Day three, or thereabouts, of the sore throat from Hell…

If it isn’t one thing, it’s another. A while back, I mentioned having a terribly sore throat, and more or less discovering through direct experimentation that it seemed to be the result of breathing too dry air from the air purifiers I’d gone out and spent a load o’ dough on within a week of moving in with Smoking Paul and his Factory Chimney Posse. I think I mentioned at the time my devout hope that no nasty strep staphococci would have taken the opportunity to move into my throat lining.

That initial sore throat seemed to get better almost immediately when I stopped running the air purifiers, and I had about a day of relief. Then I had another day with a painful lump in my throat that seemed to come from foolishly eating a bag of Fritos Paul brought home from work with him (don’t ask me why the Fritos did that, but they did) which I thought was going to kill me, but which gradually slipped down my throat (I could feel it going) over the course of a day (very unpleasant feeling) and eventually subsided.

So I thought I was finally living large, relatively healthy and without complaint… the Clairitin (or its generic equivalent) seemed to be keeping my allergies at bay, and it looked like I was getting over the throat crap… and then this nasty little bit of sandpaper mouth set in, and it’s been here for three days now with no signs of departure.

Gargling with salt water seems to knock it back for a while, and I’d been hoping it was getting better since it doesn’t bother me much during the day, when I tend to stay well lubricated with soft drinks all day long. (The first day it came on strong I drank orange juice all day, and that only made it worse, so I’ve laid off that, but vanilla Coke, orange Crush, and IBC cream soda seem to work well on alleviating the major symptoms of it during the day.) But at nights it becomes very painful and it seems obvious it’s not going away on its own. So I renewed my request to Pat (Paul’s friend, who has claimed in the past that he can hook me up with pretty much any meds I want due to his mom working in a doctor’s office) for some antibiotics (everyone around here has had bad sore throats lately, so he’d mentioned being able to get some stuff that would sort ANYthing out if either Paul or I needed it) and, naturally, THIS week his mom is on vacation. So it looks like I suffer with sandpaper-cough for the rest of the week, at the very least. Yay.

Paul and I went grocery shopping yesterday. As with nearly anything tedious and domestic, I nearly had to set Paul on fire to get him moving; on his day off, he would happily simply spend 12 or 14 hours more or less comatose on the couch, slumber interspersed with brief bouts of playing a video game or watching some DVD. I’m not being all judgemental; I’ve had days off when all I wanted to do was behave in a generally sloth-like manner, too. However, I’d told him on Friday that we were nearly out of food and HAD to go grocery shopping on Monday, and he’d agreed, and I’m not his goddam maid… if he wants to eat, he can damned well help me shop. So we walked down to the Kash n’ Karry, loaded up $90 worth of stuff, and called a cab to bring us and our haul back again. We should have enough chow now to get us through another two weeks, at least.

In movie news, I’ve watched Tombstone and South Park: The Movie since last I entered on this thing. South Park was pretty much what I expected it to be from everything I’d heard about the show all these years… vulgar and stupid and nonsensical, but, for all that, surprisingly funny. There is actually some real wit and a good eye for social commentary underneath all the scatalogical non-jokes in South Park, and I enjoyed the various layers of obviousness and subtlety in the Christian metaphysical explorations of the film (the whole ‘Kenny goes to hell’ sequence). Obviously, the most hysterically funny bits belong to Satan, a poor, overly sensitive demon king trapped in an abusive sexual relationship with Saddam Hussein (who is, pleasantly, dead, in the South Park universe). If you’ve seen the movie you know what I mean; if you haven’t because you think South Park is just generally stupid and trashy, well… you’re right, but it’s pretty goddam funny, too. You might want to check it out.

Tombstone is, basically, just poorly edited. There’s the makings of an excellent film in that mess somewhere. George Cosmatos is a director who has never much impressed me, but I really can’t be sure if the muddle that is this movie is his fault, since most of the scenes, in isolation, seem to work well enough. It’s simply that there are several scenes that seem to be sequentially confusing. An early scene where Kurt Russell’s Wyatt Earp goes off riding with Dana Delaney’s slutty actress character seems to come out of nowhere and is just perplexing, in that from the dialogue, it would seem to have been meant to take place much later in the movie’s continuity, and then it got jammed in early by default when Cosmatos realized that a romantic interlude just wouldn’t fit anywhere later on in the story arc. To my mind that means the scene should probably have been cut entirely, since the film would have worked pretty much just as well without it; forcing it in where Cosmatos does simply baffles hell out of the viewer… or this viewer, at any rate.

Similarly, a later scene where we cut from a long montage sequence of Earp and his cronies blasting bad guy after bad guy, to the gang of bad guys themselves stopping a stage coach on the way out of town where we discover the slutty actress and her friends are now fleeing from the rampant violence in Tombstone, is also jarring and completely out of place. There’s no build up to the scene at all; one second the good guys are riding all over the countryside gunning down the bad guys; the next second, the bad guys are sitting on their horses beside a road stopping a stage coach, and the slutty actress character, whom we’ve pretty much forgotten about in the last twenty very violent minutes, is weeping as she talks about how the Billy Zane gay actor character (who apparently had something going with Jason Priestley’s equally gay clerk character, but nearly all of that apparently stayed on the cutting room floor, leaving us baffled there, too) tried to defend her from being robbed and got shot, and now he’s dead, and it might have meant something if there had been some build up to the scene, or some kind of context, but as it is, we get nothing and the whole thing is bewildering.

Stuff like this makes you suspect that there was a fairly good B list oat opera shot by Cosmatos there somewhere, and perhaps the Director’s Cut, out on DVD now (that Pat keeps forgetting to bring over for me to check out) restores enough footage to avoid this really badly butchered feel to the film. I’d like to think so, since what there is of the movie usually works reasonably well from one scene to another… Kurt Russell, Sam Elliott, Bill Paxton, and especially Val Kilmer give excellent performances as the Earp Brothers and Doc Holliday, respectively, while Powers Boothe and Michael Biehn and a bunch of crusty character actors I don’t know the names of do equally good jobs playing the villains.

An interesting point is that this film came out at about roughly the same time as Lawrence Kasdan’s much flashier movie Wyatt Earp did. While Kasdan’s movie, starring Kevin Costner in the title role, was a far longer and more tediously lugubrious film than Cosmatos’ version, one thing that the two different cinematic visions have in common is that Doc Holliday nearly steals both movies. In Cosmatos’ film, Val Kilmer plays the consumptive, self loathing gunfighter with soft spoken, utterly chilling understatement, and his twice-stated, rather inexplicable, line, ‘I’m your huckleberry’, as he walks out of the shadows, hand on the pommel of his pistol, to confront a hated adversary, is Tombstone’s most memorable bit of dialogue. In Wyatt Earp, similarly, Dennis Quaid gives the best performance of his career as Doc, pretty much blowing Costner out of the water any time the two of them are on screen together.

Making one last sifting run through Paul’s movie collection, I also pulled out two George Clooney action operas, Out Of Sight and The Peacemaker, and Arlington Road, which I expect to be awful and wouldn’t normally bother with, but both Paul and Pat recommend it highly. (I still don’t expect much from it; Paul and Pat have much MUCH less refined taste in films than I do… but they both like it so much, there has to be something notable in there somewhere.)

Oh, yeah, after watching 12 Monkeys, I got nostalgic for better Gilliam, so I watched Time Bandits again. Either you love Time Bandits or you loathe it; I personally think it’s a gem of a movie, and while various plot details simply make no sense at all, the entire film is so whimsical I, for one, really just can’t care. I enjoyed watching it again (the central sequence where the child hero travels to Ancient Greece and is adopted, briefly, as Agamemnon’s heir is still brilliant and breathtaking) and while I admit to finding the Shelly Duvall/Michael Palin interludes even more annoyingly intrusive now than I used to when I first watched the film, that stuff doesn’t take up much time… and John Cleese’s brief cameo as Robin Hood is simply priceless, as is Ralph Richardson’s penultimate turn as The Supreme Being.

Email has gotten interesting again, with Marie Braden (whom I mentioned in last time’s entry) sending me a nice email about my review of Bradford Wright’s rather idiotic volume Comic Book Nation, (go to my Martian Vision page and look it up if you really want to read it, but you don’t, so there’s no point in me going to the trouble of creating a link, is there?), followed by someone named David Fiore writing me yesterday to say, among other things:

He then lists a lot of his own favorite comic book writers, a list I pretty much agree with until he gets to Mark Gruenwald, but all that’s for my reply to his email, which I’ll hopefully get to later on today.

Colin Campbell, who has been deluging me with email lately, mostly correcting little factual errors he’s found in various of my many, many articles on comics, wrote to tell me:

I realize none of you care at all, but having been barraged by factual corrections from this guy over the last two weeks or so, it’s nice to see that, like Bradford Wright, he can be wrong sometimes, too.

Scott Shepherd also sent me, as promised, a longish email about this n’ that, which I’ve already answered. He asked for the lowdown on who ‘this Jess person’ was, so I sent him a link to Jess’ own web page and to some of my earlier blog entries regarding her. I’ve thought long and hard about posting all those links here, since I took the time to dig them out for Scott, but this is an open, public blog, and who knows, Jess might one day do a Google search on, say, her own website’s URL to see what comes up, which could lead her to this page, and if she saw that I was still talking about her, she might very well hire some escaped Phantom Zone prisoners to come around and hit me with a large moving van, or something. Chances are she’d just shrug and get on with her life, since I’m really not all that important to her or much of anyone else. However, I take nothing for granted with Jess (except her continued opprobrium towards all things Darren); she is, ultimately, an enigma enshrouded in a mystery, and in some ways strikes me as rather an avatar of Khali-Dhurga. So she can just keep her six weapon wielding hands and all her little Thuggees over there, thank you very much.

Jim Harrison probably thinks he answered my email, but instead, bizarrely, he simply emailed me a copy of his longish post to my blog of about a week or so ago. I assume this is just one of those weird glitches that sometimes occurs; maybe he actually answered my email to him and then somehow the text got deleted and his post got put in its place… if he had the post text copied to his PASTE buffer, for example, and accidentally hit Control-A, Control-V while finishing up his email to me, that would have done it (sometimes these little ASCII short cut codes are real pains in the ass; I know, I’ve been in that situation).

GROWING LUMINOUS BY EATING BRAINS

I think I’m pretty much done at Electrolite. Theresa Hayden has been threatening to block/ban me from the site in her last couple of posts, because that girl apparently simply cannot STAND people who do not communicate in a straightforward, coherent, and linear manner, and geez, Patrick, I hope to hell she’s good in bed because she seems awfully goddam boring otherwise from what I can tell.

I’m not sure she can block me from the site, since I use AOL as an Internet gateway and it generates a different unique ISP number every time I sign on… but, well, I’m a bit disgruntled with the site for other reasons, so I suspect I’ve probably posted my last there.

It’s not simply that Patrick seems to be one of these essentially humorless, overly earnest pricks with absolutely no sense of proportion about his own intellect or capacity for social insight. He seems to find it obvious and implicit that He Is Brilliant And Cogent And Wise, and all others posting to his site must at all times defer to and worship him, but, well, you get a lot of that in the blogosphere. He’s a pretty sharp guy, and obviously widely read, but he’s nowhere near as smart as he thinks he is, and anyone who gets as whiney and defensive as he does at the merest hint of criticism or non-sycophantic feedback has serious self esteem issues that need working out.

It’s not even that he’s one of these people who has absolutely no sense or capacity to understand that his subjective opinions and perceptions are just that, subjective, and are not necessarily any more valid than anyone else’s subjective opinions (yea, True Believer, even those of Yr. Humble Narrator) in areas where objective truth simply cannot, or is not likely to ever, emerge… although people like that strike me as foolish at best, and dangerous at worst.

Mostly, though, it’s that his latest post (yesterday, anyway) was this really weirdly petulant thing where he excoriated some blogger he’d run across because this blogger has the NERVE to screen emails and posts from unknown people with a little questionaire that pops up before you can actually send him an email or post a comment on his blog. (I’m not reproducing Patrick’s post/text for reasons having to do with, well, my previous experiences with Robyn “Insane With A Brain” Pollman, who threatened to have my blog shut down if I didn’t get her ‘copyrighted material’ off of it, which I was using without her permission. I don’t know if there’s any legality to that, and if there is, it strikes me as having a profoundly chilling effect on the free exchange of viewpoints and ideas, but if there is some legality to it, I’d expect PNH to start waving that particular club, too, if I quoted from his writing extensively for purposes of pointing out what an idiot he’s being. So, you can go to Google and do a search on Electrolite and find his blog that way, if you want, and read the thing I’m talking about… or just read my stuff, which is much more entertaining than Patrick’s anyway, because like most editors, he doesn’t write very stylishly at all.)

The questionaire, which Patrick copied and reproduced in the blog entry, struck me as being written in a fashion that was both honest and entertaining; in it, this blogger basically explained that since he/she (I don’t know what the blogger’s gender is) had started doing his/her blog, he/she’d been getting a lot of spam, especially from one particular source, and therefore, he/she was asking people to read this little blurb and then hit a little link asserting that they were not sending spam or, especially, that they were not this particular source that had been pestering him/her.

Patrick went off at length on this person, his sermon basically boiling down to “I tried to comment on this blog… I, the great Patrick Nielsen Hayden… and THEY hit me with this annoying pop up! THE NOIVE!”

One gets the impression that the great Patrick Nielsen Hayden simply has no patience at all for people who don’t let him do EXACTLY what he wants to do, at EXACTLY the moment he wants to do it. And, hey… I hear that, I do. I find frustration… well… frustrating, myself, and God knows, I vent a great deal, and in a very childish fashion, here on my blog about various things that exasperate the shit out of me.

Still, I’m not sure I’ve ever been quite this childish. Could be wrong; I try to be fair in my own self judgements but I may simply be forgetting an example where I’ve been just this immature. Still, this seems pretty much like a five year old throwing a tantrum to me. What Hayden is basically going on and on and ON about (on a blog pretty much entirely devoted, otherwise, to high falutin’ and lofty discussions about public policy and politics and What Our Troops Are Doing In Iraq and shit like that) is that some blogger, somewhere, made it slightly more difficult for Hayden to post something to that blogger’s comment threads than Hayden expected it to be. Not MUCH more difficult, mind… just slightly more difficult, by putting an extra little speed bump in the footpath to his comment threads.

Hayden obviously read the little note; he took the time to block, copy, and paste it into his own blog entry so he could snivel about it at length. In less time than it took PNH to do all that, he could have simply hit the link affirming that he wasn’t a spammer, gone on, and posted a comment to the blogger’s thread, as he had originally intended.

But, noooooo. Someone Got In Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s Way, and God (or PNH) don’t like ugly. God being stubborn about hitting this enormously intransigent blogger with divine lightning bolts, well, PNH just had to stamp his widdle foot and go off on the guy on his own blog.

And… look… once again, I know I’ve vented about stuff here on this blog, and in my private blogs previous to this, and in doing so probably seemed very nearly as childish as PNH does in this entry of his. But, for one thing, the context here is different. My blog isn’t some vast, grand, over-inflated intellectual free market of ideas where people with way too many degrees and far too much time on their hands debate governmental process and abstract public policy issues for thousands of words at a time in the comment threads. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, other than a certain tedious earnestness of delivery that creeps into the necessarily pedantic nature of such a blog almost immediately.) My blog is about me, and the stuff that’s important to me, and, well, I don’t play sports, get laid, see a shrink, drink alcohol, or go to church, so this is where I decompress. So I think a little, or even a lot, of juvenile ‘oh it’s all about ME’ nonsense is much more par for the course here. Not so on Electrolite, where it’s supposed to be all about the rarified intellectual debate and the deep philosophical discourse, and No Geeks Talking About Doc Savage Stuff Need Apply.

Beyond that, PNH seems to have a pretty big audience, while I’m talking to (as far as I can tell) maybe ten people. I’m not sure that really matters, but, well, when PNH goes off on some poor blogger who is only trying to cut down on the amount of really annoying spam that’s hitting his/her blog or email box, he does a lot more damage to that blogger than I would.

PNH stresses in his post, more than once, that when you set up a blog and you put chat threads on it, or post an email link to it, you are, in his words, ‘soliciting comments’. He makes a great big deal about this; it is, apparently, his chief justification and rationalization for his petulant hissy fit over not being able to post a comment or send an email to this blogger as easily as he could, say, here (where he apparently does not want to). However, this strikes me as simply being, well, again, childish, and more than that, it’s reaching for shit, and PNH knows it. The fact that you solicit someone’s attention does not require you in any way to make it easy for them to provide you with that attention. And it’s not like this person hung up a big sign saying ‘HEY PLEASE COMMENT ON MY BLOG’. They are trying to do what we all do by blogging, namely, get attention… but they are also trying to be selective in what attention they get (something we’d all LIKE to do, and that all of us try to do using various different techniques).

Patrick’s complaint seems to be analogous to a salesman who, seeing a house with an unlocked front gate and no posted signs forbidding the approach of solicitors, walks up and rings the doorbell… and who then gets annoyed when, instead of throwing the front door open wide, the homeowner scrutinizes the salesman carefully through the peephole and then asks ‘what do you want’?

Patrick’s argument, like the salesman’s, would seem to be ‘well, they had an open front gate and a doorbell, obviously they WANT visitors… how DARE they then try to decide WHOSE visit they will accept IN THEIR OWN HOUSE?’

PNH then went on to very arrogantly state that he uses a particular anti-spamming software tool (available through Panix, his website host and email provider, which, just so everyone knows, is NOT a free service by any means) and it works just fine for HIM, and pretty much strongly implies that if this anti-spamming software works for HIM, then EVERYONE should use it, or something similar, or just not worry about spam at all, because, you see, when you go out on the Internet and set up a blog, your primary responsibility (you may not have known this, which is why PNH is going to such pains to tell you) is making it easy for Patrick Nielsen Hayden to do whatever the hell he wants whenever the hell he wants to do it.

This is, in fact, apparently everyone’s primary responsibility, at all times. And as I say, I hear that… I often feel that life should work that way, only, you know, for me, not for Patrick Nielsen Hayden. But, alas, it doesn’t. People can set up blogs, they can put on chat threads, they can install email links, and then, if they want to, they can put a pop-up filter into the middle of the process, and yes, that may be aggravating, but it’s not illegal or immoral or unethical or evil, and it is, therefore, rather childish of someone to spend several hundred words heaping whiney abuse on someone for doing it.

I agree with Patrick that getting an intrusive pop up when you expected to simply be typing a comment or an email to someone is, well, annoying. And I absolutely agree with Patrick’s right to, at that point, simply turn away rather than reward the person who had annoyed him (for whatever reasons they had) with attention that they themselves made it more difficult than necessary for Patrick to deliver.

Hell, I even think Patrick had a right to blog about it… well, of course he did, it’s his weblog, he can cry if he wants to.

Similarly, however, I have a right to blog about my own response to Patrick’s response, and, frankly, I found this particular entry by him to be truly, obnoxiously immature.

I’m not really sure how the morality and ethics of restricting what comments you’re willing to accept, and who you’ll accept them from, on a public interface/webpage, works. I mean, of course I feel I have a right to do it on my own blog… it’s my blog, after all; I control the vertical, and I control the horizontal, and more importantly, I took the time to create the thing out of the blankness of hyperspace, and if I don’t want certain people to post their comments on it publicly, well, I can delete them if I feel like it, and even block them out. I do believe that’s a ‘right’… although, similarly, I’m not sure I don’t also believe in another person’s ‘right’ to post to a public blog even if it’s been made clear they’re not wanted. Your freedom of speech ends when you step into my living room, yes… but is a public blog a ‘living room’? It certainly doesn’t seem to be that kind of private space. So if Patrick blocks me from his blog, for reasons I find spurious and stupid (You’re Not Allowed To Be Whimsical On My Blog, It Confuses My Wife and Undermines Our La De Da Tone, Don’t You Know), and yet, I find that due to my shifting ISP numbers I can still post there at will… which of us is right? Both of us? Neither?

It doesn’t matter, because for now, I’m pretty much over the Electrolite thing, and it seems very unlikely Patrick will ever read any of my fiction (and I doubt he’d like it if he did; he strikes me as having no capacity whatsoever for objective judgement), so it’s entirely a moot point.

If he did, however, and he wanted to publish something of mine… jesus. I’d have to be professional to the ass, wouldn’t I?

Well, that would just suck.

DON’T CALL US, WE’LL CALL YOU

Not that that brief little blast from the past has anything to do with this, but I do love my stupid pop culture references.

You’ve heard about this Federal ‘Do Not Call’ List that Dubya has sponsored, as a big show of solidarity with the little guy, right? How it’s been deluged with folks asking to be placed on the list, so they won’t have to take annoying telemarketer calls any more?

Well, various blogs have been all over the little known fact that there are certain exceptions for the most onerous telemarketing industries (insurance, health care, political surveys, a few others) built right into the language of this thing, and PNH’s own blog reports that this thing can fairly easily be tampered with, since anyone can email the list and ask that a certain number be put onto it, or taken off, and this can be done via mass email, so, say, if some smart telemarketer out there wants to, they can send an anonymous email from some throwaway AOL account asking for, say, every phone number in the Minneapolis phone directory to be taken off the list, and it will automatically be done.

All of which means that basically, whether it was intended this way or not (and I have my own dark suspicions about that) this thing is a scam. You call up and get your number registered and basically what you are doing is helping the government create one huge, super-telemarketing phone list, which it can then turn around and supply at will to its major lobbyists (all those industries that are excepted from the Do Not Call List restrictions, as already discussed). Those lobbyists, presumably, will be delighted to have access to a list of people throughout the nation who Do Not Want Calls from telemarketers; they will now represent a field of almost exclusive potential customers that most other telemarketers cannot call.

So, you call up and get your number on this list, guess what… you are guaranteeing that you will get telemarketing calls from the health care and the insurance industries, just to name a few. And political surveys? Oh my yes. Don’t even think about eating dinner in peace during an election year.

This whole thing is ass backwards, and has been since the first bright boy at Ma Bell came up with the idea of compiling all their subscriber information into one huge book that made what should have been private information (your name, your address, your phone number) publicly accessible… and then charging their customers, who are already paying for phone service, an extra amount to be kept out of the phone book.

If we have an actual right to privacy (something the Supreme Court, even our current gang of mostly judicial thugs, seems to be saying more and more we do) then this should be illegal, and certainly, it’s immoral. The phone company has for over a century basically been in the business of selling us our own privacy. If we don’t want to have our name, address, and phone number in the most publicly accessible and universally used/abused database known to mankind, we have to pay for it. In other words, privacy is a luxury for those with the money to purchase it, not a ‘right’ we are all entitled to.

The ‘Do Not Call List’ works on much the same ‘corporations first, people last’ principle. If the government were serious about recognizing and enforcing a right to privacy, then they would simply pass legislation forbidding telemarketing… ALL telemarketing… except to phone users that specifically give their permission to be telemarketed to. Instead of having a ‘Do Not Call List’, which basically forces you to initiate an effort to activate your ‘right to privacy’ (and which, as noted, doesn’t really work, anyway), there should be a ‘Yes You Can Call Me’ list, where people who WANT to get telemarketing calls (people that, as Jack Lemmon notes in Glengarry Glen Ross, ‘just like talking to salesmen’) could send an email and get their phone number listed. Everyone else would be assumed to have an implicit right to privacy, and if they don’t call up and say ‘sure, you can bug me at home while I’m trying to eat dinner’, well, then, you can’t. Plain and simple.

This is, obviously, how it should work, and any private citizen who pays for their own phone service knows that without a second’s reflection. I mean, you pay for your phone service. You do. It isn’t free, or provided by the government, or in any way subsidized by private industry or public dollars… in fact, a third or more of your (probably exorbitant) phone bill comes from extra taxes you pay to make the government’s job, and the phone company’s job, a little bit easier (a gross immorality in and of itself; if the phone company can’t provide the services you’re paying for with the fees they charge you, then they should make adjustments; similarly, if the government can’t provide us with the services it’s supposed to for what they extort from our paychecks every week, well, they should cut back somewhere). Since you pay for your phone service, through direct fees that include taxes you did not in any way consent to, how is it moral or ethical or good or right or proper for private industry, to make use of your phone for their own selfish, profit making purposes?

Personally, I think that we simply need a new feature on our phones: the Auto Direct Deposit Account. We pay a small fee, and in exchange, we get a little code we can punch in to our phones when we don’t want to be bothered, and this feature would basically act as an answering machine: “Darren doesn’t want to be bothered with a phone call right now, so leave a message, or, if you really think it’s urgent, deposit $20 into his checking account at the sound of the tone and your call will be put through. Darren may or may not refund some or all of your deposit if he agrees with you about the urgency of your call, but I personally would not hold your breath.”

(I grant you, much of this is copped shamelessly from Gwen Novak’s doorbell message in Cat Who Walks Through Walls, but Heinlein often comes up with really attractive social innovations, even in his worst books.)

Force telemarketers to pay you every time they try to use your phone for their business purposes, and they will stop bugging you pretty quickly.

Or, on the other hand, you can just do what I used to do when I had my own place, and screen your calls religiously with your answering machine. There are some people who find this very rude, but, well, I have no friends, and no one has called me on my own phone (when I had one) besides my mother or my temp agency in, literally, years. Up north, though, when I was running an RPG and did get calls from my players fairly often, they all understood that I always screened my calls, and they all waited for the beep and then told me who they were. As I say, there are people out there who find this rude, but, well, they seem to be like Patrick Nielsen Hayden… folks who are certain that everything, even my phone and my privacy and my decisions about who gets access to me and who doesn’t, should and must revolve around their convenience and whims. And I, personally, can live just as long and die just as happy if I never actually have anyone like that as a ‘friend’.

Anyway, to sum up: we should not have to pay for privacy, or make a specific effort to invoke or activate our right to privacy. Our right to privacy should be Always On; we should have to make an effort to turn it off, if we really want to. In this light, the phone company should not be able to require us to pay a fee to be left out of their massively intrusive compilation of what should be private information; in fact, we should be able to sue them for printing our names, phone numbers, and addresses in a public document, printing millions of copies of that document, and then distributing said document to everyone living within a hundred miles of us, thus making us a little more vulnerable to salesmen, telemarketers, con men, serial rapists, and other psychopaths.

Say, there’s an idea for a class action suit… I wonder how many people out there have suffered real damages because somebody found their address in the phone book…?

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.