day, I delivered myself of a witticism which I believe bears
repeating:
"What a stupid idea!" I said. "Isn't it obvious that people who are too
dumb to start using iPhoto are also too dumb to read a book? They are probably too fucking dumb to breathe. The entire potential audience for this book died of asphyxiation! What kind of a business plan is that? 'I
know, let's publish a book for a bunch of rotting dumbfuck corpses! Our zombie audience will make us rich! And when they start taking their digital pictures from BEYOND THE GRAVE, there will be panic in the streets, governments will topple, and the world will be ours!'
"Lordy, lordy."
That's what I said. I was about to continue with an enumeration of Siduri's Tips for Never Having to Wash Your Underwear:
Wear underwear normally.
Wear underwear inside out.
Wear underwear with feminine napkin attached to crotch.
Hang underwear over the shower bar for a few days. This is known as "the
other dry cleaning."
Repeat.
Hoo boy. Good times! But then along comes this stupid Weblog Handbook. All
there is to say about weblogs is that most of them are boring and silly, except for the very few that are neat and fun, and/or are about someone you used to date. Now, does Rebecca Blood say this? NOOoooOOOoo. Blood's yammering consists of endless
pearls like "Weblogs Build Self-Awareness" and "If I were King, no one in my
realm would go hungry, war would not be tolerated, and everyone would have a sturdy house,
affordable health care, and a good education."
She's a totally stuck-up, self-righteous, insipid-ass tool. "On my site visitors can click a link to donate food for free," she trumpets. Also: "I have made it a
personal policy to occasionally highlight lesser-known weblogs on my site." Well gosh, Becca, you're just my new personal hero! You provide a LINK that visitors can CLICK! You give other bloggers the proverbial "hand up"! Your charity is just such so inspirational! It's too bad they don't give out a Nobel Prize for Blogging, because you would sooooo deserve to win it, and I would just have to steal the trophy and beat myself to death over the head with it in a desperate attempt to escape from your dim and vacuous universe!
And then there are all the bits where web writers are cautioned to never insult a blogger. "Even relatively mild criticism of another weblogger or her site
design will reflect very unfavorably on you," admonishes Miss Blood. "Miss Blood," what a totally bitchin' name I just came with. You oughtter've been a pirate, sweetie, hoisting the Jolly Roger over a storm-tossed ocean of Bitter Truth. Instead you're doing circle jerks with the Care Bears of Censorship. Your brand of mealy-brained, fraidy-cat niceness has never in the entire history of humanity resulted in prose that's worth a fat crap; as an idealogue you're a wretched offense, and as a writer you're a joke. Now dock me my gold star and get the hell off my Internet.
So, uh, that's all I have to say about the Weblog Handbook. Hey,
there's also this here Blog Novel. Barf-O!
