Slashdot Mirror
Bottom of the Barrel Book Reviews — The Lost Blogs
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.
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.
Really? We're supposed to read a book review in white-on-teal?
Doesn't putting Idle stories on the front page detract from the "stuff that matters" claim of /.?
Funny, I felt the same way about this review.
Come on. The day is Sunday. The ice cream dish is a SUNDAE. Don't let the editors write things without someone else editing them!
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
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 blog comes to mind as a good way to do essentially the same idea.
Not a typewriter
As title - I have my images set to none, but Idle stories appearing on the front page are still putting images in there.
That poor customer never got his sunday just so you could watch the trainee fail six times? Six? Why?
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I quite like the white on teal.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
The "review" did not give me any useful information whatsoever, I was expecting at least some interesting insight or real argument but what I found was just unnecessary bashing of this one book. Please keep stuff like this without substance off the front page, there are plenty of articles and topics out there that deserve that spot.
So, tell us honestly, you didn't like it?
It appears that the primary purpose of idle.slashdot.org is to illustrate that samzenpus enjoys insulting people so much that he's willing to devote a lot of time and energy to it. You let her microwave ice cream all night. Hilarious. I hope I am one day blessed to work in the same place as you.
Please, please, take these stories off the front page.
Also, add my voice to the cries of white-on-teal outrage.
The first question was did she get fired? The second follow up question to the did she get fired is how hot was she?
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?
I thought that was the beginning of the boring story you were refering to.
A good expample, now being distributed by RSS is George Orwell's journal. 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.
Second, there have been a few people who have lanched blogs using the personae of famous people - Chaucer comes to mind - and have done it well.
Three Squirrels
Yeah, like people who once worked in a restaurant that served ice cream but never learned how to spell "sundae."
From the Wikipedia article:
Does anyone have a greasemonkey fix for this visual insanity?
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.
Wow ... I'm speechless. The crappy design. The pretentious asshole of a reviewer. This idle section is the worst thing happened to slashdot since the days of Jon Katz. ... and by the way ... speaking to the reviewer for just a sec ... letting your employee fail once or twice is once thing, but watching her fail six times for your enjoyment is a sign of a true douche bag. Is it any surprise that you are writing crappy reviews of shitty books that no one wants to read?
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.
SUNDAE SUNDAE SUNDAE! >_
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundae
What, no Amazon link??
I had an incident happen with my coffee at a Starbucks in a Target that was almost as bad as the sundae story.
How do we place out names on the reviewer list? I would am willing to volenteer myself to provide a decent (detailed) review unlike how this reviewer did.
NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...
There's so little real news today that /. has a review by someone who thinks it's more important to make fun of a trainee than train them? Crikey!
He works at Denny's and was just following what it says in the Employee Handbook about Customer Service.
Hm, I had to stay away from the net for some weeks... Can anyone tell me what, precisely, has happened here? Has /. changed its policies? This is not really what I want from this site, and from the other comments, it seems that there are more irritated readers...
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
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
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?
OK, so "sunday" was fixed, to "sundae".
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.
"Even for Slashdot, that was a very obscure reference!" - Anonymous Coward
I thought that first paragraph was an excerpt and not part of the review ... I thought, "Wow! This book really does suck!"
She never did
And thus you utterly FAILED in your training duties. And heaped ridicule upon someone who did you no wrong or harm.
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.
Use punctuation or form better sentences. This really hurt to read.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
I really haven't read anything that had the word, dealt with, or was associated with 'blog' that made much sense anyway.
Face it, just because you can hunt and peck doesn't mean your a journalist, writer or thinker, for that matter.
Nothing to read here, move along.
Toll_Free
I am going to disable the Idle section in my user prefs.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
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...
You have a good point there and I agree that negative reviews also can be quite useful. However I feel like this was less of a real book review but more of a bashing of a book the author deemed especially silly. Many of /.'s book reviews are well researched and full of good information but this was simply a humor-piece, trying to only make fun of the book... (thus the placement in the idle section)
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.
the above is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect that of the little voices in my head
I thought the first paragraph was literary gold. I was entertained.
Editor, please don't let this "reviewer" fail 6 times by writing 6 horribly written pretentious reviews. Stop him now, and tell him what not to do with words.
You don't by chance think that maybe, just maybe, the book is more of a humor-category, mock-history type of thing? I think the reviewers first problem is missing the entire point of it...
Hell, a quick search on Amazon (where's the slash referral link? you're losing $$ for the company!), and viewable on the front cover is a bit of a clue, "The Lost Blogs: From Jesus to Jim Morrison--The Historically Inaccurate and Totally Fictitious Cyber Diaries of Everyone Worth Knowing." So, he's pissed the blogs aren't exactly accurate...
No wonder the teal/white comments are more interesting than the main story.
Well they did call the section "Bottom of the barrel book reviews"....and that review was definitely the bottom of the barrel.
And now you're going to claim that you intended to write an article that is even stupider than the book you were reviewing. Suuure you did. Good going Ms. Morissette.
Public use of any portable music system is a virtually guaranteed indicator of sociopathic tendencies. -- Zoso
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.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
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. 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!
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
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 being made to feel shame for it. They diminish their own light as you encourage them to take steps backwards into ignorance and servitude. You encourage them to live in fear rather than in acceptance of their own inevitable mistakes as they take brave steps along the road of learning.
If you want the world to become a better place, then it is more effective to find ways to teach and encourage people; instead, you explain why microwaving ice-cream doesn't work and you don't make them feel stupid and small because of it. It is an opportunity for somebody to get the thrill of learning a new feature of reality. Remember how much fun it was as a kid when the lightbulb went on and you learned how something worked? You have the chance to share that experience. Reacting in this way to others who are not as experienced as you doesn't just teach the fundamentals of preparing an ice-cream sundae, but also it teaches them how to encourage learning in others in a powerful and kind manner. These effects spread outward. --And the opposite is also true. If you teach scorn and fear, then those patterns will also propagate, affecting others in ever-widening circles.
I really don't like this trend with these new sections in Slashdot whereby it seems the goal is to laugh at all those 'Stupid People' out there. Slashdot has always had a large component of sneering, mean-spirited dis-empowering people. But never before has it been encouraged by the editorial team.
Ask: "Am I helping the world or harming it?"
-FL
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.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Jeeesus....
Please, please, please make it STOP.
NO SIG
You must have missed one of CmdrTaco's last posts in the Idle section, where he indicated that the whole thing is an idea from corporate (which wants to be more like Digg & Fark).
The Slashdot editors want it to fail. Miserably.
"would be so turned off by it's incoherent nature" - I hate to be pernickety, but this is one context where you don't need a superfluous apostrophe!
You dick!
What?
Seriously,
You have no news, your review is worse than that book, and you're a total dousch-bag for doing what you did to someone you were supposed to have supervised, you should get fired.
Cheers,
-HamsterMaster
Anybody tell me how I can get black text on a white background, instead of white text on a cyan background?
I honestly thought the first paragraph after the pic of the barrel was an excerpt from the book until I got to the end. What the hell is this doing on Slashdot?
We've got to nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
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 at the expense of others. Intent is a large part of the equation. One can hide from this fact, but it doesn't go away, and it certainly doesn't stop it from altering a person with repeated use. Interestingly, a roomful of sneerers doesn't add up in terms of charismatic power to one self-owned person with positive intent. People who embrace scorn are similarly ruled by it; generally shells of themselves with little real power in the face of somebody with true courage.
Like you, I'd also rather be embarrassed than an idiot, but punished, scorned and castigated? I've no patience or use for that. Treat others as you would have them treat you. (Assuming they are not psychotics who are deliberate in their 'blunders'.) Always there are provisos.
-FL
The most irritating part of all of this is that that got published, and I can't.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
.. but if that was the stupidest thing he's ever seen he doesn't get out of Mom's basement much.
I mean, fercryinoutloud, there's NASCAR Brand Bacon:
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/03/30/moment-of-adversyner.html
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
> How do you tag an article??? I have been trying to figure that out since I joined. FAQ is no help.
First, you get a microwave and the editor of this article, then you gather up some coworkers and...
Err, sorry, wrong things. Actually you click this funny little triangle button to make a text box you can type tags into appear. Except that your account is probably too new to even have that option. Like moderation, not everyone gets to. I think you have to be in the oldest X% of Slashdot users for it to occur. It was several years before I ever got mod points, for example, and my UID is somewhat less than half of yours.
I literally LOL'd at the Jim Morrison thing. The sundae incident, as others have pointed out, makes the reviewer as bad as the trainee, just in a different way.
Maybe, just maybe, the book is bad enough to be good, like "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes" or "Plan 9 from Outer Space".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I thought this was a review of Nancy Pelosi's book. It won't see the inside of many Fedex boxes either.
Who let this guy into /.?
Can I have 5 minutes of my life back?
I don't CARE if you are offended, this review is an offense far greater.
The author has more creativity and prose than the reviewer.
You don't understand: I am not locked up in here with you, you are locked up in here with ME!
Well, the cover states clearly that the blogs are "Historically Inaccurate":
http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Blogs-Morrison-Historically-Inaccurate/dp/0446697389
So what's the point on emphasizing that and making it as though the author meant the blogs to be accurate? Read the book and missed the cover?
As for the poor girl, maybe she was under pressure for being supervised by such an Old Nice Guy? Or maybe having the rest of the employees looking at her? I hope she left that day, because that looks like a very healthy environment to work in. No wonder you stayed at least a year there. You must have enjoyed it.
And it gives a great insight on your professionalism: publicly humiliate a poor girl while a customer is waiting for their order...
This review was the stupidest thing I've read in a long time.
Seriously, though. Who is the publisher. I have a book I've been trying to get in print. I've had about a dozen people read the manuscript and loved it. If an idiot can get his icecream training in print maybe I can get mine published.
tell me tell me tell me - who's the publisher?
We've really hit the bottom of the Slashpot story barrel here. Was this even worth the effort of writing?
The 6 sundae customers were girlfriends of the intelligent and good looking blond trainee. And they all had a giggle fit every time the idiot trainer failed to figure out how to correct such a simple mistake.
Got to take it easy after burning thru Saturday.
Obviously the last page was missing from your copy of the book, as page 272 starts off thus:
Bottom of the Barrel Reviews Book - By samzenpus
from the absolute drivel dept.
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. Blah blah blah. Others become part of an impressive wall of books on my desk before they find a home. Blah blah blah. There are a choice few however that are doomed to never see the blah blah blah...
And not only that, but starting now, you are the greatest asshole that I have never met.
Time to update the preferences, I think...
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
Smirking while someone makes the same mistake over and over, ruining food, really demonstrates his intelligence -- that's presumably why Samzenpus shared this little anecdote. Of course, to most people it just shows what a complete asshole he is.
Could you choose another icon for this section? Thinking about burning books, however bad the books may be, always gives me the creeps and puts you in very bad company. Find a shelf in a dark corner, donate them to charity, send them back but never, ever think about burning. Please.
It is incoherent nature?
@ 1st i thought the ice cream story _was_ the lost blog;-)
Cool. I haven't been to http://www.kuro5hin.org/ for a while. Nice to see you've brought it here to Slashdot.
Seriously, aren't there enough dicks on the internet already?
How can we expect to continue to get respectable, intelligent people willing to answer questions for Slashdot interviews if the site starts getting filled with "LOLWUT" nonsense like this?
What purpose does this serve? I never would have heard of the guy if it weren't for this posting. If the book is so bad, why are you promoting it?
There's no such thing as bad publicity.
And on top of all that, now I need to teach my Feed reader to ignore "idle" submissions.
What is the Book Reviewers List and who do I have to fellate to get on it?
Fnord.