Ahhhh. I’m making friends and influencing people again.

As always, my half life of welcome on a new blog seems to be about 24 hours. I’ve been posting to Electrolite, Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s blog, for about two days now, and in the latest two comment threads, I find that Patrick himself has bitch slapped me around rather gratuitously, for making sweeping generalizations I don’t back up adequately for his tastes, and for stating that I think anyone with a Bush bumper sticker is either stupid or obtusely ignorant.

On the first, Patrick had posted a blog entry in which he basically stated that while Americans give themselves airs as being cocky and independent and resistant to conformity and authority, in fact, our media and our press and our populace in general are more cowed by officialdom than anywhere else in the world. I responded by stating that humans are, for the most part, herd dwellers, and while Americans do tend to think they’re different than every other human tribe in this regard, we aren’t, and we should stop thinking so. Largely, I agreed with him and offered my own observations as to why what he said was true. In return, he bitch slapped me around for making a scientific sounding general statement that I did not adequately back up with examples, and that was, therefore, meaningless.

On the second, out of a several hundred word post to one of his message threads, Patrick pulled fifteen words of mine and proceeded to eviscerate me for them. That he took me out of context goes without saying, especially when one notes that in fact, the fifteen words he pulled were the first half of a sentence; the rest of the sentence substantially modified the first half. And, of course, the remainder of the post explained, supported, and clarified my statement in ways his own sneering response simply didn’t address.

This is something that extremely well educated (not necessarily extremely intelligent) people do. It’s one of the major tactics in the Intellectual Bitch Slap game: find a few controversial words in a lengthy discussion of a complex issue, isolate them, and attack the person who wrote them based entirely on those words and those words alone.

I had had hopes that Patrick wasn’t the sort of person who would do this, although my very first post to the blog was given exactly this kind of out of context rhubarbing by a couple of his regular readers.

What I suspect happened is Patrick did indeed follow my posted links to my fiction page, found this blog, read what I wrote yesterday about hanging around on his blog in hopes of leading him to my fiction without seeming obvious about it… and now he’s annoyed with me for being such a manipulative prick, and rather than come out and say so, he’s simply going to stick sly intellectual knives in everything I post to his blog until I go away.

I will, probably, give up and go away fairly soon, giving him what he wants. I haven’t honestly enjoyed much of the discourse on Patrick’s blog. Most people there are liberals, like me, which you’d think would be a good thing. Most of them are smarter than I am, which you’d also think would be a good thing. The discourse level there is high, and I’m clearly way out of my league and have little ‘game’ on that level… which, again, you’d think would sharpen me up nicely.

However, this level of political discourse honestly bores me, which is why I stopped even trying to do it on my first blog long long ago. There is no objective truth in any social continuum, and politics is the most social continuum of all of them. In an absence of objective truth, what you end up with is people competing to see which of them can make their own subjective opinions seem the most persuasive and convincing, and they will do pretty much anything to accomplish this… including smacking the hell out of someone using the unfair rhetorical tricks I’ve already outlined here, and much worse.

If one is going to compete to make one’s subjective opinions seem persuasive, I prefer to do it in a field where my subjective opinions are somewhat authoritative. I know little and understand less about actual politics… something that I, at least, am willing to admit to; Patrick, a managing editor at a fantasy publishing house, seems to feel that in addition to this he’s a stunningly brilliant social and political analyst as well, and he may well be, and so too may many of his readers with blogs of their own. However, no matter how degreed they are, no matter how many foreign newspapers they read in their original languages, no matter how often they watch the news shows on a hundred and fifty different cable channels, and no matter how glibly they throw around the names of the various top American and international political journalists, Bush and Clinton cabinet members and top appointees, and whatever the hell all else they sprinkle into their erudite little blog posts to make themselves look really really smart, the simple fact is this: there is still no objective truth in the continuum they profess expertise in, and ultimately, they don’t know any more than I do, or you do.

On the other hand, my blog is all about me and what interests me, and while that may be shallow and pointless and futile and ultimately quite stupid, at the very least, I can claim to be an absolute authority on those two subjects. There may not be much objective truth about me and the things that interest me, but at least I can talk about those things without looking like a complete idiot more than half the time. Over on Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s blog, apparently, I cannot talk about anything without looking like a complete idiot all the time… and if that weren’t true by itself, it certainly will be with PNH doing his best to ridicule everything I post there.

I’m not quite done with him yet. I’m simply saying, my tentative, and entirely self serving, venture back into political analysis isn’t anything I’d have chosen to do simply for fun, and, well, I’m not having any. Being rudely bitchslapped by someone I’d expected better of… well, I get that EVERY time I start posting regularly on someone else’s blog. I don’t know why it surprised me here… I guess I was just hoping for better.

Well, of course I was, I was hoping this guy would be cool enough to buy one or two of my novels, eventually. But so far, Cool Has Not Been In Evidence.

I also broke down and sent a note whining for Information, Please to my Australian editor, asking him what is going on with the Jeff Webb art book I put together for him a few weeks ago (and have heard nothing about since) and how the issue of THRILLING MYSTERIES IN SPACE with the first quarter of Warlord Of Erberos in it is doing. If this works as well as my past interactions with my editors has, this guy will now sever all contact with me forever for being such an asshole as to send him an email after two weeks of total silence regarding, you know, him making money off my work. Editors tend to be arrogant, and God knows I know this, but I keep forgetting it. Still, we’ll see if he answers me, and if he does, what he says. Maybe things will work out.

If you go out to this link, you’ll find that S.M. Stirling, one of my favorite authors, now has his own site, where you can find a lot of his work for free, including six sample chapters from his latest hardcover, CONQUISTADOR, and three from his upcoming trilogy, which on the site is entitled DIES THE FIRE, but which S.M. tells me via e-mail has been re-titled THE BEAR LORD (I like the first title better, but what the hell). S.M. has been one of my favorite authors since Karl Wasmuth recommended the Draka novels to me back in the early 1980s. He’s a very prolific author, apparently little known even to mainstream SF fans, and like most prolific authors, not everything he does is as good as it could be. Nonetheless, when I see a new S.M. Stirling book is out, I always stop and check it out, and Conquistador looks to be one of his best… an alternate timeline book with a twist, in that it has to do with the interactions between said alternate timeline and our own world, which is largely unaware of the alternate timeline’s existence. Sort of like a combination of H. Beam Piper’s brilliant PARATIME concept and Stirling’s own Draka, on a more limited scale.

Conquistador is one of a half dozen books my editors at Joe Bob Briggs are supposed to be ordering me readers copies of, but if they don’t get it to me soon, I may break down and buy my own copy. And you can see for yourself if you’d like to do that by going to S.M. site and reading the sample chapters for free. They’re quite good; I strongly recommend it to anyone who likes good SF.

In the non-virtual world, I nearly exhausted myself entirely yesterday (Thursday) walking to an Eckerd’s about four miles from the house in what I’d estimate was high 80s, high humidity weather. There was intermittent shade along the route I picked (up 12th Street to CR 54, up CR 54 to that other major highway that leads out eventually to the super Wal-Mart whose number I can’t recall) but for the most part it was definitely a ‘mad dogs and Englishman’ type of journey. I mostly just wanted to get a feel for how easy it would be to make the trip, since that Eckerd’s (and the Walgreen’s across the street from it) are the closest drugstores to our house, where I could pick up some allergy meds without needing someone to give me a ride.

One drawback to Wal-mart is they don’t have their own generic brands. If you want Claritin, for example, you pay Claritin’s price, which is about a buck a capsule. 20 24 hour tablets, for example, costs 22.99 at Wal-mart. At Eckerd’s, as I’d hoped, they have a generic version of the med for $9.99.

I also picked up a backpack full of other stuff for around the house while I was there, including Minute Rice (the bachelor non-cook’s best friend) which I combined with some Spam I’ve had sitting around since the previous apartment, along with various seasonings I found in Paul’s cupboards, for a very palatable dinner casserole.

Best discovery of the expedition, though… about three miles away (a long, hot three miles, I grant you) is a public pool (quite a nice one, from what I could see). It’s $1.75 admission for adults, and that’s a deal on wheels as far as I’m concerned. I’ll probably be heading back up there tomorrow, whenever I manage to drag myself out of bed. It’s a long haul up there and will be a long haul back, but… a pool! You just can’t beat that for livin’, especially in a hot Florida summer.

Now, I grant you, this particular blog is much much less erudite and politically aware than Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s. But hey, at least I know what the hell I’m talking about, if only because I’m talking about me, and at least I don’t bitch slap my commenters on my chat threads… at least, I don’t think I do. I’m grateful when people comment on this nonsense.

****THIS JUST IN****(4:17 p.m., Friday) As noted, yesterday I sent the following note off to my Australian editor:

Today, I get this:

This is a weekend blog entry, and I know most of you won’t respond to it much if at all, so naturally, I’m dumping a LOT of stuff into this one. Read it, don’t read it, comment, don’t comment… it’s all good.

For all the noise I’ve had lately about people sending me emails, I still have virtually nothing to show for it. But that’s okay, I have all these movies of Paul’s to watch.

THERE AIN’T NO RULES IN A KNIFE FIGHT

Now, you might think that’s the English translation of the Latin motto on Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s blog, but no, no, it’s just my way of leading into a review of one of my all time favorite movies: Extreme Prejudice, featuring one of the greatest casts of interesting looking, long experienced veteran character actors Hollywood has ever fielded in one place at one time, including Nick Nolte, Powers Boothe, Michael Ironsides, Rip Torn, Clancy Brown, and William Forsythe. It also more or less features Maria Conchita Alonso as the mandatory latina love interest and Chick In Peril, but I like the movie just fine in spite of that.

In the summer of 1987, before I met my future girlfriend and his further future wife Kristy, my then-friend Gary Lindstrom and I were out tooling around in his car (Gary always has a nice ride; he’s worked for GM since the early 80s and takes advantage of his employee discount), bored as hell, when we passed a little theater we’d never seen before set at the end of a small outdoor shopping mall. On the marquee was NOW PLAYING: EXTREME PREJUDICE STARRING NICK NOLTE. Gary looked at me and said “Ever heard of it?” I could vaguely recall seeing maybe one late night ad for some such movie, and it had looked for all the world like a low-rent Steven Siegal or Chuck Norris action oater, inexplicably starring the far more talented Nick Nolte instead of either of those two brainless stalwarts.

I shrugged and said “Not much… it’s probably terrible.” And five minutes later, of course, we had our feet up on the seats just ahead of us (we were two of maybe fifteen people in the afternoon matinee) and were watching as what we both fully expected to be nothing much better than an UNDER SIEGE movie, or maybe GOOD GUYS WEAR BLACK, began to flicker across the screen.

If you’ve seen Extreme Prejudice, you already know how startling, and how riveting, and just how plain damn brilliantly attention demanding, the opening of the film is. A teletype starts to chatter out lines of terse, technical sounding, ominous seeming nonsense… militarese regarding somebody or other being reassigned to somebody else’s command temporarily, along with the place name El Paso Texas and the really strange, in that or any other context, words ‘zombie unit’ and ‘werewolf’. We then cut to a group of odd looking fellows arriving at some non-descript, generic looking American airport, each of whom, in only seconds of screentime and a few terse dialogue exchanges, quickly establishes their own very distinct look and characterization. As each character is introduced, we get a flash of their Army military I.D., and quickly teletyped letters across it, telling us that each of them is dead, and that they died in such a way as to make the recovery of identifiable remains impossible. In other words, these guys, whom we’re watching hooking up at some obscure American airport somewhere in the Southwest, are all supposedly dead… but no one has seen their bodies.

Hill throws all this data at you in bullet sized nuggets at a machine gun pace, and expects his audience of modern day larger than life post modern heroic mythology to be able to put this together without Cliff’s notes. Much MUCH later on in the film’s narrative, one of the characters (Major Paul Hackett, portrayed with wonderful icy contempt by that master of understated and ominous villainy, Michael Ironsides) explains briefly to Nick Nolte’s Texas Ranger Jack Benteen that this squadron of men are all legally dead because it helps them get in and out of dangerous places and situations without worrying about paperwork. (He doesn’t mention that it also makes them all completely deniable if they’re ever compromised on a mission, but those of us who cut our teeth on Alistair MacLean novels understand this without having it spelled out.) However, if you haven’t managed to keep up with what’s going on up until that point, you most likely already walked out on the film. I assimilated the various pieces of data tossed at me and was, as Hill expected me to be, immersed in the flow of the film within seconds… and by the time Walter Hill’s directorial credit came up on the screen, I already knew that I was watching something pretty frickin’ amazing.

When, indeed, the name ‘Walter Hill’ appeared briefly, over a bloody setting sun, Gary and I turned to each other, eyes wide, and I spoke for both of us when I said, “Oh, this is going to be good.”

It was one of the more pleasant experiences of my life… walking into a theater simply out of boredom, to watch something that I expected at best to be mediocre and stupid and hopefully fun in some parts, if I resolutely turned my brain off. To discover that I had inadvertently walked in on greatness… greatness I might never have known about without simple random fortuitous luck taking a hand… well, it was astonishing and delightful. Yes, indeed… this was going to be good.

Extreme Prejudice is good, and in fact, it’s more than good; it’s probably the single most perfect example of its post modern deconstructionist sub-genre of political action thrillers ever made. With a cast like the one I’ve already detailed it would be hard to make a mediocre film (hard but not impossible; the Brian Bosworth vehicle Stone Cold has nearly as good a cast of veteran character actors and it still pretty much sucks like an Electolux), and with a still fairly young Walter Hill directing the movie, not too many years after his biggest success (48 Hours), you’d think it was impossible. And in this case, you’d be right, and perhaps the script that was co-written by John Milius (who is either very good or very awful, never anything in between) helped out some. Whatever the case, watching Extreme Prejudice on the big screen that day was an astonishing experience. Hill and his amazingly talented cast catapulted the audience within seconds into a fully realized, immaculately detailed and thickly atmospheric world of government corruption and intrigue, covert military action squads and Mexican drug running, all of it swirling around two old friends… Jack Benteen, Texas Ranger, and Cash Bailey (in an entertainingly over the top performance by Powers Boothe), major player in the Mexican/American dope trade. Old friends now turned enemies, rivals for the love of the same women… and yeah, you’ve seen that story a few million times already, but now, drop a team of elite American covert commando operatives into the middle of it, operating under secret orders that even they themselves don’t fully understand, and suddenly you have a completely unpredictable action thriller exploding in fifteen different directions at once.

At one time, Walter Hill directed absolutely the best fight scenes, especially gun fights, on celluloid, and Extreme Prejudice showcases that capacity to the extreme, with several brilliantly filmed, balls to the walls high velocity ordinance exchanges that will suck your heart out through yoru eye sockets as you watch. But Hill, unlike many other action directors, also understands how to get nuanced characterization out of his actors and can wring three dimensional portrayals from some of the shallowest and most goddam dumb, glib screenplays in the world. Much of the dialogue in Extreme Prejudice is, admittedly, rather wooden… or it would be on paper; in the mouths of Nick Nolte and Rip Torn, however, or Michael Ironsides and Clancy Brown, it becomes memorable and colorful and wonderful to watch and listen to. What would have been a flatly two dimensional, brainless, and completely confusing B list Western/action opera in the hands of a lesser director becomes a remarkable example of post modern deconstructionist anti-heroic mythology. Jack Benteen, Texas Ranger, becomes the only good man in a morass of moral relativism; and it’s characteristic of the twisted mythic landscape portrayed in this film that Cash Bailey, drug pusher and nominal bad guy, spends most of the movie in a white suit, while Jack Benteen, a larger than life Good Guy, wears a black Texas Ranger uniform from start to finish.

Extreme Prejudice is not an easy film to keep track of (and it nearly grinds to a screeching halt every time Maria Conchita Alonso is on screen over emoting), with its various sub-plots flying every which way like bullets from an out of control machine gun, or perhaps shrapnel from an exploding grenade would be a better analogy. However, it’s easily one of the finest films of its kind ever made, however obscure it may be, and I think it represents the best performance of everyone involved in it. After this movie, Walter Hill’s stock continued to decline (although I believe he still had one good movie, the equally underrated and little known Johnny Handsome, in him at that point), and the rest of the cast has continued simply to be solid character actors whose work, while steady, has been little recognized by various awards committees over the years. Nonetheless, I absolutely love this movie, and I strongly recommend it to anyone out there who hasn’t seen it (although not to my brother Paul, who falls off a movie’s enjoyment train at the first unexpected plot twist; this movie, which throws an enormous amount of necessary information at its audience in high velocity text and visual bytes in its opening ten minutes, expecting the audience to soak it up, make connections, and figure out what’s going on without slow and careful expository dialogue, would baffle and infuriate Paul utterly within seconds of its beginning).

If you’re wondering why I just decided to write this film up, it’s because last night around 9:30, Paul’s friend Kyle showed up, just as I was about to turn the lights out and go to bed. Paul was still at work until at least 11, so to keep myself awake and give me and Kyle something to do, I tossed this film in the DVD player out front. Kyle didn’t seem to get much out of it, but, well, that’s the modern generation for you… if the storyline is even slightly more complex than The Matrix, they simply can’t be troubled to try and follow it.

SIMS ON FILM

A week or so ago, for a brief period, Paul got into a game called The Sims. If you’ve played The Sims, you need no introduction, but for those who haven’t, this is a game in which you basically act as, if not God, then some sort of guiding spirit, to a virtual reality person who lives in a virtual reality world. You take this little slacker from about their late teens, at the point where they are getting ready to get their first job, on through various stages in their life, attempting to set them up as well as possible with a good job, helpful friends, a babe for a girlfriend, a nice place to live, etc. etc.

It’s trickier than it looks, because your Sim guy has a mind of his own and often will ignore your instructions. Maddeningly, he will also not do stuff you’d think anyone the age of 18 would have long since mastered if you aren’t careful to keep on top of him about it, which is to say, if you don’t keep an eye on his Fatigue levels and get him to bed for several hours of sleep when he needs it, he’ll keep going until he simply crashes to the ground unconscious wherever he happens to be standing at the moment. And, well, if you don’t keep an eye on his Bladder levels, well, I’ll just leave the repercussions of that to your imagination, while saying they really aren’t pleasant to watch or vicariously experience.

Apparently, there is a whole sub-cult of Sims players out there who like to simply make their Sim as miserable as they possibly can out of some mean-spirited, vicarious power trip. From what I’ve heard, these guys compete to see who can get their Sim to commit suicide the most quickly. (Actually, Sims aren’t programmed to commit suicide, but if they get unhappy enough and stay that way long enough, they simply die.) This strikes me as being pretty much a 21st Century version of pet torture, and I wonder if some mid 21st Century FBI (or Homeland Security Investigation) handbook isn’t going to note ‘SIMS torture’ as one of the childhood markers for sociopathy.

I was thinking that, given that Hollywood is looking for pretty much any popular media property it can turn into a film, and since The Sims is a popular game, and Hollywood has done many successful game adaptations, this one would be a natural. Now, the angle you’d expect a Hollywood treatment to take would be for either (a) a ‘real’ person from our world to get sucked into The Sims world and end up trying desperately to communicate back to his controller/player (probably his best friend/roommate) that he’s in there, with whacky results, or (b) for a virtual reality person from The Sims to somehow appear in The Real World, and spend the movie trying to get back to the relative safety of his own world, with whacky results.

I, however, would like to see a more existential tact taken. I think it would be wonderful if a VR character from the Sims world were to discover the nature of his ‘reality’ and were to somehow get into communication with his ‘player’, letting the ‘player’ know that while these entities may indeed be artificial and live only in virtual reality, they are, nonetheless, real and valid and self aware, and the people playing ‘The Sims’ in our world are wreaking utter havoc in theirs… especially these psycho ‘SIMS torturers’, whose activities are reflected in the SIMS world by a growing wave of inexplicable suicides that is destroying the fabric of SIMS society. The result could be a sort of modern day “Horton Hears A Who”, in which the hapless hero would be faced with the moral duty of communicating to the entire gaming community that “The SIMS are real!”… and trying to get people to voluntarily stop playing the game, allowing the poor little VR folks to pursue their own destinies (which hopefully would include a social program towards effective toilet training) without the interference of random and whimsical otherdimensional entities from on high.

Or, you could throw in some plot device mechanism or program that the SIMS hero, and the real world hero, have come up with together that, if programmed into the next SIMS module, will effectively make the SIMS world its own independent universe once enough copies of the module are activated and played. The major thrust of the film would then be the two heroes’ attempts to infiltrate the gaming company and upload their ‘virus’ into the new module software, in order to free The SIMS once and for all.

And, hey, if our real world hero was male, and the SIMS protagonist was that hot redhead everyone wants to get into the hot tub with, you could have a doomed romance thing going on there, too… although most likely, in the end, just as the SIMS universe is about to be walled off from our ‘real world’ forever, the real world hero would somehow dive into a digitizer and wind up sitting in the hot tub with the babe. Yes… I’m sure that would have to be the happy ending of THE SIMS ON FILM.

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.

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:

If there is a 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.