Bottom of the Barrel Book Reviews — The Lost Blogs 235
We get a lot of books for review here at Slashdot. Most are sent out
to users on our reviewer list within a few weeks. Others become part
of an impressive wall of books on my desk before they find a home.
There are a choice few however that are doomed to never see the inside
of a Fedex box. This is mostly due to the complete and utter
stupidity or absurdness of their subject matter. I've decided to give
these failed intellectual endeavors a chance and explore just how big
a waste of time a book can be. We start scraping the bottom of the
barrel with a little number written by Paul Davidson called, The
Lost Blogs. Read below to find out just how bad it got.
I used to work at a restaurant in college. After I was there for a year it was my job to help train new employees. One evening they had me train a nice young girl on the dessert station. The dessert station was one of the easiest places to work all you did was bake and slice pies and make the occasional ice cream sundae. An order for a hot fudge sundae came through the ticket machine so I got out a bowl and got her started. We used hot fudge packets that had to be warmed up in the microwave before being squeezed out onto the top of the ice cream. I told my new young trainee that the hot fudge needed a thirty second bath of microwaves and to get me when it was done and I'd show her how to pipe on the whip cream all fancy like. After a few minutes she came up to me and said that the ice cream had all melted, so she tried it a second time with the same melting results. I looked over both bowls of liquid ice cream and asked her how they melted so fast? I asked her to make another one while I watched to see what she was doing wrong. She scooped out the ice cream, opened up a packet of fudge squeezed it out and put the whole bowl into the microwave. I didn't know what to say. She microwaved ice cream six times that night while I watched, not once did it occur to her that ice cream would melt in a microwave. I comped the mans bill for the sundae he never got and had a good portion of the restaurant employees gathered to see if the trainee would ever solve the melting mystery. She never did and until I opened the first page of The Lost Blogs the six sundaes in the microwave was the stupidest thing I have ever seen.
The book starts off with a rambling two page acknowledgments section that drunkenly wanders from subjects like the South Beach diet to petty theft. It pauses to discuss the difference between Abe Vigoda and Bea Arthur and finally embarrasses Paul's family by forever linking them in ink with this sham of a book. This section does serve a valuable purpose however. Anyone with any level of discernment would be so turned off by it's incoherent nature that they would be saved the agony of reading The Lost Blogs. Discernment is not a luxury I had, so it was with much regret that I read on. The premise behind The Lost Blogs, like talking fruit and a submarine for babies, seems like a good idea until you see it in action. Quoting the back of the book, "What if the most famous, brilliant, obsessive, dumb and evil people throughout history had blogs? Wonder how Charles Lindbergh kept busy during his transatlantic fight? Wonder how Napoleon could possibly have reached the keyboard? In The Lost Blogs, you'll read the intimate weblogs of 175 iconic historical figures writing about their stupid pets, shaving rituals primate romances and plans for world domination-just like any other blogger...maybe even you!"
What it delivers is 271 pages of nonsense that is reminiscent of an assignment in your high school creative writing class. Many of the blogs are a few hundred words or less, which was fine with me since most of them are historically inaccurate. Alexander The Great's blog talks about how great his blog is. Joseph Stalin's blog talks about how he's going to purge his blog of all links. I assume because he purged his country of ethnic minorities, political opponents and other undesirables, killing millions. Hilarious! Samuel Morse just has five paragraphs of dots and dashes. Noah has a list of animals he still needs. Louis Pasteur talks about how germy his keyboard is. Herman Melville is obsessed with fighting a giant black cockroach that lives in his toilet (alright I kind of like that one). Fifty-one out of the first 100 words in the Howard Hughes blog are urine. That's over half urine! I took this as a metaphor for the whole book. Lastly, Jim Morrison posts the lyrics to a new song he's working on called, Light the Fire
You know I've opened up the flume
and thrown inside a rubber tire
so can you please just follow through
and finally, please, start the fire
Come on baby, light the fire
Come on baby, light the fire
but please don't light the house on fire.
I know that somewhere Weird Al is crying. I could go on and on but you get the idea.
It seems to me that anyone with nothing to do, I mean absolutely nothing, could sit down with a few beers, a note pad and Wikipedia and crank out something like The Lost blogs. Lets pray that they don't. Almost every historical figure in the book has surviving writings that you can read. Some have a huge amount that you can sift through. So in addition to being inaccurate and unamusing The Lost Blogs is also redundant. My favorite part of this book is that I finished it and never have to open it again. The Lost Blogs is an exercise in mental masturbation that doesn't have the decency to let you finish. It is the bottom of the barrel.
Goggles &c (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? We're supposed to read a book review in white-on-teal?
Re:Goggles &c (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Goggles &c (Score:5, Informative)
White on light green is even harder to read.
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Then paste into somewhere with your own font.
Or better, hack up the stylesheet and apply it with Greasemonkey.
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This is idle.slashdot.org. You are wasting your time flaming here, because the whole place is meant to be a waste of time. Carry on!
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I don't usually waste time on AC's, but you are clearly new around here. Having been using this site for some 10 years now, it's not unusual for a book to be bashed. "News for Nerds, Stuff the Matters".
This is news for nerds. It's a warning to avoid the book. It is stuff that matters, if you like to not waste money.
Now grow a set and post with a real username in future.
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Re:Goggles &c (Score:5, Informative)
Don't worry. I read the review for you. The summary is "Don't read the book".
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Hasn't anyone explained to you that you aren't supposed to read the articles on this site?
Friggin' newbies!
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That would probably be CmdrTaco, Slashdot's foremost proponent of Grammar 2.0.
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It makes Slashdot "more real" if it's badly written, according to CmdrTaco.
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What, a thread started with "Goggles" in the title, and no Simpsons references?
I'm sure if samzenpus were wearing a pair while reading that tripe, he would have at least yelled out that "THEY DO NOTHING!"
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That was the Simpsons reference, see?
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View -> Page Style -> No style
Re:Goggles &c (Score:5, Funny)
View->Page Style->No Style
I'm pretty sure they've already got that one licked.
-G
What gives? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What gives? (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. I was much happier when this stuff was hidden in a dark corner of Slashdot Labs.
If they'd pull idle off the front page and off the newsfeed I'd even be willing to use all of those mod points responsibly instead of throwing them around randomly.
Re:What gives? (Score:4, Informative)
You can do this yourself.
Click on 'Help & Preferences' in the top bar.
Click on 'Sections' under 'Index' in the right column.
Select none, i.e. the red circle with a slash through it, for 'Idle'.
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Maybe if the front page Idle stories get enough bad comments and not enough views, Idle can go back to it's corner.
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Maybe if all the comments were not simply "idle should go away" the stories would actually be interesting.
Re:What gives? (Score:5, Insightful)
The big problem with idle so far for me is that there is no scope for comments. What are we supposed to say about this story, for example?
"Thanks for your funny anecdote and warning us not to read this book none of us would ever have seen anyway!" /. is famed for the quality of the discussion, and so far the promoted idle stories aren't really providing any possibility for that. Heck, the summary/story does not even go so far as to pose a question, and defines the book in question as the bottom of the barrel, so what remains?
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Just go to your user preferences section on /. and go to the Index/Sections settings and select the thin bar setting for 'idle' topics.
hmm... (Score:5, Funny)
Funny, I felt the same way about this review.
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Strange that this would be a turn-off to the author of this review.
Bottom of the barrel... (Score:2)
Editors? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Editors? (Score:4, Funny)
But who will edit the editors' editors?
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Re:Editors? (Score:4, Funny)
A cookie for the appropriate Star Trek episode on this...
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Come on. The day is Sunday. The ice cream dish is a SUNDAE.
The book review starts off with a rambling two paragraph anecdote section that drunkenly wanders from subjects like overnight delivery services, to the water content of frozen milk, to poor management practices.
You know I've opened up the flume
What is this, a log-jammer ride in an amusement park? I'm pretty sure that flue would rhyme better with through, so I suggest using something better than a spell-checker.
Re:Editors? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe "No that's not what I meant, just heat the packet not everything."? You're not very good at training people are you?
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Indeed. It's been a long time since "samzenpus" has had to train for a new job. Every time I have a new job, I always make the mistake of trying to use common sense, and get slapped for it every time.
Me: "So... why exactly do we need to incubate all these triple sterilized agar plates in the incubator?"
Trainer: "So we can be sure they're sterile."
Me: "But they're double bagged, sealed, and have been subjected to radiation several times, they're more sterile than surgical instruments!"
Trainer: "It's in the
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and didn't correct her 6 times.
And as he's standing there watching her and not telling her she's doing it wrong, it would be reasonable to assume that she's doing it right, but for some reason it's just not working. And if she was nervous (young and first day in the job) she probably wasn't thinking clearly enough to work it out herself.
Hilarious!
(Actually, being prepared to admit to it is even more hilarious!)
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Her brain may have been devoted just then to "Why the *$%@ do they microwave the ice cream? How does this even work for them? Why are they all standing around looking at me instead of telling me what I'm doing wrong?"
Re:Editors? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, if he was training her to have low self-esteem when she realizes someone she trusts is letting her humiliate herself over and over, then he's great.
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watch someone
send out emails
that should have
attachments with
them all day long
and laugh at them
but what I SHOULD
do is show them
how to add an
attachment.
Especially if your
job is to train
them.
PS--Blame the
comment box.
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Re:Editors? (Score:4, Insightful)
Bottom of the Barrel Site Design (Score:3, Insightful)
White text on green background make eyes bleed.
The book sounds like something that could work if done right, it was just hobbled by bad implementation. That old Darth Side [blogspot.com] blog comes to mind as a good way to do essentially the same idea.
You should have made the sunday yourself (Score:4, Insightful)
That poor customer never got his sunday just so you could watch the trainee fail six times? Six? Why?
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Cause he's a jerk.
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Trust me, it gets funnier after the 3rd time.
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Personally, I think the "critic" (and I use the word loosely) should go back to his career in the fast food industry.
And then write a bookabout his experiences.
We'd be happy to review it.
Re:You should have made the sunday yourself (Score:5, Funny)
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday...
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Yea I have throw this in then.
"Joseph Stalin's blog talks about how he's going to purge his blog of all links. I assume because he purged his country of ethnic minorities, political opponents and other undesirables, killing millions. Hilarious! "
Stalin was a total murdering bastard but he really wasn't much of a racist. Not only that but Russia is still full of ethnic minorities.
Stalin only killed people that failed, where too talented, caught his attention, opposed him, or could have possibly opposed him.
B
Stand by for blasphemy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Stand by for blasphemy (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't especially mind the white on teal either. The painful part is the contrast when you scroll down to the comments section and it suddenly switches to black on white.
Please keep it off the frontpage (Score:5, Insightful)
Uhh, the point of a book review is, what exactly? (Score:2)
Negative book reviews are as worthwhile as glowing positive book reviews - they help me try to figure out what might and might not be worth reading in a world of a billion books, where I certainly don't have time to read more than a tiny minority of extant works.
If I ever see "The Lost Blogs" in the Library or a bookstore, now I'll know it might be a good idea to skip it.
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Life imitating art? (Score:2)
If anything can be read of the review, I think it is that is perfectly mirrors the mood of the book itself: inane and pointless.
Re:Please keep it off the frontpage (Score:5, Informative)
Help & Preferences -> Sections
"You have the ability to choose how much or how little content you want to see from each section. Further, you have the ability to choose if you want to view each type of article in 'Full Text' or 'Abbreviated' format."
Idle -> Never
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Yeah, this was pretty bad. Pretty fucking bad as a matter of fact. The first paragraph has nothing whatsoever to do with the book, and the rest is extremely uninformative and not even entertaining.
did you fire her? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:did you fire her? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sometimes people are stupid. You solve this by education.
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Sometimes people are stupid. You solve this by education.
You can only solve sometimes-stupid with education.
You can't really do much for the always-stupid, except to pad the sharp corners for them and hope they learn from their failures without hurting anyone else in the process.
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Bad example (Score:5, Insightful)
What's dumber, a rookie ruining ice cream six times or you watching it happen? I'm going with the latter. Did the owner know you were in the habit of letting employees flush his profits?
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Having everyone gather around to mock one employee is a classic team-building exercise, he saved the restaurant a bundle on training doing that himself.
Good idea, poorly done (Score:2)
A good expample, now being distributed by RSS is George Orwell's journal. [wordpress.com] Admittedly the content posted thus far is at least as lame as many of those "three months then abandoned" personal blogs, but still it's cool.
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I'm a big fan of the super secrete diary of Legolas. http://www.subreality.com/chimericon/sd02-legolas.htm [subreality.com]
-Rick
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Greasemonkey (Score:2)
Does anyone have a greasemonkey fix for this visual insanity?
Oh, ooohhh. (Score:4, Funny)
Ahhhh, yeeeahh. Um, well, that's basically sums up my entire posting history here on Slashdot. Come to think of it, I don't think I'm alone on this one.
The bottom of the barrel reviews itself (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The bottom of the barrel reviews itself (Score:4, Informative)
Not only that, but he even "had a good portion of the restaurant employees gathered to see if the trainee would ever solve the melting mystery". Not only did he do a bad job of training her, he went out of his way to deliberately humiliate the poor lass.
To top it off he did it to what he describes as a "nice young girl", which makes me wonder how he treats people that aren't nice and young. In short, samzenpus just outed himself as a first-class douche bag.
Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)
Reviewer List (Score:2)
new tag: pleasestop (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure what the etiquette is for this, but I'd like to propose a new tag for these idle articles that hit the front page:
pleasestop
I, for one, will be tagging all future idle articles in this manner.
-G
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How do you tag an article??? I have been trying to figure that out since I joined. Faq is no help.
a submarine for babies (Score:5, Funny)
Two things wrong with this statement
1. It does NOT sound like a good idea and shouldn't sound like a good idea at any point.
2. You've seen one in action?
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More edits (Score:5, Informative)
Now....
"a thirty second bath" should be "a thirty-second bath"
"fancy like" should be "fancy-like"
"the mans bill" should be "the man's bill"
"two page acknowledgments section" should be "two-page acknowledgments section"
"by it's incoherent nature" should be "by its incoherent nature"
That's enough. I'm bored. Let me just add that the Morse and Hughes entries in the book sound hilarious.
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William Safire's Rules for Writers:
Has it ever occurred to you... (Score:5, Insightful)
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This is a pointless me too comment!
News that doesn't matter!
Mod me +4 funny!
so (Score:5, Insightful)
She never did
And thus you utterly FAILED in your training duties. And heaped ridicule upon someone who did you no wrong or harm.
Argh! My eyes! (Score:3, Insightful)
Use punctuation or form better sentences. This really hurt to read.
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Until I reached the end of that paragraph, I assumed I was reading an excerpt from the awful book... after all, it does sound like an awful blog entry of the sort that would quite justifiably be "lost".
The Idle conspiracy theory. [slashdot.org] Do you Slashdot guys draw straws for who has to write the "idle" articles? Is there a prize for the worst "idle" article? Poll idea: let us vote for the worst "idle" article after a few more weeks of this. No way is this the bottom of the barrel - you can do worse!
Because of articles like this. (Score:4, Insightful)
Famous people don't write blogs (Score:2)
They actually do the stuff that's talked about in them.
Or some jerk makes a fake-someone blog like FakeAdolfHitler.blogspot.com (Goodwin?) or FakeAbrahamLincoln or something...
Samzenpus blog (Score:4, Funny)
Pot, kettle... (Score:2)
What are you, 13? You complain about the writing of the book in a review filled with awkward sentences and the occasional typo? This review really sounds like it was written by someone still in middle school. Maybe 9th grade.
Is this helping or harming the world? (Score:2)
HOWEVER. . .
I have found that if one spends a great deal of energy belittling and scorning others, it starts to have a negative effect upon you personally; repeated actions have a way of becoming who you are on a deep level; it becomes hard to stop.
People around you will recognize these qualities, and start to limit their own experimenting with the world for fear of making a mistake and bein
Provisos (Score:2)
But one thing is not be ignored: idiocy is what it is. The basic question you are asking is if its ethical or good for the majority to point it out in big orange letters.
There is a time and a place for all manners of behavior.
As a general 'for instance', when prominent leaders make repeated, huge and destructive blunders, I see only benefit in pointing it out. Loudly.
But I would argue that the intent in this Slashdot section is rather more self-serving and mean-spirited in nature, seeking simply pleasure a
Now hat I have mod points (Score:2)
I can't mod the entire thing down. I can't believe I got suckered into another idle post. Note to self: Look for word "idle," skip.
Stop It! (Score:2, Insightful)
Jeeesus....
Please, please, please make it STOP.
You Never Got The Man His Sundae? (Score:2, Insightful)
Black text on white background? (Score:2)
Anybody tell me how I can get black text on a white background, instead of white text on a cyan background?
Most Irritating of All (Score:2)
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I don't want this idle.slashdot.org crap in the regular RSS feed as if it was an actual story.
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