Monday, October 11, 2004

And cursed be he who first cries ‘hold, enough!’

I owe a few people fairly lengthy emails. They know who they are. My creative energy for today, however, is going to go into this blog entry, so they’ll just have to wait.

I’m online as I type this. I don’t need to be, but it keeps irritating telemarketers from making my phone ring, and utterly eliminates the chance that anyone from work might call me up and ruin my day. Not that this has ever happened, but my boss makes everyone on our particular team fill out a form providing our home phone numbers, in case she needs to call us for any reason, so, it’s a possibility, especially on Mondays. Mondays are ‘black out’ days where I work, meaning no one has them as scheduled days off, and no one is ever given a Monday off for any reason if they request it… making me probably the only person who works for my company who has Monday as a regular day off. So… I’m staying online most of the day, or at least, until after 4:30 or so, when my boss should be out of the office and I should be safe again.

All right. We’re externalizing today, not talking about my personal opinions of my co-workers (some of whom may be reading this blog right now) or the idiotic little cyber-fight I’m having with one of my ex girlfriends.

Before I move on to stuff like comic strips and the Bucs, however, let me congratulate my old friend Monica, who, after making heroics efforts at keeping her marriage to an utter dick together over the summer, has finally decided to ditch the bitch. Given his recent email to me, in which he tells me he blames me primarily for the break up of his marriage (yeah, dude, I’m the guy who keeps dissing your wife in front of your kids, uh huh, that was me, every time), I am no longer urging Monica to keep giving him just one more chance, since he is the father of her kids and they have been together for 17 years. At this point, I’m just saying, ‘you go, girl… as soon as possible’.

Monica foolishly blames herself for her not-soon-enough-to-be-ex’s excessive behavior towards me, and she shouldn’t. He’s a big boy, he logged online and typed me a hostile, childish, immature, vituperative, threatening email all by himself. He’s a creep, and she can’t dump his ass fast enough, and Monica, his actions are not your responsibility.

I typed that I was staying online to avoid phone distractions, and suddenly I am being barraged by automatic pop up messages from people who want me to go look at their ‘free’ web cams. There is a God, and S/He/It is omniscient… and has a very childish sense of humor.

Passing the Buc

Everyone around here with a keyboard has already done the ‘the Bucs were expecting salvation from the son of a Super Bowl winning quarterback… just not THIS one’ bit to death, so I won’t go there. Yeah, Brian Griese came off the bench and did a pretty good job of being the Super Bowl Brad Johnson after the Super Bowl Brad Johnson had clearly left the building, once Chris Simms went down under a brutal hit that ended up spraining his shoulder (the defensive tackle who made the late hit was penalized and fined for unnecessary roughness, so you know it wasn’t exactly a regulation NFL love tap). Yes, Michaels Pittman and Clayton have been playing spectacularly well… well enough that those idiots on the Fox Sports Team need to get their heads out of their asses and stop whining about how it doesn’t matter who the Bucs put in as quarterback when ‘he has no weapons’ to give the ball to. And yes, our defense showed a flash of the playing style that used to terrify the NFL’s best offenses into mumbling, stuttering paralysis.

I come not to praise the Bucs, however, but to beat them with a shovel. If anyone out there thinks this particular victory means a whole lot, they are looking at the world through rose-colored manhole covers.

The New Orleans Saints are very nearly the worst football team playing in the NFL this season. Playing against the Bucs yesterday, they did not look anywhere near as terminally mediocre as they were.

They made a lot of first downs.

They came back from a 13 point deficit to within a field goal of sending the game into overtime… and overtime is a place as hostile to the Bucs as downtown Baghdad is to anyone with a US flag on their shoulder.

A nowhere near the top of his game Deuce McAllister ran all over the Bucs, picking up nearly all of his 100+ game yardage going right up Tampa Bay’s middle.

The papers today congratulate our defense on holding Saints QB Aaron Brooks to ‘only 104 passing yards’.

Our defense did have two big plays, Greg Spires’ stripping the ball from McAllister as he tried one of his rare end-arounds (which probably would have gone for at least 20 yards if Spires hadn’t spryly punched the ball out from underneath McAllister’s casually-crooked elbow), which let Rhonde Barber pick it up and run it 18 yards into the end zone, and Brian Kelly shutting down a late drive with a key interception.

I hesitate to call those plays ‘flukes’ because there wasn’t much luck involved in either of them. Spires made a beautiful play, using skills he has trained to develop on top of a natural athleticism I couldn’t match if I worked out for the next twenty years. Barber got a bit lucky being in a position to make the touchdown, but the Bucs train to be aware of the ball and to run to it, and Barber has recovered enough fumbles and run them in for touchdowns that you can’t just dismiss it by sneering ‘he got lucky’. The Bucs, more or less, earned that touchdown.

Kelly’s interception was hard work on his part, too; the product of effort and training, not simple luck. He waited on the route, popped up at the last minute, and literally stole the ball off the fingertips of a bewildered Saints’ receiver. That isn’t luck; that’s talent and skill and discipline.

Nonetheless, I watched every minute of yesterday’s game, and I cannot help but feel that had either the Saints or the Bucs played against a truly good team yesterday… say, the Philadephia Eagles… either of them would have looked like inept stumble-bums.

Griese’s offense did look good, but I have to wonder how much of that was the Saints’ mediocre pass rush, and how good Griese would have looked if he’d made his debut against, say, the Oakland Raiders two weeks ago, or Denver last week. I have a feeling he’d have eaten a whole lot more turf had he been up against a more motivated, talented, disciplined, and fiercely competitive team.

Griese’s connection to Ken Dilger for very nearly the only offensive touchdown the Bucs have generated so far this season (or for much of last season) was a lovely thing… and yet, at the same point, as I watched the aging, often over looked, generally sure handed but sure as hell not by any stretch of the imagination fast Ken Dilger lumber like a rowboat in choppy swell towards the end zone, I could not help but wonder just how quickly he would have been cut down if the Saints’ had had anyone reasonably quick at safety. It’s hard to imagine the Bucs getting that touchdown against the Carolina Panthers.

It is all, at this point, just speculation. The Bucs won, finally, and thank whatever power you give it up to for it. I’m happy and relieved (although I’d be happier and more relieved if the Bills had managed to hold off the Jets in the last four minutes yesterday, but leave that aside).

I’m merely pointing out that the Bucs won against probably the worst team they have faced on their schedule to date, they did not win by much, the upcoming star quarterback that we all were really hoping would do something for us got hurt… and next week, the Bucs play the St. Louis Rams on Monday Night Football… and the Rams just pulled a last minute victory over the eyes of the all but invincible Seattle Seahawks.

When the Bucs win two games in a row (something they did not manage to do all last season), I will allow myself to feel cautiously hopeful. If they win three, I will be ecstatic. Until then, however, with only this not particularly impressive victory under their belts, I remain wary.

In the meantime, I’m still waiting for the Bills to win one this season…

Oh, and one final note: let’s imagine the Bucs completely turn their season around, go to the play-offs, win the play-offs, and go to the Super Bowl. If that happens, anything is possible; I could wake up any day now and find Lake Bell knocking on my door, soaked to the skin from a cold autumn downpour, all her tires flat, giving me puppy dog eyes and asking if she can please come inside and dry off while her cell phone re-charges.

If all that happens, odds are very good the Bucs will be playing the New England Patriots in that Super Bowl. And in that event, whether Chris Simms starts, or Brian Griese starts, or Brad Johnson starts, or Jon Gruden and Bruce Allen reveal that they have successfully cloned a 26 year old Joe Montana and have been training him arduously in Gruden’s West Coast offense for the last four months before putting HIM in… none of it will matter. The New England Patriots will render whoever the NFC puts up against them this year into gruel, because, well, they are the New England Patriots. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that I like the fuckers, because I don’t, but, well, they are simply unbeatable, invincible, and unassailable, as far as I can see.

Given that, I would much rather they hand a Super Bowl ass whipping to the Philadelphia Eagles, who richly deserve one.

Strippers

Let’s talk about comic strips.

I have a subscription to the St. Petersburg Times, because the in-bred, virulently homophobic, racist, and generally toxically hateful small Southern town I seem to be perpetually trapped in does not have a lot of corner newspaper boxes that one can get a Times out of. There are Tampa Tribune vending boxes every ten feet and three or four of them in front of every business (mostly beauty salons, small restaurants, and a surprising number of pawnshops featuring a not at all surprising array of firearms, in addition to hole in the wall souvenir/knick knack stores that are perpetually going broke due to competition from the Super Wal-Mart just up the road… oh, and quite a few bars, nearly all of which have a depressing amount of Tim McGraw and Travis Tritt on their jukeboxes), and if you think from all this you can quickly determine which of these papers is more liberal, and which more conservative, well, if you’re the sort of person who actually reads this blog without skimming or moving your lips, you are probably entirely correct in your assessment.

I’ll give you one more hint: one of these papers recently ran George Soros’ two page anti-Dubya ad. One of them very ostentatiously didn’t.

However, I’m a narrow minded, pig ignorant, not particularly bright kind of guy, so it will come as no surprise to any of you that I have chosen the newspaper I read every day based not on its political leanings, but on its comic strip selection.

The Trib and the Times have nearly equal comics pages, it’s true. For a long time, the Trib did not carry Foxtrot, which forced me to read the Times. Last year, however, or maybe the year before (I’m old; time slips by me like a high velocity hail of machine gun bullets, and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, then it’s going to start doing the same thing to you, too, you young punk, in a couple more years, so shut up), the Trib picked up Foxtrot, so that was okay.

Despite being right-leaning, the Trib, it must be admitted, has a lot more ‘fun’ features than the rather stodgier, more adult Times. The Trib has a pop culture column by a fairly funny guy named Kevin Walker who doesn’t pay anywhere near enough attention to my brilliance as he should, but, well, that’s a big boat with several billion people in it, so I forgive Kevin and if the Trib’s comics pages were as good as the Times’ comics pages, I’d read Walker’s column more often, and enjoy it (except when he’s writing about the crappy non-SF novels he reads, or the crappy non-me approved music he listens to, I mean).

The Trib faithfully covers every salacious jot and tittle in the Debra Beasley LaFave story, while the Times is generally aloof.

The Trib has several humor columnists I like, while the Times regular columnists tend to address local issues rather more seriously and even pompously (although Howard Troxler is one helluva good and entertaining writer on these things).

Yet the Times is now carrying The Boondocks, and one cannot imagine the relentlessly conservative Trib ever giving that particularly virulently non-politically correct, and worse, non-politically correct in a relentlessly minority report sort of way, comic strip house room.

Plus, a buddy of mine, Chris Goffard, writes for the Times, but that has nothing to do with this article.

On comic strips, then:

The Times carries the following comic strips:

Family Circus
For Better Or For Worse
Bizarro
Zits
Garfield
Get Fuzzy
Marvin
Pickles
Foxtrot
Curtis
Rose Is Rose
Pearls Before Swine
Sally Forth
Blondie
Mother Goose & Grimm
Baby Blues
Non Sequitur
Dilbert
Marmaduke
Doonesbury
Dennis The Menace
LuAnn
The Boondocks
Cathy
Shoe
Hagar the Horrible
Classic Peanuts
Hi & Lois

Unlike the Trib, the Times also does not indulge in the truly exasperating habit of taking some of their most popular comic strips and putting them in otherwise poorly perused sections of the paper. When I used to read the Trib every day while working at the Tampa City Clerk’s office (because it was always on the break table at the back of the room), I always had to remind myself to turn to the business section and read Dilbert. This reminds me of one of the local Buffalo papers where I grew up, that used to insist on running Tank McNamara on the inside of the sports section. This kind of thing really aggravates me; it’s hard enough to find the damned comics section in most newspapers, since newspaper editors deliberately try to make it difficult to locate in hopes that people will see something else that interests them while they search for the comics. Once you manage to locate it, ALL the damn comics strips should be THERE, not somewhere else. This isn’t an Easter egg hunt, people.

Anyway, the Trib, by contrast to the Times, runs the following strips (and I am only going to list the differences from the previous list):

Buckles
Jump Start
Arlo and Janis
Beetle Bailey
Herman
The Wizard of Id

Now, there is absolutely nothing on that list of comic strips that would compel me to read the Trib over the Times, and honestly, if by avoiding the Trib comics section entirely I can eliminate the chance of even accidental exposure to so much as one word balloon of any random Buckles, Jump Start, or Beetle Bailey installment, that in and of itself would justify the choice.

Still, that’s not fair. The Times comics section has plenty of pupil-searingly “god I wish my brain could vomit before that panel lodges itself irretrievably into my long term memory” comic strips itself, that I have had to learn to very carefully and warily sidle my eyes around as I traverse down the comics page daily. Probably leading this pack is the insanely, horrifically colonic-spasm inducing Cathy, which is one of the leading examples we have of why any sane culture needs a law to ban the continuing publication in a daily newspaper of comic strips that are entirely in reprint. Once a grotesque and abominable visual and conceptual blight like Cathy ceases original production, we should never be subjected to its mind-numbing terrors again. (Any such law, of course, would have to have a Calvin & Hobbes exception written into it, but I think that’s understood by everyone… everyone I ever want to sit down at a break room table with, anyway.)

Most of the comic strips I don’t read simply fall into the “in the name of GOD, whatever you do, DON’T… OFFEND… ANYONE!!!!” category. Such comic strips are, to me, a complete waste of space, time, and ink, since humor can’t really work unless it offends someone. But most of any widely read newspaper’s comics section will be taken up by such visual fodder; not only do they not offend anyone, but they appeal to the vast majority of people in the world who have no actual sense of humor, but who like to be reassured that they do. Where truly funny comic strips simply bewilder these people, they can nod and guffaw (gently) at the pleasant, family values oriented antics of Jeffy in The Family Circus, or beam and say “Oh, that’s just SO right!” when they read a particularly pertinent to their experiences (if not even remotely humorous) observation in Baby Blues.

(My personal opinion, which is worth exactly as much as yours, if not a tiny bit more because I may be smarter than you, is that anyone who buys a collection of Family Circus and/or Baby Blues, and/or Marvin comic strips, is someone who is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Moreover, I also happen to feel that selecting such a collection off a bookstore shelf, carrying it up to the cash register, and actually paying for such witless wastes of murdered plant-life should be grounds for universal disenfranchisement… but, as an ex-girlfriend recently noted, I am annoying. Let’s move on.)

So, I read the Times instead of the Trib, mostly because of the comics section (and also, perversely, because it’s more difficult to get hold of it out here in Lets Lynch Us A Liberal, Florida… population 20,000+, saaaa-LUTE!). And I’ve already mentioned that the primary mover in that decision at the moment is Aaron McGruder’s often hilarious, but always controversial The Boondocks. So let’s take a look at the half dozen or so comic strips I read regularly, and examine exactly why I like them:

For Better Or For Worse - I’m a sucker for romance sub-plots, and I started reading this low key, soft boiled family oriented comic strip about the not particularly exciting lives of a run of the mill Canadian family a few years back now, when one of the characters was involved in breaking up with her really good looking, absolutely worthless live-in boyfriend.

I kept reading it for two reasons: first, it’s beautifully drawn, and that is a relative rarity in modern day comic strips. (And that is a common element we will come back to in most of the comic strips I read regularly, as well.)

Second, for all that it’s a family values comic strip, and one that subtly celebrates decent, PTA type middle class living, the values that make up this strip aren’t rabidly conservative. Church is rarely mentioned. Young lovers co-habitate frequently without the benefit of the clergy. The strip is never overtly funny, but it’s always engaging, and once you read about these characters for a few weeks, you find yourself genuinely beginning to care about them.

Lynn Johnston’s artwork is superb, in a very subtle fashion. She can literally draw anyone doing anything with anything else, a skill that cannot be overestimated (and is often underestimated) in a visual art form. She can draw people so that each of them are utterly distinct, she can draw clothing, she can draw animals, she can draw artifacts, and all of them are not only immediately recognizable, but they are attractive to look at, too. Her very low key storytelling requires a remarkable ability to both direct the reader’s eye and maintain the reader’s interest in a strip which never shows any skin, or violence, or, really, anything at all salacious or spectacular.

Johnston is equally deft with her word balloons. You can palpably see her characters grow and change over the course of several years reading the strip, and since the strip happens in real time and her characters do visibly age, this is important. Very few cartoonists… in fact, I’m not sure I can think of any others, at this point… would take on this kind of challenge. Most cartoon characters live in an imaginary bubble where time never passes (the Family Circus hasn’t aged a microsecond in 40 years, nor has the nearly identically boring clan of Hi & Lois) and while Johnston’s work doesn’t leap out at the eye, it’s remarkably rewarding to follow over the long term.

Bizarro - about the closest thing we have to The Far Side these days. This doesn’t often even come remotely close to the standards of Gary Larsen for humor, but the art is always better.

Garfield - I read this because sometimes it’s surprisingly funny, and the artwork is decent, if largely repetitive and uninspired. Sad to say, Garfield is still consistently more funny than it’s ‘edgier’ rip off

Get Fuzzy - which I also read. Pretty much every character in Garfield has been cloned, only darker and somewhat nastier, for this not even remotely original strip. The artwork is lovely, and occasionally this strip is pretty hilarious. More often than not, though, I simply find myself wondering why the Jon-clone in this strip doesn’t beat the Garfield-clone to pieces with a baseball bat. Garfield the Cat is obnoxious but in some odd way lovable; Bucky, on the other hand, is vile and should be harpooned to death at the earliest opportunity.

Foxtrot - one of the exceptions to my rule of generally only reading comic strips that have good art. Foxtrot has frankly horrible art; I often have a hard time telling one character from another, and the various ‘schticks’ that each character has assigned to them (mom is a vegan health food nut, dad is basically clueless, the older son is irresponsible, stupid, and eats a lot, the daughter is boy crazy, the youngest son is a budding Heinlein-male supergenius obsessed with everything geeky) can get very tiresome very quickly. Offsetting this, though, is the fact that the strip is genuinely funny most of the time. On a newspaper page loaded down with the likes of Beetle Bailey, Buckles, and Baby Blues, ‘genuinely funny most of the time’ must not be overlooked.

Pearls Before Swine - Stephan Pastis is obviously strongly influenced by a lot of different people with this strip… Trudeau, Breathed, Watterson, Adams, among many others… and all you can say about his artwork is that it’s clear (although I have to admire him for making it a funny animal strip; if he’d created human characters, he’d obviously have as hard a time drawing them distinctly as Bill Amend does on Foxtrot). It took a while for this strip to grow on me, and I think that’s because when it first started out, Pastis was struggling too hard to push people’s buttons and find his own iconoclastic voice. Since then, however, he’s settled down to just trying to make us laugh, and that’s been working a lot better for him.

One particular series of strips from a while back, in which Rat took the strip hostage by threatening to keep reading punchlines from Garfield until Pastis gave into his demands, was really hysterical, although I doubt it made Pastis many friends among newspaper editors or his fellow cartoonists. In general, this strip entertains me whenever I read it.

Sally Forth - I got sucked into this one during some kind of romantic sub-plot last summer, too. I’d always passed it over before, as it rarely seemed to me to be particularly funny, and “Sally Forth” is to me associated nearly primarily with a semi-pornographic strip by Wally Wood back in the late 50s. However, having given it a chance, well, the art is always lovely, and the characters are generally interesting if you give them a chance, and come to think of it, the creators of this strip also seem to be tackling the ‘real time’ thing much the same way Johnston does on “For Better Or For Worse”.

Mother Goose & Grimm and Non Sequitur - I scan both of these every day, and if the strip is one of the relatively rare ones that isn’t about the regular cast of characters, I’ll read it. Both these strips do funny stuff whenever they simply address themselves to some particular aspect of pop culture, or even to illustrating a really atrociously lousy pun. However, whenever their regular characters put in an appearance, they’re an excellent cure for insomnia. Both of them have very strange art styles, as well, that I don’t find particularly pleasant to look at. Still, if they’d just go over permanently to a four-panel ‘Far Side’ type format, I’d read them every day.

Dilbert - despite Tom Tomorrow’s more or less accurate bitching that this strip makes millions off lampooning a toxic corporate environment without ever making the slightest attempt to propose anything better, and despite the fact that the art is just crap, crap, CRAP, and worse, really lazy crap that tells you the ‘artist’ can’t be bothered to make more than the bare minimum in effort for the several thousand dollars he must get paid per strip, still, it’s often hilariously funny. I hate to say that, because the institution named Scott Adams is clearly part of the problem, not part of the solution. Nonetheless, it’s a funny strip, and I read it.

Doonesbury - still in there pitching gamely after nearly thirty years, we find this old childhood favorite. Trudeau can still throw political fastballs with the best of them, and, yes, once again, I have to come back and admit that here is another artist who is doing more or less real time development of a long established cast of characters. Well, no… the aging happening to the characters is discernible, but obviously occurring at a vastly slowed rate. Still, few comic strips would show as venerable an icon as D.B. with grey in his hair (or, for that matter, blow his leg off to show us the human cost of having a wanna-be he-man posing as President, with much of the rest of our authority structure validating his delusion) and beyond all that, Trudeau is more often than not really really funny, too. Mad props to the old master, and please, keep ‘em comin’.

LuAnn - again, sucked in quite a while ago by a romantic sub-plot (the geek in the wheelchair getting involved with the bitchy she-geek, neither of whose names I can remember). Still, I stayed because the art is quite good and the characters are interesting. I can’t say I really care all that much, because plots develop at a glacial pace here and cartoonist Greg Evans skips around his annoyingly large cast of characters entirely too much without ever settling anything. If LuAnn disappeared from the paper tomorrow I wouldn’t cry much, but I read it now.

The Boondocks - usually reliably funny, sometimes uproariously hilarious, nearly always thought provoking. I sometimes agree with McGruder’s expressed viewpoint, and often times disagree with it, but the man has a unique voice. The art style takes some getting used to, but you can tell there’s some talent there. The recent “Can A Nigga Get A Job?” series of strips was hysterically funny, although it underscores the troubling reality of America today, where you can only voice certain thoughts if you happen to be a member of a certain ethnicity… had a white cartoonist created those strips, no one would have dared to publish them.

Unfortunately, the “Can A Nigga Get A Job?” series also underscored one of McGruder’s real weaknesses; he comes up with a good idea, and then can’t follow through on it. Most of his effective concepts just kind of peter out somewhere in the middle, just when he seems to get conceptually rolling with it. Still, “The Boondocks” is well drawn, consistently funny, and it is voicing a viewpoint that is unique in the comics pages right now. Nothin’ wrong there.

I should also point out that the Times is currently running the latest Berke Breathed Opus-revival strip on Sundays. I believe this is a Sundays only strip right now; if not, though, I’d like to see the dailies added to the regular comics page. It’s a pity Breathed is such an irrefutable Trudeau rip-off, but at least he steals from the best.

And, lastly, Calvin & Hobbes is one of the miserably few indications we have that a just and loving God may actually exist, Bill Watterson is a brilliant, brilliant man, and any truly enlightened society would have him chained to his drawing board and keep hostages permanently under lock and key to ensure that Watterson continues to produce more, more, more Calvin & Hobbes for a world that desperately needs it.

Or, okay, fine, I guess we could just pay him so much money that he’d have to keep turning the strips out for us. Now there’s something they can hike my taxes for.

RIP

My good friend Monica mentioned to me a while back that my non-good friend Aaron Hawkins had died some time ago. I’ve just checked his former blog, Uppity-Negro.com, and it seems that it’s true.

Monica also said she had seen some mention somewhere that Aaron had committed suicide.

I didn’t like Aaron, and he didn’t like me, either. I felt he treated me horribly and shamefully, for very shabby reasons that reflected quite poorly on him as a human being, when I found his blog and spent a day posting in rapturous delight to it a few years back. I’ve told the story of Aaron’s brutally cold reception to and rejection of me on other blogs of mine back when it happened, so I won’t go into it here… although I also do not subscribe to the notion of being hypocritical towards someone’s failings simply because they have died, especially when they die by their own choice.

Nonetheless, for all Aaron’s miserable failings as a human being (not least of which being that someone with as many genuinely loving friends as he obviously had could be such a creep as to hurt and abandon them all by suicide), I have to give him his props: he was a smart guy, a funny guy, and a guy with a lot to say, who said it, at great length and usually with at least some wit, generally without worrying about the consequences of voicing his opinion.

Aaron and I had a lot of interests in common, and when I found his blog I had hoped he and I could be friends, to the extent that a friendship can flourish on the Internet. Alas, I am not a likable person, and pretty much every time I find a blog where I hope I can be friends with the blogger, I end up being categorically and callously rejected, and I’m not trying to deny that that must be in part (perhaps large part) my own responsibility.

Nonetheless, I do really feel that if so many of Aaron’s female blog-participants hadn’t been so petty and mean to a newcomer, and if Aaron himself hadn’t been so sycophantically devoted to indulging their every whim regardless of how spiteful and childish said whims might be, he and I could indeed have been friends.

Whatever the case, his was a unique voice and the world is diminished by his loss, as I was diminished by his rejection of my overtures of friendship.

Aaron, I hope you’re happier, wherever you are. However, if I should run into you wherever that is someday, I’m going to punch you in the mouth, you little creep.

You have been so advised.

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.