Superbia in the Suburbs

Written by Liz from Three Bright Stars

I'm loath to identify myself with any particular Cardinal Sin. I'm pretty much Condemned, with all sins attaching themselves to me like flamboyant alphabet fridge magnets. I'm atheist. It has to work that way.

However, if you wanted to know which sin best fits me as a mother, it must be Superbia, pride. Isn't that a great new Latin word to add to your vocabulary? I plan to replace "excellent" with it, in the sense of tapping my fingertips together consecutively repeating, "Su-per-bia" as Mr. Burns says "Eg-cellent." To honour it as a sin, I suppose I'll have to fill my heart with the pitch of evil first, and on second thought, that sounds like entirely too much work. (Oh dear, I've just qualified for Acedia, sloth. Sins like fridge magnets.)

Daniel never fails to amaze me, and it does fill me with Superbia. His brain is so big! He is constantly trying new things - new sounds, new combinations, new actions – all on his own. About a week ago, he was drinking water from one of our Tupperware cups with lids and straws, which are pretty leak-proof unless you shake them upside down over your face, which Daniel was doing while Husband was changing him. Of course he soaked himself, but when he realized what had happened, he looked up at Husband and said, "Uh oh," so perfectly.

He's suddenly so good at negotiating stairs that he brings your heart into your mouth, partly from Superbia, and partly fear that you've let him go too soon. At the bottom, he sits on the stairs so nicely, patting it as though to say, "This is the perfect size for a new chair." I broke out the foam toddler chairs, and he practices backing up into them, learning spatial judgement right in front of me.

And I must not omit the continued fastidiousness of replacing fallen petals on the correct flowers, applying my used Breathe Right strip to Husband's nose, putting toys and plastic containers back where they belong, and helping me empty the dishwasher. These actions imply a superb level of intelligence.

So sue me, I'm proud. I'm proud of Daniel, for the tiniest of accomplishments, of Husband, for working so hard and being such a great dad, and of myself, for (apparently) doing a good job as a mom.

Surely, I'm misinterpreting the sin, but really, what did you expect from a heathen? I would offer to eat humble pie, but then I couldn’t help exclaiming, “I make the best humble pie!” Not humble, Liz. Try again.


Liz will include a recipe for the Best Humble Pie, which her family can’t get enough of, on her Monday Cooking Blog at Three Bright Stars.

Blog Review: The Birds and the Beads

The Blog: The Birds and the Beads by Lavender

The Reviewer: Liz Medwid from ThreeBrightStars

First impressions: At first glance, The Birds and the Beads is a very girly, very artsy blog all about – you guessed it – birds and beads. The title is cleverly specific about the main topics of the blog, yet suggests adult naughtiness (generally not delivered in the content). The tagline, “It’s nice & light… so it’s fun to read,” defines the tone of the posts as well as the appropriate reader response: it’s a clever and effective technique to invite casual surfers to stay and read further.

Design: Pinks and purples signal a feminine personal blog, and if you like that, you’ll like this page. At the top of the page, the sidebars seem a little disorganized, but as you scroll down, you notice the posts are short, consistent, organized into tight paragraphs, and littered with gorgeous photographs, which, to the North American audience, are bound to have an exotic appeal. Overall, I think most of the target audience will hang out here long enough to check the content.

Content: Lavender offers advice about raising budgies and parakeets, and sells home-fired glass beadwork on a linked web page.

Although she has only been posting on Blogger since April of this year, with a total just topping 100 posts, she seems to generate significant discussion on many posts. One post hints that The Birds and the Beads gets a lot of traffic from Google and other searches on the main topics. When you delve into the posts, the content type and the page design actually diverge, in the sense that the content, being expert and business-related, could benefit from a more professional web-page design.

The rest of the content deals with photography and Lavender’s personal experiences living in Australia. A beautiful nature photograph accompanies almost every post. She does include some memes, such as Wordless Wednesdays, and in this case, they blend well enough into the rest of the photography content that they don’t detract from the overall experience of a casual surfer.

Blog writing is so often hit-and-miss that competence in this area must be mentioned: Lavender’s writing is concise, conversational, and generally error-free, which makes it a pleasant read.

Best and Worst: While the design is good enough to attract casual readers, the content actually rates an even better design. Lavender’s knowledge about birds and bead artwork provides a light and fun read, as the tagline promises, but it is also a great starting point to develop and maintain customer relations with that part of her audience wanting to take advantage of her expertise on these topics.

Improvement tips:

1. Improve design with a more professional color scheme. This doesn’t mean abandoning pinks altogether – but a little pink goes a long way on a page like this.
2. Tidy your widgets, especially at the top. The most important elements, your bead link and your profile, should appear at the top of each sidebar. Then, consider editing your other sidebar links to include the most usefulness with the least visual clutter. If possible, condense your topics list. Periodically cull some of your directory links: only maintain the ones that provide the most impact to your readership.

Blogroll worthy? Yes, for anyone who is interested in raising budgies and parakeets, and anyone who might want to collect handcrafted bead artwork.

Overall score:

Blog Review: Modern Musings

The Blog: Modern Musings by Danielle

The Reviewer: Liz Medwid from ThreeBrightStars

First impressions: The overall style is appealing, but lack of consistency in format and content is an irritation throughout the blog.

Also, when a writer expounds about something important, such as society or politics, I want to know why I should bump someone off my daily reading list to add them, in particular: what gives them authority in their subject area. It could be education, experience, family history, peer accolades, success in their field, or anything else.

Danielle doesn’t reveal her background in politics. She calls herself “a woman, a mother, a wife, a student, a writer, a poet, a seeker and a member of the global human society” yet she wants “to facilitate grassroots ‘Intelligence Gathering’ concerning prominent issues facing America.” I’m just one of those people who needs to know where a writer is coming from before I can take them seriously. (Note: In an email, Danielle revealed that she has her associate degrees in history and anthropology, and this detail would help the average reader.)

Design: Online readers have short attention spans: readable lines should be short, and blog conventions like hyperlinks should be clear and predictable. Musings doesn’t have a right margin and as a result, the blog entries are a bit too wide for on-screen reading. In-text hyperlinks are also too long, so that although the choice of hot pink is eye-catching, the goal of each link is hard to determine.

Formatting between blog entries should also be consistent, but Danielle is guided by some mysterious outside force from entry to entry. Some entries are left-aligned, some are centered, some have adequate inter-line spacing, some are spaced to make you squint at the screen from a foot away, sometimes font size looks normal, and sometimes it screams at you – and none of these variations seem deliberately chosen to illustrate a point.

The sidebar contains some interesting accolades and endorsements, which add notions to her otherwise mysterious identity, but organization and restraint would improve things here as well. Danielle forces the reader to slog through seemingly random links before a clear picture emerges.

Content: Modern Musings is a mess of memes and quotes. For the first-time reader, it can be difficult to ascertain whether the voice is Danielle’s or a Center for American Progress Action Fund talking point. Readers expect the hyperlinks to imply a single reference, with the remaining text being the blog author’s – and in Musings, this is usually not the case. The reference is there, but until you hit on it, nothing in the formatting suggests that the interstitial voice is not Danielle’s. I’m sure this effect is unintentional, but in a political blog, sloppy references seriously undermine the author’s credibility in the mind of the reader.

Best and Worst: The overall style, including color choices and base font, give it a fresh appeal. Danielle’s raw enthusiasm is also winsome.

Improvement tips:

1. If you want a general readership to take your social and political commentary seriously, you need to abandon the shield of anonymity and reveal all relevant credentials.
2. Format your blog with relentless consistency. Readers love that.
3. Your picture and profile should top the sidebar, since they are the most interesting and important aspects of your profile. Then, organize your charitable or political endorsements beneath one heading, your accolades and accomplishments in another heading, etc, to help readers visualize you more quickly.
4. Use clearer formatting to distinguish between your own analysis and that of other writers. Also, let us hear more from Danielle, and less from memes and quotes!

Blogroll worthy? Not yet.

Overall Score:

Christmas Time Is Here

Written by Liz Medwid from Three Bright Stars.


I love Christmas! And yet, ever since I’ve been married, and more since we’ve started our own family, it fills me with a certain gnawing dread. This year, I have foresight: my pregnancy gives me that superpower. We’ll have a new baby in November, our second. As everyone else heads into the land of Santa, my poor husband and I will be heading into that bleak and sprawling land of no sleep. How can we also survive everyone’s festive expectations – including my own?

As with writing, the key will be editing – ruthlessly cutting away any superfluous Christmas detail, leaving a tangible and tolerable Christmas essence: all of the pleasure, and none of the pain. No Christmas tradition is safe if our sanity is to be preserved.

But, as with writing, cutting is hard, like killing that superfluous character who has become a close friend, and yet adds nothing to the plot. Should I cut gingerbread-decorating? Do we miss viewing the Christmas displays on Candy Cane Lane? Do I forget my promise to host family on the day? What about my desire – NEED – to bake lots and lots of festive goodies?

Part of the answer has occurred to me, although I have to fight the current season to put it into action. Start the season now! It’s so obvious. I’m going to be large with pregnancy complaints by October, so Christmas preparations must be completed before then. I’ve already gathered some festively themed crafting supplies to make combination Christmas-birth announcement cards. I’ve never made cards before, but I must say my first attempt is respectable!

Confections can be made well in advance and frozen. With a little creativity, even Christmas shopping can be completed by autumn.

It’s a little annoying to notice everyone else’s total lack of festive spirit, though. Martha Stewart’s website has a very limited Christmas page, and most of the stores don’t even carry a Christmas theme until, what, October? I guess I’ll have to make my own holiday spirit. I wonder how long before Husband flushes all my Christmas albums down the toilet?

Liz Medwid is the only one in her neighborhood wearing a toque in July. Learn more at Three Bright Stars.

A Hard Man is Good to Find…

Written by Liz from Three Bright Stars

On the two hospital shows I watch, I’ve noticed two kinds of men: the metero-sexual career boyfriend and the hard-as-nails career bachelor with the dark past and heart of gold. If I have my choice between these two idiots, I’ll take the hard man every time.

My soft men are the sweet and adorable J.D. Dorian of Scrubs and James Wilson of House. Their primary skill is relationship assessment: they can figure out where they fit in the social order. J.D.’s skill serves his function as narrator, while Wilson’s defines him as Gregory House’s character foil. Scrubs openly mocks J.D.’s masculinity: in a bar after work, J.D.’s (female) friend comments on his ordering an appletini, “Nice drink. Does it come in hetero?”

What I can’t figure out is how male characters with such an overtly feminine skill set are also the male romantic interests of their shows. These guys are self-conscious, worried how other people will perceive them. They’re not risking anything for love. They express their feelings, and need a woman’s acceptance.

J.D., for example, is much better at expressing his feelings verbally and through facial expression than he is at performing a medical diagnosis. A woman will notice D.J.’s feelings and assume a motherly role long before his knowledge of medicine turns her knees to jelly. Wilson is the lady-killer of House, but his method of seduction involves a protracted period of theatre and museum meetings (“it’s not a date!”) until he maneuvers the woman to consider herself the aggressor.

This is what popular culture now defines as masculine sex appeal? I’m beside myself with lack of arousal. In desperation, although “hard” men are invariably maligned as the worst sort of man with whom a woman could have the misfortune to spend any time, let us reconsider him as a candidate for hot, lusty romance.

J.D.’s opposite is Perry Cox, hard-ass doctor and mentor whose total self-confidence, and corollary disinterest in the opinions of others, releases him to perform better than anyone in his field. Cox is so good at his job that he gets away with berating everyone else, including J.D., to his face. Shouldn’t he, life-saving genius doctor, and not his child-like charge J.D., be the one to make all the girls swoon? Plus, props for the name “Cox.”

In House, Wilson’s opposite is the title character, Gregory House, whose genius for medicine lies in his ability to transform entirely into a robot while solving medical mysteries. He is represented even more cruelly than Scrubs’ Cox as not only socially inept, but a lying, cheating addict, completely unfit for a relationship, romantic or otherwise. But hark: he is an intelligent professional with a quick wit, a large salary, and who also performs feats of heroism weekly. If you read that personal ad on Match.com, you’d be one of a thousand to respond with, “I’m a bubbly and charming D-cup, with an understanding that your career comes first.”

And there are other “hard” guys, rough and masculine, such as the ego-maniacal Jack Donaghy of 30 Rock, Malcolm Reynolds of the brilliant Firefly, Alex Tully of the gripping, now-cancelled Drive, and “Sawyer” of the wayward Lost. All of them have a dark, dangerous side, casting them from the potential boyfriend pool. Our culture now pairs everything masculine with everything evil or dangerous, and look at the appalling cost in on-screen sex appeal!

Liz Medwid blogs about her lavish stay-at-home lifestyle on http://www.threebrightstars.blogspot.com/, in which she primarily admires her son’s cuteness and resists writing about her husband’s hotness, out of respect.