1 step beyond

The last thing I am is a grammar nazi. I utilize punctuation marks in odd ways - mostly to reproduce thought process as I go along because, as we all know, my thought process is just really important for everyone to see. This, of course, is the death of rule #4 which is "never let the reader see the work behind it". Yeah OK blogs killed rule #4. Hats off in memoriam. And I am not above starting a sentence with "and" and "but". But at least I will admit to occasionally getting lazy on my spelling unlike some folks for whom any little criticism is a declaration of war. I usually correct it but sometimes I'm really just honestly too lazy.

Now, to business...

The following paragraph is intended for only a few people who never comment here or probably even read here anyway. So if you are reading it here, it isn't for you. Got it?

But I get to some blogs out there by various means and my latent inner-editor comes out and I want to say look... you've got to hold my interest. Reputation is only going to go so far. Whatever cache you may have been enjoying all this while as some kind of blogging god will be squandered utterly by repeating the same old crap over and over again. All you'll be doing is developing a different set of 16 daily suck ups from the last set of 16 daily suck ups you had. When you've recycled the same crap 37 times it just looks like shredded cabbage as far as I'm concerned. And yes - I know - you don't think anything of my opinion. I know. I'm nobody. I admit it.

But if a nobody thinks you're starting to get old what does that make you? HUH?

You know what I don't like less than people who live off their reputation because they stopped being hungry to be good at something? Pretension. I dislike pretense. The bloggers who are so caught up in being some kind of savant because they can make a compound sentence three times a year and are suddenly writers because of it. They do 40 pages and suddenly - yep fer shur! - I'm writing a BOOK! Oooo!

And yet I do enjoy literate people. I like literate humor more than literate people. Literate humor is funny. A lot of times literate people are boring little twerps. You want to flick them off your sleeve like a wayward snot. You know?

So if I can find an unpretentious literate person who is funny and not a twerp or a snot on my sleeve, is someone who holds my interest because they're not just phoning it in off their reputation as a blog god then I AM ONE HAPPY LITTLE CRANK believe you me.

In light of that, here are two blogs by people just like that who do stuff just that way and I enjoy a whole lot for just those reasons.

What?

Two blogs you really need to read that I don't think are read by enough people.

insert title here is a blog by someone from our old team blog (back in the day) who has kept in touch. He's some big chemistry or laboratory PhD guy whose references have references but the biggest thing is he is a total beer hound. For his blog style think provocative without being a boorish lout you'd like to kick into the garbage cans out back of the tavern. Brian never looses his cool and did I mention he's a beer lover? He's at his best in this blog incarnation. If you're a blog-design Nazi you're going to hate the way it looks. And if that's all you're going to see when you get there screw you, then, while I'm on the subject. Go read.

ReadySteadyGo seems to be written by some hip young New York literati chick who knows a famous person here and there, wears cool shoes and has just the right style of glasses that have come back into style from the 60s or something. A person who hangs out in the kind of book shops you expect Kerouac to pop into reading Dylan's Tarantula even though the first is dead and the second is irrelevant. That is exactly what it looks and sounds like. Then it turns out it's just Helen, who has been baking me cookies now for the last three weeks I think. She also fits the description (above) of the kind of blogger that makes me a happy little crank. To the letter!

You need to check in on them. In different ways (and even from different politics) they are really great great really really great reads. And they don't go in for hyperbole like some schmucks I know.

They also don't check in here regularly either, just to show you there isn't some kind of quid pro quo bloglike consideration I use to decide who I tout and who I don't.

But I am waiting on the cookies. Helen...

Labels: Blogging