New T-shirt idea:

"Over 20,000,000 Bad Profiles Read!"

It's no secret how I feel about the "I don't know what to write here" and "Anything you want to know, you'll have to ask" profiles. Complete wastes of time for everyone involved.

BUT --

I saw a profile yesterday that was actually quite long. I noticed the length, and I thought "Hmmmm, maybe someone has something to say, something worth reading....?"

Nope.

What it was, was EVERY SINGLE FREAKING PROFILE CLICHE EVER USED, all tacked together into one big long ultramegacliche. Most people just use 3 or 4 or 5 and let it go at that.

But someone actually took the time to compile this huge list of banalities and stick them all together to make one enormous and worthless non-statement, rather than say one thing that might provide a little insight into the actual person behind the compilation.

Is there a "Best of Dexy's Midnight Runners" CD?

Maybe they did it just to annoy you?

Well, that's a possibility.

I tend to think that it's unlikely though, because I'm not famous enough to where annoying me would have any real entertainment value, TMZ or no TMZ.

Authors are more or less at the bottom end of the "celebrity pool," kind of on the same level with mimes, Dave Coulier, and the San Diego Chicken. Are any of us really worth irritating?

Hey now, Stephen King is my god.

Well, there are SOME authors who transcend the inherent celebritificationlessness of the profession and become authorial superstars. But not many. Certainly not me. Hey, I have to write 489 more books to catch Isaac Asimov.

The worst ones are the ones that quite literally say, "rather than come up with something original, I'm just gonna cut-and-paste what another Mingler put in his/her profile!". If you're gonna use a cliche, then fine... but don't go so low as to let the profile-reader KNOW that you're stealing the cliche beforehand! That's beyond weak.

And people wonder why online dating has such a stigma attached to it.

Well, most of the profiles are see are either basically empty or just strings of half a dozen cliches that are the same ones found in everybody else's profile.

What struck me about this particular one was its length -- and yet it was still all cliches. I hadn't realized there were THAT many dating site profile cliches out there! It's like thinking there is only one Gilbert Gottfried and then finding out there are actually 100 of him.

Okay, Lex.. Now I'm curious. Just how many cliches do you see on my profile?

Tsk, tsk. You're exaggerating. Does even ONE of the 20 million start with "It was a dark and stormy night...."

Besides, it makes no difference. Even if this were a dating service for the Extraordinarily Literate, they'd still always be wanting to know how big your dictionary is. Or, if it really gets edgy, one's talent for cunning linguistics and proficiency at wordplay.


-Kerry O. (Merriam-Websters and The Chicago Manual of Style)

Dammit, Sully, I read the whole thing and didn't see any!

I think maybe this explains why you never showed up in my Mutual Matches!

Seriously, I don't often look at guys' profiles (well, maybe Fear's) but yours is superb. Everybody should read it; maybe then they'd get a clue about how a profile looks when you're actually saying something substantial about yourself! (It's too much to ask, I know....they won't look at anything that has more than three sentences....)

Yeah, the one from the beagle did....



I would be glad to see something with a little more content than "I like to go out or stay in."

Profile police????? Cliches or not, everybody says what they wish.......

Yeah, but if they "wish" to say the same things everyone else says, then that tells me everything I need to know....

They could save everybody a lot of time by just typing the word "Ditto" in their profile and leaving it at that....of course, if a few of them do that, then 85% of them will be like that in a month....!

It's still theres. Not everyone is a Rhodes scholar. To imply someone is not intelligent or worthy by the words they choose is the same as judging someone by a picture. Screams judgemental to me...

Yes, it's so sad that there isn't anybody out there that is perfect, original, and up to standards.

Oh, please. You're telling me you can't discern more about a person's intellect from their words than from their picture?

Call it judgmental if you want. We're operating in a written medium here. The only way we CAN say anything about ourselves here is through our words. If someone doesn't care enough about how they present themselves to make a minimal effort to be clear and coherent, or to say something that hasn't been said exactly the same way by 100,000,000 other people, that tells me something.

And we're ALL judging all the time. To pretend otherwise is disingenuous.

But really, when you think about, profiles are the articles in Playboy. No matter how cerebral...

-Kerry O, "Survey says: It's the pictures!"

....or who gets the point of the OP. Oh well....

You find the cool people simply by looking for the ones with goat pictures.

Hey, it's been a LONG time since I read Playboy, but if there's an article in there that consists entirely of "I don't know what to write here," then they need some new writers!