Holler if you're a blogger!

If you want to know the epitome of the modern trend, look no further than the phenomenon of blogging. I mean, honestly, there are so many blogging blogs in cyberspace these days, and they’re all made by blogging bloggers who love nothing more than to blog about their blogging lives, right?

Not exactly.

There are a ton of crappy blogs out there that are nothing more than somebody’s personal rants on what happened to them at work, the “life-changing” Mexican food they had last week or how excited they are to have bought new socks. No matter how much we all love new socks (if you don’t, you need to have your head checked because they’re tighter than bicycle shorts), there’s nothing really redeeming about reading these kinds of blogs unless you know the person. Still, it seems like people want to be cyber-celebrities to the point of acting like their own paparazzi, posting candid pictures of themselves online alongside descriptions of their daily activities. I say save something for your autobiography. Nobody’s going to buy it if they can read it on your blog for free.

But not all blogs are trivial. Some reach into a deeper human experience that can be expressed with simple pictures and short captions. I’m talking about blogs such as icanhascheezburger.com and failblog.org.

These may sound like random Web sites, but I assure you, if you have not visited the pages of these sites yet, you will lose days of productivity scrolling through them.

On icanhascheezburger.com, you will find a picture of a cat holding a Rubik’s cube with the caption “color blind cat never wins” and a picture of a panda with his arms around a tree stump with the caption “tree-hugger panda is too late.” The fact that the content is entirely user-generated means there is proof comedic genius can come from a place other than Hollywood. Then again, if you saw “Corky Romano,” you probably gave up on Hollywood long ago.

Then, as an ode to the great missteps of modern world history, there is failblog.org. Rather than ingenious captions, though, one word can suffice for every picture: “fail.” The site features pictures of people failing to catch footballs and getting hit in the face, a stained-glass window in a church that inadvertently portrays a priest doing inappropriate things with a child and even a picture of a giant, inflated Pokémon that kids enter through a flap in the crotchular region – all glorious fails.

Then there’s the Internet celebrity fail boat: everyone’s favorite klutz. It’s hard not to love the fail boat’s flaws. It’s done everything from breaking in half and sinking to getting stranded in a desert or forest. You can say it’s one hell of a failure, but you can’t say that it doesn’t fail with style, or to the benefit of our collective procrastination efforts.

So check out these sweet picture and caption blogs, stop blogging to strangers around the world about your doctor appointment this morning, and don’t repeat this advice to the TRENDASAURUS, because he’ll just tell you he doesn’t give a blog.

Brian McMullen is a journalism senior and Mustang Daily columnist.