TotalPress WordPress theme scores low on "MobiReady" -- i.e., i hate the internet

The current mobile-friendly theme I am using is called TotalPress.
I like it OK -- it still needs a few tweaks.

My issues with it are:

--not crazy about the light-grey text in blockquotes --

I need to figure out a way to darken it

[Update: I changed the font color from #8a8a8a to a darker shade of that, #656565. Still thinking about this.]

--it's not as easy to "poke" the CSS as it was with my previous theme. I would like to "comment out" the theme branding in the footer but haven't figured out how to do it yet. [Update: Done, thanks to Rene Abythe for the CSS] Would also like to remove the phrase "comments off" that appears in each post; that seems like a needless provocation for the "no comments means intellectual fascism" contingent. [Update: Done]

--I tested the site on MobiReady and it got a low score. The reasons have to do with exotic web developer considerations that make an OG, HTML-era blogger such as myself want to f*ing hurl. It's painful to read that, in the course of making my site "better" on phones, I've adopted a theme that has the following negatives:

1. DOM element count is high at 938. [Update: I think I reduced these deadly DOMs to under 700, the acceptable range, by switching my Archives on the sidebar to a dropdown. That list was too long anyway.]
2. All page assets should use appropriate Etag headers to enable client-side caching and speed up future page loads -- No Etag header found.
3. JavaScript includes should always be included at the end of the document to avoid blocking the page loading -- Found JavaScript inside head.
4. HTTP response should be compressed using server-side configuration of GZIP or similar compression technology -- Gzip transport encoding not detected.
etc
etc

For what it's worth, a nearly pure HTML page such as this one also scores poorly on MobiReady.
They are freaked out because it's all images, even though most are in the 100KB range. I'm sure there is some low-res art that would be appropriate for your precious phone but I'm seriously not interested in making it.

responsive theme experimentation

Am going to be fooling around with WordPress themes in case you're wondering why the site looks different, at any given moment.

The purpose is to install a so-called responsive theme, one that changes the look of the blog depending on the size or configuration of the screen. Obviously this is motivated by the pressure of mass humanity's move from PCs to phones. Arguably blogs are a creature of PCs and if they were truly going to be mobile-friendly, each post would be 240 characters or feature a snappy video (plus lots of advertising plugs).

My dilemma is how to preserve some of the site's current customization using an off-the-shelf design. Problem #1 is where to put the sidebar links. The first theme I tried, Galaxia, moved the top group of links, called "Pages" here, to a menu at the top, below my name. I guess that's OK but then the links called "Links," "Archives," and "Categories" just disappeared. Adding a widget called "Sidebar" moved "Links" to the bottom of the page when the blog was in mobile mode. It's basically too much information to shove to the bottom of a phone screen.

Galaxia had a nice minimal design but it ignored blockquotes. All indented text was just shoved over the left. Not acceptable.

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