somehow escaped a mention in either the Bloggies or the Anti-Bloggies. Or indeed, on any other site anywhere on the net, according to Google. We couldn’t think why. Just because all we do is rehash endless Grauniad stories and make bleedin’ obvious snarky comments about obscure subjects that Americans wouldn’t care about (like bombing non-American civilians), that doesn’t seem a good reason for discriminating against us.

In search of enlightenment, we resorted to desperate measures and went out surfing other blogs to see if we had somehow drastically misjudged our audience (or merely been unable to find one). And it quickly became obvious why Empty Spaces has conspicuously (in a highly invisible way) failed to become a leading light in the bloggie community. To play such a fine and upstanding role, or least GET NOTICED, we’d need to be either: * gay (thanks for sharin’); * divorced (with a teenage kid); * a teenage kid, convinced that “life sucks!” (darn, only missed qualifying on this one by 12 years); * over twenty and still complaining about “mom” (e.g. “Mom rang to nag me about getting back together with Brad and claiming that she’d caught Hayley smoking crack in her bedroom. life sucks!”); * friends of people called Ed, Kiki, Amanda and Jason (which is apparently accomplished by writing “Hi Ed/Kiki/Amanda/Jason! <hugs>” at least once a week - if that particular tag is accepted into the next HTML standard, we’re gonna push for <vom> too); * mad; * sad; * tedious to know; * suffering from several highly imaginative allergies or mental illnesses (e.g. “Ed wanted me to come bowling last night, but the shoes cause my feet to ooze blue pus and besides, my agoraphobic hypomania is playing up after I drank too much pepsi. life sucks!”); * suffering from several highly imaginative love affairs (we’ve tried to picture some of these people dating but really, we can’t attain the same frenzied heights of fantasy - and if we could, we suspect we’d need to <vom>); * missing the point of cApiTal leTTerS; * some kind of HTML pervert, hell-bent on playing with tags mortal man should not meddle in (“JavaScript deviant seeks XHTML slave to brutalise endless layers of dynamic CSS objects with weird and twisted results”); * hermetically sealed into a loft apartment with the TV and Internet bringing the only news from the outside world, which may explain the manic obsession with utter trivia; * suffering from delusions that we’re special or talented, when we’re really so, sooo average in a way that really hammers home the unending levelness of the playing field implied by the term; * logging an entry every hour that goes, “i’m back! did ya miss me? i dont know why i’m bothering writing this, no one is reading it. anywayz, life officially sucks. im like so depressed and i can’t see an end to it, cant go on much longer, i just feel like theres this big VOID and i cant escape it, blah blah drone…” (we often feel something similar - particularly after reading such encouraging thoughts - but really, if you’re under thirty and you can put it into words, you’re not really feeling it at all).

So anyway, thanks but no thanks. (If you think this is cruel, I can link each of the above to specific examples.)