Keep the Government Out of Ballroom Dancing

I feel that when doing busi­ness on the web it is not only impor­tant, but vital to iden­tify your tar­get audi­ence and cater to them. You offer prod­ucts and ser­vices that they want, and prices they’re happy to pay, and you’ll be a suc­cess on the web. Then we have this guy. Clearly, no one told him that it was pos­si­ble to main­tain more than one website.

Being a white, male, het­ero­sex­ual, web nerd, I don’t dance (and I make no apolo­gies for this fact. If you don’t like it, don’t date me), so find­ing this site was a bit of a mir­a­cle. Find it I did, and I’m happy to announce that it is about to be dismantled.

Um, how does a dead kid sell dance shoes?

Firstly, if you intend to run a polit­i­cal web­site, it should not have the word “ball­room” in the URL. Nor should there be any links or ref­er­ences to ball­room danc­ing (except if you hap­pen to be dis­cussing how dig­ni­tary X attended a ball). On the other hand, if you intend to run a site about ball­room danc­ing, you shouldn’t include polit­i­cal com­men­tary and pic­tures of dead babies (no, I’m not kid­ding). The owner of this ball­room danc­ing sup­ply store thinks otherwise.

He has this annoy­ing scrolling ticker (sorry, three of them, side by side) in red white and blue. in the ticker you’d expect to find info about danc­ing and sup­plies there­unto related. Well, you do as long as you only look at the white part. What you also find is polit­i­cal com­men­tary about how bad the Democ­rats suck and how the Repub­li­cans need to get back to their roots and other such non-ballroom related dri­vel. Get­ting past the ticker, take a gan­der at the canary yel­low back­ground. Huh? Didn’t any­one cover with this guy the fact that yel­low is the most annoy­ing color you could pos­si­bly use as a back­ground? Nope… Guess not.

There is a line on the screen, “Bill Rowe’s BDS endeav­ors to be your one-stop ball­room dance shop.Become a BDS Distributor.BDS is Inter­na­tional.” fol­lowed imme­di­ately by a link that calls all Amer­i­cans Impe­ri­al­ist Bas­tards and a pic­ture of a dead baby. If that doesn’t scream “buy my ball­room dance stuff,” I don’t know what does. Hey, Bill… You wanna, maybe, not gross out and alien­ate your poten­tial cus­tomers / dis­trib­u­tors? Maybe get a domain like, “thegovernmentsucksmyleftnut.com” and put a blog on there. Good talk…

Some­thing else I never under­stand is, when Amer­i­cans talk about how bad their gov­ern­ment is, why do they always use terms like “we”. If you dis­agree, wouldn’t you point fin­gers and say “they”? Why include your­self with their wrong­do­ing, man? I digress…

I also can’t fig­ure out who would want a “George the BASTARD, Repub­li­can Fas­cists” but­ton to go with their new ball gown and shoes, but per­haps that’s because I don’t do much ball­room danc­ing. The links on the site take you to Bill’s rants about such things as, him being a Nazi, the ball­room dance store, the Bas­tard Admin­is­tra­tion, Casa Musica CD’s, etc. What the hell does any of that have to do with any other of that?

I, for one, am a huge pro­po­nent of “say what you will” and free speech and what­not. What I can’t stand is peo­ple that have no idea what a proper forum for that speech might be. Ball­room dance sup­plies is not an “I hate George Bush” venue. Hate him all you want, but I just wanted a set of tap shoes, man.

Some­one please call this guy and tell him that: A). Blog­ger, Word­Press and just about every other blog ser­vice is free, and B). No one who wants a new ball gown thinks that dead babies are sexy. Idiot.

Cheers!

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