Next!

I've been indulging in a new favorite pastime lately. By "lately," I mean the past two days at work. I've been using the once-new, then forgotten, now once-again reinstated "Next Blog" feature at Blogger.

I used to have "Next Blog" set up on my Explorer. It was a button you could push at random, and, well, at random up would come a blog. Someone Somewhere's blog. You never knew what you were going to get. And it was pretty damn exciting.

Then I got a new computer at the beginning of the year, and nowhere in Blogger did I see the option to reload "Next Blog" onto my system, so I just figured it was a now bygone feature. And I lived without it, lo these 9 months, until I suddenly saw it start to show up again at the tops of people's blogspot blogs. And I hadn't really played with it much until yesterday at TheCompanyIWorkFor, when things weren't actually slow, but I was, because we all know that a four-day workweek is way longer than a five day workweek for some reason, and I was just damn tired of working.

As I said above, "Next Blog" really is like a box of chocolates wherein you never know what you're gonna get.

First of all, there are more Republican propaganda-spouting blogs out there than should be allowed by law. (Only one should be allowed by law.) (And that's being generous.) There are some rabid-ass bloggers out there who love W. And in loving W, they hate liberal commie pinko types. Like myself. That's OK, though, I read their blogs, well, as much of them as I could stand, and left nary a comment. People like that can't be swayed with comments any more than, well, let's face it, any more than I can.

Then there are the Singapore blogs. I hit about six of them in my two days of browsing, and let me tell you, it was like entering a weird and creepy world that one would probably conjure up thinking of teens in Singapore. They write in this weird-ass patchois of Pidgin English, Ebonics, and some other Godforsaken language I've yet to figure out yet. It's readable, but just barely. It's one of those unexplainables; I know it's creepy, I just don't know why.

And of course there are the American teen blogs. They're fun for a while. Who met who where and who likes who and why and when did who start liking who and what did who say about who where this afternoon after school and how much are we going to beat their football team by, and who was at the game and what they were drunk on. There was a particularly poignant blog I read, all done up in tones of pink, written by a girl who met a boy on Monday at school, discovered after they spent an afternoon talking she really liked him, then was madly in love with him, and then - had been dropped by him. Total cold shoulder, and she was crushed. This all happened over three blog entries. And her entire blog, folks - was three blog entries.

One high school blog was a single entry, a massive description of high school life that used the words "fuck," "fucked," "fucking," "fucking-ass," and "fuuuuuuck" more times than even I was prepared to see.

That's another big feature at "Next Blog." Blogs with only one entry. And sometimes that entry is "Test." Sometimes it's a long rambling diatribe about how this is going to be the window to their soul and to be sure and stay tuned for lots of deep dark secrets. Then the blog was abandoned like so many beer bottles on the highway.

Anyway, "Next Blog" is more than aptly named. Because after doing this for about an hour (keep in mind that over two days at work I played with it probably a total of four hours), you can categorize a blog really quickly. And there's only one thing at that point you can say: Next!

Like:

Blogs about the bliss of Mommyhood - Next!
Blogs with nothing but pictures of babies - Next!
Blogs with nothing but pictures, period - Next!
Blogs with nothing but news headlines - Next!
Blogs in a foreign language - Next!
Blogs in a foreign text as well - Next!
Blogs that contain tacky midi files of songs like "Somewhere Out There" or "You Light Up My Life" - Next!
Blogs of people's hideous poetry - Next!
Blogs about Japanese Anime - Next!
Blogs basically serving as someone's resume - Next!

However, there are the good hits. I came across some stuff, just everyday type stuff, written by teens, and written really well. That always warms my heart. And some people out there are geniunely funny, which doesn't warm my heart as much because they're generally funnier than I am, but it at least stirs admiration. And speaking of good blogs, one of them that came right up on my screen whilst "Next Blog"ging was the one and only "Bitterspice Project," the blog owned and operated by our own Venice.

But the bad poetry and the weird and creepy Singapore blogs have to end. The teenaged guy who uses "fuck" 12 times in a sentence, well, I hope he keeps at it. I really fucking do.

Betland's Olympic Update:
*I seem to be watching Miami and Florida State play football. I hate them both. As my sister and I used to say, when teams like that play, you just hope the stadium blows up.
*The Betland Security alert has been raised to "Chilled." Bet is stirring, but mellow. After all it is Friday.