I urge anyone reading this who has any respect for any of my opinions at all, or for any of Doc’s, to get to a music store and find a copy of Emmylou Harris’ Luxury Liner album. Not only does it have Pancho & Lefty on it, it’s also got Emmylou doing a lot of other really excellent country/rock tracks. “To Daddy” will break your heart. “Two More Bottles of Wine” and “Ain’t Livin’ Long Like This” could make a stuffed alligator climb down off the wall and boogie, and “You’re Supposed To Be Feelin’ Good” will speak to you in the secret language of your soul. And if, while you’re in that section of the store, you come across a copy of Emmylou’s Quartermoon in a Ten Cent Town, take a listen to her and Willie Nelson dueting on One Paper Kid. I tell ye in truth, my friends, my friends… this is the stuff that makes our hearts keep beating.

Cowboys and Indians and trees he could climb
tomorrow came too fast, but he didn’t mind
The distance was short, so light it again
It never takes too long to go where you been

Well the One Paper Kid
He wasn’t really so mean
Just a little bit scared, and a little bit green
Now he’s heard of a place where it’s legal to dream
So he sat with his coffee
And a blue Tex machine
And rolled on a rock
The One Paper Kid, he’s rollin again

Driver was drunk or he just couldn’t see
Future was there, it’ll happen to me
Now all the time that he’d wasted was his once again
It don’t take no time to get where I am
Broken hearts scattered all over the past
Old bad memories dyin at last
Whiskey and women and growin up fast
Fussin and livin and itchin like grass
Well the One Paper Kid, he wasn’t really so mean
Just a little bit weary cuz the times were so lean
Now he’s gone to a place where it’s legal to dream
No coffee, no curses, no blue Tex machine
They wrote on a rock:
‘The One Paper Kid, he’s rollin again’

The One Paper Kid, he’s rollin again

No time for lengthy speeches

My life remains boring. I had a good sales day Saturday, and didn’t talk to anyone, so hopefully I won’t be fired… but every day is a mystery to me now. Saturday night after work I pretty much came straight home and went to bed fairly early, since Friday night I didn’t sleep much. I was actually more or less mildly proud of myself; I kept wanting to just get up and sign out and go home again all day Saturday, as I was very tired, but I didn’t, and got through the day without another occurrence, or losing any more hours. Hey, I say good business is where you find it.

Sunday I didn’t do a single goddam thing except watch Buffy, go out once to get Pepsi at the local convenience store, bake some cookies (from a mix; I’m not the Iron Chef by any means, but I had a box of brownie mix and a box of sugar cookie mix sitting around in my cupboard from a weird shopping trip I took with a girl I briefly dated a while back, so in a fit of whimsy I stirred them up together, and the results are pretty good), take a walk to hopefully get my fatigue toxins up so I can sleep tonight, and waste some time online blackening the shriveled, tawdry remnants of my soul a little further in adult chat rooms. Now, I would not have to do this if some fine and decent woman would provide me with a sex life, so I in no way blame myself for it.

Oh, after three weeks of leaving me alone, our monitoring team reviewed three of my calls this last week, and I got a 93 average, which isn’t bad at all. My supervisor went over my weekly review with me and I actually improved in all my stats, so she said nice things about me… dangerous, since she’s pretty hot and when hot women say nice things about me to me, I tend to relax my guard and say nice things back, and that way lies doom. I tried to be reserved. She’s in the loop on the whole sexual harassment complaint, and she’s trying to be nice to me about it, so it may be okay. I don’t think I leered at her boobs overly. But she does have a very nice set.

I mentioned last time how annoying I found the lifelike humanoid robots on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I was thinking about sitting down and doing a little essay on it. You know, discussing how these things were a common theme in science fiction and a common element in superhero comic books, and that’s probably why Joss Whedon felt it was okay to include them in Buffy continuity, but they were really out of place there, because he’s never established the presence of that kind of advanced technology.

I mentioned it in an email to Doc, and he got really enthusiastic about it, and wrote back telling me to be sure to mention SF stories like “Helen O’Loy” by Lester somebody or other from 1938, and “Marionettes, Inc” by Ray Bradley from his The Illustrated Man anthology in 1951. He also told me I should be sure to bring up how Superman and Batman both used to build lifelike robot duplicates of themselves to fool their snoopy friends into thinking that they weren’t actually Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne, and later on these robot duplicates became so common that it turned out Superboy had built some back in Smallville, and Supergirl built some too when she got to Earth, and Superman also had robot duplicates of Lois Lane, Lana Lang, and Jimmy Olsen. Exactly what Superman did with those Lois, Lana, and Supergirl robots during long, lonely evenings in the Fortress of Solitude none will ever know, I guess, but he may very well have had his own adult webcam feed directly into the Bottle City of Kandor. HotRobotMamas.com may well have paid the mortgage on the old Kent place back in Smallville, for all we know, since it’s unlikely Clark Kent’s salary as a mild mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper would do much more than cover the rent of a Metropolis one bedroom apartment.

Anyway, Doc suggesting all those different literary citations to establish the historical background of the robotic duplicate tradition in fantasy and heroic fiction was like a cold bucket of water in my face. Obviously, this is something Doc should write, not me. However, while we’re on this subject, I’ll just note that Superman is a super genius with total knowledge of advanced Kryptonian science in his brain, and Batman is a billionaire and pretty frickin’ bright himself. And in the Marvel Universe, the people who build humanoid robots are utterly brilliant superscientist types who happen to have access to billions of dollars themselves, like Tony Stark and Dr. Doom. And as I said before, superhero universes also have ray guns and jet packs and powered armor and teleportation and time machines and fairly routine deep space flight.

Buffy, on the other hand, has exactly none of this, and the humanoid sex bot from the fifth season was built by a geek named Warren on apparently no budget at all in a college engineering lab. Which is ridiculous. As is the fact that he apparently built her out of some material that is no heavier than a normal human being would be (she didn’t sink into the ground when she walked, or even leave noticeable footprints), and while she was, apparently, under her padded plastic skin made of metal and wires, he could somehow evidently shoot a full load into any of her orifi without shorting her out. All of which is beyond flatly ridiculous.

Most ridiculous of all, having built this cybernetic houri (and she was goddam hot, too), we’re supposed to believe that someone as shallow as Warren played with her a few times and then abandoned her for a real woman, who was obviously difficult to live with based on the behavior we saw from her, because, you know, real women are so much better than some totally hot artificial babe whose only purpose in existing at all is to please and gratify him.

The episode was written by Jane Espenson, and, well, it shows. Only a woman would write something like this. Supposedly Joss Whedon approved of the whole thing, and it was supposed to be a poignant lesson for Buffy in how she had screwed up her relationship with Riley, but honestly, any guy could have told her that the basic fallacy here is the notion that any male anywhere would just leave that robot babe to run down by herself in a dorm room, simply because he latched onto a real woman to nag him twenty four-seven about how he dresses and what he eats and who he hangs out with.

I’m here to tell you, the minute delectable, utterly biddable and compliant android hotsies like that hit the open market, women everywhere had better either go lez or become very good friends with their vibrators. Guys will save their money, guys will take out mortgages, guys will sell their cars, in order to get great sex from a total babe who doesn’t make them jump through hoops for it first.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m exaggerating… a little. What Warren, or any other guy, would really have done is, yes, date the real girl, sure, because a real relationship is a cool thing. But he’d have kept Robot Girlfriend in his closet and any time his real chickie poo had a girls night out, or told him no she wouldn’t do that for him, and he was disgusting to even think about it, or she just couldn’t see him tonight because she needed space, well, that’s when Robot Girlfriend comes back out of the box and gets wound up for the evening.

In a way, it would be a good thing for relationships. All the real women in the world would never have to do that really nasty thing with their mouths again that they apparently only pretend to even tolerate until they get that ring on their finger, and all the guys in the world could still have really hot sex even after they were dumb enough to put that ring on her finger in the first place. Everybody wins.

I’m willing to bet no woman will see it that way, though…

What’s cool is how virtually no one ever puts comments on this thing since I took it over. It means I can basically say anything I want and no one cares. I find that to be a wonderfully liberating concept. I’m tempted to call somebody a spic or a kike or a jigaboo, or something, just to see if anyone is actually paying any attention at all, but Doc would get mad at me. Even if I did it in an absolutely nonsensical fashion, like, you know, saying it about Britney Spears or Anita Bryant. Sometimes Doc is alarmingly PC.

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.