Could you please, for the love of all things good, post the odd ramble that doesn't include all of the markup crap?
Seriously... punctuation used properly can portray emphasis all on its own. The whitewash of html-y tags and such detract a reader from actually smoothly reading through each paragraph, and when my eyes get sick of it, they give up. I have to assume I'm not the only one, although I could be wrong.
You've been around a while. When was the last time you read a *good* blog post, or especially a novel that has to emphasize with underlines, bold, italics and other stuff to get the point across? It's distracting, irritating, aggravating and bluntly, just doesn't flow.