Monday, January 31, 2005

Most of this huge wallopin’ page was written yesterday, hence, the date you’ll see below. But there are a few updates for today, and as only two of the four people who read this page have commented so far on Sunday’s drivel, I don’t want to post a whole new page. Hence, this:

I updated my my HeroClix House Rules. I’ve typed in the entire Powers Card, along with all Team Abilities (that was a sheer joy, let me tell you). HeroClix purists are going to scream and pull their hair out when they see some of the stuff I’ve done (especially to Steal Energy and Shape Shift) but scroo’mm. It’s not like anybody but me is ever going to play using these rules anyway.

Now, I hope to GOD I don’t have to update these rules for at least another couple of months, but you never know when someone is going to send me an email pointing out that I changed these rules over here, but forgot to take out this paragraph over there that directly contradicts the new changes. And I appreciate people pointing this out to me; I just wish I weren’t such an idiot that I didn’t do stuff like that.

The Greatest Norton In The World (men call him… Mike) sent me clix today. Just a few leftover IC pieces he had that he thought I didn’t as yet (and he was correct, except for the Vet Magneto, which I have one of already, sorry, but I’m sure Paul will be happy to have this one, if I ever see him again), but still, any day where I get an unexpected package containing HeroClix is a good day indeed. And that rookie Firelord does indeed look promising. So thanks, Mike, you’re the best there is at what you do.

Looking at my clix list, I see I must have typed in Magog over Magneto, or something such. I’ve fixed that, and added in my recent Kingdom Come acquisitions (some of them, the Uniques, I can’t recall all the little stuff I got and don’t much care about) and I put in a couple of the new ones Mike sent me, but didn’t want to get up and go out and actually look at the table where they still are, so I probably didn’t get all of them (in fact, I know I forgot to add the rookie Ultron, darn me).

And Tammy is still an amazingly wonderful person, and I am going to do email tonight, I am, I am, I am.

Okay, now read all the crap I posted yesterday, or, you know, actually go outside and do something instead. It’s not like I’ll know.

Sunday January 30, 2005

I owe everybody email. Well, okay, not everybody. I owe Tammy, Mike Norton, and Scott Shepherd email. I may owe Hartmut email. I probably don’t owe Steve Tice email, but I almost certainly owe him money. And yet, with all that, here I am, typing on this thing. And my solid plans for the weekend (aside from posting this new blog page) include watching Assault on Precinct 13, playtesting my new HeroClix rules a bit more, finishing Dorsai!, and typing a modified HeroClix powers card to put into my House Rules . Do you see email anywhere in there?

If I can find a good electronic copy of the HeroClix power card (or, in fact, the HeroClix rules) online somewhere, though, that will speed things up considerably. I’ll add looking around for such to my weekend activities list… which still doesn’t get any email done. As that old geezer in Excalibur used to say quite a lot: “It’s the way of things…”

Seems strange to have no football on the tube today. I may actually watch the Super Bowl… next week?… I think it’s next week… although I loathe both teams playing in it this year. I’ve decided I have to marginally hope, given my wretched lack of options, that the bedamned and loathsome Eggos win, because the inculcated-in-childhood hatred I have for the hideous, tumorous New England Party Hats, which goes back to me being a Buffalo Bills fan in my adolescence, outstrips even the rampant contempt I have for the vile and reprehensible Philadelphia Beagles. Plus, the Pasty Sluts are entirely too arrogant these days, and I don’t even want to imagine how aggravating they’re going to get if they win two in a row. So… rah, Urkles, he said, choking and gagging, hissing and spitting. But if there is some way both teams can lose, that’s my first choice.

I’ll be heading off to watch Assault On Precinct 13 in a few hours, but meanwhile, I may as well blog. I have high hopes for this movie, and even higher ones that if it does suck, the fact that it exists will get the original film by Carpenter out on DVD. Oh, it probably already is, but I mean, you know, with good enough distribution that I can find it without rooting through 57 different copies of old obscure Lou Diamond Phillips straight-to-video action movies in the discount bins for half an hour first.

Okay, now I’m back. The remake of Assault on Precinct 13 actually could have used Lou Diamond Phillips in a few places. I guess that after Training Day Ethan Hawke is just resigned to having to play heroic, beleaguered, street smart urban cops for the remainder of his career, and never never never spend six to eight weeks on location making out with Julie Delpy in front of a camera crew again. Sucks to be him, you betcha.

Laurence Fishburne absolutely exudes menace in this movie, which is pretty much all his character exists for, and the rest of the cast does their own stuff with reasonable style and panche before, you know, they each get shot in the head.

This movie’s clever screenwriter actually wrote in parts for two, count them, two Hollywood hotties in this movie, and then wasted one on former Sopranos skank Drea deMatteo, whom I wouldn’t fuck with John Leguizamo’s dick. The other hotty part went to Maria Bello, whom I thought I’d heard of until I looked her up on the Internet, when it turned out she did one season of ER back in 1994, and since then, she’s worked mostly on Lou Diamond Phillips movies… or stuff in that genre, anyway.

Mind you, Ms. Bello is pretty hot, but annoyingly, despite the fact that she spends most of the film very nearly falling out of her amazingly skimpy New Years Eve party dress, she never quite manages it. In fact, there’s absolutely no skin at all in this movie, which, given the type of movie it is, and the actresses in it, strikes me as simply being incomprehensible and wrong. Ah, Mary Elizabeth Mastrontonio, where are you when we need you?

Overall, while I imagine the original version isn’t really as good as I’m remembering it, after seeing it maybe twice more than twenty years ago, still, it has to be at least as good as this.

Oh, I nearly forgot, listening to Gabriel Byrne trying really really hard not to speak with his normal accent is hilarious. He’s no Dominic West or Linus Roache, that’s for sure.

Which is a reference to The Forgotten, which I enjoyed quite a lot. Dominic West I knew mostly from The Wire, and he was good in The Forgotten, too, so I was stunned to discover, when I watched the usual “Making Of” featurette, that he’s British, and normally speaks with a pronounced accent. Linus Roache, who plays the villain in the movie, is also British, and you also absolutely wouldn’t know it from his dialogue. Poor old Gabriel Byrne; he just can’t do an American non-accent. I guess that’s why he never gets nominated for Academy Awards.

Julianne Moore is pretty good in the movie, Gary Sinise is watchable as always, and veteran Hollywood hack director Joseph Rubin puts it all together deftly enough. It is, essentially, a 90 minute X Files episode in which Mulder and Scully never show up and we never really miss them, either. I should, probably, give Ms. Moore more props than just ‘pretty good’; her part calls for her to do nothing except alternate between being distraught and defiant for the entire film, and yet, nonetheless, she manages to make her character, who is pretty much an archetype wrapped in a cliché, surprisingly three dimensional.

I also enjoy the movie because it may well be the ultimate tale of feminine empowerment, and Our Heroine never so much as throws a punch. Motherhood conquers all, as it were… which is an unusually upbeat message, coming out of a major Hollywood studio these days.

The DVD has a lovely feature; not only does it have the usual Deleted Scenes, but it offers an alternate Extended Version in which the Deleted Scenes, along with an alternate ending, have been cut in where they belong. It’s a feature I wish to God other films (notably Hellboy, where the Deleted Scenes are delightful and really add to the film) had. The only problem with it here is I like the theatrical ending, in which the bad guy is genuinely bad, and Our Heroine genuinely defeats him, more than the alternate ending, in which he’s just Above Us All but, in the end, is moved to Take Pity On The Poor Gallant Humans.

Me, I like to see entities that do bad things get their asses kicked, not relent in patronizing sympathy and make everything better in the end. But your mileage may vary, and at least this DVD gives you the option.

Kind of on that subject, I was talking about the rather idiotic time travel/alternate timelines movie The Butterfly Effect with a guy at work the other day, and it turns out (at least, according to him) that I have only seen the Alternate Ending version. In the theatrical version, Ashton Kuchter doesn’t kill himself in the womb at all, but rather, settles for a fairly decent version of his life (one in which, presumably, his girlfriend isn’t a crack ho and he himself isn’t in prison fellating Aryan Brothers, although that would really only be better from Ashton Kuchter’s viewpoint, not mine) and burns his journals. I gotta tell you, I really prefer the alternate version. If there’s anyone who could improve the world by never being born, it’s gotta be Ashton. Although maybe it’s just me thinkin’ that. A lot of people sure seem to like his movies.

THROW AWAY PLANET

During the two years I spent working for the local metropolis’ City Clerk’s office, I was exposed to a lot of new and different information. I learned far more than any sane person would ever want to know about the astonishing corruptness and inefficiency of the local metropolis’ government on every level, and about things like zoning, and Architectural Review Committees, and neighborhood action groups, and all kinds of crap like that.

And, I learned a fairly astonishing statistic, simply from transcribing so many reports given by the Solid Waste Department to City Council… the average American generates about 1.5 tons of garbage a year.

We whip right on by that statistic, don’t we? It causes nary a ripple to our consciousness. 1.5 tons of garbage a year… nah, that really doesn’t sound like that much. 3,000 pounds of offal and detritus we don’t want and have no use for, going into plastic bags and out to the curb for people we don’t know to haul away for us to some destination we are not aware of, per American, per year. 57.7 pounds o’ crap a week per you and you and you and you. (Probably 57.8 per me, since I throw out a lot of HeroClix packaging, at least, lately.)

8.24 pounds of shit we don’t want any more per day, per person.

Read that again. EIGHT POUNDS OF WASTE MATERIAL PER PERSON, PER DAY.

That’s the equivalent of a gallon of water, or a human head’s, worth of mass that each one of us throws away every single day.

Well, you’ll protest, there’s just no way – that’s got to be wrong. I mean, all those wrappers and hamburger cartons and paper bags from fast food places and newspapers I’ve read and… all that stuff is light! There’s no way I toss out eight pounds worth of shit each day!

And, in fact, if we go back to what I said way above, for the sake of hyperbole, when I was talking about how we pay people to haul this crap away from the curb for us and take it to someplace out of sight, and thus, out of mind, well, no, we don’t generate 8 pounds of that each day. If I generated 8 pounds of throwaway crap each day, I’d be hauling 42 pounds of garbage out to the curb, 21 pounds at a time, twice a week. I’d notice that, I’m not in very good shape.

But that’s because about half of our output of waste material each day is, well, waste. It doesn’t go into the trash can beside your recliner, under your desk, or over by the wall in the break room at work. It goes out the bottom of your commode and into the solid waste disposal system lying beneath your feet even as you read this… and said system belonging to the major metropolis I used to work for handled between 600 and 1000 tons of solid waste per day.

Don’t think your liquid waste doesn’t weigh anything, have mass, take up space, or have any environmental impact, either. It may seem like nothing when you’re flushing it away after lunch, before heading back to your cubicle. But it’s not nothing, not at all. It’s enough material that, when your power goes out and stays out and the Solid Waste department can’t get electricity to run the pumps and water pressure to flush the pipes, suddenly you and several hundred thousand people living within ten square miles of you have a serious problem.

Now, here’s the thing – no matter what you may hear, we recycle very very little of this crap. There’s no real way to get a handle on just how much or little, because, well, the people who run the recycling plants have no vested interest in being truthful about such things, and even if they were, many recycling processes generate run off wastes of their own that nobody mentions in the brochures. Still, a wildly generous estimate of how much of this garbage we find some other pragmatic use for would be 5%. That means about 2,850 pounds of trash per American per year, going… somewhere.

And that means, given that we’re around (rounding off ) 295,000,000 strong this year, so, well, that’s (yes, I have a calculator, I’m going to hit you with the figure, prepare to flinch) 840,750,000,000 pounds o’ crap going… somewhere… every year.

Eight hundred forty BILLION, seven hundred fifty MILLION pounds of garbage. Per year.

That’s 420,375,000 tons, if that makes you feel any better.

Bear in mind, it is a basic physical law (we believe) that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. Ultimately, all you can do is convert it from one form to another. All of us do this every day, when we convert a Big Mac into shit, and Pepsi, which is mostly water with certain additives, into urine, which is mostly water with other additives.

We also do this to some extent when we send some of this trash (I have no idea how much – 10%? Let’s call it that) to an incinerator. We then turn it essentially into ash and smoke and heat, much of which goes up the incinerator chimney and into our atmosphere… say half of that ten percent does this, so that’s 42,037,500,000 pounds of hot soot we put each year into the fairly thin layer of gases surrounding our planet without which life on Earth cannot continue to exist.

Where do we put all this crap that we don’t recycle? Any place where we don’t have to look at it, or smell it, on a daily basis. We burn some of it, and see above for what that does. The vastly greater part of this unimaginable mass of refuse we bury.

Now, here’s the thing. All of these impressive sounding figures don’t mean much of anything without comparison figures, like, what is the total capacity in pounds of Earth’s atmosphere? How many square feet or miles of Earth’s accessible surface area do we have to use as landfills and toxic waste dumps? How many sea bottom trenches and valleys can we fill up with crap before the oceans die? In other words, how much ecosystem do we have to tuck this crap away into?

I imagine those figures are probably available somewhere on the Web, but I have no idea how to find them. But I’m willing to admit, most likely those incredible figures I listed above as to the tonnage of trash we generate every single day don’t add up to 1% of the volume of the space we are pouring our waste materials into in that same time frame.

Maybe not even a fraction of one percent.

Here’s the thing, though --

Most of this stuff won’t go away.

The soot we throw into our atmosphere doesn’t just vanish. It collates around suspended water molecules, and in the process, it alters weather patterns substantially, and eventually falls along with rain, and aggregates on the ground, or in our sewers, or in our water supply. It doesn’t vanish, and there really isn’t any particular place that it would be, you know, good, for burned up waste that we didn’t even want in the first place before we burned it up, to eventually accumulate in.

The heat we throw into our atmosphere doesn’t go anywhere, either, and that’s a whole different story, and one I won’t go into right now, other than to note the story in today’s paper about glaciers all over the world steadily diminishing at unheard of rates since the 1980s, and disturbing projections that human cities with populations totaling in the millions who depend on those glaciers for run off water may have to suddenly relocate, en masse, sometime in the next decade, as those vast, millenia old geological water stores simply vanish.

And while a lot of the organic trash we throw out… left over food, orange peels, potato skins, old lettuce, that crap… will rot and return some sort of value to the soil, and so will the metal cans, unless they are treated not to, still, a lot of it is man made plastic or ceramic or styrofoam, and that shit isn’t going anywhere. That shit will still be sitting, pretty much exactly as it is now, wherever it is we dumped it, ten thousand years from now when curious alien archeologists come down from Arcturus and start excavating.

My point is, however slowly we are doing it (and I have a feeling that it’s honestly not all that slowly), we are filling up a very finite amount of storage space. And when it’s full… what are we going to do with our trash then?

All of this, by the way, was brought to mind by another story in today’s paper, about a gigantic manure fire somewhere out West that has been burning for three months and that just won’t go out. They can’t simply dump a lot of water on it, because they’re worried that several thousand tons of cattle shit will run off and poison the local water table. And they’ve tried scattering it around with heavy machinery, but then the smaller piles caught fire… it’s a problem.

And it only seems like a comical one because, you know, we’re lucky enough to be way over here. This problem arose because over the past few decades, these feed lots have become big business. Farmers ship their cattle to these feed lots from all over America, where their cows are fed on high protein feed to beef them up for a couple of months before they are slaughtered. This feeding regimen apparently can generate 9 pounds of cow shit per bovine per day… and at any given time, these feed lots have up to 12,000 cows on them, eating their fool heads off.

That’s 54 tons of cow shit a day these guys have to figure out what to do with. Apparently, what they do with it is, they pile it up out behind the barn. And, since manure gives off heat, this pile of shit tends to spontaneously combust after a while.

A couple of entries ago, my good buddy Mike Norton made a comment, at the end of a blog entry on how long it had taken him to get to work one particular day due to snow-slowed traffic, that we need a plague.

Grim though it is, I’m tending to agree with him.

And I strongly suspect we’re gonna get one, too, sooner rather than later, with all this garbage lying around… not to mention the burning manure.

COMFORT ZONE

Speaking of my good buddy Mike Norton, something else he wrote quite a while ago must have been rolling around in the back of my head for a while, as it just recently occurred to me that I’ve been looking at the American political scene all wrong.

Well… not all wrong, I guess. My viewpoint has just been slightly skewed.

It’s kind of like, with network TV, I used to more of less just unthinkingly assume that I was the consumer, or, if you will, the customer, of the broadcast networks. I think this is a common misperception, because we all behave like outraged customers when a TV network does something we don’t like… pre-empts one of our shows for a lousy sporting event or Presidential speech, shaves yet another few minutes off this season’s episodes to fit in another couple of commercials, puts Dennis Franz’s ass on national TV, whatever… when the TV networks do something that pisses us off, we tend to react with outraged huffiness, as if we’ve gotten bad service at a restaurant or been gouged outrageously at a garage.

Here’s the thing about that, though – we are not television’s customers, nor are TV shows a network’s product that they are selling to us. We instinctively feel it must be that way, but it’s not.

The fact is, we are the product. Whatever a network broadcasts is the equivalent of the manufacturing facility that they use to create and refine their product, which, again, is us. They sell their product – a transfixed audience, hopefully fitting a certain target demographic, staring slackjawed at our tubes with drool running down our chins and the judgement centers of our brains firmly turned off – to their actual customers, the sponsors.

Once you get that through your head, a lot of stuff falls into place. We realize why, for example, networks so often ignore huge fan outcries to do something (usually, keep an endangered or canceled show on the air), and why the wilier folks out there (like the Reverend Donald Wildemon, who is pretty damned smart for a goddam moral midget) always back up the idiotic narrowminded pigheaded demands that they make to the networks by threatening to organize a boycott of the network’s sponsors… which is what will make the networks sit up and take notice, because that’s the sort of thing that makes their real customers (again, the sponsors) walk away.

I’ve been similarly coming at American electoral politics from the wrong angle, and again, it’s something Mike Norton wrote on his blog a month or so ago that brought me, at a glacial pace but still, I’m here now, to the following realization:

Being a successful politician in America isn’t really all about charisma, after all.

It’s all about comfort.

See, what Mike said, a month or so ago (or maybe longer) is that Americans would never hold the kind of demonstrations over an obviously cooked election that the Ukranians did, because “we’re just too comfortable”.

And that’s entirely correct, and it’s the keystone of Dubya’s victory. Not moral values, or the undeniable fact that he’s a more charismatic man than Kerry is, or Gore was. It’s quite simply this: a near majority of American voters are more comfortable with the notion of Dubya being President than they were with Kerry.

Now, I’ve been saying for years that you can pick any election, especially a Presidential one, simply by figuring out which candidate is more charismatic. It’s why I was mortally sure/deathly afraid Bush would beat Gore in 2000 (I was wrong; Bush had to steal that election with his brother’s, Katherine Harris’, Halliburton’s, and the Supreme Court’s help, but it was Clinton’s charisma he couldn’t overcome, just as his father rode to victory over Dukkakis on Reagan’s charisma, rather than his own). And charisma is important, absolutely… but it’s not the be all, end all.

In local politics last year, an astonishingly charismatic politician (Bob Buckhorn) lost a mayoral race he had all but sewn up in Tampa, to a somewhat less charismatic opponent (Pam Iorio), because he went negative in a truly, spectacularly ugly fashion in the last two weeks of the campaign – and that made voters uncomfortable with him. (Most likely, I think, because it was felt on some primal level that he was beating up on a woman, whether people articulated that to themselves or not.)

More recently, Bob lost a race for County Commission to a less charismatic opponent, Bryan something or other, who, despite being an ex-professional wrestler, nonetheless, made an increasingly conservative district of Hillsborough County feel more comfortable with the idea of him representing them than ex City Councilmember Buckhorn.

Now, charisma certainly helps. Every successful politician has to have some of it; one can define charisma, in fact, as being a personal attribute that makes a person feel comfortable with another person. But in the end, charisma won’t seal the deal. It will make whatever your message is more palatable, but the most charismatic politician in the world cannot sell people a Lava soap enema if he actually describes it as a Lava soap enema. The message is more important – and it has to be a message that the voters are comfortable with. At least, more comfortable than they are with whatever alternative messages the opposition is trying to shill at the moment.

See, once you realize this, as with the TV thing, so many things fall into place. Call the Republicans what you will (just don’t call them late to the feeding trough), but they implicitly understand this essential principle of electoral politics, and when you look back at the last year of Presidential campaigning, you can clearly see it all in these terms. Everything they did was intended to either (a) make the country less comfortable with Kerry, and/or (b) make the country more comfortable with Bush.

Kerry understood this, too, and to be honest, he was about as good at it as Bush was (which is why the GOP had to, once more, cook the election). The Democrats have learned their lesson from the Reagan-Mondale debacle in 1984. Mondale told the country pretty much the naked, unpleasant truth about our dire economic circumstances and the sacrifices that would be necessary to get through the tough times to come, and not only that, he used big words to do it, too… something guaranteed to make the American voter doubly uncomfortable.

Reagan, on the other hand, constantly reassured us that it was ‘Morning In America’. Like virtually every conservative buzz phrase – ‘what about the victim’s rights’, ‘support the troops’, and, all time universe champeen, ‘family VAL-yews’ -- that one is semantically meaningless… but like them all, it was crafted by expert writers to make a majority of people feel comfortable.

This is why Kerry so stringently avoided talking about gay rights. Only Bush could win with that issue, because he’s on the side that makes a majority of Americans comfortable. However tolerant we may try to be (and statistically, a depressingly small number of Americans even bother to try) the fact remains that only gays are really comfortable with openly expressed gay sexuality, and gays will, apparently, always be a minority until they found their own country. You cannot, therefore, make the majority of Americans comfortable by supporting gay marriage, or other gay rights that would allow gays to more openly express a sexuality and a lifestyle that most of us are, in fact, uncomfortable with.

The debates gave Kerry a huge boost (and necessitated a massive Republican effort to swipe the vote in Ohio and Florida) because they allowed him to, for the first time, position himself as someone that a majority of Americans would be comfortable voting for, especially as compared to an obviously at sea, utterly inept Dubya.

Once you realize this fully, you also realize what a truly sick, spoiled, rapidly decaying society we belong to. If we do indeed vote for whichever candidate makes us feel more comfortable, what does that say about us as a culture? People living in other nations have violent demonstrations if not out and out armed revolutions so that they can have fair elections, so that they can have basic human rights, and occasionally, so that their kids can not starve to death or die of some horrible disease before the age of 10. Us… well, when something happens that we know is wrong, like our electoral process being hijacked right in front of our eyes, or our military invading a nation that has never attacked us, for no good reason at all, killing thousands of people who never did anyone any harm… well… we blog about it. That’s what we do.

And then we go back out and vote for the candidate that we feel most comfortable with.

I’m no different. I didn’t vote for Dubya either time, because I am extremely uncomfortable with the idea of a not particularly intelligent man who claims to use the Christian faith as a touchstone for his most crucial decisions sitting in the most powerful leather executive chair in the world. And I even voted for Nader in 2000 – yes, that’s right, I’m a Florida resident who voted for Nader in 2000, it’s my fault – because I was much more comfortable with the idea of having a President who hadn’t been bought and paid for by corporate special interests than I was with, you know, the god fearing idiot from column A, or the ineffectual dolt from column B (whose wife is a paladin for the cause of censorship, lest we forget).

One could certainly argue that there is nothing wrong with voting for someone who makes us feel comfortable, as another way to put that is, we vote for the person we think will make our lives, and our children’s lives, better… and that’s okay, right?

Well, first, I’m not sure that’s what we do. When I speak of a successful politician making the plurality of voters more comfortable, I am talking about an emotional condition. Nobody in their right mind who makes less than $100,000 a year, and I include most conservatives in that statement, could possibly, given even thirty seconds of rational thought, actually believe Dubya is going to do one single goddam thing to make their lives better. That’s not what he does, and even a cursory examination of his track record will show that. The only people whose lives get better under Dubya are those who are already wealthy, and their lives don’t need to get better. In fact, by any enlightened ethical standard, they could stand to, and should get, considerably worse.

But when politicians make voters feel more comfortable, they are, to a large extent, lulling them to sleep. People vote these days in a warm, fuzzy cloud. If even a majority of the electorate actually thought about the issues, and what Dubya has done in the past and is overwhelmingly likely to do in the future, they could not possibly be comfortable with the thought of him in office. Even the most rabidly conservative redneck in America cannot be comfortable with the rising American death toll in Iraq, or the fact that every single reason the Administration gave in support of the invasion has proven to be undeniably false (something the White House itself has, albeit rather quietly, recently admitted to). Nobody can be comfortable with the state of our economy. Bush’s own core support base cannot be comfortable with what we all know he did to avoid service in Vietnam, nor is their any possible way they can be comfortable with the behavior and demeanor of his daughters.

Nonetheless, clearly a large number of Americans are comfortable with Bush, more comfortable with him than they are with Kerry. I do not say ‘a majority’ because Bush did inarguably steal the 2000 elections, and I remain convinced he chopped, boiled, basted with butter, and deep fried this one, as well. But the Republican electioneering machine is geared to swing a statewide vote by a few percentage points either way; the Elephant lovers could not steal elections if they were not first so adept at getting very nearly half the country to feel better about them than they do about ‘those goddam tax and spend liberals’.

And, second... the globe has finite resources, and a whole lot of people living on it. We have reached a point where another way of saying we are voting for the guy who will make our lives better, is, we are voting for the guy who will make the lives of a lot of other people who live in other countries worse. And there is no moral or ethical standard I can think of whereby that is considered acceptable behavior.

Ultimately, it has to catch up with us. Nature does not acknowledge our comfort level. We may enjoy our billion dollar aerosol industry, and we may be very happy with our fossil fuel powered life style, but the ozone layer continues to shred, and the glaciers continue to melt. That the universe is utterly apathetic to anyone’s inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness cannot be denied, especially only a few weeks after a mere eyelash flicker on Mother Nature's part, somewhere in the Indian Ocean, wiped out 170,000 people and counting.

Whether we need a plague or not, I really think we’re going to get one… or some kind of global cataclysm… that won’t be conveniently on the other side of the planet, next time. Unless, of course, we start making some uncomfortable choices.

And we’re not going to do that.

Hey, I’m definitely included in that. No moral superiority here. Pass me the chicken and biscuits, please.

I’M IN LOVE WITH TESLA GIRLS

On the way over to Assault on Precinct 13 tonight, my mind wandered to various things that don’t work when the lights are out. (We Florida residents tend to dwell on this to a perhaps morbid degree, after our Summer of Four Hurricanes.) And it occurred to me that, honestly, the pervasive presence of electricity is such an overwhelming influence on our day to day lives that, if it were suddenly to vanish, well, we simply couldn’t survive.

I think a lot of people don’t realize that. Oh, we’ve all lost electricity for a few hours or a few days, and it’s horrible, so we all think we know what it’s like… sitting in the dark with our TVs, and our stereos, and our X-boxes, and our computers, all completely silent, listening to battery powered radios, cursing the local utility company for prioritizing other neighborhoods instead of ours in their repair sweeps… yes, it’s torture, absolutely, especially since hurricanes tend to hit Florida in the summer, and summer in the semi-tropics is no time to be without air conditioning.

Nonetheless, when all is said and done, we tend to regard power outages as, well, extreme annoyances. Which is bad enough. But if you keep your head and don’t go wandering around outside near the downed wires, and you’re smart enough to set your generator up outside so the fumes don’t kill you, they aren’t life threatening.

This is because, of course, we have implicit faith that in a matter of days, at the most, we’ll get our power back.

But what if we didn’t?

When we say that everything runs off electricity, well, we really don’t grasp what that means. The stove is probably electric, but hell, we can eat cold food out of cans for a while… assuming we have a non electric can opener, or we really like Spam. And if you’re a savvy hurricane survivor, then the first thing you do when the lights go out is fill up your tub with water, so you can use that water to flush your toilet with, until such time as the lights come back on again. And of course, you’ve got your three or four or five gallons of boiled water stashed under the sink. Not having air conditioning truly sucks, as does no Internet, no TV, no DVDs, no videotapes, no music, and no goddam light after the sun goes down… and there are no nights as endless as nights without power, I have learned, unless perhaps they are the nights you spend when you can’t sleep during a winter camp out in a goddam pup tent in the Boy Scouts when you are 10 years old and it is five degrees outside, and really dark, and your sleeping bag has brushed up against the side of the tent no matter how you contorted yourself to prevent it so it is slowly getting wetter and wetter on that side, and all you wish is that you were home again and had never heard of this idiotic frickin social torture known as Scouting…

…but still, that dreadful time without electricity is tolerable, because we know it’s only going to last a few hours, or a few days.

But, still, somewhere in the back of my head, I have always assumed that, hey, if the lights went out and never came back on again… if some strange weird intricacy of quantum law involving sub-molar physics were to abruptly, for no discernible reason, shift a decimal place or two, and electricity simply wouldn’t work any more, as lovingly detailed in S.M. Stirling’s excellent novel Dies The Fire… still, you could survive. I mean, yeah, life would suck and maybe you wouldn’t want to survive, without the DVDs and the Internet and air conditioning and all that, but, you know, you could.

After all, the Amish do it, right? How tough are they? With those silly little beards? I mean, c’mon.

What occurred to me tonight, though, is that the Amish do not live in cinderblock shoeboxes that have four windows, none of which are really designed to open very far. They do not live in houses with running water or working plumbing. The Amish have wells, and presumably, hand pumps to bring the water up from those wells. They have outhouses, I imagine.

Forget about starving to death if the lights go out forever. Most of us won’t last that long. What are we going to do for water?

That three or four or five gallons in old plastic milk jugs stowed under the sink will get me through a week. If there is still no water coming out of the taps after that, though, I’m bummin’. I literally do not know where I would go to get fresh potable water around here, other than, you know, the Dollar General over by where I work… and I’m pretty sure that by that time, the Ayatollah of Rock and Rollah will have set up in there with his gang of mohawk-sporting enforcers, and I’ll be (literally) screwed if I venture my probably not quite as fat by then ass onto the premises.

The simple fact of the matter is, take away electricity, and the building I live in becomes uninhabitable in a week. Hell, the entire town I live in isn’t much better suited for a pre-Industrial Era society. Once the Wal-mart is picked clean, we’re all gonna die.

Unless, of course, the Ayatollah of Rock and Rollah would like to learn how to play HeroClix. Then I’m golden. As long as I let him win a lot.

NEVER TELL ME THE ODDS

The average roll on 2d6 is a 7. So I’m told, and I believe it. See, to get a 7, you can roll a combination of a 1 and a 6, or a 2 and a 5, or a 3 and a 4. That’s six possible combinations on two six sided dies. To roll a 2 or a 12, on the other hand, you have to get either a 1 on each die, or a 6… it’s not likely. A 3 and an 11 are equally unlikely; you need a 2 and a 1, or a 6 and a 5. A 10 or a 4 you can get with a 6 and a 4 or two 5s, or two 2s, or a 3 and a 1. And so on. Only a 7 has six possible combinations.

This is important in HeroClix, and tonight’s playtesting match showed me why.

If 7 is the average roll in HeroClix, then that’s the numerical range you figure for judging the numbers on a combat dial. If it’s easy to hit someone with a 7, which is a roll you’re more likely to make than any other, then that character is not particularly effective. And if a character can hit most other characters easily with a 7, then you can figure that particular fig is going to be, at the very least, an effective attacker.

Now, last night and over into today, I put up the entire Kingdom Come team as it exists now – KC Superman, KC Wonder Woman, KC Batman, KC Shazam (the character’s name is Captain Marvel, but Marvel Comics stole the copyright to that name back in the 70s, so DC has to lump it) and no good lousy Magog (that’s not his name, but I think he’s a dreadful character), along with two, count them, TWO, Bat Sentries – against an equal point value of X-Men. Since X-Men tend to average around 50 points a fig, well, this was a whole LOT of stinkin’ muties who were hated and feared by a world they were sworn to protect – apparently, from an invasion by a lot of really wretched Mark Waid characters.

Kingdom Come pieces are, without any argument, currently the most powerful pieces in the game. That team I rattled off above came to around 1280 points, which is a frankly prodigious amount of points for a HeroClix game. The worst clix in the lot, perhaps ironically because they are the most visually impressive, are the double sized Bat Sentries, which weigh in at 67 points each (and which, because of the huge walloping 1958 Plymouth Fury type fin on their backs, take up an enormous amount of room on my bookshelves). From there, it’s a jump to the next least powerful KC figure, Kingdom Come Batman, who gets picked on by all the other Kingdom Come superhumans for sporting a shabby 188 points. Kingdom Come Superman, on the other hand, is not only the most powerful KC figure at 265 points, he’s also the most powerful HeroClix figure currently in existence, unless you count idiot stunt figures like the Sentinel and/or Galactus, which I don’t because I think they’re just stupid, and anyway, I wouldn’t have any place to put one, given that I barely have room for two Bat-Sentries.

So, it was 7 KC figs, versus, oh, I don’t know, I’m going to say, about 18 or 20 X-Men. Let me think if I can remember them all – I had all the Silver Age X-Men there, so that’s Professor X, Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Iceman, the Beast, and the Angel, plus latecomers the Mimic, Havok, and Polaris. Then I added in the All New, All Different X-Men from GIANT SIZE X-MEN #1, at least, such as I have, which is to say, Storm, Colossus, and Wolverine. (There are no Banshee, Sunfire, or Thunderbird figs as yet. There is a Nightcrawler, but he costs about a hundred bucks, so I don’t have one.) I also threw in Rogue, just because, you know, she looks so cute in the movies, and she’s been an X-Man for a while. I rounded it out with X-Men who have interesting and very effective powers – Bishop, Domino, and Psylocke. I honestly have little to no clue who any of them are, and care even less than that, but Bishop has Outwit, Domino has Probability Control, and Psylocke has Enhancement, so in they went.

So, that’s what… one, two, three… er… sixteen X-Men. Okay. Not quite the overwhelming numbers I originally guestimated from memory, but still. 16 to 7 is considerably better than 2 to 1 odds.

Now, one reason the KC team is so powerful is the KC TA, which basically forces anyone trying to get base to base with a KC piece to roll a die, and if you roll a 1-2, you cannot do it… you have to stop on a non-adjacent hex. This is pretty powerful in HeroClix, even though there is only a 1/3 chance of it going off. KC clix also have very effective offensive and defensive powers, like Charge and Hypersonic Speed and Exploit Weakness and Flurry and Outwit and Blades/Claws/Fangs (the KC Wonder Woman is in full Amazon battle armor, with a magic sword).

Most of all, though, they have godlike numbers on their dials.

Attend: if you figure a very good normal human will have about a 9 attack in HeroClix, and the average dice roll is a 7, then a very good normal human can hit, on an average dice roll, someone with a 16 defense. This is for the most part why a 9 attack, and a 16 defense, are considered nominal, or, well, acceptable. Anything less than a 9 attack is considered substandard. Anything more is considered to be good. Similarly, a 17 defense in HeroClix is quite good, and an 18 is godlike. A 15 or less, on the other hand, means all the other kids are going to laugh at you, and then steal your jet belt and your electro-stun blaster off your unconscious body after Captain America or the Taskmaster beat you unconscious and leave you in the middle of the playground.

The lowest attack on a KC fig’s dial is a 10, and it’s on the Bat Sentries. All the actual superhumans with a KC faction stamp have opening Attack Values over 10 – Superman, Magog, and Wonder Woman have 13s, Shazam has a 12, and wimpy, weezing old Bruce in his para-wing has an 11.

Defenses are equally exorbitant. The best Defense you are going to find in the game, without someone using a super power to somehow tinker with it, is an 18. (The upcoming DC set, Legacy, will introduce a new piece with a 20 defense, but that’s also a Kingdom Come piece, the KC Flash.) The contemporary Kingdom Come pieces have defenses ranging from 15 (shared by the Bat Sentries, which are twenty feet tall and have gigantic halogen targets mounted on their chests, and poor elderly doddering Batman in his clumsy exoskeleton), through 18 (which Wonder Woman has, along with a power called Defend, which lets her share that Defense with any friendly figure who happens to be adjacent to her). Magog has a 16, while Shazam and Superman have 17s.

On the current Kingdom Come team, the Bat Sentries can hit the best defense in HeroClix on an 8. Batman can hit an 18 defense on a 7. Shazam needs a 6, Superman, Wonder Woman, and Magog all need 5s.

On the other hand, only Batman and the Bat-Sentries are particularly easy to hit. A very competent human with a 9 attack can hit the Bat-figures on a 6. It takes an 11 attack to be able to hit Wonder Woman on an average 7, and Superman, Shazam, and Magog are all nearly as difficult to hit. Plus, the Boys (other than Batman, of course) all start out with Impervious, a power that always knocks 2 off any damage they take, and has a 1 in 3 chance (rolling a 5-6 on a d6) of simply reducing all damage done to 0.

On the other side of the table, two X-Men have 11 attacks, Cyclops and Professor X. (Cyclops only has to look at you to blast you through a wall, and Professor X attacks telepathically, which is hard to see coming, much less dodge.) A handful more start out with 10s on their attack values – Storm, Wolverine, Colossus (when he gets off his activation click), Psylocke, Havok, Bishop. The rest start with 9s. All of this means that the X-Men can really only hit Kingdom Come figs on an average dice roll before they take any damage, since numbers start to drop the instant you start turning those dials to reflect successful attacks by the enemy.

Kingdom Come figs also deal a lot of damage in one shot – Magog, Superman, and Shazam each do 5, and both Magog and Superman start with Charge, which (under my House Rules) adds 1 to damage from a close combat attack, if you moved up to your target before you belted them one. Beyond that, they also stand up to damage well, with their dials only incrementally falling from start to finish… and most of them have very deep dials.

Most of the X-Men, on the other hand, can’t take more than six, seven clicks of damage at most, and their stats tend to drop off pretty precipitously when they start getting hit, too.

If you thinking I’m leading up to a description of a route by the Kingdom Come team, well, you wouldn’t be wrong.

In the opening turns, I actually thought the X-Men might stand a chance. KC rolled first player status, meaning that, on my House Rules, they got first attack, due to my ‘no attacks on the first turn’ rule. I’d hoped to negate this by having Iceman throw up a barrier to protect my most valuable figs (Professor X, with Mind Control, Bishop, with Outwit, and Domino, with Probability Control) but poor placement necessitated me moving Domino in order to let her use her power for the benefit of Marvel Girl (who was trying to TK Wolverine up next to Magog and Superman, and had to roll to see if she could place him right next to them in hopes of tying them up for a turn). That left a space open next to Professor X, and Wonder Woman immediately hurtled into that open space and brought that old joke about ‘what do you call a paraplegic in a meat packing plant’ to life quite vividly with one stroke of her magic sword.

(The answer is ‘Chuck’, by the way, as in, “Professor Charles Xavier, who no longer has any arms or legs, or any ability to remain conscious for the remainder of this battle.”)

With Mind Control out of the game, well, the X-Men’s cause staggered and nearly fell flat, but still, they had other more or less heavy hitters out there, and some interesting combinations of powers. And they got a lucky break immediately following that, although it didn’t seem that way, when Magog and a Bat-Sentry between them immediately turned Wolverine into an expanding, vainly-struggling-to-regenerate vapor cloud.

This, however, freed up Superman (although, under my House Rules, he was free to move anyway, as Charge allows a character to automatically break away as long as they are moving to engage someone else in close combat). He immediately flew up to Domino, figuring he’d take out the PC piece on the other side (Bishop was just out of his range, or he’d have gone for the Outwitter instead) – and rolled a 2, which automatically misses and always does a click of damage to the piece that rolls it. Since he’d pushed himself getting that far, that did two clicks of damage to him. Meanwhile, out on the board, Batman and his other Bat-Sentry were smacking the crap out of the Mimic.

Then it was the X-Men’s turn.

Superman was literally in the thick of the enemy, surrounded on all sides. He still had Impervious and a 16 defense, so he figured he was okay. Then Bishop moved up and Outwitted his Impervious (Outwit isn’t a gimme on my House Rules; Bishop had to make a successful attack roll and he did; he rolled a 2 first, but Domino let him re-roll it) and followed that with a successful blast for two clicks of damage.

Havok, on a nearby rooftop, had a 10 attack, along with a 4 damage. He fired at Supes too, who now had Invulnerability rather than Impervious. Havok hit as well, doing another 2 clicks of damage to the Last Son of Doomed Krypton (Invulnerability subtracts 2 from all damage done, without having a chance of reducing it all to zero like Impervious does).

The Beast, who was on that same roof at the top of the stairs, then did a flying body slam on Supes. Actually, he ran down the stairs and rushed around the corner and slammed into Supes in terms of actual movement on the map, but I figure the way it worked in actual ‘reality’, he just jumped off the roof and pummeled Supes into the ground with sheer momentum. Charge, as noted above, adds 1 to damage in my system, so the Beast did 4 clicks total, doing another 2 to Supes past his Invulnerability, moving him onto Toughness (which takes 1 off any damage done).

There are 12 power slots on a circular HeroClix combat dial. Generally, some amount of those power slots are taken up by KO clicks, indicating that the character is now knocked unconscious and out of the game. (One reason I like HeroClix is no one dies, just like in the comics of my youth.) The X-Men, as I noted, all tended to have 6 or 7 active clicks, meaning that they’d have about half their dials taken up with KO slots.

A deep dial is a character with 9 or more power slots, meaning they only have 3, or fewer, KO slots.

KC Superman has ONE KO slot. He has 11 clicks of activity. He keeps very decent stats and a lot of super powers all the way down the dial. So, let’s recap:

He took two clicks coming in, one for taking an action two turns in a row (called ‘pushing’) and one for rolling a 2 (which always misses, and always does a click of damage to the attacker). Bishop then Outwitted his Impervious (which required Domino’s help, as she let him reroll a 2) and then hit Supes for 2. Havok hit him for another 2. The Beast followed that with another 2. Supes has now taken a total of 8 clicks of damage. Since of course you always start out on your first click, this has moved him to his 9th click of life. He has two left, and is down to Toughness. Three more clicks of damage will take him out.

Polaris, with an opening Attack Value of 9 and 4 clicks of damage, blasted him resoundingly, and that was all she wrote for the Man of Steel.

So, the most powerful HeroClix figure on the board (in the game, actually) had been taken out. It only took a massive stroke of cataclysmic misfortune on his own part (rolling a 2 while already pushing) and the combined efforts of FIVE opponents to put him on the mat. And while getting that far, the X-Men lost two members (Professor X and Wolverine). And now they have used their entire turn taking out one of the enemy.

That was their shining moment. After that, it just got really bad, really fast. Wonder Woman and Magog took out somebody every round between them. Shazam took out three or four X-Men with his HyperSonic Speed before he finally got pig piled, and even then, they never knocked him all the way out. Oh, the Angel managed to knock Batman down about half his dial, and Storm eventually finished the Parawinged Protector off, but that was the last victory the X-Men celebrated in this fight, and by then they were down to Domino, Psylocke, Storm, Bishop, Marvel Girl, and Havok… and nearly all of them were on their last couple of clicks.

All through the last two turns of the fight (it only lasted six turns; fights go fast under my new movement rules) I was cursing the way I was rolling for the mutants, and blaming the X-Men’s poor showing on the dice going cold. It wasn’t until after I was done with the battle that I realized it wasn’t true. The dice rolled about average for the X-Men, and, in fact, during that one turn when they’d taken out Superman, the dice had actually rolled spectacularly well for them. The problem wasn’t in the dice; it was in the fact that once the X-Men took a few clicks of damage, their attacks all dropped to single digits, and they didn’t have anyone who could do a lot of damage left, either.

After that, I grant you, really good rolls were rare for the X-Men. Psylocke had a chance to mess up or even take out Wonder Woman, but she needed an 8 to hit with her psionic blade, and she couldn’t roll it. But 8, as stated above, is an above average roll to make. The odds weren’t with her anyway.

The Kingdom Come team, on the other hand, other than Batman, remained hard to hit for most of their dials, and if they did get hit, they were generally hard to hurt. They continued to have high attack values, and continued to deal out a truckload of damage when they hit. They didn’t need good dice rolls to hit, they simply needed to avoid rolling really low.

And when they did hit, mutants flew to pieces.

I did not learn as much about my new rules as I thought I might, although I did discover that an idea to add 1 to movement for characters using Charge really wasn’t necessary (as Mike Norton noted in an email last night). Another suggestion, to let characters with Running Shot get off their free ranged attack at any point during their movement, is also a good one, and I think I’ll implement it.

I’d hoped to see how my new Telekinesis rules worked, but I picked bad TK figs to play. Jean Grey has a lousy attack and a starting click of Support that I felt it was much more important to use when I needed to, so she didn’t TK much, other than sending Wolverine to his death early on (and rah rah Jean, you go, girl). Polaris… well, when you’re fighting the Kingdom Come team and a fig has a damage value of 4, you don’t use her TK, trust me.

Beyond that, virtually every Kingdom Come fig has Super Strength, and a lot of them have Charge, which makes putting Objects in their paths really pointless (or counter-productive, if Superman or Shazam decide to just pick up the dumpster you’re trying to pin them behind, fly it over to you, and belabor you enthusiastically about the head and shoulders with it).

Still, I’ve playtested these new rules enough now to say definitively that I like them, and to declare them ‘official’ Doc Nebula House Rules… whatever that means.

Given my lack of social success hereabouts, it’s nice that the game I enjoy most is one that you can, with some enjoyment, play against yourself.

Note I carefully did not say ‘play with myself’, just to keep you Beavis and Butthead fans in the audience from snickering breathily for the next ten minutes.

Still, I have to admit, it gets a little old playing against yourself sometimes, because you really can’t manage to come up with anything surprising. I mean, when you know that the plan is to Mind Control the HyperSonic Speed guy, it’s easy to take precautions.

I found a decent electronic copy of the Powers Card over at some guy’s HeroClix website, so that will help a lot… tomorrow. Right now, I am sick to death of typing, and my forearms, wrists, and fingers really ache, too.

To post, perchance to dream…

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.