Each week we browse LiveJournal’s Popular Entries feature to unearth fascinating, obsessive, and sometimes bizarre communities for your perusal. There’s bound to be one just for you.
Who’s to say Dear Amy, Prudie, Ann Landers, and Carolyn Hax are the real advice experts?
For more than 50 years, these columns have doled out advice to millions of people around the world, despite the fact that most is just plain common sense.
The snarky folks at Dear CF Abby are more than happy to point that out. This LiveJournal community prides itself on thinking up the most tough-love responses possible to advice column queries in newspapers and on the Web.
According to a moderator, Dear CF Abby gets its name not from Dear Abby, but from CF [Child Free] Abby, an offspring-abhorrent Internet commenter who made snarky advice a regular column at her now discontinued blog.
“For those of you who aren’t familiar with CF Abby, she finds examples of advice-column trainwrecks and posts her own advice in the form of snark on her site. I think the site was brilliant, but appears to have gone offline. This community is meant to take up the torch.
“The idea is that members will find examples of brain damage from the various advice columns on the web (both in the original questions and the replies, both of which should be posted) and post them to the comm, then post our own ‘advice’ (read: snark) in letter form in the comments.”
While it has just 900 members, Dear CF Abby ranks highly in LiveJournal’s Popular Entries nearly every day, no doubt because of its entertainment potential.
Here are three recent posts that caught the Daily Dot’s attention.
1) Dear Amy: Neighbors are Jerks
When the people next door are treating your backyard like its their own, what’s the neighborly thing to do? Dear Amy says “be friendly but firm,” but commenters are less gentle:
“Good fences make good neighbors. Electrified fences make crispy neighbors,” aerynalexander wrote.
2) Invite my husband’s mistress to his funeral?
Prudie calmly suggests that the widow should do whatever makes her comfortable, but community members are hopping mad she even had to ask.
“NO WAY should that woman be there. So she’s grieving? So what. She knew he was married, she should be too ashamed to go to the funeral – especially with her CHILDREN. What’s she going to say to them? ‘Oh, that’s Uncle Peter’s wife – the woman he was betraying with my help,’” janmmarie wrote.
3) My boss caught me masturbating and won’t stop flirting
Prudie gets all the good questions. Here, she scolds the questioner for getting into this situation in the first place, but she suggested writing to Human Resources to work it out. Commenters have other ideas, mostly deny, deny, deny.
“LW’s first mistake was admitting that she was tickling the bean in the bathroom. Maybe she should have told her boss that a tampon was stuck? Or, she was applying Vagisil?” funnyoldcatlady suggested.
Photo by Seth Anderson