Author: admin

Mondo Irlando is a collection of Film, Music and other ‘stuff’ reviews by Aaron, also known as ‘The Duke’. Graphically the site is rather primitive. The graphics look like they were done in Windows Paint. Creepy. Even creepier is Aaron constantly refering to himself in the third person as the Duke. Cringe. Wasn’t there a beer commercial that says no one can be nicknamed The Duke because ‘everyone’ would want to be called the Duke? Anyway, must focus.

I started clicking around and became a little frustrated. I hit a dead link which took me to a Yahoo page then encountered really slow load times on the content from mondoirlando.com. The website could certainly use some love.

But onwards I went; surely ‘The Duke’ must have something important to say. The content here is easily accessed via the review archive page. A lot of content is linked to his reviews at ‘blogcritics.org’ (which loads fine). The content consists of current movie reviews, cds reviews and a series of editorials in the stuff section. I’ll focus on the reviews. (Although the editorials, such as ‘The 13 Best Horrors of all-ever’ and ‘The motherfucking Cinema of Woody Allen’ are good reads.)

The writing is at times insightful and creative, at others, offensive and unnecessarily derogatory. I sea-sawed a lot with my opinion on Aaron’s writing. Many reviews were full of f-this f-thats which, IMHO is the quickest route for a reviewer to lose credibility. Not to mention that the effectiveness of the word is lost when it is used so habitually. It is obvious that Aaron has vast media knowledge and great creative potential. His reviews are often very long and deeply insightful. At times perhaps too insightful. To fully appreciate Aaron’s reviews you often require a strong understanding of pop music and pop culture as he makes a lot of rather obscure references. The references are great *if* you get them, if you don’t however, you may miss the point he was trying to make which limits the usefulness of a review.

The MP3 digest is a good idea. Aaron provides a short review of a song and a link to an MP3 of the song. (Legal?) The store has a series of Aaron’s favourite films and CDs which he claims might make you say ‘Man, The Duke is one smart individual when it comes to choosing quality listening material.’ *Cough*

I can’t recommend this collection of reviews for everyone. I think the best audience would be 20 something film or music students, the rest of us could take or leave Mondo Irlando depending on the particular review. Aaron easily has the potential to become a great and influential reviewer *if* he can focus more on who he is writing for than on himself.

Mondo Irlando

What a cool first impression this site makes! I entered in the standard template which is sunny yellow with a hive pattern and a bee at the top, hence the Hunny Hive reference, I suppose. Then I noticed in the sidebar a number of other template choices and, by golly, I clicked on a few. It was one of the neatest things I’ve seen in a while.

It was difficult to find the archives, as she only used the calendar format for them. From all I can tell, her archives only start a month or so back. If you go to the first archived page (August 25, 2004), it seems there were other archives at some point, but she ‘cleaned house’ and now they are gone. Shame, because as it stands now, you know very little about her. She is SweetHunnyB from GA is about all I can muster. What’s with the honey references? Do you just like honey a lot?

And what in the devil is SSOHP? It took me almost 20 minutes to find out that it means “Secret Society of Happy People” and it was buried in a randomly titled post. Yeah, this site is a very happy one. Indeed.

Also in the sidebar, there are a bunch of links to ‘word of the day’ and ‘This Day in History,’ things like that, and she also lists her favorite comic strips (complete with links!). All those SSOH People out there are getting’ happier by the minute. Thank you for brightening their day.

I liked the look of the site, including all the alternate templates, very much. The content may have been a bit too happy for me. I’m no member of the SSOHP after all. For those of you who are, you can’t find a better place to celebrate.

Hunny Hive

Fringe Blog has a nice white background with a centered column that looks like a piece of paper. Nothing cluttering the sides, very easy on the eyes. I wish more blogs looked like this one.

In the About section I found that our author is 23 years old and wants to be a film editor when he grows up. He’s serious about it too, because he has won a few awards already in local film festivals.

I browsed through the archives, which start in February of 2003. Here is a quote from his first entry:

“The Grand Experiment
February 8
I’ve gone and done it. I’ve finally succumbed to the pressures of life in the digital universe. I’m not talking about starting up a dotcom (I already did that).

Blogging. Blog. Blogger. I am Jack’s Lack of Good Sense. What makes me think I can keep this up? What makes me think people care? Is it for the people that I make daily reports and maintain my independence, all the while drumming up thoughts on…whatever?”

These are all questions we bloggers asked ourselves when we first stepped into the blogosphere. Will anybody care? Blogging is a leap of faith there is no doubt about it. And our author found that his own motivations and the direction of his blog evovled as he went along, which is documented on the about page.

The entries are surprisingly mature considering the age of the author. He is articulate and has wide ranging interests that keep the posts from becoming mundane. He does movie reviews, posts chapters from his ongoing novel, takes a trip down memory lane about Garbage Pail Kids trading cards, discusses politics, and links freely to other blogs that he reads. I especially enjoyed the recurring Zen teaching posts.

I found something new to me on this blog…. something called the Christian Carnival, which seems to be a roving venue for bloggers to post essays on certain topics of interest. Our author was the recent host. Twenty bloggers participated. I also ran across something called The Storyblogging Carnival that is a site to submit a story that you have posted on your blog. This sounded like fun to me, and I am happy to have learned about it.

The author has an efficient style for his archives. They are listed by month and only include a brief paragraph and then a go to link for the full entry. It was easy to browse through the excerpts to find things you might be interested in reading. While I don’t care for the “read more” links on the main page of a blog, it worked surprisingly well for the archives.

I enjoyed my visit, and was impressed by the variety and depth of the writing. While there is a fair amount of strong political opinion here, it is far from ranting. And since politics is not necessarily the dominant theme, I think this blog would appeal to a wide audience.

Fringe

Mondo Irlando opens to a rather garish page, with a lot of homemade icons and an annoying flashing Amazon advertisement. The background is black and in three columns we have the headings, Film, Music, and Other Shit. Overall, not an inviting looking place I’m sad to say. I did not run across an explanation of what the title of the site means, although it may be in there somewhere. And I only found one journal entry, so technically, to my way of thinking at least, this is not a blog.

The author writes reviews about film, and music. In the “Other” category you will find articles like “The Duke’s Guide to Ireland”, and “The Cinema of Woody Allen”. The writing style is rambling, tangent filled, and liberally sprinkled with profanity. I must confess, I’m convinced the fellow is fairly intelligent, but his penchant for smart aleck asides gets in the way of some otherwise cogent remarks on his chosen subjects. This is a shame, for he obviously has put an impressive volume of work here.

There were a few links that I tried that were not working for one reason or another… might have just been a bad day on the Web. There is no “About” page that I could find.

I don’t think I will be returning to this site any time soon. But it is entirely possible that it might appeal to film and music buffs, who look for a healthy dose of sarcasm and irreverence in their reviewers. It didn’t work for me.

Mondo Irlando

Mama’s Rants starts out with a nice layout, visually simple but effective. No amazing graphics of any kind, but appealing nonetheless. It’s a three-column layout, very tidy and the links include the usual recent posts and sites plus a long list of books she enjoys/reads.

The blog boasts a very complete “about” page with excellent writing regarding her background, her family and the purpose of the blog. Anne is a mother of two, married, ex-web content writer with a degree in journalism who is very much involved with “mom” work in her community plus some writing work on the side. Although she is now a stay-at-home mom, you can tell she is the intellectually restless type, looking for outlets to express her talent both as a person and mother.

This blog is unlike other “mom” blogs in the sense that Anne posts about issues that interest her as a human being mostly. Not just the mother. There are no long digressions on what motherhood is like or rants regarding parenting issues. Anne posts from the top of head on whatever she feels the need to say, be it pictures, news articles, musings from her childhood and/or present life. You might want to call this an eclectic “mom” blog. More about the woman than the mother, or both in somewhat equal amounts.

Her entries vary in length and her writing style is intelligent, simple and direct. I especially recommend the early posts dating from March and April of 2004.

Overall, I very much appreciated the work done on her blog. You can see she’s put a lot of thought into building a nice appealing site for her own self-expression and those who wish to share it. A Mama’s Rant