I needed a Flash plugin, so the first thing I saw on this page was a fullpage popup. Closing that, I get on with Schmutzie. The layout is big and red and beautiful, and apparently Schmutzie designed it herself. It’s one of the best layouts I’ve seen – mostly text, clean, and eye-catching.
The blog is called “Milkmoney or not, here I come,” but the page itself says “Sticking One Toe In At A Time.” Both are sort of the average, cutesy titles you could expect from almost any site, which tell you nothing about the author or the content of the site. Personal weblogs, however, even though mostly solipsistic, cover such a range of topics that in most cases it’s good to be ambiguous to a degree.
It turned out to be a fluke, but I thought it was a bad sign that the first entry was one of those lists of 200 things where you have to bold the ones you have done. Schmutzie, a married Canadian woman, has never touched an
iceberg. But she’s milked a cow. Her sitemeter tells me she’s only had 7,400 readers since August, but it seems often that far-inferior weblogs with better networking skills get ten times the hits with 1/10th of the content.
Her entries are essay-long, and always contain plenty of information about the lobes of the brain, freed lab rabbits, and the French word for dandelion (³pissenlit²).
Some gems:
“Brown twine is comforting and right.”
“When I found myself absentmindedly etching a caricature of myself into the side of the tub
during a bath, I knew that I had let that one go too far. I mean, I was actually naked and soaking in hot water inside a container I would not have fed a dog out of.”
I’ve found this blog fascinating, and I can’t usually swallow personal weblogs. Most make you feel like a child that’s wandered into the middle of a movie theater. The author is intelligent, and her writing makes her seem approachable and friendly. The mistake most personal weblog authors make with friendliness is that every entry reads as a
continuation of a story, without exposition or reference. I could read Schmutzie backwards, entry by entry, if I wanted (and I just might) and still get it.milkmoney or not, here I come