Sunday, December 26, 2004

It’s actually Monday, December 27, 2004, as I type these very words, but it’s like 12:39 a.m, and I’m hoping that as this Monday wears on (somewhere on the other side of me getting at least a few hours of sleep sometime tonight) good things will happen, such as the gits in Australia who run SquawkBox getting their thumbs out of their great dirty arses and fixing their server so my blog has comment threads again, and also, I’m hoping to get a package in the mail from Mike Norton. And if that’s all that’s noteworthy that happens to-day/morrow, that will be fine, because things could be much, much worse.

The day after to-day/morrow, of course, things get much, much worse, because I have to go back to The Placed Where Nobody Likes Me Very Much, And Yet, the Management For Some Reason Continues To Pay Me To Show Up.

I’m going to throw together some kind of list of all my Christmas loot, because I got quite a bit of it this year, from sources I am not supposed to specifically name online, because, I suppose, they will all be publicly embarrassed. But first, because my old English teacher Mrs. Chassin replies to my sending her an electronic Christmas card by saying she misses my political rantings (she didn’t say ‘rantings’, she’s quite the nice person), I’m going to rerun something from August 27, 2003. Something I think is noteworthy, not simply because it’s some of my better writing, but also because it was written back BEFORE we had any idea of all this nonsense going on in Abu Ghraib.

I’ll see you on the other side with more seasonal stuff:

BRING IT ON

From behind the most sophisticated sensor array in human history, a screen of billion dollar fighter jets and a phalanx of heavily armed bodyguards, half a planet away from the people he’s taunting, our unelected jefe issued the above bold challenge to those of differing cultures and creeds who may be displeased enough with his foreign policy decisions to initiate a violent response to same.

From what I presume is a comfy chair in an air conditioned room in front of a functional high tech telecommunications device currently plugged in to a working electrical grid, half a planet away from the geographic region he is about to make fulsome statements regarding the condition of, Dean Esmay firmly and unconditionally states:

Iraq Continues To Go Well

This is, like Jane Craig’s POV on Tom Grunnick’s ability to anchor a newscast, not opinion.

Or so it seems, from the lack of conditioners in Dean’s straightforward assessment of an area that, as far as I know, he has never so much as laid actual eyes on, much less stirred a single digit, extremity, or protuberance of his own in the sandy soil of.

Dean continues in this interesting vein:

“By any measure, the invasion was a success, and the average Iraqi is better off than he has been in decades. That war quite apparently saved more Iraqi lives than it cost, and the subsequent occupation's cost has been entirely bearable. Indeed, we're losing more soldiers on a daily basis to things like traffic accidents and heart disease than we are from the steadiliy weakening guerilla operations.
…Iraq is already in better shape than Japan or Germany were four months after hostilities ended in World War II, and things are going swimmingly well. I am constantly bemused by people who see different. To me, it just reaffirms something I have come to believe over the years: some people will always believe that things are hopelessly screwed up, no matter what the situation under discussion.”

Now, I simply don’t know what to say about this. Honestly, I don’t even know for certain that Dean has never actually been to Iraq, nor can I be absolutely certain that he is not, currently, hunkered down in a storefront somewhere in downtown Baghdad, with his entire family hunched miserably behind him, tap tap tapping away into a battery powered laptop, waiting for the maybe two hours of electricity his area might be lucky enough to get that day so he can upload this glowingly positive account to the Internet. Perhaps Dean spends ten or twelve hours a day on foot patrol in Iraq armed only with an 8mm pistol, wearing a loathed national symbol prominently displayed on his uniform, never certain when some 10 year old is going to walk up to him with a big smile on their face and a bigger bomb strapped to the small of their back. Perhaps he comes home every day to his lightless stinking airless hovel, unsure of how he’ll feed his family today, uncertain if his female relatives will even still be there, or if maybe some Shi’ite mob caught them while Dean was out and dragged them out into the street and stoned them to death as godless infidels because they weren’t sweltering to death in burq’as.

So, I don’t know. If Dean has even the slightest shred of an actual idea what the U.S. military forces currently in Iraq are going through, or what the Iraqi civilian population is currently going through, or what they were going through before under Saddam Hussein (when, at least, the power worked in the parts of the country Saddam wasn’t mad at at the time, and women could safely walk the streets without worrying about irate male mobs coming up to them and performing forcible cliterectomies on them with pieces of broken glass) so he can actually make that comparison knowledgeably, then I defer to him in this regard.

If, on the other hand, Dean, like me and several million other windbags, is simply flatulating an opinion gathered from TV and the Internet viewed on the other side of the globe about something he has no actual first hand experience of whatsoever, well, I respectfully suggest that his use of words like “by any measure, the invasion was a success” and especially “things are going swimmingly well”, in regard to a situation in which coalition soldiers keep getting killed, and Iraqi civilians live in a state of constant chaos, unrest, and terror, many of them without most civilized amenities or even an assurance of enough food and water to keep them alive from one day to the next… are ill considered.

In fact, I suggest Dean’s use of these phrases, without any conditional phrases to soften them, without any indication that he thinks there is the slightest chance that his opinions might not in any way accurately reflect the actual state of events in Iraq at this moment, make him the reigning asshole of the Western World… or at least, the biggest one I’m currently aware of in the blogosphere.

My view is this: many… dare I say most… Iraqis seem to be without electricity, or food, or water, or any sense of security in their homes or their persons, because my country decided to blow a lot of their shit up for reasons that seem to be turning out to have not a great deal of actual merit to them, when examined closely after the fact. This seems, on the face of it, to be a decrease in the general quality of their life (which I grant you, was not as high as ours here in America) that existed prior to my government’s decision to go over there and blow a lot of their shit up for said increasingly specious reasons.

In addition, a lot of Iraqis, soldiers and civilians, got killed in, and continue to be killed during, the current military involvement in Iraq.

Further, many American soldiers have died in Iraq. Dean suggests that just as many of these soldiers would have died of natural causes if we had not sent them to Iraq, and I don’t know, that seems like a great big heaping helping of horseshit to me, but maybe he’s right. Nonetheless, when he speaks of traffic accidents and cholesterol related deaths he is speaking of statistics and potential. When I speak of American soldiers who have been killed in Iraq, I speak of sons and daughters and husbands and wives and brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers who are cold and stiff and never going to kiss or hug or be kissed or hugged again, because they were in Iraq and they did not have to be there.

Now, Dean seems to think that all this can best be summed up by phrases like ‘swimmingly well’. In my opinion, this is foolish if not cruel, ignorant if not actively heartless, absurd if not actually grotesque, sickening if not actually reprehensible, and, abandoning cadence and rhythm for simple honest judgement, completely and unutterably contemptible.

I, on the other hand, think that a lot of dead human beings who don’t have to be dead, and a lot of live human beings currently suffering from things they don’t need to be suffering from (and that Dean Esmay almost certainly isn’t) is… I’m going to go out on a limb here… a bad thing.

Perhaps even an evil thing.

It may be a necessary evil. I don’t think it was at first, but now, having gone over there illegally and immorally and inflicted an enormous amount of unnecessary harm on distant strangers and their land, I feel my country and my government and I, myself, have an obligation to try to undo and repair some of the astonishingly egregious damage we have all done. So the continuing occupation does strike me as a necessary evil, and I think some of my tax dollars at least should be spent trying to fix the problems the invasion caused. The fact that the occupation is a necessity AND an evil created by the wickedness and corruption of my government in the first place both sickens and saddens me enormously, but that's neither here nor there; the situation is what it is.

By no means, however, would I describe such a pile of rotting corpses, and such an intensification of human suffering directly caused by my government, to be a process that was ‘going swimmingly well’.

But I’m a fucking liberal, and a namby pamby bleeding heart asshole who doesn’t understand global politics, or even accept that you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.

In fact, I think that people who use terms like ‘omelets’ when they’re really talking about large numbers of actual human lives should probably be hung up and flogged in public.

But, again, that’s just me. Your mileage, as always, may vary. Dean Esmay’s certainly does.

Loot List

I was so overwhelmed with loot, again, entirely due to the unwarranted generosity of a few wonderful and entirely deranged friends, that I’ll probably end up leaving something off this list, and hurting someone’s feelings horribly. But I loved everything I got, honestly. And now:

One of my friends, hearing me lament in private email about how one of the displeasures of spending Christmas alone is that you get no Christmas stocking, actually prepared one for me, and brought it over for me several days before Christmas in a box, with stern admonitions that I must not get into it before Christmas morning, nor even take it out of the box before Christmas Eve, when I was allowed to hang it. Said friend wrapped the top of the stocking in flannel to keep me from seeing whatever it was that protruded there. So I hung it on Christmas Eve, and when I finally managed to get to sleep, and then woke up again, the first thing I made a beeline to was that stocking. Which, when I unwrapped the flannel, I found to contain:

* A Giant Sized Treasury Edition of CHRISTMAS WITH THE SUPERHEROES, published by DC in 1975, containing reprinted holiday tales featuring Batman, Superman, Captain Marvel, the Teen Titans, and the Angel & The Ape. I used to own many of these Giant Size Treasury Editions, mostly the Marvel ones, and I especially loved the Marvel Holiday Grab Bags, and miss them. So this was a really nice thing to get. The Teen Titans story has really fantastic Nick Cardy art, and yet another one of those truly weird Silver Age Teen Titans scripts by I don’t know who, featuring all the various kid sidekicks of that era speaking so much groovy gear Mod Talk that nobody ever actually spoke in the real world that you can’t tell half the time what the hell they’re talking about. But Nick Cardy sure does draw a swingin Wonder Chickie.
* A DVD containing 8 of the old Superman cartoons, you know, the ones from the 1940s by Max and Dave Fleischer, some of which feature brief appearances by some unhinged, cackling, buck toothed little leprechaun in a gigantic bow tie named Louis who, I presume, must have somehow mutated into Jimmy Olsen over the later decades, as he bears a sort of vestigial resemblance to some horrifyingly stunted and devolved version of Superman’s Pal,
* A whole LOT of candy. Now, last year, my brother Paul and I were sharing an apartment and we did stockings and he put a whole bunch of candy in mine, but the stuff he got me was all dime store generic non-chocolatey nonsense. My stocking-patron this year was no such shirker; I got name brand chocolate from Hershey’s and Reese’s and Snickers. You can’t go wrong there.
* And, while I was poking around in all the foil wrapped, different shaped pieces of candy to see what all I’d got, something odd caught my eye, wrapped in translucent plastic. I plucked it out and turned it over, and what to my wondering eyes should appear, but… A SILVER SURFER! Which is to say, a HeroClix figurine of the Silver Surfer, a character I had long wanted to add to my collection (my FF Allies team badly needs another flyer, and the FF just don’t befriend all that many of them) but, since there are only two Silver Surfer figs, and one of them (the Unique from the Critical Mass expansion) costs $70 as a single, while the other (the Limited Edition available only as part of a promotional set you had to buy at a convention last year) goes for around $100, and I just won’t spend that much on a single piece of plastic (which is why I will never own a Kingdom Come Superman fig, either). And, not only THAT, but this wasn’t the less expensive (although still piratically priced) Critical Mass Silver Surfer… I got the CHROMIUM Silver Surfer, with the Power Cosmic Team Ability, that was only available as a convention exclusive!

Then, under the tree (somehow, that phrase makes me want to launch into a Homer Simpson musical number, but never mind:)

* A Marvel Masterworks Edition featuring FANTASTIC FOUR #s 31 through 40 and ANNUAL #2. This was the last of the FF Marvel Masterworks I didn’t have yet; I now have all of them that have been published, featuring FF #s 1-60, I believe, and several of the Annuals. A very thoughtful gift.
* A Fantastic Four t-shirt, meant to mimic an actual Fantastic Four jersey. I am loving it lots and lots.
* A Tampa Bay Buccaneers cold weather hat, the kind our Northern brethren refer to as a ‘took’, although what annoying little pothead hobbits have to do with winter headgear I have no idea
* A Nike hooded sweatshirt
* A special commemorative Christmas coffee mug (as I don’t drink coffee, it’s a cocoa mug in my house)
* A new wallet, containing a lot of stuff, like a Wal-mart Gift Card and an Amazon.com gift certificate and some Wendy’s Burger Bucks and a coupon for a free sandwich at Subway
* A Conair Beard & Mustache Trimmer, which will be cool, if I ever figure out how it works
* a big tin full of hot chocolate mix and Christmas cookies
* five different CDs: The Stranger by Billy Joel, Can’t Buy A Thrill from Steely Dan, something I don’t know the name of by Melissa Etheridge that has a lot of really good stuff on it, including “I’m The Only One” and “An All American Girl” and “Talking To My Angel”, and something else by Eric Clapton with the only two tracks by Clapton I like on it (“Layla” and “Bell Bottom Blues”), and something by Tom Petty I’m not that familiar with (I really like the Tom Petty stuff from the late 1970s and throughout the 80s; once we get into the 90s, Petty seems to run out of interesting material to write about fairly quickly)
* a DVD of Arsenic and Old Lace
* a lovely sweater
* an even lovelier leather jacket (which, since my little brother is no longer wearing my old leather jacket, that I made him a Christmas gift of last year, well, I’m happy I got this one, since otherwise, giving away my old one would really feel like a completely wasted gesture now)
* a Scrabble Soup Set, with some very nice bowl/mugs (bugs? mowls?) for, you guessed it, soup

And, as I said, probably a few other things I’m not remembering right now. And, geez, I should be getting a package from Mike Norton tomorrow, and God knows what I’ll get in that.

I did my Christmas shopping after work on Thursday night (so, technically, about as early as is possible on Christmas Eve, since I work until midnight and got a ride up to Wal-mart from someone at the call center), and while I was doing that, I bought copies of Snatch and King Arthur as Christmas presents to myself. Snatch was interesting and fun, if largely indecipherable; King Arthur started out wretched and descended from there into utterly horrible with a rapidity I found astonishing and appalling. Occasionally, lines of dialogue that were very nearly good would swim up out of the depths, like somebody or other saying “Don’t waste your time praying, your God doesn’t live here” to a supposed Catholic priest who was nearly wetting himself during an ambush, but for the most part, the script was dreadful, the acting was dreadful, the story was dreadful, it was all just dreadful.

I grant you, I’m one of those really annoying people who thinks if you’re going to make a historical melodrama, you should at least trouble yourself to do five minutes’ worth of actual historical research first, and I realize a great many people out there who just go to movies to watch stuff blow up (or see people make out, whichever) find that very tiresome of me. But I made an honest attempt. Five minutes in, when it was obvious to even a half assed historical scholar like myself that this movie had nearly as much actual period accuracy as any episode of Star Trek has real science, I said to myself “all right, let’s just treat this as a fantasy film, and ignore the fact that the whole ad campaign was about how this is the real history behind the Arthur legend, and pretend it’s all set on a particularly moronic version of Middle-Earth, and see if the story works in that context”. But no. The story doesn’t work in any context at all. It’s just rubbish from start to finish.

I should also point out that Christmas Eve with my family was just excruciating this year, for two reasons: first, there weren’t any kids there other than my 11 year old nephew Kolton. Kolton was very well behaved, given that he is, in fact, one of those demons in child form they used to make movies with “Omen” in the title about, but last year’s family Christmas was just splendid… in fact, it was pretty much perfect. All the grown ups in my family that I love the most and find most interesting, like my cousin Chad and his wife Mel, and my cousin Ashley, and my brother Sean and his wife Erica, and my cousin Heather, all showed up, and the first three clauses separated by commas all have little kids, so there was a horde of little kids running around and, later, sitting down and tearing open presents with mad abandon, and I hadn’t really realized it before, but, well, that’s what Christmas is really all about.

This year it was just the core group; my brother Pat and his wife Janette (who are Kolton’s parents), my mom and her husband Carl, my grandmother, my brother Paul and his newly impregnated girlfriend Dawn. Other people who usually show up, like Chad and Mel and their two kids, and my Aunt Denise and her husband Larry (Chad’s mom and stepfather) weren’t there, either.

Now, I love Pat and Janette and Kolton, but I’m not close to them at all any more. I love my mom, but we’ve drifted a bit apart over the last few years, too… just grown up stuff, nothing really dramatic, it just happens, I guess. And Paul and I… well, you live with someone you love beyond all let or hindrance for eight months and find out that this person has a lot of really heartbreaking human flaws you wouldn’t wish on some jerk you went to high school with, much less your utterly adored baby brother, and it puts a strain on your relationship with them.

So it was quiet, and in fact, everybody opened presents so quickly that I didn’t even see people open the stuff I’d shopped for at Wal-mart the night before, and Kolton didn’t even care about the Hulk action figure I got him (but he got snarkily possessive about it when I offered to take it back, because I would have played with it, at least).

The other reason I found Christmas Eve excruciating was that everyone wants me to like Dawn, and I just won’t, and any time she was within twenty feet of me, she was smiling and rolling her eyes like a collie and just radiating “please like me” vibes like a nuclear reactor throwing off loose particles, and the rest of my family is determined to like her because She Is Carrying Paul’s Child, like, you know, turning my 29 going on 12 year old baby brother into a father is doing the world some kind of goddam favor or something.

However, there were some fun moments. When my brother Pat, who is the most prosperous of us all (he’s upper upper management at some very well to do insurance company), and who is thus very very conservative, opened the gift I gave him, and saw Michael Moore’s fatuous smile beaming up at him from the cover, the look on his face was priceless. Pat lives in a very nice house, with a working fireplace, that actually had a fire burning in it at the time, and I think, if I had not pointed out to him that the title of the book was MICHAEL MOORE IS A BIG FAT STUPID WHITE MAN, and that the book was actually written by some nutbag conservatives who don’t like Moore, he would have pitched it into the fire with the same kind of horrified hissing you’d expect to hear from a vampire who had just unwrapped a crucifix. So that was fun.

And my mom’s husband Carl seemed delighted at the laser beam-tape measure I bought for him, which I thought he would be, since he's a Tool Time kinda guy. So that was nice, too.

But, for the most part, I didn’t really feel much of a connection to anyone who was there, and I was happy to have my mom drive me back to my place again. What I say is, if you’re going to feel alone – and I nearly always am going to feel alone, it’s just my nature -- you may as well BE alone, because then, at least, you can dress comfortably and watch whatever the hell you want to watch on TV.

Still, last year was a rare family Christmas for me; I honestly didn’t feel alone, for most of it. Oh, no one in my family really understands me all that much, but when a bunch of the ones that like me anyway are around, and there are a lot of kids running around like mad little bastards driving all the adults crazy, it’s odd, but… well, it’s so much like family Christmases when I was a kid, that I really feel like I’m part of something greater than myself, like I’ve taken my place in the generational flow, or something, like I’m, you know, Weird Uncle Darren, and I actually have a legitimate, valid place there. I belong.

You know, more or less, to the extent that I ever will.

It just didn’t feel anything like that this year, and, well, that made me sad, and happy to get back to my wretched cinderblock hovel where I could, as I say, dress comfortably, and watch whatever the hell I wanted to watch on TV.

But, due to various wonderful friends I in no way deserve giving me various presents to put under my tree for Christmas morning, I had a very nice Christmas Day itself. I had a stocking (with a CHROMIUM SILVER SURFER in it; that odd sound you hear coming from somewhat south of you is me chortling like a demented elf over a tiny shiny little piece of plastic), and I had presents, and I had leftover Thanksgiving turkey and ham (which I’d put in the freezer just for this event) and I had How The Grinch Stole Christmas and It’s A Wonderful Life on DVD, and I had Silver Age Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR comics I hadn’t read yet to marvel over and goggle at, and it was about as splendid a Christmas Day as you’re going to have when you’re spending the damned thing by yourself.

Now, though, there are still some things I’m waiting for that haven’t happened yet.

First, there’s a few things I ordered from Amazon.com that haven’t showed up yet, but I imagine they will. More importantly, I’m supposed to be getting a big box of comics from Steve Tice sometime soon, as I sent him a $200 check two weeks ago, and he told me he got it over a week ago, and I’m still not seeing anything from him telling me he’s mailed my package and giving me a tracking number. Which is considerably annoying, since that package is supposed to have a lot of my old college buddy Slappy’s recent work on Conan and JLA in it, as well as some stuff by writers I’m sure I’ll enjoy, like Geoff Johns doing Hawkman and JSA, and quite a lot of Alan Moore work. (Someone told me Alan Moore was retiring from writing comics, which makes me not so much sad as determined to raise a lot of money so I can start up a really idiotic superhero line filled with wretched characters that will tempt him to come back and straighten the whole thing out after some bad artist/non-writers have utterly screwed it up for a few years.)

Oh, yes, and I'm also WAITING FOR MY GODDAM COMMENT THREADS TO SHOW UP AGAIN.

Seriously, if you want to post a comment and the comment threads aren't there, send me an email at docnebula01 AT juno dot com. Except, you know, make the format functional, as I'm sure you know how. I will write back, nearly immediately, if not sooner, unless you're Ted, or someone who has told me if I ever want to write to him again I must first apologize for telling him exactly what I honestly thought of him, which isn't very likely to happen in this life, or someone else I really intensely dislike, in which case I will haughtily ignore you. You Know Who You Are.

And after today’s debacle against the utterly loathed Carolina Panthers, the Bucs are officially one of the two worst teams in professional football. However, the other of the two worst teams must be San Francisco, who got utterly annihilated by my beloved Buffalo Bills today, so life ain’t ALL bad.

To those who made my Christmas wonderful and who won’t let me publish their names, I thank you. To those who didn’t, but who still read this blog and even occasionally comment on it when there are actually comment threads, well, I thank you as well. I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year, and to all the rest of you out there, I merely say, good night.

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:

(a) seem smarter than the person writing the blog you are posting comments to

(b) be funnier than the person writing the blog you are posting comments to

(d) be correct when you point out some manner in which the person writing the blog you are posting comments to was wrong, and/or

(e) Upset The Wimmenfolk On The Blog.

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:

(a) seem smarter than I am, I like people who are smarter than I am, as long as they're not jerks about it;

(b) are funnier than I am, then I get to laugh at your witty remarks, and hey, that's all good;

(c) are a better writer than I am. Although I'm in a peculiar place as regards writing skills; good enough to be better than nearly all the amateurs out there, not good or lucky enough to be a professional at it. So if you are a better writer than I am, you are probably a professional writer and therefore do not have time to post comments on other people's blogs, so this probably doesn't matter, as relates to this blog;

(d) correct my mistakes; unlike apparently 95% of the remainder of the human race, I am under no illusions as to my own infallibility and simply don't care if someone points out that I am wrong about something. Being wrong about things does not strike me as either a character flaw or a shameful embarrassment; we are all wrong about a lot of things every day of our lives, and that's just how that works;

(e) Upset My Wimmenfolk. Well, actually, I shouldn't say I don't care if you upset my wimmenfolk, I do, the very thought deeply offends me. However, it's just that the wimmenfolk at this point on this blog are my mom, my cuz in law, and my sister in law, and if you do something to upset them, I strongly doubt the authorities finding what's left of you will be able to identify you without a DNA comparison. My mom, and any woman who marries any of the males in this family and stays married to him for any length of time, are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. So offend them all you want; it's a self correcting problem.

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.

A Brown Eyed Handsome Man