When I came across “Simon Templar”, I was very excited. You see, I’m a big fan of “The Saint”. I love the movie, and as for the TV show, I used to watch the reruns on TV back in the late 70s. Simon is slick, smart, and just plain cool.
Then, I started reading the site. The content is political. If you’re the kind of person who’d rather have an elephant in your house than a donkey, you won’t like what he has to say. I like to think “The Saint” has political leanings just like the author of this site. I don’t know for sure, but a lot of things point that way, so I feel the name of the site is justified on those grounds.
However, the web site and the legend have little in common when it comes to being slick and stylish. The layout is not very well thought out which in all fairness, may not be the fault of the author as it appears to be controlled by the hosting service. The navigation is difficult, and the writing is nothing like what I expected. For the most part, it’s just entry after entry of rants. He seems to be very angry and it comes out in the site. The use of different fonts and font colors is simply distracting and the seemingly random placement of images is annoying. He needs to find a punching bag somewhere and get rid of his anger. Then, he can come back and write something thoughtful and meaningful instead of raving on and using slurs.
Although my personal beliefs are more in line with the liberals than the conservatives, I find it difficult to read what he has to say and have any confidence in it. If he were to tone down the anger a notch or two, he might have something worth reading.
To cut a little slack here, the author hasn’t been blogging for very long. His style hasn’t come out. He lists himself as having expertise in several areas, including freelance writing and amateur punditry. Sadly, none of this freelance work shows up on his site (that I could find). In fact, he references another site quite a lot and seems to be more of a cheerleader than author.
The author has done a lot of work on the promotion of the site. He’s on five different blog rings, which I would guess bring a lot of visitors. This will get a lot of people to see the other sites he references. Those people will likely go back to those sites, but as for Simon, what Simon says doesn’t really matter.