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Websites Suck at Evaluating This Website

July 28, 2011 | 1 comment

A few longtime readers may recall the time I had this blog’s reading level gauged by a web-based tool. The less-than-flattering result was “Junior High School level.” Less than a year later, that particular website evaluator no longer existed.

graded-paperDespite that experience, I seem to have retained a masochistic urge to be graded. Spurred on by the example of MaryAnn (a.k.a. The Flick Filosopher — see my blogroll), I rashly submitted this blog to the scrutiny of Hubspot’s Website Grader. Following her lead, I focused on Section I, letter E of the report:

high-school

Hey — that means I graduated up a level in only three years! Although… oh yeah, junior high school is only three years. Read the rest of this entry »


How Do You Rate on the LA-dar?

June 29, 2009 | 5 comments

Again, an item in Ye Olde Facebook Newsfeed set me to thinking. The blurb below was posted by an old schoolmate of mine. I have anonymized her profile picture, and (obviously) blurred out her name. She still lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where we grew up; I (in case you didn’t know) now live in Los Angeles.which-ca-city-LA-screencap

I haven’t taken the quiz, so I don’t know what questions my friend answered. She was puzzled by the result, so I’ve endeavored to develop more in-depth questionnaire to determine how temperamentally well-suited one is for L.A. residency. So here it is: Derek’s L.A.dar, v 0.5.
Read the rest of this entry »


Easy Pickings for a Prehistoric Predator

March 1, 2009 | Permalink

velociraptor-bunkbed

OK, then… I guess if I can’t avoid velociraptors, I can at least stay away from bunk beds with chains on them.


List-mus Test: How Well-Read are You?

February 27, 2009 | 5 comments

Here’s what happened: the seemingly endless succession of Facebook memes had produced one intended to measure how well-read you are in terms of a list of 100 classic works. It read:

The BBC believes most people will have read, on average, only 6 of the 100 books listed here. How do your reading habits stack up? Look at the list and put an ‘x’ or a ‘*’, or otherwise highlight the ones you have read. Tag some people.

Geek that I am, I dutifully went down the list and checked off the 25 of them that I had read, and posted it in a Facebook note with the added comment

This list is a bit Brit-centric. Not that it ignores American classics or anything, but I count no fewer than four Jane Austen books on here and six by Dickens, whereas I see but two Steinbecks, one Fitzgerald, and zero Hemingway. Plus, as Hemingway would point out, only chicks read Jane Austen. ;-) … On the one hand, I’ve read just 1/4 of these classics, which seems kind of pathetic for someone who claims to be educated. With that in mind, I’m still four times more well-read than the BBC gives me credit for being – so suck on that, crumpet monkeys!

That’s where the controversy began. And it didn’t even have to do with my comment about Jane Austen, nor my calling the major press outlet of the land of my forefathers “crumpet monkeys.” Read the rest of this entry »


It’s Perfectly Simple

July 10, 2008 | 1 comment

UPDATE – March 9, 2009: OK, see, there was this site called criticsrant.com. Key word there is “was,” because the site appears to be kaput, at least for now (try the link below this if you want to double-check). Anyway, it had a feature where you could type in the your blog’s URL and it would assess its readability assign it a school-level classification, complete with a badge that you could embed displaying the result. C&B was declared to be Junior High School-level reading, hence my one-liner at the end of this post.

If you never got to see it, sorry about that. Believe me, it was wryly hilarious.

Blog Readability Test

That’s it – I am through with dumbing it down for you people. ;-)