Thursday March 3, 2005 – real early

FREAK OUT

It hasn’t escaped my notice by any means that whenever I reprint excerpts from my Martian Vision articles here on my blog, everyone resolutely ignores them. But I don’t care. I’m going to keep doing it, because what the hell, it fills up space and exposure is exposure and who knows, maybe someday someone of the four of you who read this thing will actually bother to peruse one of these reprintings and offer an thought provoking response. At the very least, reprinting them here gives people a CHANCE to do so; the original articles as published on the Calliope Comics website have no comment threads.

The article I’m reprinting now will provide me with fodder for weeks, months, years, or possibly decades, so if you don’t choose to be entertained by it, it’s your loss.

Everybody loves a freak show. And there is no freak show in the history of humanity more colorful, chaotic, or discordant than that presented by the peculiar fantasy sub-genre of superhero funny books over the course of the Silver Age. (Well, actually, the Modern Age has its share of freaks, too, but they're mostly sad, often gruesome, and generally not very funny.) What this article will do, aside from kill time at work, is present a list of what I consider to be the freakiest superhuman characters of the Silver Age - characters that are just SO darned weird, strange, and otherwise straight out of a polka-dotted banana tree that they stand out from even as motley a crowd as comprises any of the coherent comic book universes from this time period.

And as we're speaking of coherent comic book universes, we may as well start with what was, for an all too brief and shining moment (that actually lasted from 1961 to 1974 or thereabouts), the most coherent comic book universe of all - the Original Three Dimensional Metareality that changed everything for everyone forever - the Silver Age Marvel Universe.

One of the primary differences between the Marvel Universe and its greatest competition, DC, is that at DC, the freaks tend to be second or third string characters who could never support their own titles, and are rarely given a chance to try. In the MU, on the other hand, the freaks owned the whole damned cruise ship. As we'll see with our lead off hitter:

The Amazing Spider-Man - One of the most successful and influential superhero characters, and arguably, fictional mass media characters, in human history, the Amazing Spider-Man, during the Silver Age, supported at least three different monthly superhero titles - AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN, and MARVEL TEAM UP - and is probably the prototype for the teen-age, angst driven superhero icon that has come to dominate the marketplace. (Stick that in yer hat and wear it, Wolverine fans.)

It's interesting to note that Spider-Man's powers, while designed to be suggestive and evocative of those of a spider, really bear no resemblance to the natural abilities of said arachnoid entities. While spiders do demonstrate disproportionate strength to the extent that some of them can jump great distances and most manipulate masses far in excess of their own bodyweight, it's important to remember that spiders weigh an insignificant amount, so such measurements are deceptive. Spiders also gain their 'strength' from the superior leverage ability provided by the fact that they are exoskeletal creatures, have many legs, and can anchor themselves firmly to surfaces. Thus, Spider-Man's mid level super strength can hardly be attributed to him actually gaining the 'proportional strength of a spider', since he has only the normal human amount of limbs and is not, so far as we know, exo-skeletal.

Spider-Man's most interesting and controversial powers are his ability to maneuver freely in defiance of normal gravity while in contact with sheer planes, and his ability to sense danger. Over the years his maneuvering ability has been defined and redefined in different ways, including Peter David's seemingly authoritative statement that he somehow harnesses static electricity to create friction.

However, the simplest and most consistent explanation would be to state that, as with most superpowers, Spider-Man's are psionic (in this case, psychokinetic) in nature. He clings to sheer surfaces psychokinetically, and the power manifests that way because his subconscious believes it should, since the 'trigger' for his superhumanity was the bite of a radioactive spider.

The psionic explanation is also the most useful way to explain his danger sense, although this is difficult to quantify, since it has been depicted somewhat inconsistently over the forty years Spider-Man has existed. Nonetheless, calling it a limited form of clairvoyance is about the best anyone can do, especially given that at various times, various events have managed to rob Spider-Man of this extrasensory perception for limited periods.

It goes without saying that neither his gravity defying wall crawling nor his danger sense are actually 'spider' powers, since spiders scale sheer surfaces via tiny, very strong, spikey hairs that cover their legs and provide them with enormous friction (a physical feature Spider-Man demonstrably does not share with actual spiders, or I'd imagine Mary Jane would have said something) and spiders simply don't have a 'danger sense', or no one would ever have successfully swatted one. (Spiders are somewhat sensitive to vibrations in their immediate environment and have inhumanly wide ranges of vision, but they can be successfully attacked and killed by surprise... and Spider-Man has never demonstrated a particular sensitivity to vibrations or an enhanced visual range. He simply senses danger - and, in some stories, can apparently find his way around in darkness or dense mist easily - with his 'spider-sense'.)

What makes Spider-Man truly freaky, though, beyond his rather icky super powers and the hyphen in his name (meant, according to Stan Lee, to differentiate the character from Superman) is that he's the first superhero character to be motivated by guilt.

Prior to this, most superhero characters didn't really have any heroic motivation other than general altruism or a sense of civic duty. Batman was a clear exception to this; traumatized by bearing witness to the violent murder of his parents when he was very young, he grew up full of rage, determined from an early age to avenge himself on the criminal underworld that had shattered his childhood.

The vast majority of Golden Age characters, and DC's few Silver Age characters that appeared prior to Spider-Man, however, had no such motivations; they simply did what they did apparently because they thought it was the right thing to do. (One of the many fundamental differences between metarealities and our own more mundane universe is what 'civic duty' comprises. Here, civically motivated people work for the Red Cross, help build housing for the homeless, join the military, or run for public office. Across the dimensional gap, at least a few of them dress up in tights and run around beating the crap out of random strangers they don't overly much care for.)

Many, over the years, have mistakenly said that Spider-Man is, in many ways, simply a rip off of Batman, at least to the extent that they have the same heroic motivation. This is a misperception, although the difference between a hero who is motivated by rage and a need for vengeance, like Batman, and guilt and a need for redemption, like Spider-Man, can be subtle. Batman is out to 'get even', and he never really can, making him an obsessed and ultimately unstable character (although I personally think that most of Batman's heroism lies in his constant battle to control and channel his rage and remain lucid and rational and even compassionate in his fight against injustice, rather than in the way the modern Batman, under Frank Miller, has been allowed to indulge and exult in his rather sociopathic fury against all forms of non-conformity instead). Spider-Man, on the other hand, is simply out to redeem one tragic failure of character, to live up to the high moral standards of his murdered, gentle Uncle Ben. Batman must constantly fight his rage, Spider-Man his desire for a normal, more self centered life not constantly devoted to dangerous, unpaid, unappreciated public service.

It's also worth noting that Daredevil also originally had a guilt motivation, which later on, under McKenzie and Miller, was transformed into the less subtle rage/vengeance motivation . Kevin Smith, of late, seems to have restored Daredevil somewhat to his thematic roots, although in so doing he's injected an often intrusive element of religion into the book, making DD's guilt very Roman Catholic in nature.

Getting back to Spider-Man for a moment, one of his freakier career moments was the three issue story in which he attempted to cure himself of his spider-powers (what a maroon; as if every fanboy on the planet wouldn't kill to have those abilities) and wound up with four arms, instead. Naturally, he wound up going to Michael Morbius for help, with, as they say on TV, whacky results.

In the annals of Spider-man's often overly freaky career, few moments are quite so transcendently absurd as those which feature:

The Spider-Mobile - Okay. Some guy, who obviously had gone completely off his medication for weeks prior to this moment I'm about to describe, flagged Spider-Man down while Spidey was web-slinging past a rooftop at one point, and offered him a ton of cash for the rights to various entirely hypothetical pieces of stupid Spider-Man merchandise. Spider-Man, not being an idiot, said "Sure thing, friend!" and grabbed the money, but there was a catch... this moron wanted Spidey to get himself a Spider-mobile and drive around in it in public, so he could market miniature models of it to dopey little kids. (No, this is not a Fred Hembeck story, this really happened.) So Spidey, naturally, went to the Human Torch and asked him to build him a Spider-Mobile ('wait,' you say, raising your hand somewhat desperately, 'what part of that was natural?') and the Human Torch, naturally, said "sure, what the hell", and, I don't know, five issues later, came up with this blue and red dune buggy thing that, like, fired webbing from behind its headlights and drove up sheer surfaces and Jesus Christ somebody just kill me now. Anyway, eventually someone... I think it was Hammerhead... drove the goddam thing into the East River, and I sincerely hope it's still there.

In other freaky Spider-Man moments we have this whole clone mess, but I'm not even going into that here.

I will, however, note that recent readings of stuff like the new MARVEL TEAM UP title seem to indicate that at some point in Marvel history when I wasn’t watching, Spider-Man stopped using mechanical web shooters of his own contrivance and started manufacturing and shooting out his own webbing, as was established in the movie version of the character.

I think this is stupid and grotesque; one of the few things I did not like about the movie version of Peter Parker is that he is never clearly established as being, well, the brilliant scientist in training that he actually is. The character coming up with his own artificial spider-web formula and web shooters, as well as spidey-tracers keyed to his spider-sense and various other technological goodies, is a key component to Spidey-continuity, and I resolutely reject this new development as specious twaddle and egregious horseshit. The REAL Spider-Man does not actually have spider-powers, he has spider-LIKE powers. And now let’s move on, at least for the nonce.

KABOOMEX – IT’S NOT JUST FOR BREAKFAST ANY MORE

Work was fairly exasperating today, as the Woman I Loathe The Most took most of the morning (when I wasn’t at work) off for a doctor’s appointment, and made up the time by staying until 8 pm (when I was there). And she was her typically abhorrent, hateful, psychically toxic, and emotionally retarded self while she was there, too. I swear to God, if anyone ever beats that bitch to death with a tire iron, I’d better have an airtight alibi… and hopefully enough money to order a pizza and pick up a 12 pack of Pepsi, too.

But I won’t dwell on that. Let’s update reality:

I got three games for my X-Box along with the X-Box. One of them, TimeSplitters 2, seemed like a decent enough DOOM type game, although I’m not wild about the graphics in it. I threw it in and quickly realized there was a world of difference between moving people around with the arrows on a keyboard and using the X-Box controller, so I booted up the Arcade option to try and master the subtleties of move and shoot with two different joysticks, a couple of triggers, and whole buncha buttons.

I quickly discovered, however, that sometimes evolution is a bad thing. In the decades since DOOM, gaming software has gotten much more sophisticated; now, you are not only expected to deal with the annoying people that you can see who are shooting at you, you are also supposed to effectively handle enemies you can’t see shooting at you from off screen. And the fuckers could be anywhere, too… up, down, sideways, behind you… it’s insane. This much stress I don’t need. It was challenging enough just shooting the little bastards I could see scampering around in front of me, firing machine guns in my general direction. If I have to watch four different icons to see when I’m taking damage from someone I cannot in any other way perceive, and then run around like a mad bastard until I can see them, and then get my guns lined up all over again to kill them, by which time three other people will be shooting at me from other vantage points… no, no, no. This is not fun. I’ll stick with the games that don’t make me keep track of all this shit.

Speaking of which, I ordered KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC (henceforth known as KOTOR) and KOTOR II online yesterday, and should have one or both of them by the weekend, hopefully. (My weekend starts Sunday and runs through Tuesday, assuming, of course, that I don’t completely lose it and either kill the Bitch from Hell gruesomely or just quit my damned job between now and then, in either case, I would expect the length and quality of my weekend to be significantly impacted.)

I mentioned my new X-Box to my brother Paul at work today, as living with him for 8 months is what introduced me to the joys of X-Box gaming, and he advised me that his X-Box won’t play games any more. He’s been using his girlfriend’s Playstation, and thus can’t play KOTOR II, as it is only available for the X-Box. So I told him to bring a spare controller by sometime, and if he actually does it, I’m going to be slightly pissed off at him, since of course he can’t find fucking time to drop by and play HeroClix with me, the prick…

Ah, I’m in a rare mood tonight.

I got a check for about $2 in royalties from Publish America today. Bewildering Stories has accepted two more of my stories for publication (more or less, it’s an online mag), Positive and No Good Angel, and their editor even wrote me back (normally they don’t acknowledge submissions; I find out they accepted something when I do a Google search and turn up something else of mine in one of their issues) and said that everything I wrote was good, but “Positive” was damned good. Personally, I think “No Good Angel” is probably the best short story I’ve ever written, but I’m probably not the best judge. And certainly, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog, and Isaac Asimov bounced it with alacrity a couple of years back, so even if I’m right, it’s probably not saying much.

Beyond that, hmmm… let’s talk about the last episode of NYPD Blue.

When Buffy the Vampire Slayer spent most of a season (their worst season, the sixth) turning Willow evil, I thought it was a resolutely rotten idea… but I also thought, if they were going to do it, they should have gone all out, slam bang, hell for leather and really turned her stone cold frickin’ EVIL. It’s not that I really wanted to see the utterly adorable Willow go permanently bad, hell, I think it was a truly idiotic idea to even have her go temporarily bad (and let’s not even get into how utterly moronic the whole ‘Willow is gay’ thing was). But I did think that if the show was going to do it, they had an opportunity you never ever see in heroic fiction: to establish The Hero’s Arch Enemy Who Used To Be The Hero’s Childhood Friend in a manner nobody had ever managed previously in all the annals of larger than life heroic melodrama.

After all, the Arch Enemy Who Used To Be The Closest Friend is one of the oldest cliches in the entire genre. Nearly every larger than life hero has such a nemesis. As a general rule, we never see the friendship itself; it’s just back story. Oh, we may see an occasional brief flashback, or, once in a while, even an entire flashback episode. But even that’s pretty rare.

With the Dark Willow story, though… well, they had the chance. We’d seen Willow and Buffy as very close, very loving, very real friends for five years up until that point. The relationship had been established and could not be refuted. If they were going to turn Willow bad, they should have done it up right, and made her really bad, permanently. Turn her into Buffy’s arch-nemesis for real. Make her into the exact opposite of the Slayer – a magical powerhouse to offset Buffy’s physical powers; a supernatural menace to humanity diametrically opposed to Buffy’s office as mankind’s sole protector from the dark forces.

It would have been cool. If they had to do it, that’s what they should have done. But, instead, they wimped out; Willow went bad for a little while, tried to blow up the entire planet (for no good reason), and then got better, cried a lot, and sought redemption… just like, you know, everybody else in the cast.

See, this is what the final episode of NYPD Blue reminds me of, kinda.

Oh, nobody goes bad. But it’s a case of a beautifully executed idea happening, with no follow through.

I’m a big Blue fan, but there can be no doubt that the show has been running on a quarter of a tank of gas for a long time. It’s not even a consequence of David Milch walking away from the series; Milch kind of lost his mind during the sixth season of the show and started treating the franchise like some kind of weird off Broadway improvisational drama, not even scripting scenes, but simply giving the actors vague dialogue coaching right before shooting began and letting them mostly ad lib stuff to get through a plot that Milch mostly made up spontaneously as the videotape rolled.

The series got onto a much more even keel in the seventh season after Milch left, but it had lost it’s creative spark. It was just another cop show… a good one, solidly grounded on the foundation that Milch, Steven Bochco, and executive producer/ex NYPD detective Bill Clark had created, but still… there wasn’t anything about it that made it stand out above the run of the mill, except the characters themselves, and their dialogue wasn’t all that great. Writers and producers seemed to be making an effort to make most of the supporting characters interchangeable; if one hot blonde actress playing a hot blonde female detective took another job offer, well, you just plugged in another one, no problem.

The essential element of credible reality that had permeated the series throughout its first season and a half or so had begun to seep out as soon as David Caruso walked off the show, and by the time Season 5 rolled around, well, again, there wasn’t much to try to take seriously. Nearly any episode of any franchise of Law & Order was grimmer n’ grittier, and seemed more believable, too.

This isn’t to say there weren’t good things on the show over the past six years, or good actors. Bochco doesn’t cast untalented people, and the scripts were competent, they just lacked sizzle. The storylines were a little tired; to the true Blue watcher, it was apparently that nearly every ‘new’ show was just a compendium of old storylines given a slight window dressing and presented from a somewhat different angle.

Anyway, I watched it, and more or less enjoyed it, but when it was announced that this would be Blue’s last season, I didn’t mourn. It was time and past time.

I felt that way all through this season. I enjoyed watching it, but, well… it was clear that the franchise was worn out, and it was time to put it to bed.

Right up until the last episode.

Suddenly, Sipowicz, who had passed the sergeant’s exam five or six episodes before the end and taken a job as a supervisor of patrolmen, found himself in command of the detective squad he’d been the surly, rebellious lead officer in for so long. Two new detectives, absolutely green rookies on their first days out of ‘the bag’ (police slang for a cop uniform) were written in, to give Sipowicz someone to mentor. Sipowicz’ first case as a boss involved an influential millionaire sadist who had almost certainly beaten his mistress to death, and then bribed a Japanese diplomat to confess to the crime… a case which forced Sipowicz to defy his own bosses when he continued to investigate dangling leads in the case and refused to accept the resolution he’d been spoon fed.

It was, honestly, like a new show. And, as with turning Willow evil, it was the sort of thing we never see in this kind of fiction. Generally, you know the grizzled, choleric, crusty but lovable, street smart boss cop in charge of the squad has a real history, and is a living legend on the force, but only because people tell you. You only hear about his previous career in bits and pieces, when the show does an occasional episode where one of his former partners/informants/enemies shows up and involves him in some unfinished business, after which the focus goes back to the younger, better looking cops again.

But here, we’d seen the back story. We’d seen the cases that would turn into myths and legends for other cops. We’d watched Sipowicz solve the Bucci kidnapping. We’d seen him fall off the wagon and climb back on again, watched him marry Sylvia and reconcile with his adult son, seen him grieve for both when they died too early and too tragically. We’d seen him lose one partner to internal politics and two others to the grave. Cliché though it may be, we’d watched him grow from the lost, flawed, drowning man he was into the better man he became… the leader and mentor and teacher he finally was, in that final, ultimate episode.

There was an enormous amount of energy and potential in the new situation. I’d watched Andy Sipowicz, defiant, brooding, unreconstructed, hugely flawed, ignoring the system and the rules to do what his heart told him was the right thing regardless of the consequences, for 12 years. I’d seen him snarling at his bosses, going behind his bosses’ backs, even punching out his boss on one memorable occasion. Now, suddenly, he WAS the boss… responsible for an entire squad, looked up to and admired by those he was in charge of… and still infuriating those in charge of him.

Really, it could be a great show again.

Pity it was the last episode…

Let’s see. In addition to one or both KOTORs, I’m also looking forward to getting my case of Legacy sometime this weekend. So far, though, no specific shipping time frame has been forthcoming. But if it doesn’t get here until Monday or even Tuesday, that’s okay.

Oh, and Amazon.com finally gave up on my order of Modesty Blaise books and decided to ship me three of them separately from the rest, so I should have those sometime soon. Of course, the only one containing material I haven’t read yet, Cobra Trap, is among the missing, but I’ll take what I can get.

I am, at this moment, eating the very last steak from my Omaha Steaks package, sent me back at the start of February as the kick off for Spoil Darren month. It’s yummy. And I’m listening to my favorite music on my brand new X-Box. There’s a lot in my life that is pretty wonderful right now, and I am grateful to all of you who have contributed to that... Tammy, Mike N., Nate, Scott S… the editor at Bewildering Stories, many of my family…

Oh, speaking of that, my brother Sean cracked his truck (he’s a short haul trucker, or was) over Christmas. We’d thought he’d gotten out of it with miraculously little damage, but it turns out that broken ribs are nowhere near as casual an injury as Frank Miller’s Daredevil stories would lead one to believe. He’s got two broken right next to his spine, behind his lungs, that are pinching a nerve and giving him a lot of pain… and it’s an area that’s dangerous to operate on.

So, anyone out there with any good thoughts or positive energy to spare, send it Sean’s way. He’s a good man, a great brother, a wonderful father, and, I gather from the way my sister in law treats him, a pretty solid husband, too. I want nothing but the best for him, and if all of you could direct some energy his way, I’d appreciate it greatly.

Finishing my slightly previous thought, I appreciate all of you anyway. Even the Speedmonkey. If idiots like him didn’t hate me, I’d know I’d gone badly wrong somewhere.

Life is mostly very good. I just really really need a new job. Or a winning Lotto ticket. Or for someone, somewhere, to want to pay me for my writing…

A new town to live in wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world for me, either.

Okay, I guess that’s enough out of me for now.

I wish everyone a wonderful Thursday. Even the Speedmonkey, and those witless cretins at Portal of Evil. Although in the last two cases, I hope the wonders that their Thursdays are full of come shaped like locusts, and boll weevils, and technology that won’t quite function correctly, and inadequately cooked pork…

Later!

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, "Wow, I didn't recognize you in men's clothing". According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I'm reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I'd take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here's The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people's blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin's Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron's blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don't really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren't related to me by marriage, I'd most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I've learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don't care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I'd get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don't Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.