Picture Page it's Picture Page

First of all, you guys are swell for being so positive about my banjitar song in comment land.

OK ladies, we're going to have to have a little talk about your personals pictures. There are a number of picture no-nos that you keep sticking in your ads:

- "Guess who I am!" This is where you post 4 different pictures of you and your friends. This can go wrong two different ways. The first and most common way is that when I look at your pictures I can't figure out who the common person is in all of them. Which one are you? It's often much harder to tell than you'd think. The second is that you may compare really unfavorably to one or all of your friends. I wonder how many girls get emails saying something along the lines of "Hi. I was wondering if the girl in your first picture with the pink shirt is single. She's really hot."

- "I'm 1000 miles away on the beach!" You have your arms up in glee, maybe you're jumping for joy, there are palm trees and blue skies, and the person with the camera is just disappearing behind the curvature of the earth. It's probably a great picture when it's an 8x10, but when it's 2x3 on a personal ad I can only tell that you are smaller than a building.

- "Meet the imposing men in my life!" This is the picture where you are hanging all over a huge and probably easily angered frat guy. Unless I look just like he does, it doesn't inspire me to whip up a love letter.

- "Me in a bikini on a fire truck!" I'm not against this picture per se, but I imagine it attracts the wrong sort of guy. While I like the picture itself, I'm not sure I want to date somebody who regularly hangs out on fire trucks wearing a bikini. (In that sentence the girl is wearing the bikini, not the fire truck. I may, in fact, be more inclined to date a girl with a picture of a fire truck in a bikini.)

- "It's a leaf!" No pictures of scenery! Unless I recognize that particular portion of forest floor, it's not going to make me any more likely to email you.

With that said, perhaps I'm not who you're trying to attract. After all, you never return my emails.