I say ‘holiday’ because it really is, at least, given that ‘holiday’ is most likely derived from ‘holy day’. In most religions, there are several ‘holy days’ one doesn’t much enjoy; not so much celebrations as they are simply days for people to remember something grave and solemn, often making some ritual of sacrifice and public show of humility in order to show that whatever it is that’s being remembered, hasn’t been forgotten.

And that sounds nice, but fuck it. I have no use for a holiday with no presents and no comfort feasting and where, if I was working, I wouldn’t even get the day off with pay. Like the gentleman caller with the blue suede shoes, I just wanna have a good time.

Fortunately, this year 9/11 falls on a Thursday, and I don’t generally watch anything on TV on Thursdays, so that’s okay. (One wonders how ABC managed to resist the temptation to launch their new Thursday evening 9/11 inspired show Threat Matrix, tonight, though. By doing so, however, they’re showing considerable more class than Resident Bush, who will, by all reports, kick off his official re-election campaign tomorrow.)

Okay, I realize my irritation with our national continuing memorial to self indulgent grief sounds rather, well, self indulgent, above. So let’s get real. Does America need a national day of remembrance of the horrors of September 11, 2001? Do we really need a recurring yearly day of mourning for those who fell on that heartlessly bright and infamous morning? Must we, really, indulge in a yearly orgy of self conscious weeping and wailing, in an annual hog wallow through the slough of national self pity that 9/11 has become? And whether we must or not, should we?

Well, let’s look at that another way. Do we really want to dedicate a national holiday (albeit an unpaid one where we don’t even get to eat a big meal with family and/or watch a football game) to the sociopathic thugs who conspired to kill 3,000 or so people they’d never met… people who didn’t do anything to deserve it beyond getting up that morning and going about their legitimate business?

Should we forget 9/11? Of course not. The question is moot, we can’t forget 9/11 even if we want to. And we should have memorials at the site of the WTC, and the site of the crash of Flight 93, and the site of the impact at the Pentagon, and those memorials should be inscribed with the names of every single victim and hero who died that day. And we should certainly have a moment of silence at schools and all public functions that fall on that day, and absolutely those in a position to do so should travel to one of those memorial sites and lay a wreath, if they feel like it, on the anniversary, to commemorate those who we lost then.

But we’re Americans. We don’t do anything small and subtle, we don’t do anything with elegance or class, and we certainly don’t pass up an opportunity to enact an enormous international attention getting display when we’re given an undeniable opportunity. Tomorrow will be a nonstop feeding frenzy of pumped up lachrymony, a vast national circle jerk in which everyone will look at everyone else and say “oh, yes, cry if you want to, it’s okay”, and the media will smirk and wink and give those of us who cry the best, while wearing the most colorful handmade patriotic costumes, a chance to weep and wail and guh-nash our little teefies on TV and in the paper.

Honestly, this all just nauseates me. 9/11 sucked profoundly, and I was as emotionally battered by it as anyone who didn’t actually lose anyone on that day was (which is to say, most of us). But using 9/11 as a continuing excuse for a media circus and a massive display of attention getting behavior is just embarrassing. There ought to be a law by now: if you didn’t lose a close friend or immediate family member on 9/11, then shut up and get over it. And those of you who did, if you’ve gotten your check for a million plus and cashed it by now, you can shut up and get over it, too.

Oh, yeah, and there should be another law as well: anyone who politically campaigns on 9/11 should be put in a public stocks on the site of the WTC naked for the entire day. And any crowds of mourners should be provided with rotten vegetables to throw free of charge.

TOP O’ THE WORLD, MA

Despite the annoyed and sulky tone of the above, I’m really not in a bad mood at all today, mostly because, for the first time that I can remember, I actually slept in… got to sleep around 2 or 3 am last night (the Paul Posse was watching Malibu’s Most Wanted on DVD with the volume up very loud until around then, and I had my earplugs in to spare myself even listening to Jamie Kennedy’s cruel and unusual punishment of the entire concept of comedy, and didn’t nod off until after I could safely take them out) and slept through until a little after noon. Well, I didn’t sleep straight through… I woke up now and again, here and there… but still, I had no trouble rolling over and going back to sleep. It was nice. And no, I’m not planning to get used to it, I realize that was probably the one I get for a year or so. Still, today for once I feel well rested.

Yesterday was good, because Pat showed up early, dragged me out of bed, and we went up and rescued my books. Even my stupidity in giving the storage place close to fifty non-replaceable dollars, when they would have held the books until the 18th for me anyway, didn’t manage to dim my mood. (It was stupidity, since my gentle inquiry regarding any chance of a pro-rated refund was met with just as gentle hilarity, and, well, I can’t blame them. I gave them the money. You give people money, they are generally quite reluctant to give it back.)

Much of the rest of the morning was spent breaking the books out of their boxes and getting them up on the shelves, where I think they look just spiffy-keen. The rest of Paul’s Posse seems to agree, at least, they seem to think the now loaded bookshelves look much better than the clusterfuck that had been there before. There’s a great deal more room to move around in that section of Paul’s apartment, as well, although Paul’s dirty laundry seems to abhor a vacuum and is doing its best to take over the new space aggressively.

I suppose much of my mood has to do with the way the Bux finally got their acts together in the second half Monday night and handed the Eagles a real (and much deserved) shellacking. How much did the Eagles deserve the ‘methodical butt whipping’ (to quote Donovan McNabb, I believe) the Bux handed them? Well, several of their defensive linemen, apparently, had the balls to snivel to the media about how the Bux were ‘taunting’ them by putting Warren Sapp in at tight end and throwing him a pass that he wound up running for another seven or eight yards, straight through one particular member of the Eagles secondary.

I mean, hey, guys… when a member of an opposing team makes a catch in a game and then runs the ball well, that’s not ‘taunting’ you. That’s… what do we call that… oh yeah… playing football. And when you cry about your opponent playing football in a manner that embarrasses you because, you know, it’s just so much better than the way you play football… um… well, I just don’t know what to say about that. Except, well, I guess the Philadelphia Eagles are losers in many more ways than one.

Other than all that, there isn’t much real world nonsense to report. I still have no job. No one has called me to offer me a job. I’ve called Wal-mart twice to follow up, but they don’t want to put me through to talk to anyone in Personnel, so that’s not doing much. I can’t call Amscott since you contact them via email only. I’m wondering if I shouldn’t sign up for the local Accent call center thing just to do the three week training. It’s not much money, but it would be something, and then, what the hell, they’d just fire me as soon as I got out on the floor anyway because I’m not going to do sales and I’m just not patient with manager ineptitude, which is apparently rife there.

Scott Shepherd just sent me a nice note also. Things are still going as well as they can be, given the horrible stuff going on with his family. He also makes some very interesting points, comparing the children’s fiction of past decades (Narnia, specifically) with the Harry Potter books, noting that in past decades, authors would take their time and establish atmosphere and character slowly and thoroughly, providing a lot of detail and interesting dialogue and narrative and often building up to the action, whereas in a Harry Potter book, there’s action, action, action, action on nearly every page. He also notes that for all the action in a Potter book, none of it is anywhere near as scary as, say, the sequence on the Isle of Dreams in VOYAGE OF THE DAWN TREADER.

He also just finished Zelazney’s Lord of Light and agrees with me as to its excellence. I think it’s probably the best science fantasy novel ever written, but in a lot of ways, it’s very much what an adult superhero comic books really should be… a study of superhuman conflict, yes, but with a continuing emphasis on the humanity of the superhumans involved, and a subtle but thorough exploration of the complex morality involved in using technology to either improve yourself and your friends so that you can rules the masses as gods… or to improve the state of the masses themselves, so they can all live as gods and be ruled by no one.

Nowadays, of course, an ‘adult superhero comic’ is one with a lot of really graphic violence, frank sexual situations, and an enormous amount of profanity. I’m not at all sure Lord of Light has any profanity in it, and I’m absolutely certain it has no graphic violence (it’s hard to do really graphic violence without pictures, although some writers manage it handily) or much sexual reference at all. (There’s some fairly subtle gay-bashing early on, which is regrettably typical of the era the book was published in, but at least it’s not blatant, like the homophobia in Haldeman’s somewhat later Forever War, and in fact, Sam’s baiting of the formerly female Krishna, who always wanted to be a very virile male and who finally got to be one through the wonders of body hopping technology, is hysterically funny as well.)

Paul and I just officially finished off the Weaponmaster portion of Soul-Caliber II, so pretty much the game is done. Now I know why Alexander wept because there were no more worlds to conquer.

Hey! No physical discomfort… no headaches, no indigestion, no sore throat, no sore muscles or aching feet, no horrifying allergy attacks… and I’ve had enough sleep. There’s a West Wing rerun on tonight I haven’t seen yet. Is this a good day or what? And there’s a Lotto drawing tonight, too! As the animated Gambit has been known to intone, ‘life don’ ged much bedda dan dis!’

TV FUNNIES (WITH DICK TRACY!)

Jake 2.0 is premiering tonight. Paul’s all over that action, but the show is scheduled in this and last season’s Time Slot of Death, i.e., Wednesday nights at 9 p.m., leaving me out in the cold.

In past seasons, the networks had been known to gang up and overprogram the hell out of Tuesday nights, jamming a ton of shows I wanted to watch on opposite each other from 8 to 11 on Tuesdays. Lately, though, they’ve switched their attentions to Wednesday at 9.

Apparently, a few seasons back, programmers smelled blood in the water when West Wing started losing ratings, and a lot of them started doing their best to pick up marketshare in the 9 p.m. time slot… the WB programmed Birds of Prey there, just for one example, and when Birds didn’t fly (it was, to all reports, simply a bad show), they shifted Angel there instead, where it apparently did well (and kept me from watching West Wing all last season).

This season, virtually every network I can immediately think of is putting something I’d like to at least check out on Wednesdays at 9. And it’s a bummer, because, well, I’m going to be watching Angel when it’s new, and that’s just a given, and if Angel isn’t on, I’ll be watching West Wing, so really, Jake 2.0, and Karen Sisco (on ABC, which, I grant you, I’d only be watching because Carla Guigino is SUCH a hottie, but still, I’ve watched shows for worse reasons) have no chance and should head for other timeslots immediately.

I can’t even check out Jake 2.0 tonight in its thoughtfully early premiere, because while new Angel episodes won’t be showing up until October 1, there are West Wing reruns I need to catch up on. I will, apparently, never ever see the last half of the fourth season or the first half of last season (unless I eventually buy them on DVD), but I’ve been enjoying the few re-runs of last season NBC eventually, grudgingly, through clenched teeth, gave up for me after they ran out of shitty reality shows to throw on in the timeslot instead.

Mind you, West Wing has been running on about one-third to one-quarter power since the first season, and I expect it to get worse now that Sorkin won’t be creatively involved at all. But on the other hand, Acting President John Goodman should be a lot of fun to watch this year. Pity I’ll be watching Angel instead…

However, to show that it’s not all bitching here on Planet Darren, and also because I just mentioned reality shows, let me say how pleased I am that ABC continues to program the execrable Bachelor on Wednesdays at 8, because this year that will put it on opposite Smallville. Now if only all the other networks would put something dreadful, shameful, and appalling on opposite Smallville too, that would make for an utterly perfect timeslot.

GEEK REPORT

I picked up Marvel’s recent softcover re-packaging of the Englehart Celestial Madonna story from Avengers in the mid 1970s and started to reread it for, I don’t know, the thousandth time or so yesterday. It’s still brilliantly written stuff, with some of the best dialogue ever scripted in superhero comics. However, at the age of 41, and having read a great many four dimensional comics since then, well, there are some plotting problems I didn’t notice when I was 12 and reading much of this for the first time.

One of the nicer installments of the arc was issue #131, entitled “A Quiet Half Hour In Saigon”. It opens with what was to become one of Englehart’s signature narrative passages:

All this, over a pretty lovely splash page (Sal Buscema inked by Joe Staton, a very nice combination) of Mantis kicking some ill advised knife wielding Vietnamese assailant in the face, while the Mighty Avengers… in this case, Thor, Iron Man, the Vision, and Hawkeye… look on from maybe ten feet away in the background.

It’s a beautiful piece of scripting, and one I myself echo frequently in my own writing, using Englehart’s ‘and yet… and yet…’ gimmick rather often when occasion presents itself.

And yet…
And yet…

Excuse me, Stainless, but what the hell is this Vietnamese idiotthinking, getting in the collective faces of the Mighty Avengers while armed only with a frickin’ knife?

Oh, well, he’s Vietnamese. Maybe he doesn’t recognize who Thor and Iron Man and Hawkeye and the Vision are. Maybe he just decided, you know, to jump out of an alley and demand money at knifepoint from a posse of hugely muscled men and one petite Vietnamese chick. Maybe he didn’t notice that one of those hugely muscled men was carrying a sledge hammer the size of a Dodge Caravan. Maybe he didn’t take in the gleaming red and gold armor another of those godlike physiques was clad in, or the bow and arrows on the back of a third massively muscled mesormorph, or the odd red skin of the fourth member of this weird contingent.

Maybe, somehow, he just knew that these guys would hang back and let the girl handle the whole thing.

Well, that would be okay then, because he’d have no way of knowing that this chick in the bar floozy outfit was actually the universe’s greatest martial artist and, having in the recent past opened up colossal cans of whup ass on everyone ranging from the Norse God of Thunder to Kang the Conqueror his damn self, could fairly easily handle one lousy bald headed street thug in bright yellow pajamas.

You have to give Stainless this scene, though, because he obviously wanted to do a fairly calm, interim issue in between major action arcs, and back in the mid 1970s, you had to have SOME action in every Marvel comic. And this sequence is it, pretty much all the action that occurs in this entire installment. For the rest of it, the Avengers wander around with Mantis in Saigon trying to figure out what the hell is up with her (she’s an enigma shrouded in a mystery, of course, since she’s Asian and inscrutable and has weird occult empathy powers and bizarre martial arts mastery and refers to herself as ‘this one’), talk to Nomad when he shows up (bizarrely; the last we saw him he was over in the South Pacific battling the Serpent Squad, and while Englehart tries to do his best to insist that this means he was ‘right in the neighborhood’ and therefore ‘just stopped by’ when he ‘heard you people were here’), all the while completely unaware that Kang the Conqueror has hooked up with the ever occult Immortus and has hatched yet another completely unhinged scheme to… um… do something… to the Avengers… humiliate them or kill them or make them give him autographed pictures for his memorabilia collection, I’m not sure… by plucking various gomers from the sands of history and forcing the Avengers to do battle with them in the timeless labyrinth of Limbo.

Let’s go back to the Nomad thing.

Nomad is, actually, Captain America. Cap, over in his own title, got fed up with being Cap after a big plot (also scripted by Englehart) in which he discovered that his enemies, the Secret Empire, were covertly being run by someone high up in the American government. (Originally, in 1973, this was understood to be President Nixon. However, in current Marvel time, it is now 2003, of course, and next year, it will be 2004, and the whole Secret Empire story took place, oh, we can’t be sure or really pin it down, but maybe six to ten years ago, so right now it probably happened during the Clinton years, and the Secret Empire was probably actually being run by Hillary. Ten years from now, I’d guess it would have been being masterminded by Dick Cheney.)

Anyway, Cap, discovering that the leader of a criminal conspiracy attempting to take over the United States by force was, actually, someone from the American government in a very high position, became disillusioned. He gave up his position as Captain America, and tried to retire (with the enthusiastic aid of his then girlfriend and major league blonde hottie Sharon Carter), but found he just couldn’t stifle the urge to put a costume on and run around beating the shit out of complete strangers. So he created another identity for himself called the Nomad, and for a couple of issues of CAPTAIN AMERICA AND THE FALCON, that’s who he was, whipping around putting the bitch slap on various villains (and tripping over his cape).

Now, Cap has no super powers. Which means the Nomad has no super powers. As I recollect, the Nomad got to the middle of the Pacific Ocean (where he was ‘in the neighborhood’ to drop in on the Avengers while they were hanging out in Vietnam helping Mantis) by hitching a ride with the Sub-Mariner, who had this advanced technology Atlantaean sub/jet (don’t ask me how Atlantaeans manufacture flying submarine-jets on the bottom of the ocean floor; maybe they just buy them from Stark Enterprises like everyone else). However, Namor (the Sub-Mariner’s name, for you non-comics junkies who are reading this, although I don’t know why you are) is a kind of pissy dude, and I really don’t feature him going along with Nomad wanting a side trip to Vietnam just so he can say hi to a bunch of guys the Sub-Mariner has rather often in the past gotten his ass whipped by. (“Oh, sure, Cap,” Namor snarls, “no problem, we’ll just go over to Saigon so you can chat with a bunch of folks who used to beat hell out of me and my armies whenever I tried to invade New York City. Anything else I can do for you? Want a foot rub? Like to date my cousin?”)

All of which makes me wonder, exactly how did Cap/Nomad get to Saigon? And a few minutes later, when he hears a news bulletin about his current bad guys showing up on the West Coast and abruptly leaves to deal with them, exactly where is he going? Did he borrow the Fantasticar from Reed Richards? Did he double park it in front of the American Embassy, and is he heading back there now, hopefully before he gets ticketed by those ornery Saigon meter maids? Or are we supposed to believe Subby actually did give Cap a ride over to Southeast Asia just for kicks, and is currently sitting behind the wheel of his jet-sub a few blocks over, drumming his fingers on the dashboard and staring at his watch, going “Ten minutes my ASS, goddamit, Cap, you ALWAYS do this to me, if I don’t have this thing back by the time Namora needs to get to her bowling league I am gonna hear about it for WEEKS…”

Yeah, I guess I’m being a little fussy, but it’s because with great fiction and great fictional characters, I like things to be plausible… I like to be able to take this seriously, as if this world and these characters really exist somewhere. And in the world of the Avengers, this stuff should matter. If someone claiming to be an old friend of theirs shows up in ridiculously implausible circumstances, they should notice it, and someone should ask some questions. I mean, they have enemies that can impersonate anyone, and who, given the opportunity, would love to have the chance to infiltrate the team. How do they know Nomad is Nomad? They didn’t ask for I.D. They didn’t ask him any really hard questions. He could be a robot, or an alien shapeshifter. Both are entirely plausible in the Avengers universe.

What isn’t very plausible is a guy with no superpowers who was last reported beating up some bad guys on an oil rig in the middle of the Pacific Ocean suddenly ‘hearing’ about the Avengers being in Saigon (when they’ve only been there a couple of hours) and deciding to just ‘drop by’ for a chat. In fact, that’s more than implausible, that’s pretty ridiculous. I think a little “Um, say, Cap, how the hell did you get here, anyway?” would have been very much in order.

Other than the above, all that happens in the rest of the issue is Kang using Immortus’ machinery to summon various mooks from various points in history, so he can sic them on the Avengers. Somehow or another, Kang seems to feel that if he sends a bunch of bad supervillains, nearly all of whom have already had their asses whipped by the Avengers or other superheroes in the past, into battle against the Avengers, this will accomplish something.

I don’t know exactly what he’s thinking, here; personally, if I had access to 1/10th the resources Kang has at his fingertips, and the Avengers got up my ass as badly as they apparently do Kang’s, I’d go back in time to 1961 and invest five bullets in taking out Don Blake, Tony Stark, Hank Pym, Janet Van Dyne, and Robert Bruce Banner before they ever got super powers. Then a few years later, in a timeline with no Avengers at all, I’d snatch up the Celestial Madonna from whatever Vietnamese bar she was working in at the time and Go Home Happy.

However, supervillains pretty much never do the sensible thing… I wrote a whole article once on how stupid this whole “Now that I’m out of jail again, I’ll go find the guy who beat hell out of me and put me there in the first place and attack him” nonsense is, but all of them do it like clockwork anyway… so you can’t expect Kang to come up with a reasonable plan, either (about fifteen issues after this particular one I’m talking about, Kang will decide to conquer the 20th Century by first taking over the 19th, and there his plans are eventually foiled by a buncha cowboys with guns… well, and a serious ass whuppin’ from Thor).

And I really shouldn’t complain about supervillains having no common sense, since otherwise, they would beat the heroes every time, fairly easily. Jeff Webb, in fact, once posited something I call Webb’s Syndrome, to explain why the Classic Superman always did amazingly complex and convoluted stuff to get around various supervillain schemes, instead of doing the obvious thing (which would usually involve him flying up to the supervillain at superspeed and beating said supervillain into unconsciousness before he could blink). The Webb Syndrome basically describes a mental condition in which a person first thinks of something completely ridiculous that they could, just barely feasibly, do about a particular situation with their particular super powers, abilities, or resources… and then, once they’ve thought of it, instead of going “no, that’s stupid, I’ll just punch that idiot in the jaw until he falls over”, they must immediately implement the ridiculous idea in its entirety, without any further reflection.

This explains why Superman was always doing stuff like spinning his body around at superspeed to bore a huge tunnel through the crust of the Earth in order to coat himself with tiny metallic flakes of lead that he could then, with his heat vision, fuse to his body in such a way as to, for only a picosecond, repel Lex Luthor’s artificial Kryptonite beam, after which, he would paint himself green and fall over in a mock faint pretending to be dead, allowing Luthor to believe he had finally triumphed, which would cause Luthor to throw down his artificial Kryptonite blaster and raise his fists to the sky in exultation, which would then allow Superman to throw his big red cape over Luthor and fly him off to prison.

You see, Superman, while trying to figure out how exactly he was going to get that damned Kryptonite blaster away from Luthor without getting his Butt of Steel killed, happened to think of the above strategem, and where anyone not suffering from Webb’s Syndrome would have said, “Okay, that’s truly deranged, why not just fly over there faster than Lex can think and slap the living shit out of his hairless Smallville High graduated ass?”, the Last Son of Krypton had to immediately implement that completely deranged set of tactics, simply because he could.

However, Webb’s Syndrome apparently does not merely apply to Superman (or various other absurdly overpowerful characters from DC’s Silver Age who also did stuff like this all the time). It seems to also apply to nearly every supervillain, who at some point or another, immediately upon being granted parole or breaking out of prison, thinks to themselves “Damn that Spider-Man! He smacked me silly and put me in jail! Ooooh, I’m gonna go put a damned big dent in his head, yes I am!” and then, without even remotely considering the fact that if Spider-Man kicked the living bejezus out of them before, he can most likely do it again, and if they happen to pick on him during the time of the month that he’s doing an appearance in Marvel Team Up, he’s going to have help from someone else, too, they just take off after the Web-Slinger, big, dumb, and happy, and 22 pages later, there they are back in their cell again with a fresh set of lumps.

Or, in Kang’s case, while he has time travel technology, not to mention a whole lot of 40th Century ordinance and personal battle microcircuitry built into his cool villain suit, and he’s supposed to be this major tactical genius, still… Webb’s Syndrome.

He thinks to himself “Say, I could summon up a buncha goobers from various time periods, half of whom the Avengers have already beaten into the ground like tent pegs, and send them after the Avengers!” And having thought that, he does not calmly say to himself “But that’s insane and stupid; I rule the entire 40th Century, I should just go home and fuck a lot of good looking slave ho’s and then watch Monday Night Robot Football”. Noooooo.

Nor does he even reflect, “Hmmm, okay, if I’ve just GOT to whip up on these aggravating freaks of nature, there are much better ways to do it, like, I don’t know, finding a particular historical moment when they’re all at the Mansion for Thanksgiving Dinner, or something, and dropping a cobalt bomb on their asses”.

Once again, nooooo. Having conceived the unhinged and idiotic scheme, he must immediately carry through on the unhinged and idiotic scheme, and that, more than anything, is why Kang the Conqueror and all his ilk will always be beaten like big brass gongs by my boys the Avengers.

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.