The Laundry Nazi

Down deep in some dank minimum wage hole, lives an awful creature.  She stalks about during the day time, her attitude acidic, her voice abrasive.  Travel into her den, and be prepared to do battle. 

The Laundry Nazi, in her natural habitat

Step out of line just one time, and feel her wrath.

This is not some beast of mythical lore, no, this is the old woman who runs the day-to-day operations at my local laundromat.  She's a vile, evil, semi-human bitch of a woman, and she doesn't take shit off of no body.

The establishment itself is a dirty little building, a series of washers in the middle of the floor,  banks of dryers along the walls.  I'm pretty convinced that they recycle used washing machine water without any sort of filtration.  The people who congregate here are usually the lowest of the low: desperate shells of human beings, most with limps and lumps, scars and vacant stares.

But one amongst them all is the queen cunt.  The Laundry Nazi.

This woman, who plants herself in the far corner of the small one room laundromat, scans over her land from over the top of a free newspaper.  Her glasses are grimy, clothes stretched and threadbare, her teeth the color of the bottom of a urinal.  She has a very strict protocol for doing your laundry in her domain, and if you fail in any such way at all, you'll feel her burning hot meth-breath all over your neck.

Stories run far and wide, but I can only tell you about our first hand experiences:  A few summers ago, I was doing a load of wash.  I had been keeping an eye on the clock, knowing that, since she was on duty that day - and it was a busy day at the laundromat - I had to be Johnny-On-The-Spot changing out my load, or she would do it for me.  And you don't want that to happen.

In the back of the laundromat, there's a little closet filled with black plastic bags full of moldy, abandoned, misfit clothing that people had left in the washers for too long.  What's "too long?"  About a minute, according to the Laundry Nazi.

As I walked the thirty or so feet from the parking lot to the inside of the laundromat, I could already see her standing over my washers, black plastic bag in hand, lifting a washer's lid.  I sprinted, yanking the door wide open, and shouted out.

"Hey!  What're you doing?"  She reared her ugly, shovel-beaten face, snarled her day-glo yellow teeth.

"This washer has been off for 5 minutes!  We're very busy here today!"  She croaked like a toad with it's legs caught under a tire.  I glanced down at my watch and saw that maybe a minute had passed since I had started into the laundromat from outside.  I got between her and her bag and the washing machine.  She skulked away, snarling.  Her forked-tongue slipping out between her crusted over, crackpipe-burnt lips.

My wife would have similar experiences as well.  One time she loaded a washer without knowing the machine was out of order.  She placed detergent in it as well, and when she discovered the washer wasn't working, she had to face the Laundry Nazi to get a refund for the 2.50 in quarters she fed the machine.

"She was so rude!  I almost told her to forget it; it was worth the 2.50 to not have to deal with her," explained my wife, days later.  In sum, the Laundry Nazi gave her an inordinate amount of grief for putting detergent and clothes into a malfunctioning washing machine.  My wife tried to explain to the despot that there was no signage to indicate there was a problem, but the Laundry Nazi pulled out a scimitar and started waving it around like crazy.  It was all my wife could do to get out of there alive.

She has since decided to do her laundry late at night, since the facility is open 24 hours a day.

Scholars believe this is the first known image of the Laundry Nazi

Most recently, again, I was doing laundry, when the machine wouldn't take a quarter I was trying to insert into it.  I checked the coin to make sure it wasn't Canadian, and it was good ol' fashion American currency.  I gave the coin bank a little shot with my palm to rattle it just so, and apparently this was enough to spark the ire of The Laundry Nazi.

Like an evil genie, she materialized next to me, the smell of pure sulfur announcing her arrival. 

"Is there a problem here?"  She hissed.  My skin went cold and rippled with goosebumps.

"The machine won't take my change..." I was barely able to indicate, as I could feel the life being sucked out of me.  She admonished me for "beating on the machine" and then shoved me aside.

She then began to wallop the washer while howling at the tops of her lungs like some sort of she-wolf in heat.  She snarled and kicked and slashed with her hawk talon-like hands.  The local residents cowered, taking cover behind industrial grade trash barrels and giant dust bunnies that have been a part of the landscape since the 1980s.

She then turned to me, as the tiny "clink" of my change being finally accepted by the washer sounded.  "In the future," she starts, "don't hit the machines..." the last word rings in my ears like Parseltongue.  She walks away, back to her perch and free newspaper.  Her grease-slicked glasses lamping over the establishment, silently keeping order.

Seven(ish) Reasons Why I'm #NotFollowing You on @Twitter

By now, most people understand the very basic concept of the social networking site Twitter.  Unlike Facebook, with it's time-sucking gravitational field of information overload, and Tumblr, which is essentially Twitter without the character limit, Twitter is a "microblogging" site where users can post quips or links, but are restricted to 140 characters to get their point across.  It can be kind of like a game sometimes, trying to fit your idea into a limited amount of space.  Imagine being a headline writer for a newspaper, or Mark Twain's retarded nephew.

One of the aspects of Twitter is following people.  By "following" I essentially mean subscribing to another's Twitter-ers feed, and everytime they update, you see it on your screen, phone or whatever.  The unspoken rule for Twitter is that if someone follows you, (that you aren't already following) you should follow them back, for at least a little while, just to give them a chance.  Because in the Land of Tweets, how many followers you hold, is sort of like internet clout; you could argue that the number of followers you have, represents the direct amount of influence you hold over the world in chief.

You could argue.

However, there are certain criteria that will not get you followed, by me at least.  The following are about seven reasons why I'm not following you:

1.  You're a bot.  A "bot" being a "robot" or program that someone created to dispense information autonomously and automatically around the web.  It can be essentially just a mindless commercial bobbing around in cyberspace.  Typically, these are laden with viruses, or other malware.  They might pop up and ask you to click a link amongst a smattering of gobblygoop.  I would argue that at least half of my followers are bots.

2.  No biographical information.  If I get a notification that so-and-so is following me, and they have what looks to be an actual picture of themselves, I'll go the further step and check out their profile page.  The profile page is where Twitter users put a little information about themselves... kind of like a pitch in order to get you to follow them.  It usually involves a location (say, Boston, MA) as well as a little about what you could expect them to tweet about ("I work at Cyberdine Industries; robots are fun!").  But often times, people will either leave this whole section blank or not even post a picture of themselves.  Instead, I'll be greeted by an egg with a colorful background (Twitter's default profile pic).  If I don't know who you are, why the hell would I follow you?

3.  You don't tweet enough.  Looking at your biographic info, I can see how many times you tweet, or post something on Twitter.  If it's less than say, 100 times and you've been a member for over a year (which I can also see) I'm not following you.  Why bother?

4.  You tweet too much.  Again, if I'm looking at how many times you tweet, and it's at 100 and you just joined today, I'm not following you.  I already think my feed is filled with mindless drivel from the people I DO follow, I'm not adding your hysteric ADD tweets to the mix either.

5.  Your tweets are protected.  I can understand that privacy with online social networks is the topic du jour, but c'mon.  This is Twitter, not Facebook.  If you're protecting your Tweets, why are you on here anyway?  Your 140 characters of intellectual property are not so sacred that you require a lock and key.  If I have to send you a "follow request" in order to see what you're tweeting about (which is likely such mind-blowing topics as going to the car wash, or eating ice cream on a nice day), I look at that as an extra step that's going to take time out of my day from where I could be sitting here, mindlessly staring off into space.

6.  Your tweets aren't funny/interesting/thought-provoking.  I'm not saying every thing you tweet needs to be comedy gold, or in the essence of Walt Whitman, but if all you're ever saying is incredibly dumb, overtly biased rhetoric or some other baseless claim (I'm going to the store now!  I'm eating a waffle!) you're not worth my time.  Granted, we all get one or two every once in a while that is just words for the sake of hearing our own voices, but do it too much, and I'm cutting you lose.

7.  Your tweets are a mess.  If you're tweeting something, and it's all links and #hashtags and @s, so that the block of text is a glowing nuclear field of blue hyperlinks, I'm not clicking on shit except the "unfollow" button.  Granted, people like to share with each other items they think are important, like news stories or other people they think others would want to follow, but put some words around it.  Explain to me why I should be following someone on Friday, or why I should click your bit.ly link.  See The Oatmeal's take on how Follow Fridays should work.

7.5:  On the heels of that, if you're constantly linking tweets to your Facebook or other social networking site, I'm outie-5000.  I got off Facebook for a reason, I don't need you sucking me back in so I can look at your sister-in-law's children, or enter a contest to win "free gear for a year."  Also, if your tweets are constantly too long and they extend to your Tumblr site, I'm not falling for that shit either.

In The Hood

Via Twitter: RT @chrisspahn "I think you can make anyone look shady in a hoodie."

My buddy Chris (a transplanted Codder now living in Ohio, for some goddamn reason....) posted this short tweet a few days ago, and at the time it resonated with me, because it's pretty true.  Put a hoodie, or hooded sweatshirt, on anyone, and instantly they look like a bluddy criminal.

It's unfair that one of my favorite articles of clothing ever invented, the ultra warm, multi-seasonal, all-purpose hooded sweatshirt, has been co-opted by a criminal element and been given this poor reputation.

Don't believe me? Wear a hoodie into a bank in the middle of the afternoon.  Before you even get inside, there's likely to be a little sticker or placard on the front glass doors telling customers to remove hoods (as well as sunglasses and ball caps) before entering.  All one has to do is look at security camera footage from bank robberies to understand why.

So on a cool, blustery early Spring day, any person wearing a hoodie will likely pull the hood up.  I can't walk my dog down our street in the mornings without pulling on my J. Crew fleece-lined zip-up and toss the hood up.  I'll shuffle down the street in PJ pants and birkenstocks, happy yellow Lab on the end of a blaze-orange leash, and tho my neighbors all know (or at least recognize) me, I still find myself getting the stank-eye when I have my hood up.

But I'm equally guilty of this snap judgment as well.  The other afternoon, while out doing groceries, I turned down a side street and was met by an on-coming car.  The driver was some dude in his mid-20s, smoking a cigarette, with his oversized gray hoodie up.

Granted, there's absolutely no reason to operate a motor vehicle while wearing a hood, unless you're a drug dealer, but instantly my mind was made up that this person was probably of less-than-reputable stature in the community, and likely up to no good.

It seems that anyone under the age of, say 25, and wearing a hooded sweatshirt instantly becomes a suspect in a slew of crimes committed and yet to be committed.  I think this sucks.  No other garment as utilitarian as the hooded sweatshirt has the same dubious reputation (well, maybe the ski mask).  The wearer as well, seems to cover himself in a veil of dangerous and ill-will as soon as he or she wears the hood.

I will say tho, with little exception, there's no reason to wear a hoodie indoors.  Half of the kids in my classes wear their hoods up while sitting during a lecture.  If I were a professor, I would find this very disrespectful.  Hats as well, (unless they're beanies, then, by all means, continue to hide your matted-hair shame) should be removed at the start of a lecture.

The case I'm trying to make, ultimately, is that we should all strive to be a little less quick to judge those who wear a hoodie in its up position.  Everyone, and I'm willing to go out on a limb, loves wearing a hoodie: grandmothers and priests alike. 

So before you judge, think about the warm security provided by that piece of inner/outer wear to its wearer.

Unethical and Underhanded

I know I said I wouldn't bitch about my gym anymore, but really, as soon as someone says something along those lines, you might as well peg them as a total liar.  Because, here we go again:

My 15 month gym membership is nearly up and I'm coming to this cross road where I have no idea if I'm going to continue to pay the $55 bucks a month to belong to a gym that treats it's members (and I mean, the core members, the people who actually come to the gym to workout) like crap.

Last night, as my wife and I were heading in for our typical Friday night workout, we were met with this shotgun blast of disgusting and gross behavior, just running amok around the gym facilities:

Children.  Hordes of children.  And balloons.

My wife has a rather bad latex allergy, so balloons, while seemingly harmless helium-filled orbs of celebration, can literally be a death sentence for her.  The entire ceiling was just covered in the local school's colors, black and gold.  Inside, it was like 6th grade prom.

'Tweens (children not exactly in their teens, but older and bigger than most elementary school kids) were running around, crashing into things and people, dancing to the Black Eyed Peas, ... everything you could imagine from a Robin Williams movie from the mid-1990s.  Obviously, to a young couple with zero desire to have children, this was very off-putting.

"You know when you have those feelings when you get in the front door, and immediately don't want to do your workout?" I ask my wife over the din as we cautiously make our way to the front desk to check in.  She's notorious for getting all the way out to the gym, in the doors, only to want to turn back because she doesn't feel like working out.

"You're having one of those moments, huh?"  She says back.  I nod.

We wait at the front desk for an employee to "beep" us in with our membership fobs, but no one's paying any attention to us.  There's one employee way off to the side having some sort of deep conversation with a parent who's just ... caught up in this whole whirlwind of screaming pre-adolescence.  The poor woman looks shell shocked; a victim of some sort of terrorist market bombing.

Eventually, after leaving enough time for someone to notice us, I said "fuck it" and swiped our cards for us.  We grabbed towels (we were going to TRY to swim...) and made our way downstairs to the gym proper, while avoiding more balloons and sugar-high kids.

"But seriously, let's get out of here," I try again, as making our way down the stairs becomes an effort; the stairway is clogged with loitering, unsupervised children.  We're able to look into the pool area and we see it's awash in splashing kids.  No laps for us tonight.

We honestly thought there'd be no way kids would be allowed to run amok downstairs in the actual gym area, but we were wrong.  Tubby kids in the pilates room throwing swiss balls at each other like over-sized dodge balls, children running at full speed across the gym floor, one of the racket ball courts converted into a giant inflatable bouncehaus.  A few hearty (and presumably single) souls were trying to tough it out, and try to workout despite the constant distractions, but you could tell they weren't enjoying themselves.  They were annoyed; one guy just sat on a bench with a numb expression on his face, earbuds in, watching children climb all over the ellipticals. 

We got about halfway to the lockerrooms when I tried again, to dissuade my wife from actually going thru a workout that evening.  She finally relented when a pudgy 11 year old came flying around the corner where they keep the floor mats, with what looked like fresh puke smattered on his oversized cheeks.  From the far corner of the gym floor, where the rockwall is located, we could see children dangling upside down in some sort of crude version of the Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark play.

We about-faced and tossed our towels on to a nearby desk, like "fuck it."  We weaved back thru the crowds of ungrateful brats and stunned proctors.  No one seemed to notice that we were leaving within five minutes of arriving.

Last night wouldn't have bothered me so much if there had been at least a 24 hour heads up, some sort of printed-off notice that said "hey, on Friday night, we're hosting a middle school dance and function, you might not want to be here for it, thanks, the Willy's staff."  Something like that, printed out and taped to the wall over the water fountain would've sufficed.  Nothing crazy, no mass emails, no phone calls, nothing.  Just a simple white sheet of paper with those words on it.

It took me less than ten seconds to type that sentence out.  Printing might've taken all of 30.  Taping on to a surface within a high-traffic area, maybe a minute.  Seriously.

But no heads up was given.  Literally, we were blindsided by this turn of events.  Did the Willy's staff really think for a second people, due-paying members, would want to workout in this type of environment?  How bad is this facility hemorrhaging money to rent out the whole establishment on a Friday night (see also: failed restaurant-in-the-middle-of-winter-on-Cape idea)?

To make matters worse, the management at Willy's (in Eastham, MA by the way.....) has been stacking it's reviews on the business web aggregate site "Yelp" recently.  By "stacking" the reviews, I mean, hiring people who may have never stepped into the facility to write bogus glowing reviews in an attempt to raise the business's web clout.  You see, Google ranks it's search listings for businesses based off of reviews from sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, etc.  The better the overall reviews, the more frequent and more towards the top of the search pile the business will appear.

For over a year, there had only been three reviews for Willy's Gym, the best was a 4/5 star rating from some gay dude out on San Fran.  The other two (one being mine) were mediocre.  Suddenly last week, a slew of ultra-positive, rather vague reviews from Oregon of all places, started to pop up on Willy's Yelp site (not to mention "new" Yelp pages, stacked with positive reviews, to help off set the original site listing's less-than-stellar rating).  The reviews are pretty much identical, from people whom have reviewed no other businesses on the site, and have no real profiles.

Thus, a rather unethical practice, attempting to dope the casual summer tourist into thinking Willy's Gym is worth the 20 dollar day pass. 

I can only hope that people will be able to see thru the bullshit.

The State of The Art

From Twitter: "@jcharles_ "Seems like a new big game is just another FPS that isn't as good as #cod"  -John Nup (@_jnup)

That's my friend John commenting on the lack of originality found in most of the "big games" that were due to come out this early 2011.  His point: games are trying hard to surpass the gold standards of gaming, but coming up way short.  Probably because they're trying to inject too much shit into games and not sticking to what makes gaming fun: simplistic, intuitive gameplay.

The "COD" he mentions is the long standing king of the hill in First Person Shooters (FPSs) the "Call of Duty" series.  Since the early 2000s, COD emerged as the go-to in shooter games.  Military in nature, players take over the roll of a grunt and are placed in harrowing and engaging missions.

Then you have the online multiplayer aspect.  The COD games have always made the online part of their games to be truly enjoyable experiences.  Experiences other game developers try desperately to emulate.

Case in point: Earlier this year, two new shooters were introduced: "Bulletstorm" and "Homefront" both slated to be "COD Killers." "Bulletstorm" is a crass, futuristic shooter that allows players to interact with the game beyond the normal "Aim Shoot Move" series found in most FPSs.  In it, you can lasso an enemy, kick him into a pile of cactus or rebar or hot lava, and then slide away into cover to take on the next wave of enemies.  While this all sounds cool, and it's game controls aren't that hard to master (going from mashing one series of buttons to another) it becomes tedious after a while.  Mix in the terrible voice acting and plot, and soon enough any player older than 21 is going to be reaching for his Black Ops disc (Black Ops being the latest in the COD franchise) for a more rounded out and polished game play experience.

I was most excited for "Homefront" when I first heard about it.  In it, a unified Korea (sometime in the future) invades the US and citizens become insurgents to fight back the oppressive invading army.  I watched a few videos of the online play, the story mode, etc.  I was pretty much hooked on the idea that I would plop down my 65 bucks and pick this guy up.

But then I started hearing from credible reviewers and people I know, saying that the single player campaign is woefully short (about 4 hours...) and that the multiplayer aspect wasn't all that deep.  Sure, they added a few nice touches (leveling up while in a match, opposed to waiting for a match to be over to reap the benefits) it really wasn't worth paying retail.

I mean, four and a half hours for the games primary story line?  For those of you who are not gamers, the average "single player" experience in most games usually runs around ten hours.  In recent years with shooters, this number of hours has been drastically cut, as developers want to spend more time and energy on what they think the gamer will be spending more time and energy on: multiplayer.  So the single player experience suffers.

I mean, seriously, four hours?  I'm supposed to believe that a home-grown insurgency repels a national army in just FOUR HOURS.  There is so much you can do with that story line!  I know you want to leave something for the sequels, but come on, seriously.  I buy the game after lunch and I've got it beaten before dinner.  That sucks.

And if the multiplayer isn't nearly as engaging as what your dev team thinks it is, I'm going to be returning the game for a full refund before the end of the week (thanks GameStop!).  It's shitty to think that gamers of any age or skill, are going to hang on to a game that has no redeemable replay value.

I'm looking at you "Medal of Honor."

Games are becoming more mainstream as time wears on, even being compared to an art form.  There are some really great games out there, as there are shitty ones, same as with movies and television programs.

But video games have the cards stacked against them, because like comic books, there's still a lot of people out there that assume video games are just mindless entertainment for kids.  If gaming wants to be considered a legitimate art form, they've really got to go in and hook a wider audience.

You're not going to do it with cookie-cutter shooters, or sophomoric sandbox games (Looking at you, Duke Nukem Forever).

At the same time, developers, stop trying to stuff as much shit as possible into a game.  Yeah, it's cool that I can do a little more than just riddle my enemy with bullets from a cache of assorted Cold War Era weaponry, but all the effort to go out of the way, all the time, becomes tiresome (looking at you Red Dead Redemption).

Instead of seeing how many freshman can fit into a phone booth, how about finding out if the phone booth works first? Take all that energy and refocus it on amazing game play, super intuitive controls and a story arch that lasts longer than lions fucking.

I was reading an article on the up-coming "Saints Row: The Third" game... a giant sandbox-style game that pits you against virtually a whole city, ala "Grand Theft Auto."  The interview with the lead developer went something like this:

Interviewer: So what can we expect from the new "Saints?"

Lead Dev: You're going to be able to sky dive naked and fall into a car being driven by a fucking tiger, and then you're going to be on a reality tv show where you do nothing but feed hotdogs to pornstars, and then you can go and gamble all of your winnings away at any of the cities nine-fucking-casinos, all while your buddies mod out your stolen car at any of the 173 chop-shops in the city.  Pretty much, if you can think it, you can do it in this game.

Which is all well an good if you're a spastic high school sophomore with ADD and a crippling energy drink dependency.

Hey Saint's Row developer, how about focusing on making a game that (first, isn't a crudely drawn GTA knock-off, second) won't drive me mad with just this laundry list of shit I feel like I have to do in order to experience your game in full?  It's cool and all that to have a game that will allow me to do anything, but what I really want to do is drive from point A to point B, murder some gangsters, go home and have a PB&J, nap, and then hit the gym.  If you can make a game that has all that ridiculous shit you mentioned, you can give me a game that is simplistic, easy on the eyes and above all else, fun.

A Tweet Too Long to Post about Sandwiches, Jokes and Married Life

Wife: this butter and honey sandwich is like sex on bread!

Me: gimmie a bite.
Her: no get your own!

=

I heard a joke today, but you'll have to find the guy who told it to me.

Reviewing Yelp

If you've never heard of Yelp.com, let me break it down for you like this:

Imagine a world where anyone, anywhere, can voice their opinions on anything (pertaining to mostly businesses and locations) for the whole world to see.  And then, based off of these, say, "reviews" an overall score was given to said establishment.

That's Yelp in a nutshell.

Yelp.com has existed for a few years... at least as long as I've had my iPhone, which has been about two years.  I've been a reviewer for about that long, coming and going as I please.  To me, my relationship with Yelp is love/hate.  I love being able to review and read reviews of places I either have frequented or plan to visit (a new coffee shop or bagel place for instance...) respectively, but I hate the aspect that ANYONE can write a review for a place.

Let's focus on my hate, first: It's terribly irksome to me, that someone from out of town can swoop in, try a place out, and based on that snapshot, five minute experience, decide to give a local business a shitty review.  As we all know, I live in a tourist-based summertime community, where most of these businesses are only open for a few months out of the year, and even then, hire high school kids or kids from overseas on Study Abroad programs to help out during the rush hours.  Of course, that's when Johnny Tourist is going to walk in, demand his needs are met expertly on demand, and be disappointed.  He then logs into his Yelp account and leaves a scathing, unwarranted review.

Granted, I've been known to do this as well, as my reviews range from Angelic to Acidic.  But when I sit down to pound out 250 words on why I didn't enjoy my experience at a particular place, I try to find issues with my experience than can only be attributed to the business itself, not it's staff or customers.

I also try to keep in mind that if it's my first time at a particular place, to try to give it a break.  No business, especially small, locally owned businesses (chains are exempt from this rule.  A cup of coffee from Dunks in Boston should taste just as shitty as a cup of Dunk's coffee on the west coast...) can't be firing on all cylinders 100% of the time.  That's just impossible.

So my solution for these snapshot bad reviews, is have Yelp only allow reviews from patrons who have "checked-in (a feature where a person who has a Yelp account can use their GPS-enabled smartphone to log in to a particular location just as long as they're within a certain proximity)" no less than three times.  This will allow people to maybe get a full spectrum view of the business before tossing down a 1 or 2 star review.

Understandably, if a person had such a terrible experience with a business that they'd never dare go back for a second and then third visit just to write the review, I would say, allow a solid week to go by without a check-in before unlocking the review feature.  This would help curb trigger-happy bad reviews made in the heat of the moment.

Another advantage to having users check-in "X" amount of times before leaving a review is the eradication of the "spam review."  A business can be helped or hurt by these types of reviews, which take place when either the owner of a business creates a number of false accounts or gets friends to create accounts and leave biased "outstanding" reviews to help float the business's profile.  This can also be used to hurt a business, as someone with a grudge can do essentially the same thing, but in reverse, leaving tons of really bad reviews to trash a business's site.  Making it so actual real deal people would have to check-in to a business before leaving a review would make spamming to much of an effort to be followed thru upon.

Another unfortunate aspect to Yelp is that business owners can be a touch thin-skinned at times, especially regarding poor reviews.  Some businesses owners are not even aware their business has a profile on Yelp (anyone can "create" a profile for the business in question, tho Yelp does offer a special profile tool for business owners that allows tracking of stats and other doo-dads).  However, those who do, and did not like what people have said about their business in the past, have gone so far as to take legal action against certain reviewers, citing "harassment" and "obstructing the normal operations of the business" with a bad internet review.

While these cases are extreme (I can't seem to find the corresponding articles in the NY Times), it goes to show how much persuasion a business owner can be put under by a Yelp review.

Which brings me to my next issue with the website: the reviews.

I consider myself fortunate enough to live in an area where there are not many reviews for places on Yelp that I frequent, other than my own.  If I lived in NYC or Boston or any other major city, I'd likely be flooded with reviews for places.

Reviews can be helpful, but you have to know how to read thru the bullshit.  If I see a reviewer giving a negative review and he's not from the area, I disregard (mostly for the above mentioned reasons).  If a review looks like it was written by a five year old or was typed using a mashed fist on the keyboard, I disregard.

A lot of the reviewers I find on Yelp are articulate, at times funny and usually fairly flattering, even with negative reviews.  Unfortunately, some reviews come with only one word:  "Sucks" "Great!" or "Ok."

If it sucked, why?  If it was a great experience, tell us more!  Like, actually try, people!

The people working behind the scenes at Yelp do a pretty good job policing the antics.  Some comments and reviews will get filtered out, and from what I understand, it's pretty hard to dupe Yelp with spamming reviews.  I myself have been alerted that one of my reviews was being taken down because I had admitted to working for the business I reviewed while in High School.  Oops.

All in all, Yelp works for the greater good, and I feel that it's doing more harm than good.

(You can follow my reviews on Yelp by checking out www.itsjim.yelp.com)