King of the Blogs Tournament: Week 11 Judging

King Jeremy of American Warmonger put forth some effort this week and redeemed himself from the lack of sucking up (and lack of mentioning my blogiversary)... So, pretenders to the throne, be grateful, my mood is better tonight - it could be that, or it could be the fabulous crab dip I made for dinner tonight.  Recipe will be posted for this week's Carnival of the Recipes if you're interested.  Check back Thursday night. ;)  And now!  Forthwith!  Judging!

Overall Blog/Design

American Warmonger:  Hmm.  I could be remembering incorrectly, but it strikes me that Jeremy has done a bit more work to his sidebars - nice big sidebar item headings with borders, it really sets them off well.  The header graphic is still not showing up for me in Firefox, by the way, but it's working fine in IE.  I dun' get it.  American Warmonger gets another 4.5.  Good stuff.

Razors Kiss:  Oh, wow.  Now this is a well-designed site.  Very cohesive color scheme, attractive graphics, good "about me" information, working comments and trackback... Just gorgeous.  I have only two constructive comments for Joshua:  First, searchable archives would be a great thing.  Second (and this is kinda nitpicky, but...) the sidebar content is a little bit unbalanced between the left and right side.  The left side is a lot shorter than the right - it does happen, but if there is anything that it would make sense to move from the right to the left, it would help keep me from listing to the right while scrolling down the page *wink*.  However, these are very small issues, and I'm just in awe of how fabulous this site looks.  I'm gushing.  Shut me up.  Razors Kiss earns a 5.

Political Nightmare:  OK, so this is a blog?  Because it seems very un-blog-like to me.  Overall, the graphics are slick, and the color scheme holds together well.  The sidebar text is a bit teensy (white/red on black is harder to read when it's that small than some other color schemes) but all in all that's not terribly significant.  What is significant, when judging a blog is that it seem like... well, a blog.  In an earlier round of this tournament, Judge Harvey took pretender Dawn Xiana Moon to task because her blog wasn't "bloggy" enough - and it was a heck of a lot more like a blog than this one.  No comments, no permalinks, no trackback, no blogroll, no searchable archives, no "about me" information... I'm sorry, just because you put up new content on your website on a daily basis (or thereabouts) does not a blog make.  It's a lovely website, really.  But it's not a blog.  And as such, in a competition for King of the Blogs, Political Nightmare gets a 1.  I'm not even sure why I gave it that much.  Probably because it's got good graphics.

Submitted Post

American Warmonger:  A thoughtful and well-written missive regarding immigration (legal and illegal)... There are a couple of word choices that I'm not sure are correct, but the meaning is clear.  It's getting to be too late at night for me to drag the English Teacher out when the need to nitpick has not overwhelmed me.  American Warmonger's submitted post gets a 4.

Razors Kiss: Another wow.  In his submitted post, Joshua gives a detailed point-by-point study of Ephesians 6:10-20, the "full armor of God" passage.  I need to get these reviews done, so I can't take the time to read the entire thing right now, but... wow.  This post is written very well, and (unusual for most posts of this type I've run across) very conversationally.  It's easy to read.  It makes a lot of sense.  It's like going to church, but in the comfort of my living room wearing my jammies and listening to U2.  Spiffy.  Color me impressed - I'm giving Razors Kiss a 5 for this effort.

Political Nightmare:  Political Nightmare's submitted article (I can't call it a post - can you even get to this article from the main page, anyway?) is a theory on why liberals behave the way they do, from a self-described student of human observation.  Something about the phrase "student of human observation" sounds redundant to me. The English Teacher is threatening to jump out of hiding and take her Red Pen of Death to this article... there are missing apostrophes, missing punctuation, and even the dreaded split infinitive to be reckoned with.  However, the most distracting thing about reading this submission is the sentence fragments.  Let me assure you, I have nothing against incomplete sentences used judiciously in informal writing - it makes the writer's "voice" more conversational, and it is more natural to the ear if you are reading it aloud.  I use incomplete sentences myself every now and then.  It's pretty common to begin a sentence with a preposition now and again... but as often as Cary does it in this article, following full stops (periods) instead of pauses (ellipses or dashes), it's just distracting.  I don't mean to insinuate that this is badly written... It's just that my fingers are itching to take a pen to the printed page and mark up a host of nitpicky corrections that distract me from reading this smoothly.  Political Nightmare gets a 3.5.

Challenge Post

Again this week, since I think it's a good way of going about it, let's review the Challenge Question our contestants were given:

Finish this story. I'll give you the first few sentences.

Turning quickly I saw trouble walk in my door in the shape of a nine year old. Completely unexpected, and completely unwanted.

American Warmonger:  Jeremy launches right into the response without the hated "this is the King of the Blogs challenge question and here is my response" intro - many thanks for that...  Jeremy also takes the opportunity to use this post to do some mighty sucking up to the judges, making all three of us characters in his private detective story.  Of course, I ended up being a nine-year-old in this story, but I'll forgive that.  I got the requested links and trackbacks and an apology for missing my blogiversary, so all is well.  Jeremy also takes the opportunity to address Pietro's unexplained absence from last week's rulings.  The story is fun, easy to read, and best of all, written capably in a very much "1940's detective show" voice.  I enjoyed reading it, and I thoroughly enjoy giving American Warmonger a 5 for this challenge response.

Razors Kiss:  Joshua also manages to avoid the despised Intro-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named (heh.  I like that.  I'm keeping it.) - the explanatory note is at the end of the story, where it doesn't tick me off so bad.  He takes some liberties with the challenge, seeing as how the "first few sentences" that the hosts provided were not actually used as the first few sentences... But the story does begin in a fashion that fits well with the sentences that were given, and explains why the writer was "turning quickly" in the first place.  The revelation that the first-person character in this story is the 14-year-old brother of the 9-year-old troublemaker surprised me...  The older brother's early interaction with the 9-year-old made him sound more like a father or father-figure type.  This sounds almost like it could be a true story, however.  It's not as dramatic and over-the-top as American Warmonger's, but it's a nice piece of writing.  Liked it.  Razors Kiss earns a 4.

Political Nightmare:  Why do I get the impression that this was never posted on the front page (or anyplace accessible for that matter) of this site?  At least not having any of the normal readers of the site run across this story unexpectedly means there was no need to explain it with the despised Intro-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named.  Cary also takes liberties with the form of the challenge, adding a few scene-setting sentences prior to the sentences that were given in the challenge question.  Cary's story is set in the late '50's, which seemed to be a pointless convention until the very end, when we are given the final pieces of information that tell us without explicitly saying that Indian Boy is supposed to have been Ward Churchill as a young boy.  While it was clever and topical, some of the dialogue was kind of stilted, and the bit about telling the boy of a future in which everyone could broadcast their opinions and people could access them from their homes, offices, and handheld devices was just incongruous.  Unless the man in this story was a time-traveller, I don't think anyone in 1956 could have envisioned wireless Internet access on handheld devices or anything similar.  And the foreshadowing of 9/11 was kludgy, awkward and forced.  Sometimes a story should just be a story, you know?  Political Nightmare's challenge response gets a 3.

The Queen's Rulings

American Warmonger:  13.5
Razors Kiss:  14
Political Nightmare:  7.5

Comments

[RazorsKiss]

Thank you very much for the kind words!

Just as a note...

The left/right imbalance is due to the javascript blogrolls on the left. If you lick on the blogroll name, they "unreel" - and end up, actually, much longer than the right.

So, that's why it looks imbalanced.

And yes... that was *based* on a true story. I'm the oldest of six kids - so I did a lot of babysitting growing up...

Glad you liked it.

[RazorsKiss]

*click.