
Lots of businesses get hate mail, but few owners react the way Dooce's Heather Armstrong does. She prints out nasty emails, puts them in her driveway and drives over them with her car. "That's the attitude I have," she says, "and it's made my life a thousand percent better."I stopped reading at "a thousand percent." (Photo by Heather B. Armstrong)








Comments
Were I in her shoes, I'd probably spare the air and simply drop a Dooce on those pesky emails.
What kind of freak gets off more by driving over sheets of paper than by burning them?
@matto: The logistics of that plan blow my mind.
@sample032: It's not that hard, really. For instance, I just crapped in your printer.
I think she needs a better alternative to killing trees...perhaps the shooting range?
I used to put a picture of someone I didn't like on the target and fire away. Worked pretty well, too...
The Very Special Correspondent reads Dooce?
The mommyblogosphere is full of brittle, defensive women (I speak as one) but Dooce is pretty okay. I, on the other hand, post those emails complete with IP. Why? Cuz I'm not Dooce, I'm a douche.
@franky: Not usually, but she was hard to miss this morning.
[farm4.static.flickr.com]
@raincoaster: Mind you, it WAS really funny when the Scientologists astroturfed me...all from the same IP.
@Paul Boutin: Do you get a free copy of the Journal, or do you have to pay for it offline like everybody else?
Can someone please explain why anyone still cares about, much less is reading, Dooce? Even in the mommyblogger genre she just isn't that interesting and I swear that 99.9% of her audience reads her only because they hear she's cool and the "It" mommyblogger. *yawn*
What's wrong with the expression "a thousand percent"? That simply means 10 times the current value.
It's annoying when people go over 100% in absolute terms, like saying they're giving 110% percent or what not, because that's impossible - if you are measuring over 100% of something absolute, obviously you are measuring it wrong. But when you make a statement in relative terms, like she did, it's fine - if your life was at, say, 5% of how good it could be, making it 1000% better would simply bring it up to 50% (well, 55%, if you want to be picky ..).
I hate over-100 percentages being misused as much as the next bloke but it's perfectly correct here.
Remind us again.
She got famous for being fired from her job, because of her blog, back in what? 1998? And that makes her the prototypical mommy-blogger?
Scary thought: ten years from now, Jakob Lodwick assailing us with the trials and tribulations of the little James Rambin-Lodwick Esq.
@CyndyA: She's a good writer and has first-mover advantage in the mommyblogging sphere. The majority of what she writes about isn't even parenting-related. She got famous, so everyone checked her out, and now she's famous for being famous. They come back not because she's informative, but because she's entertaining. Simple as that.
the site's funny as shit if you actually read it. I'm no mommy and she makes me laugh my ass off with her humor and sarcasm.
pure and simple--I like what the chick writes.
@raincoaster: So she's the Paris Hilton of blogging moms?
@CyndyA: uh yah i gotta agree here. people keep telling me to check this chick out. I keep going to the page, wondering "sooo this is about her dog? her photos? her "mastheads?" huh? clicking around for five minutes, getting bored and getting the heck outta there.
kinda like i feel about harry potter... if you want a good kid's book i can think of about 100 i'd recommend before harry plopper. likewise, want a mommy blog? go to my page for a few. I'd start with "maggie dammit" or "soup is not a finger food"
sorry, but i don't get dooce. but then i don't get the plopper either.
washy
[washwords.wordpress.com]
@raincoaster: Seconded. I've been reading dooce for a few years now and I think she's pretty fascinating as well.
Hotness, Madness, Adorable Dogness - the momyblogga trifecta!
@dalejo: You do not understand. The woman is talented, unlike Paris Hilton. And she was fortunate to be blogging just at the time it became economically viable as a source of income. She was the first famous mommyblogger because she was good enough to attract some attention and smart enough to know what to do with it when she got fired.
This may well get me executed for saying on a tech blog, but according to the Pew Institute, the tech and business segments of the blogosphere together make up only about 17%. The rest is a big, messy mix and the largest segment is "this is my life" blogs.
The AVERAGE blogger is a woman over 35 who blogs for social reasons; to keep in touch with friends, to talk about her life, etc. So you might be more accurate to think of the mommyblogs as possibly the most competitive and thus Dooce as really one of the best bloggers out there.
Oh... am sad. What a squanderly waste of resources! Not just the car fuel and printer ink, either. But it did pay off in media time.
Can't someone design a virtual simulator to do this in a place like, uh, Second Life?
I'm a mommy blogger, and although I agree that very little of what Dooce has to say these days would still qualify her as a mommy blogger, I still like to read her blog from time to time. Say what you want about her being interesting or informative, she was obviously interesting enough to be mentioned on this site in the first place.
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