Wednesday, April 6, 2005

AGGRAVATION

Playing on the X-Box’s random feature as I type: King of New Orleans by Better Than Ezra

Here’s how it goes for me sometimes:

I’m trying to do something. I won’t tell you what, specifically, but, well, I’m in the middle of this very complex and often frustrating process and I had to make some calls and set some stuff up, and it’s normal, every day stuff, but at one point in the process, one person in another state insisted I had to fax them a copy of my State I.D.

FAX them a copy.

Now, I’m not working, and the scanner my mom bought me years ago is no longer working, and I’ve never been able to figure out how to use the fax feature on this computer anyway (I could do it from my old computer, but I tossed the old computer when I moved out of my brother Paul’s house). So this meant finding a fax machine somewhere in this idiotic small town I live in that does not even have a photocopy shop.

The number I needed to fax this copy of my State I.D. to is an 800 number, so there’s no expense involved for anyone on my end. If I could just get access to a fax machine, all would be well.

But, while there are fax machines in every business large and small in this rotten little town, and I walk by dozens of small businesses when I walk any distance at all to or from my apartment, I have no access to any of these fax machines. It would take considerably more personal chutzpah than I have to simply walk into a place where I don’t know anyone and ask for that kind of favor. Now, if I knew someone at any of these businesses, sure, done deal, but, well, I don’t. (It’s a curious psychological phenomena, that no doubt has something to do with how tribal all humans are. If I had any kind of personal relationship with anyone with their own business, or who worked in an office around here, this wouldn’t be a problem. But I don’t.)

Now, one thing I could do is make a scan of my State I.D. and email it to a friend of mine who works in an office, who told me she would be delighted to help. But, as I say, my scanner doesn’t work. I know people who have a scanner that does work (and it would fax, but they deliberately left off the ‘fax’ option when they bought it, arrrggggghhh) so I could go over there and get my ID scanned. But I tried to call them early yesterday morning when I was trying to get this whole mess resolved, and, well, they weren’t home. Fuck.

So yesterday I walked over to pay my water bill, hoping maybe the nice people at the City offices would take pity on me if I explained my plight. Nooooooooo. But a woman there did helpfully point out that the Post Office, which is just about as far in the opposite direction from my apartment as the City offices were, had one of those combination photo copiers/fax machines. So I headed over there.

After making a photocopy of my I.D. and writing on it the stuff I was told to write on it, I tried to fax it off to this 800 number. This required me to deposit a dollar in change, which led to another minor frustration, as I had a pocket full of change, most of it pennies and nickels, but with a few quarters, and when I started poking around in it, I discovered (of course, you can see this coming) that I had THREE quarters. Arrgggggh. No real problem, just, you know, the additional inconvenience of having to make up another 25 cents in nickels.

So I laboriously plug in my money, dial the 800 number into the fax machine, hit SEND… and underneath the electronic mating call of the fax, I start hearing the annoying automatic tones of an error message, saying “we are sorry this call cannot be placed as dialed”.

The fax machine won’t dial a 1, because whoever put it in the Post Office doesn’t want to pay for long distance faxing, of course.

FUCK.

So I wait in line and get up to see someone at the post office counter and start to tell my tale of woe and immediately the person I’m talking to puts their hands up in front of them in a horrified warding off gesture and says, quickly, in a toneless “I am not here I am a machine there is no point in arguing with me about this” tone, “That’s not our fax machine, they just rent space here”.

Don’t you love it when you have a problem and nobody will take any responsibility or make the slightest effort to help you out?

Let me underscore: all I needed was two minutes with a fax machine, of which there are dozens if not hundreds within a two square mile radius of my apartment. The fax was going to be sent to a toll free number. Helping to facilitate this would cost someone nothing except a couple of minutes of their time. When I finally track down a public fax machine, it is programmed not to dial any number starting with a 1, even if that number is toll free… and… and… and…

I am just SO AGGRAVATED with this right now.

So I go home and call the people I know with the scanner again and yes, they’re home, so I go over there and scan my I.D. and email it off to my friend, and today I sign online and the first thing I check is this blog page and, oh joy, my comment threads have disappeared again. This always annoys me, because unlike many bloggers, I pay for my comment threads (I was extorted into it by SquawkBox a few summers ago; they let you have comment threads for free for a certain amount of time, and then, if you don’t subscribe, they take them away, along with all the comments people have posted for that free period of time, so I subscribed). And since I’m paying for my comment threads, I am of the opinion that they should ALWAYS BE RIGHT THERE, and fully functional.

Then I check my email, and there is an email from my friend with ‘phone’ in the subject line, and I sigh with relief and think (because my friend is one of these very rare amazingly competent people and I am always filled with awe regarding her) “okay, at least that’s taken care of”, but, NOOOOOOOOO, it’s not taken care of, she needs to call me about something, because the scan I sent her seems to be cut off on one side. (My friend is amazingly competent, but even she is helpless when dealing with an inept thumb fingered dolt like me, who can’t even scan his I.D. straight.) So now, after planning to stay online for a good long time and do a new blog page, I have to send an acknowledging email and sign off and wait for someone to call me, and there is NOTHING I hate more… well, okay, there are a few things I hate more, but still… than sitting around waiting for someone to call me.

So I sign off and I try to call her, which, since she’s at work, means using a prepaid FON card, and the first time I dial in all the numbers and listen to all the annoying commercials for Wal-mart and then dial in her cell phone number, because her job requires her to leave the office frequently, and I get an error message saying all circuits are busy, try again later, which is just aggravating, so I try it again, dialing the office this time, and someone at her work answers and says she’s out of the office, which I frickin KNEW to start with, so I try AGAIN calling her cell phone and finally get through to her.

All of this, because some idiot in another state decided I needed to FAX them something.

AUUUGGGHHHHHHH…

Playing on the X-Box: Heaven Can Wait, by Meat Loaf

WILD WILD SOUTH

Playing on the X-Box’s random feature as I type: Dr. Music by Blue Oyster Cult.

There’s a lot of stuff in today’s paper that moves me to comment, so let’s just get right onto that:

Florida, o Florida, land of the rising madness. If there’s a better bellwether for the tide of irrationality that our entire civilization always seems on the precipice of plunging headlong into, I don’t know what or where it could be.

Latest lunacy: our esteemed State Legislature has just sent a bill to Governor Jeb that will allow, essentially, anyone who feel threatened by attack anywhere they “have a right to be” to retaliate with deadly force.

Supporters of this bill claim it merely takes Florida’s infamous “castle doctrine” and extends it to any place, public or private, that a gun totin’ law abiding good ol’ boy has “a right to be”. And for those of you who are unsure what the “castle doctrine” is, it essentially means that if you’re in your home and an intruder threatens you, you can use deadly force without first making any attempt to exercise any other option. Under the “castle doctrine”, the much maligned and (by the NRA, anyway) utterly reviled “duty to retreat” is made void.

Once Governor Yippie-Ki-Yay Motherfucker signs this bill into law (as he will, just as fast as his check cashing little fingers can pick up a phone to schedule the photo op), that “duty to retreat”, which is basically spelled out as, every honest citizen’s responsibility to use every reasonable means necessary to avoid danger before resorting to deadly force, will be null and void throughout the state of Florida.

Now, it’s not quite as bad as my admittedly left wing commie symp egghead pinko geek rhetoric is making it seem. You can’t just haul out your Remmy and let daylight through any godless frickin atheist who gives you a dirty look at a convenience store. Hell, you can’t even legally shoot a goddam Gators fan who calls you a goddam ‘Noles fan, although I wouldn’t be surprised if some goddam ‘Noles fan didn’t try to write that into the Legislation, only to have it struck out in committee by some goddam Gators fan. No, before you can legally pull your piece and start throwing lead around like an extra in Deadwood, you have to “believe it is necessary to do so, to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another”.

Still, the rest of the paragraph I pulled that phrase from goes like this: “A person has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so, to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another”

So, okay, let’s try to look at this rationally and fairly:

Throughout our great nation, up until this point, for the most part, it has been a generally understood part of all civil jurisprudence that, when confronted with the threat of bodily harm and/or murder, an honest citizen had the reasonable duty to attempt to take other means prior to responding to said threat with deadly force.

In other words, if a punk with a pistol straight out of a Frank Miller story demands your valuables at gunpoint, and you’ve got a hold out derringer up your sleeve, you would be required by law to… well, I guess you’d be required to stand and deliver, rather than just shoot the bastard. After all, giving up your wallet would seem a reasonable alternative to the use of deadly force, right?

This does seem a tad unreasonable. Why should I give up my hard earned take home pay to some junkie with a Saturday night special, just because the law says his life is worth more than my beer money?

Hmmmm. Well… I don’t know. Is it possible that a human life, even one attached to a creep with a gun trying to redistribute my meager wealth, is worth more than my meager wealth?

Long ago, I used to know a fellow named Jim King. (Not the former President of the Florida Senate, a different Jim King.) Jim was a very charismatic fellow, very nice guy, pretty smart, rather conservative in his outlook. He was, in fact, the only person in the collegiate gaming group I used to hang out with who voted for Reagan twice and George I twice. And Jim used to rail about the fact that, if you happened to walk into your living room one day and you saw a thief climbing out your window with your color TV set on his shoulder, you could not legally shoot the prick in the back. You would, in fact, get charged with murder. (I personally doubt you’d be convicted by most juries, but, well, that’s a different subject.)

The underlying reason for this apparently pernicious and, admittedly, emotionally offensive legal doctrine is the concept that human life is worth more than any property.

This seems to me to also be at least part of the reasoning behind the “duty to retreat”. And, while it does indeed seem horribly repugnant to nearly anyone (especially an action-adventure fiction geek like me) to accept that I should back down and/or off if some creep shoves an automatic weapon under my nose, well, maybe there is something valid enough in the notion that human life is worth more than any amount of money that might be in my wallet, that it’s worth writing that essential concept into the legal framework of our civil society.

I say ‘maybe’. Because it’s also possible that sometimes people can take specific actions by which they cheapen their own lives, and most of those actions are, by nature, anti-social. It strikes me that it is possible, and perhaps even feasible, that when someone decides to defy the covenant of laws that defines what is acceptable, and what is not, for the society we all inhabit, then they have, by deliberately stepping outside that framework of law, voluntarily abdicated its protection, as well.

Yet, having said that, it seems worth noting to me that the same conservative culture that is currently in such an uproar over Terri Schiavo’s recent death should then turn around and pass a law like this. Apparently, life is sacred if you’re on a feeding tube in a hospital bed, but not if you’re waving a gun around anywhere in Florida.

But… I don’t know. There may be some sanity in that.

Still, there is more to the idea of a ‘duty to retreat’ than the notion of the sanctity of life, or at least, the idea that any human life is worth more than any chattel someone may possess.

There is also the notion that a reasonable person is obligated to at least look for other options before they start shooting.

This, honestly, is the part that really bothers me about Florida’s ‘castle doctrine’ being extended to any public or private space in which ‘a person has a right to be’.

Look, you break into my house, you’re asking for trouble. The notion that someone in their own ‘castle’ no longer has the burden to try and exercise other reasonable options before defending themselves with deadly force doesn’t trouble me a great deal. It doesn’t strike me as being all that onerous a duty for people to be required to avoid behaving in a threatening manner while they are inside someone else’s home. That simply seems to me to be good manners, and I do not mean to minimize anything with the phrase ‘good manners’. ‘Good manners’ are the foundation of civilization, or at least, one of the primary support pillars.

But the idea that anyone in any place ‘they have a right to be’ no longer has to exercise any sort of prudence or care towards the life of another person, if they are put in a position where they can ‘reasonably’ show threat of grave bodily harm or death… that troubles me.

I mean, it sounds good. You can see why this sailed through our Legislature. Someone pulls a knife on you in a bar, of course you should have the right to defend yourself. Why should you be required to retreat, when you were just sitting there minding your own legitimate business and this other guy suddenly threatens you?

Yet, I can’t help but think of the episode of Deadwood where Wild Bill Hickock pulls his gun first on a would be assassin and shoots him down. The guy was only walking towards Wild Bill; he hadn’t reached for his gun yet. When an onlooker pointed this out, Wild Bill simply responded “He meant me harm”.

Given, you know, that this was in Deadwood, where there was no law, and it was Wild Bill Hickock speaking, nobody gave him any further shit about it. But… well… the notion that you can just shoot someone on the basis that “they meant you harm” troubles me greatly.

And, again, this legislation won’t quite turn Florida into Deadwood. But it does, I think, enormously precipitate and enable lethal response. Given that Florida has no real laws regarding ownership of firearms (I can walk into any pawnshop down here and buy anything I see, if I have the cash), anyone could be walking around with a pistol on them at any given time.

I do not believe, technically, it is legal for a civilian to carry a firearm on their person, concealed or openly, without a permit, and such permits are normally restricted to law enforcement personnel. However, you can legally have one… or a hundred… in your home or licensed vehicle, and you can buy anything you want short of a fully automatic weapon, so there is little to keep someone from walking around with a concealed pistol if they want to… and many, I would gather, want to.

My former boss, a woman who is deeply disturbed on many levels, claims to own many hand guns and says she used to carry one habitually, and the only thing that made her stop bringing one to work with her was that our place of work had a regulation forbidding employees from coming to work packing iron. She used to complain bitterly about that. She did it fairly often, and I honestly don’t think she was kidding. She is an unusual woman in many regards, few of them salubrious, however, in this regard I do not think she is all that unusual for the Deep South. People down here take their right to bear arms very seriously and very personally.

In that kind of environment, in which access to handguns is already so easy, passing a law which states that one may now respond with deadly force in any place, at any time, as long as one ‘reasonably’ feels threatened with grave bodily harm or death (or feels someone else nearby is so threatened), simply seems a lot like… well, remember those cartoons from the 60s where someone… Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam, Wile E. Coyote, someone… would tunnel into some dark place, light a match to see where they were, and for one horrified second, they would realize they had come up inside a room full of gunpowder and dynamite?

BOOM.

That’s what this feels like to me.

I don’t know. The supporters of this bill seem to feel it will empower an embattled decent law abiding citizenry to take back their streets from the seedy depraved criminal element that has increasingly threatened our American Way of Life. Governor Shoot First And Let God Sort Em Out himself describes this legislation as “a good, common-sense, anti-crime issue”.

Maybe it is. Maybe we good decent law abiding citizens SHOULD be able to blow holes in perps big enough to watch television through, the very second they piss us off. Maybe that will have an overwhelmingly positive social impact, and violent crime will cease to exist, and nobody will want to have sex outside marriage any more, and people will voluntarily give up abortion and crack cocaine, and all Gods chillun got shoes.

I’m thinking, though, that the first couple of times good decent law abiding citizens exercise their ‘castle doctrine’ rights in a crowded public place where they have ‘a right to be’, someone besides the perpetrator they are aiming at is going to get hit by a few stray bullets. And when that happens, I guarantee you, the world being what it is, one of the people hit by those stray bullets is going to be a kid, or a pregnant woman, or some terrified senior citizen cowering behind the sno-cone machine.

At which point, suddenly, every conservative who sponsored this legislation is go into a tailspin trying to deny they had anything to do with it.

Playing on the X-Box right now (just finishing up, in fact): Layla, by Derek and the Dominoes. And just starting, the live version of Landslide, by Fleetwood Mac.

BETTER DEAD THAN RED

According to an editorial I just read by someone named Dale McFeatters, parents sending their kids to Daniels Farm Elementary School in Trumbull, CT have sent an unequivocal message to educators there: no more red ink. Red ink on their kids’ school papers, they said, was “stressful”. So teachers at Daniels Farm Elementary School are now prohibited from grading papers in red ink.

Daniels Farm apparently isn’t alone; many educators have decided that red is so “universally symbolic of negativity” that many teachers and administrators will no longer use the color.

One principal has apparently asked teachers to mark papers with ‘pleasant feeling tones’, and the preferred ‘pleasant feeling tone’ is, it seems, purple.

I guess if I had any money, I’d go out and buy stock in purple ink.

I know I’m hopelessly old fashioned in many ways, but it seems to me that the easiest way to avoid, or at least, minimize, ‘stressful’ colors on your school assignments is fairly simple: study harder, and don’t make as many mistakes.

So, twenty or thirty years from now, one assumes educators will be switching to green ink for grading papers, when purple becomes the new red?

Playing on the X-Box: Peaceful Easy Feeling by the Eagles

QUICK STUFF

* * * I’m sick of hearing about the frickin’ Pope. If he was so great, why didn’t God let him live forever? Put him in the ground and shut up about it.

On the Box: Here Comes The Rain Again by the Eurhythmics

* * * Here in Florida, we are also about to pass legislation making it illegal to drive in the left lane at or below the speed limit. You can only use the left lane to pass. Since I don’t drive, I don’t care, but apparently people are upset about this, because they think they should be able to drive in the left lane whenever the hell they feel like it, for as long as they feel like it, at any speed that strikes them as cool. I’m thinking these people should all move to England, but then they’d just want to drive in the right lane. You just can’t please some folks.

Now up on the X-Box: Wonderful by Everclear

* * * Ming Kuang Chen, a deliveryman for a New York City Chinese food place, was trapped in an elevator in a high rise he was taking an order to for 3 days. As two different deliverymen for Chinese food places have been murdered in the past five years, the cops searched that building and nearby buildings assiduously with cadaver dogs when Ming’s co workers reported him missing. However, they didn’t find Ming because he was in an express elevator that had stopped between the 3rd and 4th floors of the high rise due to mechanical failure. Nobody thought to check that elevator, which normally skips all floors between the 2nd and the 21st. The elevator’s intercom worked, and Ming frequently called residents of the building for help, but as he doesn’t speak English, none of them could understand him.

If there’s a moral to the story, it might be “hey, if you’re going live and work in a foreign country, learn the damn language, or at least, learn how to say ‘help me for God’s sake help me I am trapped in your elevator’.

Or, it could equally be, “stay out of elevators when at all possible”. I used to work for a guy named Jerry Rieder up in Syracuse who owned and operated his own elevator installation and repair company, and ever since then, I will walk up three flights of stairs before I will get into an elevator. They don’t break down often, but when they do, if you’re inside you’d better have packed a lunch, because even if someone finds out about the breakdown and reports it promptly, you’re there for the day.

Now playing: Daisy Jane by America

* * * Attorney General and International Torture-meister Alberto Gonzales has told Congress he is willing to discuss some modifications of the USA PATRIOT Act, but still, he urges the renewal of all 15 of the major provisions that are due to expire next year.

Gonzales states that the Justice Department had taken too long to report back to Congress on just how they were abus… er… implementing the PATRIOT Act’s provisions, and he solemnly promised that in future he would “treat those who express concerns about the PATRIOT Act with respect and listen to their concerns with an open mind”.

The media has not reported as to whether or not Senator John Blutarski of Faber University was coughing into his hand in a manner that sounded suspiciously like “bullshit” during this statement.

Now playing: Drinkin’ In L.A. by Van Bram 2000

* * * Brand spankin’ new Education Secretary Margaret Spellings announced big changes to the No Child Left Behind initiative today. “From now on,” Spellings advises, “we will refer to the policy as the Okay, So A Couple Of Kids Here And There Get Left Behind, What Do You Want From Us initiative.”

Okay, more seriously, she stated that from now on, the Feds will give preferential treatment to states that demonstrate they are serious about raising achievement. Anyone who thinks this is code for, any states that immediately implement voucher programs allowing parents to send their kids to expensive Christian private schools, go to the head of the class.

Now playing on the Box: Bohemian Rhapsody, and you know who THAT one is by, I’m sure

* * * In what has to be the most disgustingly stupid thing I’ve seen in the paper since… I don’t know, yesterday, anyway… Bobby Schindler, Terri Schiavo’s brother who apparently can’t get enough of seeing his name in newsprint, held up a Purple Heart at a memorial service for Terri yesterday. The medal, he stated, while choking on his own tears, had been sent to his family by a Vietnam war veteran, who indicated in his cover letter that as Schiavo was killed by enemies of the United States, she deserved the award.

This staggeringly ignorant spew of utter horseshit was greeted with a standing ovation as apparently not one single frickin slopebrowed slackjawed mouth breathing functional retardate in the church bothered to reflect on a couple of things:

First, you get a Purple Heart for being wounded in combat. Leaving aside entirely the toxic, moronic and completely libelous assertion that Terri Schiavo was killed by anyone, much less “enemies of the United States”, she certainly wasn’t wounded in combat. The idea that a woman with irreversible brain damage caused by oxygen denial after catastrophic heart failure somehow merits any kind of military medal at all, much less a frickin Purple Heart, is abysmal staggering stupidity of a sort that, if there was a loving God in heaven, would move Him or Her to implementing an immediate meteor strike on anyone making such a statement, and anyone else applauding it.

Second, there are a great many veterans in the world who have Purple Hearts, and quite a few more who deserve them and didn’t get them, and every single one of them should be gravely insulted by the idea that Teri Schiavo is being awarded one post-humously.

Up on the X-Box at the moment: Mr. Ju Ju Man by Dave Edmunds

* * * Finally, just to show us all that Robert A. Heinlein knew what he was doing when he called this particular time period “The Crazy Years” on his Future History chart, we have the second marriage of Prince Charles to his long time commoner girlfriend nearly causing riots in Britain, Britney Spears getting her own reality show not causing riots anywhere, and an American Idol recording a musical tribute to young unwed mothers that shows every sign of becoming a cultural watermark. “Cuz nowadays it’s like a badge of honor – to be a baby mama” Fantasia Barrino insists, and… and… well, that’s all just crazy, and I’m going to leave it at that.

Now playing: In The Mood by the Glenn Miller Band, which seems almost blackly appropriate.

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.