You can never have enough hats, gloves, and shoes

I'm kind of obsessed with What Not to Wear. Clinton Kelly is one of my favorite people ever, and I want him to be my new gay best friend and tell me what to wear and that I look chic. And I want Stacy London to do that whole Cher-like face thing she does and tell me to shut up! because I look so fabulous. Sure, it's an embarrassing fantasy and I'm revealing a deeply insecure and superficial (not to mention girly) side of myself, but we're all friends here (except Driz), so I'm willing to let you all laugh at me. Probably because you have this fantasy, too. Don't lie, Nutjobber. You know you do.

So, when I clicked on over to Fashion Paramedic, I was all prepared for a new fashion guru. I was ready to see dramatic transformations with the help of artful makeup and flat-front pants and layered pieces. Possibly a kitten heel or two. Or at the very least some fashion CPR. I was disappointed, however, because this blog really isn't about reviving wardrobes. It's a total misnomer. Hello, fake out.

But I wasn't disappointed long because what the Paramedic lacks in actual fashion bloggage she makes up for with a breezy, conversational, and entertaining blog.

I might actually like the blog design if it weren't for that whole three-column thing. Otherwise, I like the blue and white, and I don't mind the header too terribly much. There's just way too much going on. Get rid of all the excess crap. Or at the very least dial it down to a two-column blog and put all that crap on a different page. Also, who cares what visitor I am? Why is that at the top of the dang page? Kudos, though, for having some nice organization across the top. You have some broken links, though, like this one and this one. And jesus damn hell, that's a lot of categories. You might consider pruning those.

It's kind of a mommy blog, but the good kind, the kind with a healthy dose of snark. She's ballsy, and funny, delightfully inappropriate, and she has some great stories to tell. I am, though, extremely upset that the one post about shoes contains the word "Payless." I forgive her, though, because her husband has fashion nonsense similar to my fiance's. We all have our crosses to bear. Also, she champions the most worthwhile causes.

I liked this blog, misleading as it was. It's fun, unpretentious, and light. There's not a lot of introspection or inner wounds bared or depths explored, but that's ok. It's good, (mostly) clean, rollicking fun, and I enjoyed the ride. The writing is easy and effortless and (mostly) well-constructed, if not particularly literary or lyrical. I am going to dock you, though for pay-for-posts, you naughty, naughty paramedic. Just change that particular tag to "sell out."

Chances are I'll read this blog again. If she promises to tell me which porn stars she met.






*My title is stolen from style icon, Patsy Stone, who might need a paramedic to revive her in a pool of her own sick, but never for fashion advice.

It's the good girls who keep diaries; the bad girls never have the time.

There are these girls I went to school with. You did, too. Good girls. But not the good girls you hate, not the ones who lord it over you or get all self-righteous or run tell their mothers when you say, "fuck." No. They were actually good. Sweet, kind, unpretentious, good-natured, eager to please. They wore loafers and navy polos and pleated skirts and had square cut bangs and their Trapper Keepers were organized by subject and they always crossed their legs and gave thoughtful instructions and wrote their thank you cards on time, not six months later and smudged.

Maybe we ignored those girls. Maybe we discounted them, left them out, barreled over them, forgot their names. Maybe some of them surprised you, though. Maybe her name was Jan, and maybe she played violin and was plain and smart and hardworking and shy. And later, when you both grew up, maybe she surprised you, outstretched you in every avenue. Maybe she got ballsy, maybe she got brave, maybe she got wicked, independent, and unique.

Riverpoet reminds me of those girls, a little, before they surprised you. She seems tidy, organized, and nice. Like maybe she wears mom jeans and drives the speed limit and pays her bills on time and wears sensible underwear.

The blog design is fine, although the banner image is a little large for me. It's not cluttered or busy or ugly, but I like a less severe purple. River, you might think about moving your archives up where they can be found instead of down at the bottom in no-man's land. Also, switch it to a monthly archive rather than weekly. And why is there no blogroll?

She's a writer, but, like so many, her blog could stand some serious editing. I want to like her -- she's sweet like candy -- but I find myself glazing over. Like, here. The story about her mother in a nursing home with her buddy, putting on makeup and sharing their twilight years, could have been touching and poignant. Instead, it just kind of went on and on. And on. Not to mention the longest post ever about cats.

Her tone can be formal (especially toward the beginning of the blog), but I get the feeling she's not a formal person. She writes well -- in terms of construction -- but with little personality. There's often a seriousness to her writing, a ponderous quality, like it's weighted down. And I just want it to lighten up.

But that makes me feel guilty because she's been ill and in pain. There are valid reasons for her to be serious, to question, to feel weighted down and sad. There are lots of posts about medical procedures. I'm sure that's illustrative and helpful for people in the same situation or her close friends and family, or even not so close friends and family, but for me, a heartless bystander, it's just kind of depressing.

There are times when her personality does comes through, when she loosens up a little, and when she does it's nice. But it's seldom. And brief.

She mentions people like we should know who they are, but there's not a lot of back story, and no link to find out more. And Riverpoet, I'll tell you like I've told others -- get rid of the last names and identifying histories. Seriously. I know we all think it won't happen to us, but then it does. Don't make it easy for them.

I like Riverpoet. She's nice and kind and introspective and really kind of zen. But I'm waiting for her to surprise me. I'm waiting for her to do something outrageous or make a stand or reveal a deep dark secret or dance on a table or... something I haven't thought of, something that makes her wicked, and independent, and unique.

But, honestly, I'm not going to wait long, because too often your posts -- while they can be soothing and thoughtful and calm -- put me right to sleep.

Right now your blog is stuck on sick and tired and searching. But because I think you've got it in you, because you post frequently and consistently, and because you're a nice lady with some talent and a couple of readers who I read, too, and I assume maybe they know something I don't, I'm giving you





Also? This was like the hardest blog to review ever for me. I don't know why, but it took me ages to formulate an opinion, and even longer to get that opinion to make it to the screen. Don't get me started on how many times I waffled on my rating. Too, why do I feel like I need to call my mom now? And apologize to all the nice girls out there everywhere who I scoffed at? And organize my sock drawer? If I had a sock drawer instead of the floor.

"You fuckers think just because a guy reads comics he can't start some shit?"

Although I am not a comic junkie (except for the new Buffy series), I can understand the draw. There's an aesthetic about it that my inner geek loves. And I'm probably just a few clicks away from comic geek: fantasy geek. Yep, I admit it: I love the fantasy stuff. Scorn me if you will, but Conan, The Wheel of Time (before it dragged on and on), unicorns, fairies, RennFaires, the whole bit. I know. Loser.

In college I worked at the best damn video rental place on the planet. Well, in our town anyway. We had an impressive cult section, truly terrible horror films, and a porn room. To date, it's been my favorite job. My boss at the video store was a total comic geek. He went to the local comic shop every week on Thursdays to get his stash. He's the one who introduced me to Vampire Hunter D, which led me down the rather embarrassing but wonderful path of anime and hentai.

Today's blogger reminds me of my old boss at the video store: geeky, funny, self-deprecating, horny, and not getting laid. Ever.

The blog design wouldn't be terrible if it weren't the three-column blog of doom, with gadgetry coming out its ass and way, way too much going on. Get rid of all the clutter and crap and scale it down to two columns. But I do like the tabs, especially his description of the various parts of his blog. And there are ads. Goddamn motherfucking ads. He also has us click to read more. I understand using it if there are lots of images to load, but otherwise, hate it.

Otherwise, I kinda like this blog. I know. Weird. But Baddie is self-deprecating and funny-ish. I chuckled, even. He doesn't take himself too seriously, and he's not a bad writer. He owns his geekitude, and I guess I just have a soft spot for that.

I could relate to the Comics I'd Like to Fuck post. Don't judge me. Gaston was hot. He mentions vagina dentata and likes Gaiman and Whedon, so he's pretty much ok in my book. Oh, there are some "huh?" moments because of the whole I'm not Filipino thing, but there was no Tagalog overload.

Overall, I found Baddie to be not at all bad but in fact quite charming. He knows who he is, and he's unpretentious and genuine and silly and really pretty funny.

He lies, though. There are shockingly few unicorns.





I considered giving you an extra half a star, but I couldn't bring myself to do it based on your cluttered and ad-infested design. And the lack of unicorns.

Fashion Police Brutality

You might not know it to look at me, but I love fashion. Always have. As a little girl my favorite pastime was playing dress-up, and I saved my allowance to buy issues of Vogue. There was a time I dreamed of being a fashion designer, but my attempts at sewing resulted in a black and orange swimsuit that fell apart almost instantly, by which I mean in the water with me in it. The boys were pleased, but I gave up sewing forever, and my dreams of a couture life were dashed.

Today, my style is all about comfort and trying to minimize what has multiplied over the years (chins, rolls, etc.). Oh, I make the odd attempt at glamour, but I usually fail catastrophically (fabric softener stains, I'm looking at you). I do, however, still love fashion.

Enter The Fashion Police Files, one woman's perspective on what the A-listers are wearing.

Sigh. Where to begin. Ok, the minute I saw that this was a Live Journal blog, I knew I was in for it. Live Journal, to me, is for 13-year-olds who are too geeky for MySpace. I just can't take it seriously. Granted, I don't frequent many (ok, any) Live Journal blogs, but my experience with them leads me to believe that functionality is nonexistent and design is problematic.

This blog just reinforces that belief. It's godawful ugly. And listen, if you're critiquing how other people look, you really should do so from a place of pretty, right? I don't mind the lacy gray background, and I love purple, but the purple is too bright, the font is boring as hell, and reading white text on a dark gray background makes me go all Le Chiffre with the crying blood. Wendy, your center panel is too wide. Readers need shorter lines, dark text on a light background, and font size larger than roach turds. And what the hell is up with your tabs at the top? I never would have known they were there if I didn't get so frustrated with your lack of navigation that I went searching for them. They are invisible (on Firefox and Safari, at least) unless you roll over them. Yeah, that's all kinds of helpful.

Wendy uses those click to read more links, which I hate. I'm here now, I want to read it all in one fell swoop, don't make me click again or I'm liable to just go away. What's more, when you click to read more you wind up on a white page with no design to speak of, and that's a cop out. I don't know if Live Journal forces this or what, but it's further proof that Live Journal is blogging for preteens. Although that might be giving preteens a bad name because I suspect they could find a way to make Live Journal work, what with all their hacking and frying their brains on computers rather than getting outside for some sunshine.

Now, the writing. There are far too many of these !!? (apparently Wendy is as excitable as squirrels on speed), and they're all preceded by a space, which is bizarre. Also, Wendy pulls a Tinkerbell and sprinkles her sentences not with fairy dust but with commas. The thing about commas? They, don't just go, any,where. And I'm not even going to go into the whole ellipses thing again. Y'all know how I feel about that. But now we have a new grammar crime: random capitalizations. Is German your first language, Wendy?

Most of the writing involves illustrating what is already illustrated in the pictures. Unless you're making your blog ADA-compliant, we don't need a running commentary on what the pictures look like. We can, you know, see them.

Frankly, what I liked most (relatively speaking) about this blog were the pictures. The commentary that went along with those pictures was rambling and far too long, especially considering all the random grammatical weirdness. There were some bits I liked: "ravishingly awful," "you can have too much blue and purple animal print, you know." But the good parts are so ever-loving hard to get to.

Look, this is an audience-specific blog. I'm guessing no one who reads Ask will give a damn about this blog, but people who like to look at pretty (or terribly, unutterably wrong) pictures of fashion might. And if you want to cater to those people, get away from Live Journal, get a real blog with a pretty design, lay off the detailed explanations of each dress/outfit, tighten up your writing, get a grammar refresher course, and start all over. I'm pretty sure, given your background, that you could do a lot better. Clearly, you have the experience to back up your opinions. Your critiques are insightful and informed. But you lose us (well, me -- I can bet most others gave up long before I did) with all the crap. As it is, this blog is a hot mess and guilty of crimes against the blogosphere (I can't believe I just used that word).

For your truly terrible, hard to navigate, impossible to read design, you get






I mean, really. You want to cite others for poor taste?

For the concept and the writing, you get







Others are doing it better.

Because I liked some of your commentary and really did enjoy the pictures, you get






And now, I want to watch hours and hours of Absolutely Fabulous. Oh, who am I kidding? I always want to watch hours and hours of AbFab ("Lacroix, sweetie").

Manila vanilla

Remember way back when we had all those twee little emo kids from India or Manila or wherever submitting their blogs for evisceration? 'Member that? Of course you do. Who could forget? Well, we thought we had exhausted that particular resource, but no. There's more. Aren't we lucky? Or cursed. Whichever.

When the Excrement Hits the Ventilation

She has a terrible, horrible, really, really bad template. Bland, boring, soulless. The template actually makes me physically angry. I want to punch this template and then maybe pee on it, and I am normally a very docile, peaceful, live and let live kind of person, and I don't like to soil my hands with violence. Bad for the complexion, too. But this? I could happily run over this blog template, back up, do it again, then light it on fire and dance while it burns.

Roll up the categories 'cause they go on forever. She has like twelve zillion other blogs, too, which makes me think she's ADD. And as she's got eleventy-five hundred people on her blogroll (in coordinating categories, no less), I think it's about damn time she added a whole other page for those. There are also all kinds of linky whozits and stat counter things cluttering the sidebar up, which you know we hate, not to mention ads.

And you just know I'm going to hate the writing, don't you? Well, you're wrong. It's actually not bad. Pretty funny at times, in fact. Redjeulle's not a bad writer. Seriously. No, really, I'm not kidding. I surmise that she actually does it for a living. Ish. Maybe. Oh, there are too many memes, and there are times when she writes in Tagalog (I think), so to me it all looks like afjkd lsa jklfd uiks, and there are a lot of cultural differences that I can't wade through ("lolo" what?), but barring that, there are good things here. And she's been doing this a long, long time. Since September 2004, which is like 20 years in blog years.

Is it great writing? Is it lyrical and moving and engrossing and do I want to come back again for more, just to see what she's come up with next? No. But Redjeulle's got personality, she's keen and she writes fairly well and seems to enjoy herself. The blog is full of travelogues and details about her buddies and their jaunts to Starbucks and some place called Chocolate Kiss, and there are hangovers and small anxieties and wry observations and pretty pictures.

In her "About Me" she tells us what she hates, but hatred isn't the measure of a person (generally, unless you're Driz), so I'd be happy with more back story. As so often happens with blogs we review, there's a lot of surface, a lot of innocuous banter, but not a lot of exploration or depth or meat. And there's no sex, unless you count lusting after surfers and celebrities, which I don't, although hi hottie. She posts frequently, but meaninglessly. Little snippets of life, glimpses of vacations and nights out but never any real exposition. It's a bit like she's writing to keep friends up to date, and I'm not her friend so most of the time I don't much care, even though she makes me giggle. Also, the name is misleading: I never once saw any shit hitting fans.

All told, I was pleasantly surprised by Redjeuelle. I won't be back for more, but I didn't hate my foray into her world. I even enjoyed it a little bit, if you overlook the times I had to leave the room to refrain myself from garroting her template.

I give it





for the (surprisingly) pretty good writing,







for all the filler, memes, and lack of depth, and






for the template that made me want to kick you in the head. Hard.