About the Site This has all been going on, intermittently at times, since the spring of 2003. If you want to read more about specifics or my motivations, there's a whole gaggle of rambling to your right that your eyes are dying to examine. There's no secret to what's going on: It's just me writing about various things that seem like they'd be interesting to other people. If you have issues with a lack of updating or are upset that your favorite Tecmo team doesn't have a profile yet, then your only course of action is to cancel your non-existent subscription. Complaining or prodding probably isn't going to help your cause much. I'm also making no guarantees about the values-oriented content of the website, seeing as what one person calls an awful, family-ruining mess, another calls "The National Basketball Association." If you get really upset or really turned off, you're free to leave, but keep the football phone and David Ortiz replica jock strap as a free gift. Contacting/Contributing/Ranting All of the above have been a form of communication with me from you. I accept them all, although my facial expressions and off-color remarks will depend greatly on their content. If you feel the need to send me an e-mail, regardless of the subject, then leonardite@leonardite.com is your destination. If it's worthwhile, even in a marginal way, I will respond to it at some point. If it's completely pointless and/or stupid, there's probably a better chance of me giddily opening up all of my .exe e-mail attachments than of me responding with a "Golly! Thanks for visiting my website!" response. If you want to contribute articles, reviews, phat beats, or anything else, go ahead. I know I've stated this before, but I can't guarantee I will review it or post it quickly. And if it sucks, which honestly, it probably will, I most likely won't respond at all. I think there's more dignity for you if I skip the "Sorry Jimmy, but you sure did give it your all!" speech, delete it, and pretend it never happened. Linking As far as linking is concerned, if you would like to link here go for it. There are a couple of banners available for you to use here. But the last human to click an internet banner was looking for information on the upcoming 1996 Stanley Cup Finals, so that should tell you how effective they are. Instead, use whatever clever phrases you want to trick people into coming here. If you are looking to do a link exchange, the chances of this are extremely remote. Unless you're from eBay or MSN.com, it's probably a good idea not to waste your time.    • Choose Your Own Adventure    • Distressed Poetry Blog    • Fun Size    • Geocities    • Unsolicited E-mail About Me I am currently a student at North Dakota State University, majoring in International Heartthrobbing, with a minor in World Domination. My likes include a lot of things like athletics, pizza, and William H. Macy, but are completely devoid of lobster trapping and having fun. Everyone else says they love to have fun when describing themselves, but if people were more honest, they'd realize that they wouldn't know how to conduct themselves if their existence wasn't just a big cesspool of despair. The Name There's a big white box on this page telling you about Leonard, which is the small North Dakota town that I call "awesome" (and home.) I am the Leonardite and the website is Leonardite.com. To call the website "The Leonardite" is like calling the Cheers bar "Sam Malone." You wouldn't think that I'd have to explain this, but there are lot of people with their heads in an improper part of their body who try to communicate with me. I feel a bit guilty about being THE Leonardite, since there are at least four others who proudly wear this title. But it was either that or go with "Neil 90's Roesler". Of course, this would have violated the terms of my membership in the Non-Dipshit Guild of America (NDGA) so that idea was quickly forgotten.

Official Welcome Address "Unlike everything else I authored on this page, this little capsule has the distinction of having quotation marks around the whole thing. It is my experience that quotation marks add clarification to everything. As opposed to the ""-less rest of the page, there's no denying that I'm talking to you. One could be forgiven for picturing me miming the other words on the page since I didn't provide grammatical proof. When I AM miming, which is more often than you would think, I will be sure to add my new mime-ation marks, which is character representation of a mime being speared by a cyclist. (&<---o7o) " Spanning nearly one presidency and lasting longer than the average of almost two celebrity weddings combined, Leonardite.com is the wise old grandfather of the internet. But we're not talking any Werther's Original grandfather here. Instead, this site is the mid-life crisis Grandpa whose life was already filled with enough questions and Corvettes before his sixteen year-old daughter got knocked up. So instead of becoming a trusted and harmonious neighbor to the world, in the end this website is going to flee reality and all its burdens and instead shack-up with an unproven but easy internet start-up. Greetings. Welcome to my disaster. Make yourself comfortable as we all try and figure out why exactly this site exists. Is it to inform the uninformed populace? Is it to stroke my fragile ego? Or is it all just an elaborate scheme to get people links to their fantastic weblogs? It's a mystery, alright, but it's no mystery that you, me, and an educational background of Encyclopedia Brown stories can't solve. Things basically started on here as a means for me to express my numerous and otherwise brilliant thoughts on the world of sports. While this toughactintinactinocentric approach brought in a throng of readers consisting of 75% of my immediate family AND my brother's college roommate, I felt unfulfilled. They say that every man has an opinion. They also say that that every man likes to express this opinion. When it comes to sports, however, every man has three opinions, must express them, and can only do so by speed-dialing sports talk shows or creating shitty Angelfire-template web pages that are updated as often as the Ryder Cup is played. While the former approach is more pleasing for everyone who realizes that all opinions aren't created equal, the latter is where the internet arena gets badly mangled for the rest of us. I could sit here and critique the Twins bullpen all day making witty comments and observations ("When Juan Rincon steps on the mound, the ball is Juan RinGONE! HAHAHAHAHA") and more than likely I might surface to the top of the internet sportswriting heap. But honestly, if I actually got excited about my site being better than crap like this, I would expect my friends to call me a jackass. If they didn't, then they aren't friends at all but useless "yes men" that are probably also secretly writing about Ato Jabari Boldon and his super title of being the best sprinter ever from Trinidad and Tobago. Deciding that the strict locker room scent might be too much for the casual internet user, I decided to clean this place up a bit. And I made the decision that every major corporation has made since 1988: This site needed a heavier dose of Mike Tyson. Everything has since fallen into place in a strange amalgam of a web page that more than one user has agreed is a confusing waste of Queen Elizabeth's time. I'm from Leonard. I know that you're not, because I know 305 of the other 310 people in town. And the five people I don't know probably fear how tough I look standing next to the pop machine, chasing away crime and people's hopes of being the best-looking resident, so they stay away from me. If I were to describe Leonard in one word, I would use "Leonard," but I would draw it on a big piece of construction paper and have all kinds of fighter jets, sports cars, and scantily-clad women surrounding the name. Of course Leonard has none of these things, but we do have one black man, which is something that 95% of small towns in North Dakota can't claim. I probably don't write about Leonard enough, considering it has shaped every bit of my being down to the way I talk or in the way that I make fun of immigrants in a way only Leonardites can. Leonard has pretty much everything a kid could want. It has a golf course which has been played and over-played by us to an extent that has finally made me enjoy golf and an airstrip that's great for drag racing and fleeing Halloween crime scenes. (The official name of the strip is "90Y" according the FAA. Since finding out this nugget of knowledge, we've religiously only called it that ever since. Of course it probably is called nothing anymore since planes rarely land there and a big yellow "X" has been painted on the cracking concrete. Someone told me that it was to tell planes not to land there, but we all know that it really means "buried treasure" and that the sly fox was lying to me and planning to keep the plunder all to himself.) We have other stuff like a world-class backyard football field (F.Y.I. Leonard is rated the "#1 Backyard Football Town in the Americas" by Leonardite.com) and enough exciting locales to keep any man busy who has a good imagination or a full cooler. You'll also notice that nearly every page is dedicated to THE STICK. For the safety of your virgin, sheltered mind, I can't tell you the significance or the story. Let's just say that it resulted in one man getting permanently chased from his home and four others having their feelings of invincibility forever shattered. It seems like sections keep getting added to this site based on any whim that comes along that might lead to more than one installment. By the time you're reading this, "Fictional Bar Fights" and "Socioeconomic Interpretations of Rico Suave" will probably be already up and running. But for the time being, this is what you're going to be outrageously pleasured by: Sports Page A passionate love letter to the unfulfilled NFL career of Ryan Leaf. WVBA Chicks are totally into guys who have an elaborate fake boxing league in their arsenal. Tecmo Super Bowl Celebrating the ability to become a "Super Champion" since 1991. Card Collection Cal McLish's beauty is enough to humble a whole truckload of peacocks. The Microscope Taking a deeper look at the things nobody ever thought to care about. SI For Kids Why shouldn't 13 year-old chess players get more pub than the athletes we subscribed for? Wrestlers Because we all know, Hulk STILL Rules. Blogs I'ts funny LOL< so we lik have 2 read them. K? Specials This guy gets teased by the other sections because it has to meet with me daily, although this has subsided a bit since the WVBA got noon-hour detention for calling it a retard. There's also a guestbook on here for some reason, even though guestbook signing went out of style in 1997. The site also has an e-mail address, fourteen cabaret girls, and a secret stash of those dancing babies that we all thought were cute until the world's online interests changed from smile-making babies to baby-making adults. Your Website Sucks by The Leonardite The internet of the mid-2000's is a lot less fun and a lot less optimistic than the internet we all first used. The initial internet vibe was like the first day of a carnival, when people come out in droves just to soak it all in and see what new adventures they can find. Today's internet is more like Day 10 of the carnival, when all of the carnies stop trying to even resemble sober and everyone clutches their wallet with both hands and makes sure not to talk or make eye contact with anyone. Nobody with a social life or a sense of dignity has seen a chat room in five years, the personal homepage is a Barbra Streisand-like fossil, and fun clip art that once was rampant has been replaced by videos of beheadings and washed-up celebrities having sex with each other. At the heart of it all is the death of the personal web site. Nobody takes the time to build web pages anymore. There are probably more people with web space on the internet today than were six years ago, but they all have resigned themselves to blogs. Blog, of course, is short for "I don't know how to make a fucking web site." Blogs require no skill, patience, or vocabulary, and essentially are just a diary-laden borefest. Good writers inspire other people to write. Bloggers inspire me to drink enough paint thinner to bring myself to their level. You know you're there when you actually type the text "wuz" (I'd call it a word, but I don't call horses 'chandeliers' either.) Blogs have now spawned themselves into many different forms. When I first heard of the "political blog," I assumed that the dunces must be debating who gets to wear the Burger King crown while their special leader is getting his diaper changed. But that, like countless other topics, has become a blogging category. Covering a wide variety of topics would seem like a good thing, but the blog culture ends up looking like an encyclopedia written by an astronaut who has been in orbit for seven years, had his hands and cerebellum sloppily removed, and has been hooked up to a nuclear-powered opinion-making machine. Over time, the malleable and personality-free internet user has just said "Screw it, I'll join the space man" and the world submits to this online perversion. This isn't to say that the developers of "traditional" web pages are doing much better. In fact, their level of sucking has gone beyond "Dangerously Cheesy" and is approaching "Chester's Monterrey Jack Mushroom Cloud." Unbeknownst to most people, all private entertainment pages are in a constant competition to see who can copy each other the most, until it all finally reaches its endgame where the internet will be filled with hundreds of identical pages featuring only the Flash cartoon of Papa Smurf getting pleasured by Smurfette in a manner not appropriate for any individual to find humorous (perhaps kinky, but not humorous.) The more I look around and try to read other people's attempts to entertain, the more I am embarassed to even have a page of my own. (From now on when people ask, I do all my writing in a more respectable medium: The bathroom stalls in truck stops. The WOMEN'S bathroom. Hehe.) Almost universally these sites operate in pretty much the same manner since everybody is raping everyone else's pages of their content and individuality. Because of this, you see a lot of trends start to emerge. The first trend I have noticed is the standard disclaimer that always reads something to the effect of "This site might offend some people. Go somewhere else, pussy." (It's important to note the "pussy" because the webmaster needs to make sure you know that HE knows how to swear, even if he probably doesn't know what the word means.) I used to have a loosely similar disclaimer on this site for awhile, until I realized that nobody on the internet is offended by anything anymore. All the good-intentioned people were chased from the web in 1999 because they thought their computers were going to come to life and brutally murder them on January 1, 2000, and only about fifteen of them have returned since. The reality of the matter is that most of the websites that display or announce such a disclaimer are really just trying to pretend that their website is "way out there" or "renegade." Upon further examination, it's usually just a lot of misplaced swearing, unfunny sexual references, and pointless name-calling. Lots of these sites tell me that if I send them an e-mail criticizing their page, they will call me a "fucking retard that likes to hump goats." That's not funny. It fits into the mission statement above, but it's not funny. It IS offensive, but not in the way that they intended. I personally am taken aback by anyone who questions my stomach for terrible jokes and my tolerance of the f-word. These guys aren't very smart. And in addition to not being very smart, they don't have a lot of creativity. Before you conclude that they are tremendous webmasters, I should also note that they don't want to spend a whole lot of time on things. That's why you'll see a lot of these sites, actually a majority of these sites, featuring chat room or IM chat transcripts. Now remember, these are supposed to be hilarious. It's easy to forget if you don't remind yourself. It usually consists of someone posing as a girl in a chat room trying to pick up a pathetic male. Of course this doesn't work, because every "female" in a chat room is a mid-40's male and every "male" in a chat room is a lonely hermaphrodite. No matter what happens, these chats all horribly suck. They could hire a team of Johnny Carsons to write the material and it still wouldn't work. Obviously nobody wants to sit and read line after line of nearly indecipherable IM text. All the "brb's" and "lol's" are bad enough if you are actually in the conversation, but to read somebody else's makes about as much sense as eating a urinal cake. I already am so spaced out in my own IM conversations that the part of my brain controlling the communication is so remote, its only other function is to keep my toenails growing. So you're crazy if you think I'm going to read your lame chats. The last feature that all webmasters have been tragically tricked into believing is necessary to pass the internet webmastery bar exam is the mailbag. While a good mailbag is a great way to invite new feedback and provide witty commentary, a lame mailbag is a great way to show how lifeless your site is and how much of an attention-craver you really are. Most sites clearly don't receive that much correspondence, so they take to making up their e-mails. You can always tell the letters at awful sites are made up because they say things like "Tell me, DaPimpMan, what are your thoughts on interracial marriage?" instead of actual real mail content which would read more like "Your website is the equivalent of a toothless man in a raw meat eating contest, except this site induces more vomiting and makes even less sense." I even saw one site take the novel approach of using spam to fill their mailbag. Congratulations on your hot mailbag, I guess, but the only people in this world who don't receive spam are those without computers and people with "BEWARE OF SPAM-INDUCED CHAINSAW WIELDER" signs in their yards. This site gets enough mail these days to do an occasional mailbag. But unless it can be approached correctly, I'd rather leave my dignity intact than put myself in the same arena as the guy responding to "cheap Vi A gra" ads. In the end, maybe it is time for the literate bloggers to take over. I know there are only about three of them, but perhaps they could do better. Until then, this website is a last-ditch effort to keep the dream alive. When it dies, you might as well burn your dictionaries and your senses of humor because I'm the last one trying. At least you'll have Smurf Flash cartoons to keep you miserable.