Rock Collecting for Dummy Fifth-Graders

Rock collection

Truth be told, our staffers spend most of their time scanning the many niche sites in which Leaf Group (formerly Demand Media) has been stashing the former eHow.com content. Apparently the SEO gurus liked niches back in 2017... As a result, they don't have much time for the ever-fewer other collections of dumbassery. One site we rarely check is SnapGuide (the content is now owned by B+C Guides). With that in mind, here's an example of why we don't spend much time there" Victoria Gilkes and her little guide, "How to Start a Rock Collection."

A Sense of Sinkholes, the Dummies Version

Sinkhole, House for Scale

Once upon a time, there were dozens )maybe hundreds) of so-called content farms competing for eyeballs (and ad revenue) across the web. Google's Panda changed all that in late 2011, although some people apparently didn't get the message. One of the folks who still kept pounding out articles peppered with keywords and other tricks inspired by self-proclaimed SEO gurus was Deborah L. Osae-Oppong of HubPages, who – despite her background in health sciences and communications – opted to explain "The Science of Sinkholes: How to Survive" back in 2013.¹ Presumably,  Deborah's interest in the topic was solely financial, given a recent mini-rash of sinkhole incidents in Florida and Illinois about that time. But "how to survive"? Let's see what she says...

Manual Trannies and Reverse for Dummies

Gear shift lever. Note position of "R"

We don't know about anyone else, but if you were to ask the staff of the Antisocial Network which website is responsible for proliferating more bullshit on the internet than any other, a year ago we'd have said "eHow." That, however, may no longer be true because of something called "niche sites." Yep, the people at Demand Media Studios (DMS, as in "You can't spell 'dumbass' without 'DMS'!") have begun spinning off niche sites (e.g., Techwalla) and in some cases selling content outright. Today's DotD candidate was one of a bunch shipped off to subsidiary Leaf.tv, but it's still the same bull with the same structure and other inane rules. Ladies and Gentlemen, we give you Hunkar Ozyasar and "How to Drive a Stick Shift on Reverse." Do note that the bizarre preposition "on" was in the original question, and DMS rules generally prohibit changing wording of questions, stupid or not.

Fuel Economy Calculation for Dummies

fuel economy

There's an old story about the guy who, sick of his neighbor's bragging about his fuel economy, started sneaking over every night for and adding a gallon of gasoline to the neighbor's tank. After a couple of weeks of crowing from the braggart about his increased mileage, the nighttime sneak started siphoning out a gallon each night. So funny... These days, you can't get into the tank of most cars without the keys, so that's not gonna happen... It does, however, bring up the topic of fuel economy and how it's expressed in different countries. That's why we found eHowian Gene Tencza leveraging his BS in industrial education to explain "How to Convert Kilometers Per Liter Into Miles Per Gallon."¹ Never mind that no one uses km/l for fuel economy...

Automatic Transmissions for Dummies

Automatic transmission selector lever 

One of the Antisocial Network staffers took the family SUV into the dealer for maintenance one day, and was a little surprised to see his vehicle still waiting to be driven into the shop ten minutes later. When he asked the service writer why, he was told that they were waiting for the tech who knew how to drive a manual transmission to get free. No kidding. There used to be lots of how-to articles for maual trannies out there, but our researcher was pretty surprised when she ran across this slightly different one: "info guru" Bryce Hammons of Catalogs.com (formerly WhoWhatWhyWhere or something like that) decided it was necessary, or more likely profitable, to explain "How to drive an automatic car." And no, he didn't mean a driverless car.

Foundation vs. Slab, the Dummies Version

Concrete slab

Perhaps no step in the construction of a building is as important as providing a stable foundation. Heck, even today's dumbass understands that, because eHow.com's Lacy Enderson says so right up front in her introduction: "A house is only as strong and stable as the foundation it is built upon." Based on her long history of dumbass content regarding home construction, however, we were skeptical of Lacy's qualifications for providing the instructions in "How to Build Your Own Home Slab."¹ It turns out that... well, we were right. As usual, Lacy hadn't the slightest clue about the topic, and merely reworded some of the content from an unnamed but doubtless more authoritative site. As a result, we doubt that anyone stupid enough to follow her instructions will end up with a stable foundation...

Changing Spark Plugs for Dummies

Assorted spark plugs

Around here we love it when a money-hungry freelancer attempts to get people to leave the comfort of the couch and try a new skill; because about half the time, the writer doesn't have the skill him- or her-self to begin with. We especially like it when someone tries to get a woman to do "a man's job"; mainly because we like to give our DotD award to someone for insulting women. So without further ado, let's meet the freelancer (a woman herself) who raised our collective ire here at the Antisocial Network  today: she's Joanna Millar (formerly Msmillar, now Joanna at HubPages.com) whose condescending little article at "AxleAddict" is entitled "How to Change Your Spark Plugs!" – though we noticed by looking at the URL that the content was originally titled "Ladies, Change Your Spark Plugs"...

Rock Classification for Dummies

Schematic of the rock cycle

Many years ago, our senior staff researcher (the big high muckety-muck in the research group) learned that politicians would much rather give speeches than write essays. The reason? It's easier to, shall we say, "hedge the facts" for listeners than for readers. That's the main reason why our staff has heretofore avoided taking on video content, even though it dominates the newly redesigned eHow.com. eHow also knows it's harder to spot utter bull in a video than in writing. Alas, the time has come; and so we're taking on our first video DotD, eHow's Jane Stammer, as she explains (sort of) the process of "Classifying Rocks."¹

Let's open this by reporting that nothing Jane says in her video is demonstrably wrong. Our awards committee discussed this for several minutes -- that's several times as long as Stammer's 59-second video (in reality, 51 seconds, given her 8-second introduction); in which she tackled the question she expanded to "How to Classify Rocks" in a mere 114 words.

Indianapolis for Dummy Visitors

Children's Museum of Indianapolis

We have a staffer or two here at the Antisocial Network who've done some traveling over their real-life careers (one's been on six continents...) so we find it so-called "travel" reviews simply harvested from chamber of commerce PR releases rather irritating; especially those written by people who it's pretty obvious have never actually visited the featured destination. We also have a staffer who's lived in Indianapolis... twice. So he was somewhat taken aback to find repeat offender Isabelle Esteves holding forth on "Three good reasons to visit Indianapolis, Ind." for the fake (and now defunct)¹ news site Examiner.com (which, we suspect, she repurposed from her account at another dead website, Helium.com). We did wonder what other Indianapolis Izzy might have been thinking about, since (as far as we know) there's only one.²

Rock Climbing, the Dummy Version

El Capitan

Our Chairperson and CEO (yes, we have one; he's sometimes known as the chief cook and bottle washer) admits to occasionally wondering what it would be like to go through life as... as what? as disconnected from reality? as the freelancers he sees plying their trade on the net. Never mind the incessant "sharing" of every thought, inspiration, or bowel movement on sites like Facebook, these folks are hell-bent on harvesting pennies on sites like the late, unlamented Bubblews, EliteVisitor and PersonaPaper. Our research team browsed some of the content at PP not long ago and came across a wealth of inanity. Not least among the dumbasses they discovered on their tour of the site was one CountryWine (real name Libby Baez), who shared her thoughts, such as they are, in articles like "Aspiring to Rock Climbing." 

CD Storage, some Dummy Plans

CD tower

In the old days, back before people just bought music in digital form and stored it on the cloud, bits and pieces of plastic littered the world. We're talking about compact discs (which you may remember, we called "CDs") and their protective jewel cases. Heck, some on our staff are old enough to remember 12-inch LP records, even 45s! But we digress. Storage of CDs has always been easy to come by and fairly inexpensive, but that didn't stop Suite's Dianne Christensen-Hermance from insulting the carpenters of the world with the "instructions" she published in "How to Build a CD Tower."¹ If her name rings a bell, perhaps it's because Dianne's been here before with another set of mangled carpentry instructions. 

Careful reading of the instructions suggests that Dianne wants you to make a box about six feet tall for storage. The idea (we think) is to store the CDs in their jewel cases, lying flat, with the label sides out. So far, so good. Both the instructions for constructing this edifice and its overall design are, however, "deficient." 

Painting Ikea Furniture for Dummies

Typical Ikea furniture

We're not big fans of Ikea at Antisocial Network headquarters. Oh, sure, we appreciate their reduced carbon footprint and the fact that just about everything can be recycled. It isn't the unpronounceable names (they're fun, in fact). It is partially because we're convinced that Ikea is Swedish for "Walmart," and partially because of their incomprehensible instructions; but mainly it's because we just don't like MDF. You know, medium-density fiberboard? the stuff all their furniture is made from? They coat it with plastic (technically, melamine) and you're stuck with the finish for life – or you would be if you didn't search the internet for instructions on how to paint over the original finish. Unless, that is, you accidentally found uk_american's HubPages content he (she?) called "How to paint Ikea furniture."

There are a bazillion places on the internet that purport to explain how to paint furniture and the like with this sort of finish, which is actually known in the trade as "laminated." Oddly, that's a word the author of the post never uses – every reference is to "melamine," which the author seems to confuse with MDF from time to time:

Conspiracies: an Obsession for Dummies

Map of Bermuda "triangle"

Of all the dummies on the planet, we're pretty sure the dumbest of them are the conspiracy theorists – the tinfoil-hat types, the black-helicopter spotters, the fake-moon-landing folk. No fact too damning to their theory can survive their peculiar, circular logic; and no tangentially related factoid is too trivial to be woven into their narrative of "truth." With that in mind, take a look at "The Science Behind the Bermuda Triangle" as presented by zig25 (Paul? Paula?) on InfoBarrel.com.¹ Bear in mind, of course, that this is a freelancer who has also turned his/her finely-honed intellect on topics such as Jack the Ripper, the Biblical flood, the Hope diamond, crop circles, the "truth" of the Kennedy assassination, the "truth" of Tupac Shakur's death, Atlantis, the Loch Ness monster and others... all in prose badly in need of a grammar-checker.

Humidity for Dummies

Moldy walls

There must be some sort of dysfunction that attacks the brains of internet freelancers when they sit down to write a "simple" post – here at the Antisocial Network, we see the results of this condition every day. Perhaps the most striking symptom is the inability for a writer to come up with a simple, straightforward solution to a problem. eHow.com is a primary vector for the disease – mainly because of its minimum word count – but it crops up elsewhere as well. Today, for instance, we found it at Seekyt.com (not exactly a paragon of quality writing) in the person of "webforjason" (a.k.a. Jason Knapfel). Jason's symptoms appear in something he called "How to Lower Humidity in Your Home."

Sedimentary Minerals for Dummies

Fossiliferous limestone

It's bad enough to our staff here at the Antisocial Network when a bumbling freelancer does a halfwit job in the alleged "research" and transfer of information, but they're even more disgusted when they run across people who are supposed to know better doing a crappy job. A case in point: our staff geologist turned up a contributor to suite.io,¹ Alexandra Matiella Novak, who pretty much undermined the validity of the PhD she claims to have in geology with her poor research. Well, it seems Alexandra's back again, and this time she's giving short shrift to "Minerals in Sedimentary Rocks."

The New Toothpaste Method for Dummies

Small crack in drywall

One bit of advice well-known to college students everywhere (and, apparently, everywhen) is the "toothpaste solution": when you move out of the dorm at the end of the year, use plain white toothpaste to fill any nail holes you've left in the walls. By our conservative estimate, older dorm rooms at some of the large colleges (we're thinking of Foster and McNutt quads at IU Bloomington, for instance) probably have better "dental health" than some of the students living there! Nowadays, of course, one of the biggest problems with this solution is finding white toothpaste... but we digress. Whatever the case, Crystal Ray (real name Kim Dalessandro, we think) of DailyTwoCents.com has the "real" solution for the problem: you use baking soda! No kidding: in her post "An Easy Way to Hide a Ceiling Crack,"¹ Crystal / Kim informs us that, if you have a crack in a drywall ceiling, 

Post Holes for Dummy Fence Builders Part 2

Post hole

We aren't kidding when we suggest that, some days, this blog darned near writes itself. Take this coincidence, for example: just yesterday, we were exposing one eHowian for telling us how to calculate the volume of cement needed for post holes – and getting it wrong – when what to our wondering eyes should appear but another eHowian expounding on precisely the same subject, and getting it wrong, too. What makes this episode of serendipity particularly juicy is that it was eHow.com themselves who provided us the link to the new content, smack-dab in the middle of the page under the bold heading "Other People Are Reading..." Sadly, however, their second contributor, a self-described "professional writer" named Bryant Harland, proved no more competent to explain the procedure than was the guy we featured yesterday. For proof, read what Harland has to say in the piece titled "How to Calculate Concrete for Fence Posts."¹

Fossil Correlation for Dummies

Coccolith photomicrograph

Ever ask a general question and get an answer that's strangely specific? We've run across that one before, in an eHow.com answer about pine tree identification. Today's dumbass, overly-specific answer to a simple question comes courtesy of eHow.com (surprised? we're not) and Yasmin Zinni. Oddly, Zinni claims to have been a teacher – a biology teacher, yet – before becoming a "journalist," and before telling us all about "Fossils That Are Most Useful for Correlation" (now niched at Sciencing.com).

Yasmin starts off with a definition more or less cribbed from every beginning geology text:

Surveying for Dummies

surveyor's transit

When someone who knows nothing about a subject has the gall to hold forth on that topic anyway, it's funny -- assuming you're watching a sitcom or film comedy. In real life, though, it's not funny: taking in the resulting misinformation wastes your time and could even be dangerous. That never stopped some eHow.com writers, the kind who simply reword the information from more authoritative sources and, in the process, royally screw it up. We're talking about freelance journalism majors like Elyse James, who we caught holding forth on a hitherto unfamiliar (to her) topic in "How to Use Surveying Equipment" (now niched by Leaf Group at CareerTrend.com)

Elyse had a problem, though: she didn't know jack about surveying before taking on this "assignment"; but that clearly didn't stop her. Her instructions consist of four parts:

Troubleshooting Your Suburban for Dummies

Chevrolet Suburban

Got a problem with your car? Won't start? Never fear, Amelia Allonsy of eHow.com is here to tell you all about how to diagnose your problem. Assuming, of course, you can manage to gloss over the misinformation and downright stupidity characteristic of "help" from the crew at eHow.com. Let's troubleshoot Amelia's expertise as was displayed in her piece "My Chevy Suburban Won't Start."¹ Don't worry if your ride's not a Cowboy Cadillac, Amelia reprised her advice for several other makes and models (always, of course, rewording everything to avoid getting nailed for "plagiarizing" herself). Here's what Amelia says to do if your Suburban (FourRunner, Miata, Silverado, Starion, Millennia, Integra, Maxima, Spectra...) won't start.