Our pals at The Engine Room have found a fun little gizmo that works out the reading level required for any blog on the interwebs.

The Engine Room was designated a genius level blog. “Great,” I thought, “with the A.A Gill quote in the last post and the most indecipherable paragraph ever in a post from a couple of weeks ago we should walk it.” (Incidentally, I’m not sure how I managed to insert hyperlinks into a thought, but it happened. )

Imagine my horror when, upon inserting our URL, I was confronted with this:

On-line readability test

I was so shocked that it took me more than 2 seconds to get annoyed with the copy on this banner. A blog can’t read so how can the blog have a reading level? I think the sentence should be like so:

This blog’s required reading level:

Anyway, I’m not happy. Obviously the technology is deeply flawed. I demand a Goresque re-count! Something must be done to right this wrong!

I know there are those who may think that I shouldn’t take this too seriously; it’s just a bit of fun; my competitive smugness is extreme to the point of being nauseous etc. To those people I say, “Hi, have we not met before?”

Traditional pedants would have a field-day with that terminal preposition but I’ll push on; no time for an edit in this Kerouacian ramble. (Goresque, Kerouacian, how many more names can I mangle into the vague resemblance of an adjective?)

I was slightly heartened to see that Apostrophism was awarded the same level of reading requirement. Slightly.

P.S. Well done to J.D. and the gang at the Engine Room. I’m very fucking happy for you. See, I can be gracious. I’d also like to add that I definitely didn’t run http://engineroomblog.blogspot.com through the readability test to check that you were telling the truth. Ahem.