03/15/2003
This is a review of ukuleleking.diaryland.com.
Content - 71/75pts.
[-]Execution - 45/45pts. If I had rules for minimum entries or any rules at all that I actually follow (free-and-easy reviews are much easier to manage. And more free too), I would probably have had to refuse to review this diary since it only began about three weeks ago.
What? Refuse to review this diary so that I can read a string of "wah-my-boyfriend-dumped-me-and-I-have-three-pimples-and-I-like-soup!!!" diaries? No way.
The man, namely, the King Man, and specifically, the Ukulele King Man, is a cowboy. And he writes poetry. And I HATE poetry.
Why? Because most poetry is terrible. And I think that most poetry is a hoax too, and we only pretend to think it's brilliant stuff to make sure that we don't look uncultured and idiotic in front of others. It's a joke. Poetry is for joke writers who can't manage or are too lazy to try to manage the intricacies of English syntax.
And the diary is about poetry. It's about the worst poetry in the world. One knows this isn't "brilliant" because most of it rhymes. You know what this means. The poetry will have words like "gorilla" and "sarsaparilla" in poems that have nothing to do with apes or... fountain drinks. Later on, he has to resort to rhyming with "vanilla."
But, I shouldn't resort to criticizing his poetry. I'm not very good at analyzing poetry anyway. I get bogged down in the peculiarities of the words, and I don't understand the meanings. For example, I remember the last time I had to analyze poetry (years ago), in Poe's "Annabelle Lee," the man ends one line "my darling, my life, and my bride." When asked why he uses the word "bride," I giggled at my teacher and suggested the convenient rhyme with "side" was probably a factor. Har, har! The teacher moved off, and I'd failed miserably. In any case, our friend whom I review is on a quest to become a happy-go-lucky Poe of our time and of our generation (or his generation), and the journal attempts to chronicle this passage.
(He's apparently very serious about this. He has his own page at UkuleleKing.com. Nothing works on that site, but I'm not allowed to say anything because it isn't his DIARY.)
Well, he is an actual writer. He's had "a decade's experience as an editor and writer, including having been editor-in-chief of Omaha's alternative newsweekly, The Reader." In addition to making his diary an ongoing resume, our friend the Professional Writer of Doggerel and Such has managed to create a diary that's readable and enjoyable.
On this page, UK brings up a rather valid point about his own poetry. It's "bad," but not "bad," not the way that would have made me grumble and wish I'd never discovered the Internet. Interestingly enough, many of us feel the same way about Internet journals or weblogs as we do about his type of poetry. I feel the same way about blogs. I hate the word blogs.
I mean, I'm so scared of keeping a blog that my journal isn't really a journal at all, just another way for me to host pages for free.
But there are good journals, even if we'll (I'll) always think of them as "The Titanic" of websites. Sigh.
He's a loser because he has an Internet journal (on a site named "Diaryland").
But it's a very good journal. Nicely done.
[-]Grammar/Mechanics - 6/10pts. This is for typos.
For example: "And Jimmy would pause and puff his chest and say, father, it's you fault"
And on the same page: "I compiled my favorite poems into a little chapbook whis week..."
[-]Readability - 10/10pts.
[-]Style - 10/10pts. Even the poetry is good.
Layout - 7/10pts.
[-]Aesthetics - 4/5pts. Minor problem - your regular text, the prose parts of your entries, are centered instead of being left justified. I'm not sure what makes this happen. I looked at the source code, and I saw too many page divisions and so on and lots of clutter, and I couldn't tell which center tag caused the problem. I gave up after a while. I guess this isn't really very helpful. Sigh. Maybe you shouldn't have gotten a template that was coded with so little regard for anyone else looking at the code.
I mean, it's weird. There are two body tags. The head tags are closed before the CSS classes are declared... blah. I can't follow it.
Maybe the site was coded for Netscape. It looks fine (left justified) in that browser.
[-]Navigability/Legibility - 3/5pts. There needs to be previous/next links somewhere, at the bottom of the entry, maybe.
Your font is too small. Your font is too small. Did you hear me? I'm blind. And your font is TOO SMALL.
Contact - 5/5pts.
Updates - 5/5pts. Well, it isn't so tough - the journal's only been around for a few weeks.
Errors - 5/5pts. I guess it's unfair to count bad coding, if it doesn't show up on the browser, as an error. I want to though. I just really like counting off points, I think.
Total - 93/100pts. I really enjoyed this diary. I mean, really. It's excellent. And I'll leave you with this tribute to a great man by UK, the Worst Poet in the World:I sometimes joke that when I am in a moral quandary, I ask myself, "What would Mr. Rogers do?" In this instance, I do not need to puzzle about the answer: He certainly would not have written a comical ditty about homicidal tots. [By the way. He spelled "quandary" like "quandry." Cough.]
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