a lovely, unreadable theme

There is a screenshot above, but for those who cannot view the picture, the background is sort of all these old Victorian era (or so) paintings hung on a wall. Purplish, the wall is. Then the actual blog content box is dark, with white writing – the content boxed moves, but the background stays static. Okay, for me all that is bad enough, because I have trouble reading light type against a dark background. I understand, though, that for others it is the opposite way around. So, this I could forgive.

But in addition to the static background filled with pictures, and the moving content box… the content box is partially transparent. So, all together the blog has a bunch of pictures as a background, a transparent, scrolling content box in a dark color and light type.

If you are not horrified yet it is because I have failed to communicate the awfulness of trying to read whatever was written without being distracted by the photos behind the type, or the dark background or the white lettering. When I found myself with my face inches from the screen, though, squinting my eyes trying to read what looked like a pretty interesting post, I gave up. My eyes still hurt.

Anyway, just a word of advice, is all! If you are writing a blog that you expect people to read, make it easy for them to do so. People, especially random passersby, will not usually tell you your blog is unreadable. They will just leave, clutching their eyes and moaning, like I did. Gimmicky stuff is really cool to look at — it does not often work for blogs, and especially not for long pieces of text. I think that theme would be perfect for a photo blog.

But, Nanette, you may say… surely the bright colors on your own blog might cause some people’s eyes to bleed? And, I say, sure… but those colors are only at the top, pretty much, and once you scroll down even a little bit they are gone. Except for the very thin lines.  So people shouldn’t have a problem, but if they do I would hope they would tell me. I will, of course, ignore them completely, because I love my theme, but still. I will, at least, listen and nod understandingly. After all, I have my own Unreadable Blog horror stories, so I know what it’s like.

And then she got old and turned into a raging old bat. Oh wait, no, that was me. But the cat has still had a bit of a personality change. You know how when some humans age, they stop bothering about stuff? No longer worried about “convention” and opinion and all that?

Well, that’s Cat. She jumps on the counters and the tables and if you leave a plate around, and she’s hungry, she’ll help herself. She’s also decided that she wants to eat when she wants to eat, and who cares if it’s 4 AM? She’ll yowl, and yowl until either someone (me) gets her some food, or someone (me) gets up and throws her out of the room. And even then, out of the room, she’ll yowl at the door.

It wouldn’t be so bad if she had a soft, cat-like “meow.” But she doesn’t. She can, mind you, sound very sweet and kitty-like. But not when she is demanding food. No other word for that noise but a yowl. It’s dreadful.

So, I’m trying to get her back on some sort of normal being hungry/eating schedule, but to do that I have to ignore the noise. Far easier said than done, especially if I am trying to concentrate on something. I sometimes fail at this regulating business and just feed her just to shut her up. Which, of course, makes her even more demanding the next time.

I’ve only been keeping her temporarily the past 18 or 19 years until I find her a good home. I have now stepped up my search.

In other words… Greenwald has a Presence.

One has to wonder, then, why one itty bitty wordpress.com blogger has frightened him to the point where he’d not only go short-winded – he’d go Godwin?

To our joy, the tweet even has its own clever little tag so that we can see how many of his 28,435 (as of this writing)  followers retweeted Greenwald’s blurb of brilliance to their large or small lists of followers.  It is, of course, unfortunate that we may never know how many of these followers and followers of followers rushed to tell the itty bitty Obama-lover, who does the dastardly deed of… posting pictures of Obama,  just what they think of her Hitler-recorderish tendencies.  I imagine it’s mission accomplished, though, for sure.

Not that we blame anyone, including Greenwald. After all, what’s a Big Important Blogger to do when, in the course of being in his big importantness,  an infinitesimal  blip catches his attention alerting him to the fact that someone, somewhere, in some obscure corner of the Internet really likes President Obama? What can he do but take his continent sized foot – and stomp on her?

‘Tis what bullies do, after all.

[via GOS]

[edited for clarity and links]

It’s frustrating sometimes. Conservatives spent years filling the airwaves with so much pro-Republican, pro-conservative claptrap and going on so many attacks against anyone who attacked one of them, and going on counter-attacks against liberals that the media is fearful of even breathing on the rightwing the wrong way.

We, apparently, are going to spend years filling the airwaves with so much anti-Democrat claptrap and going on so many attacks against Obama, the administration, the Democratic Senate and House that the media will wet itself with joy that *they* don’t have to do it, just quote “the left”, and so there is still no fear of anyone breathing on the rightwing the wrong way. And certainly no fear of retribution for attacking Democrats – heck, isn’t everyone doing it?

Anyway, though…

Apparently when others were piling on Shirley Sherrod yesterday, or running away from her, Lizardoids and Johnson consistently stood up for her, without even knowing what the rest of the story was. They just knew Breitbart and his tactics and what a liar he is (my addition) and figured there WAS a rest of the story.

Cole seems to think they were just about the only ones, but I am not sure about that – I didn’t hear about any of this until this morning, so most of the (non-right wing) reactions I’ve found are to the proven Breitbart lies.

One thing I didn’t know, brought out by one of LGF’s commenters, teh mantis, last night:

The whole story is BS. Brietbart has conveniently edited out the context of this story, but he forgot one crucial detail. Notice where she says that the story took place just after Chapter 12 bankruptcy was established for family farms? Andrew really should have edited that out. You know why? Chapter 12 was so established in 1986. What was Shirley Sherrod doing in 1986? She was running the New Communities black farm coop in Georgia. She was not employed by the government in any way. Some white farmer called a black coop looking for help. She helped him, but not as much as she “could” if, you know, he were a black farmer and thus would have some interest in the coop. They also gave farmers help restructuring their loans and whatnot, so she referred him to a lawyer who could help him, despite his condescending attitude.

I should also note that the her coop and the associate RDLN recently won a $1 billion+ settlement for black farmers after they were systematically denied loans provided to white farmers in the early eighties, complements of Ronnie Reagan (Pigford v. Glickman). But we all know it was those black farmers banding together in their cooperative farming blackness that are the real racists.

I don’t know why this story hit me so badly. I guess because this woman could be any one of the older Black women I know, have known - the ones who have toiled for years, taken all the spit, all the insults, all the sexism, all the racism, all the people refusing to stand by them, all the comments about being “welfare queens”, or “lazy” or having 10 kids, and all the suspicious glances when *anything* at all goes wrong, and working daily with the knowledge that should something major go wrong, it’s likely you’ll be the first gone, last rehired  – and to get through all of that to a place where you are looked up to, where you are doing good, where are where you deserve to be because you paid your dues - only to have some lying cretin with a history of targeting relatively powerless Black folks swoop down and blithely pull everything you’ve worked for away from you in the effort to get that guy, over there…

Shame. Shame on Breitbart, his supporters, the dissiminators of this nonsense, limp pickle Vilsack and the Obama admin, too, if they don’t restore this woman’s life.

The full video and transcript, at TPM