I felt like writing an informal piece and decided to write about natural ground peanuts. It’s one of my favorite pieces. Don’t ask me why the <p class stuff> keeps showing up. I’m a writer, not a website designer.

A couple of weeks ago I was ranting to my daughter about natural peanut buitter. I told her I waasn’t sure why anyone thought that ground up peanuts in a jar should be called peanut butter. They are ground peanuts. If I wanted ground peanuts, I will go to my local co-op and grind me some peanuts.

Peanut butter should have more ingredients than just peanuts.  A little sugar or honey is good for starters.  And then a hydrogenated oil that keeps it all together.  

I don’t want to spend five minutes stirring the ground-up peanuts before I spread them on my bread and wind up with a knife laden with ground-up peanut butter.  No thank you.

When I finished, my daughter asked if I was done ranting.

Of course, I had to say no, and rant some more.   This time about that pool of peanut oil at the top of the jar of ground-up peanuts.

That got me thinking about rants and what makes a good rant.  Here’s what I learned.

Ranting About Ranting Advice

The first thing I learned was most of the advice on ranting is not good. 

As I start looking around the web for advice on how to write a good rant, I ran into the craziest stuff.  Websites were recommending that I think about what kind of language I’ll use.   

A rant without profanity is like food without taste or coffee without caffeine or peanut butter without sugar or honey.  Try it yourself.  As I searched the freaking internet, I learned that most freaking advice is a bunch of horse feces.

See what I mean? 

And I’m sorry, wiki-How, or Wiki-how, or WiKi-HoW, or however you spell it, advice about ranting with pictures is odd.  And they aren’t even pictures but drawings.  Of white people.  Seriously.  This thing was co-authored by over 20 contributors, and not one of them said, “Hey, we should at least get a token minority in here.”  WTF.

And other sites that discuss common mistakes to avoid make me think I’m supposed to write a college essay.  According to these sites, a good rant should have

• A clear thesis
• Supporting evidence
• Good examples
• Warrants and backing logic
• Summary or conclusion

There should be warrants—for the people who came up with this advice. 

Rants That I Want to Read?

So if you’re going to give me writen written advice about ranting, at least learn to spell.  I’m not going to link to this site, but a sentence like “Rants can be awesome for traffic, but there can also be a fall out” makes me think about fall.  As in autumn. 

Or, if you claim to have rant examples, then have examples of rants.   One site had a list of blog post rants I should check out.  I checked out about three, and they didn’t seem ranty at all.  More like verbal clickbait with a pretend rant and a click here to buy some crap.  What is that?  False advertising is a nice way of putting it.  Horse manure is more direct.

Rubrics for Rants?

I kid you not.  Search and thou shalt find.  Rubrics on how to rant.  I can get 5/5 for having a good topic, and another 5/5 for having a long enough rant.  What if I go over?  Can I have a boring topic but double the length and get full credit?  If I was in a class where the teacher had me write a rant without cussing, I would wind up in the principal’s office. 

Google Search Rant

While I’m on the topic of searching on Google, I’m getting tired of asking a question, and my answer is stuff I’m supposed to buy.  A search for “how to rant?” should not lead me to a list of books I can buy on Amazon.  If I wanted a list of books about rants, I would ask for “a list of books about rants. “

So I did.  And I got one book after another, but no list.  I’m not too sure about Google anymore.

Websites Going Haywire with Ads

And what’s up with ads these days?  I get it—they need to make some scratch.  So have clickbait articles at the bottom, an ad or two as I’m scrolling.  But not the immediate pop up that asks if I want to get the secrets for getting paid to write comedy.  I don’t want to be on a mailing list.  I also don’t want to click something where I am, in essence, saying, no, I want to stay broke.

And it’s getting worse.  Some sites have clickbait at the bottom, ads on the side, the pop-down requests, and videos that start automatically.  It’s like the screens on gas pumps that come on and give you a bit of news and then ads.  No.  I’m there to pump gas, not be bombarded with sales pitches for 12-hour energy drinks.

Wikis?

And what is it with wikis?  It used to be that a wiki was considered unreliable.  Now, the internet is littered with not just Wikipedia, but wiki this and wiki that.  There are so many wikis that there’s a website about wikis.  There’s a list of “lists of lists” wiki page.   

At least there’s a list of rants wiki.  The first rant listed is by John Knox—“The Monstrous Regiment of Women” (he didn’t think women should be monarchs) to Valerie Solanos’ “Scum Manifesto” or Society for Cutting Up Men.  (She didn’t think men should exist.  She also shot Andy Warhol). 

I can even hire professional Wiki page writers who will write a wiki page about me.  If I order now, I can get 50% off.   I think not.

YouTube Rants

I’ve decided the best rants are on YouTube.  This one by Hank of the Vlog Brothers had me cracking up. 

Here’s Hank ranting about donuts.  He really hates vegan donuts.  And baked donuts. 

And Lewis Black goes to town on the dreadfulness of crunchy peanut butter.

Go Ahead and Rant

That’s it.  I’m run out of rants for now.   If you’d like to rant at me, or send me a rant, drop me a line.  Just don’t tell me how much you like natural peanut butter.