First, Juno seems to be working again, so those of you who got my ‘Hail Mary’ email from ‘darrenm1961 at yahoo dot com’ can go back to writing me at ‘docnebula01 at juno dot com’. Or, keep sending to the Yahoo account; as long as I can get online, it makes little difference.

Oh, I got the Unnameable Website Paycheck yesterday, although it has not, as yet, shown up in my bank account. Paul and I want to shop for groceries today, so its tardiness and truancy are notably annoying. That’s what I get for getting to the bank ten minutes before closing time, I guess.

ALL A LOT OF OYSTERS AND NO PEARLS

Everyone is excused from reading this, it’s gonna be Bux stuff.

The Bux looked, for the most part, pretty goddam horrible in a Monday Night Football pre-season shellacking by the (oh, please) St. Louis Rams last night. Our A team offense seemed sharp but couldn’t do anything; our A team defense seemed, frankly, utterly befuddled by Kurt Warner’s crisp, laser-like, nearly instantaneous passing. Thank Zeus we don’t face these assholes in the regular season, but still, the Bux will be playing against, you know, actual professional football teams, and it strikes me that our defensive line especially might want to think about playing with BOTH hands. I realize the Bux do have the best defense in the league currently, but having our entire starting defense take the field with their left thumbs corked securely up their asses for the whole game is giving away too much of an advantage. Chivalry is fine, but that’s just going too far.

Having said that, after Shaun King came out and looked like a complete blithering idiot for about half a set of downs, Chris Simms took the field and, after a shaky start, put together the only successful offensive drives the Bux had the whole game, showing off an astonishing command of the most complex offensive system and the most challenging offensive personnel array in the NFL. The kid can pass like a little bastard, too. Two successful scoring drives (with fairly effortless looking two point conversions on both, no less) weren’t enough to overcome the criminally huge deficit the Bux shirking, witless, ‘say, are we actually playing in a football game right now’ defense let the Rams pile up, but even so, Simms looked like a god. I’m still willing to give the always smirking, perpetually preening Shaun King a chance to impress me, but the evidence is piling up… if the Bux need a back up quarterback, the rookie from Texas U may well be the go-to guy.

Now, what the FUCK is up with ABC? Yes, the chick who does the sideline interviews is pretty hot, and yes, Kurt Warner is someone a lot of people want to hear from (not me; he’s way too Jesusy for me), but you do not do a goddam lame ass interview regarding how he feels about coming back after a bad last season while there is ACTUALLY FOOTBALL BEING PLAYED!! I mean, what the HELL, the Bux are driving for the goal line and we’re looking at, as well as listening to, big fucking doofus Kurt Warner telling us about all the lessons the Lord taught him the previous season! HOLY SHIT!! The idiots directing that particular broadcast last night are lucky I don’t have an orbital array of particle beam weapons or there’d be some headless frickin’ sports producers walking around the ABC offices today!!

And, on that subject… Kurt, and Tony Dungy, and all you other sniveling suck up godheads out there who think a microphone in your faces is just another opportunity to witness for the Lord… it isn’t. Kiss the sweet Savior’s ass on your own time. I tuned in to watch some football.

I CAN’T TELL YOU WHO TO SOCK IT TO

Some guy I don’t know has given me a link (I spotted it by doing relentless ego scanning at Google). Why I don’t know. He seems to want to be the first kid on his block to link to EVERY BLOG IN THE UNIVERSE, though. Give him a look (or don’t, I’m honestly apathetic) over here. And he should be on my blogroll now, since I, unlike certain pseudonymous female socialists I know, firmly believe in the social contract.

Meanwhile, whiney geek Tuxedo Slack, who defended me quite nicely when fucktard Patrick Nielsen Hayden was using me for a punching bag on his moronista political blog a while back, has poured kerosene all over me in absentia (which means, he didn’t bother letting me know) and lit a match. There are many reasons to like Tuxedo, such as his enjoyment of my Heinlein articles (which he frankly admits to) and said previously mentioned defense of me from a great big slob. He also praises my Triplicate Girl cartoon (while posting a completely incorrect link to it, go figure), which makes him a man of rare taste, at least, in this one particular instance. And he closes by thanking me for giving him a wake up call, since he seriously doesn’t want to wake up a bitter, lonely old reprobate like me by the age of 40. (My advice, Tuxedo: Get Laid More. It’s pretty much the key to smirking self esteem at any level of the social paradigm. Had I only gotten laid more… hell, if I could Get Laid More now, or, really, at all… I’d probably be a lot more mellow. Although I still wouldn’t suffer fools like you gladly or at all, given the option.)

Mixed in with the very valid reasons to like Tuxedo, there are also a lot of reasons I will never have the slightest shred of real respect for him, either, like the fact that his favorite authors all blow, he thinks the CHRONICLES OF NARNIA suck except for the first one, and, oh yeah, when you offer an honest opinion and fully support it at length as to why his favorite authors all blow (and they do) he cries like a little girl about it.

I mean, I swear to God, when I read his list of favorite authors… J.K. Rowling, Douglas Adams, and Terry Pratchett… my immediate thought was, ‘what the hell, where’s Dean R. Koontz, how can you be that big a dolt and not love Dean R. Koontz?’ And, well, this response to me adds one to that list, as we’ll see in my next little entry, which would cause any vestigial respect I might still have for Tuxedo to spontaneously ignite and burn to ashes, had there actually been any, which there wasn’t.

Those who would like to see Tuxedo’s comments regarding me can go here. I honestly think you should judge his candy ass whimpering for yourselves, and not simply take my subjective and obviously biased (although completely accurate and truthful) word for it.

But, you know. It’s your thing. Do what you want to do.

LATER NOTE:

I've checked out a little more of Tuxedo's more recent blog pages. I... honestly don't know what to say about the guy now. He's just jaw droppingly, mind stunningly geeky, and he seems to be a sort of distilled exemplification of the Dark Side of the Geek... it's not just his favorite authors list that is near-uniformly vile, but, well, he plays GURPS (there may be some excuse, apparently, he plays in his girlfriend's campaign and I guess I can understand that). He goes on and on and ON about his Mage character in her GURPS campaign, which...

Nope. Never mind. Not gonna get sucked any further in. Y'all can find his most recent pages easily from the link I've posted; it's easier to just point you there if you're curious. Maybe you'll see the ineffable qualities to his reality tunnel that makes it quite distinct from mine (or not) and understand what I'm on about. (Or not.)

What I can and will say is, as Tuxedo does not want to ever wake up one day and find that he has become like me, similarly, I thank whatever set of malign thugs is currently running the universe that at no time in my immediately accessible memory have I ever been like Tuxedo. Geeks like him are the reason I avoid geek gatherings. ::shudder::

MIND KILLING TELEMPATHIC STARDANCING NIGHT OF TIME PRESSURE DRIVEL

Continuing with the Tuxedo Slack thing, which will quickly segue into something else entirely…

Apparently, some rather inexplicable references in Tuxedo’s one email to me were actually ‘inside’ bits regarding Spider Robinson’s work, because (and this should in no way surprise me) Tuxedo is a huge Spider Robinson fan.

Now, first, I don’t hold Tuxedo’s tossing around ‘inside references’ that are completely inexplicable to anyone not as well versed in a particular artist as the author is against him. This is a temptation we all succumb to from time to time (those of us who are remotely literate, anyway)… we kind of toss in these little referential litmus tests, to see if anyone reading us is ‘cool’ enough, within our own entirely subjective reality tunnels, to figure out what the hell we’re talking about. I do it a lot, so I don’t blame Tuxedo for doing it.

However, when I do it, I do it with, well, Heinlein, a lot, and also with stuff like Buckaroo Banzai and, geez, I don’t know, probably a lot of Buffy references, as well. Tuxedo does his ‘coolness’ tests based on whether or not other people worship Robinson’s Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon shit. And, you know, Tuxedo’s whole thesis seems to be that it isn’t fair to judge someone else’s entire worth based on what they read, and he may be right, but I didn’t. I judged the authors he specifically listed as his favorites as being authors who write tripe and horseshit, and he took that personally and stomped his widdle foot about it, saying that, in the end, he really really hoped he didn’t grow up to be like me. Which, for some reason reminds me of Bruce Willis saying “Sully, by the time I’m your age I hope to God I have more sense”, and Paul Newman replying, dryly, “Well, you sure are off to a slow start…” But hey. There I am, doing the ‘cool reference, did you get it’ thing again. So sue me.

Now, Spider Robinson is a horrifyingly bad writer, and someday I may tell you why I think so, but I’d probably have to find a copy of the truly senses defyingly abominable Night of Power so I could quote extensively from that wretched piece of utter trash in order to fully support my absolutely correct and objectively truthful negative opinion of Robinson’s non-talents, and that would be awful, because simply reading that book once was nearly enough to cauterize my sensory cortex. Robinson’s other stuff is relentlessly terrible, mind you… he has a brilliant capacity for writing characters who are all pretty much identical despite having different names from one book to the other, and who are all, in addition to being pretty much identical from one book to another, all simply thinly disguised sub-identities for one vast uber-character. They all act alike, they all talk alike, they all, with nominal differences to allow them to argue about stuff at the start of the stories, think alike, and they all exchange absolutely perfectly glib, smooth dialogue due to this unnatural telempathic connection they all share that allows them all to validate each other with absolutely perfect mutual comprehension, understanding, and unconditional support that simply never, ever happens in anything remotely like real life.

Okay, I guess I’m going to tell you why I hate Robinson’s writing right now, off the top of my head. Fine. I’m on a roll. Let’s go for it:

Spider Robinson, for all that he’s exactly the type of frothing, foaming, raving, rabid Heinlein fan I loathe the most, has somehow mutated into a philosophical commentator whose proposed social solutions in every single book (which are more like pamphlets trumpeting Robinson’s Wisdom than actual stories with actual plots) come down to merging every individual within humanity into some vast, insectile, collective consciousness in which no one will ever hurt anyone else because We Will All Be One.

This is so utterly antithetical to Heinlein’s extreme libertarianism, in which the unquestioned supremacy of the free thinking gun toting non-conforming herd-hating maverick individual human is redolent in every single syllable, as to really make me wonder if Robinson has noted just how far afield his own woolly headed addle pated weed smoking Age of Aquarius doltishness has led him from his hero/god Heinlein’s own ideals.

Actually, I shouldn’t say Robinson proposes collective consciousness as a social panacea in every single book. He does propose it, to the best of my recollection, in Stardancer, Time Pressure, and Mindkiller, all of which are pretty godawful books in their own right. In fact, he does not so much propose it as write stories in which a small, select group of superior individuals conspires to somehow ram collective consciousness into the cerebral cortexes of all mankind without bothering to take a vote, which is even scarier.

However, the social panacea Robinson proposes in the execrable Night of Power is to give blacks their own nation and let them all go live there forever, where they will be free from the oppressiveness of whitey, and, you know, the horrifying and untenable ongoing social pressure of actually having to be mature and tolerant of people with differing ethnicities and epidermal melanin contents.

Gosh. How do poor embattled modern day Negroes ever bear up.

There are other reasons Night of Power is a truly, mind bogglingly abysmal piece of literary offal, as well as being just plain offensive and obnoxious, but I think Robinson’s truly insane championing of forced-at-actual-gunpoint segregation has to be about the most gag-inducing bit of sucking up to minority zealots on the part of a white author I’ve ever seen. I often wonder exactly what Robinson’s reaction would be to an identical book written by someone else in which all the characters had their races reversed… in which violent racial supremacists who happened to be Caucasian staged demonstrations and took hostages in order to get the governments of the world to give them an all white nation of their very own. But then, so many shallow, knee jerk white liberals simply don’t seem to get the basic concept that you do not fight racism simply by reversing its polarity. Racism is bad. People should not be judged on the color of their skin. It doesn’t matter if it’s a black person judging a white person or vice versa, racial bias is simply wrong, invalid, and never justified. Here endeth that particular lesson.

Anyway, Robinson honestly frightens me, and I think this constant screeching about how individuality and non-conformity are, in essence, the root of all evil, would utterly appall RAH… not that I care, they certainly appall me and that’s what’s important here.

Beyond loathing Robinson’s writing for all these reasons, I recently (last spring, I think) reread Stardancer and found that about halfway through, Robinson has a lovely passage describing a very vivid and moving metaphor for life, likening it to falling down an endless tunnel with only a very little control about which direction you fall in. It’s a really stirring little passage, and the only problem is, John D. MacDonald did pretty much the exact same metaphor much better in a much earlier Travis McGee novel, except in MacDonald’s metaphor we’re all wading waist deep in a dark, unlit, swiftly moving river.

You’d have to read both to realize it, but, well, clearly, the Robinson version is directly ‘inspired by’… ripped off from, rather… the MacDonald original. They’re simply too similar, right down to the wording each author uses, for it to be a coincidence. And, personally, I loathe rip offs, but I do grudgingly ascribe to the Alan Moore Theorem… if you’re going to steal, make your version better than your source material. Robinson fails to do that rather miserably.

Paul likes Spider Robinson a lot, but what are you going to do? At least it’s actual text and he’s reading it.

21st CENTURY GEEKS

Paul may have entirely summed up the major difference between modern day geeks, like him, and old school geeks, like me, a day or so ago. He and his bud Scott were over smoking out, and we were all discussing the movie adaptation of Lord of the Rings, and as I made some grousing comment about something they’d left out from the books (I think it was the section where the Eagles rescue the Fellowship, which simply isn’t in the movie), Paul turned to Scott and, in slightly hushed and just a tiny bit awed tones, said, “Darren’s actually read the books”.

If I say any more it will seem like I don’t love my baby brother, and I do, dearly. Besides, I think this pretty much speaks for itself.

But… Jesus fucking CHRIST, when there is no longer a literacy requirement for being a geek, the world has become a sad and twisted place to me.

WHACKING DAY

There may be those who think I’ve been uncharacteristically vitriolic in my off handed, scathing referral to Patrick Neilsen Hayden as a ‘fucktard’, above. I suppose I have been. I could do the whole ‘it’s my blog and this is where I vent thing’, but screw that (well, it’s true, but still). I bear a special and doubtless very childish and petulant grudge against Patrick Neilsen Hayden, and it has little to do with the fact that he treated me as if I were a particularly witless and offensive 4 year old on his fucking blog simply because I posted a comment that for some insane reason pushed one of his sneer buttons. No, my grudge against the obnoxious asshole has to do with the fact that he’s an editor at ROC, and therefore, has the power to realign reality slightly and make some justice actually occur in this cruel and godless universe, by reading, buying, and publishing my novels. And he just won’t, the shithead.

Look, I can’t judge the actual writing quality of my own fiction, but I am perfectly capable of rendering a pretty informed analysis as to its commercial value. If people out there are buying Dennis McKiernan and Terry Brooks’ tripe, they will certainly buy mine. Editors who are aware of my writing and who still won’t buy it are unprofessional assholes or simply incompetent to do their jobs. Either way, ‘fucktard’, while, I admit, a complete nonsense phrase, does rather pungently sum up how I feel about PNH, and this is my blog and I’ll cry if I want to.

Or, you know, just be an ass.

THE FIFTH COLUMN

I had a nice chat with ex-gf Kristy the other day (Instant Messages) and she mentioned that her hubby, ex-pal Gary, reads my blog. This immediately threw me into a tizzy of paranoic brain wracking, as I tried to remember if I’d ever said anything bad about Gary. Then I remembered that he stabbed me in the back and snaked my girlfriend out from under me while she and I were still living together, and decided if I had said anything bad about him, it was probably deserved and almost certainly an understatement, and stopped worrying about it.

However, it does make me wonder just how many silent lurkers there are out there who show up, read my stuff, maybe even enjoy it, but who never leave comments.

Too bad there isn’t a way to make those who won’t leave comments pay a fee, or something.

That would really work for me.

Hey, speaking of that, my Pay Pal link is probably about to quietly rust into nonexistence from non-use.

I’m just sayin’, is all.

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.