Rush Limbaugh was outraged. Ann Coulter wrote an entire book citing hundred of different entirely imaginary contemporary and historical sources stating unequivocally that these stickers were treason and those responsible for them should be arrested, tried, and shot, not necessarily in that order. George Bush, Sr., stated that no true American could think Creationism was merely a theory, for we are one nation under God. John Ashcroft directed the FBI to start an investigation, and actually diverted so much manpower to the case that a few cancer-riddled potheads in California managed to not get arrested this week.

Now, honestly, folks, let’s try to keep this in perspective. Nobody said creationism was fantasy, a myth, or just plain out and out nuts. All these stickers asked anyone to do was keep an open mind, study carefully, and consider something critically. And they didn’t ask just ANYone to do this, they asked, you know, SCHOOLkids to do it. What, exactly, is wrong with requesting that kids in school, young kids whose minds are, hopefully, not as yet quite fully formed and codified with all the blind, obstinate, pig ignorant biases of their adult role models, do any of that?

Oh, wait. I’m lying.

See, it isn’t the conservatives who threw an absolute hissy fit about stickers demanding that school kids think critically and consider something in their curriculum, that is, in fact, only a theory, with an open mind.

And those stickers weren’t about creationism at all.

No, no. Those stickers were about evolution. They were put into textbooks by, you know, narrow minded, stupid, bigoted, Utterly Evil conservatives. And that, as Robert Frost once noted, has made the difference.

Maureen Dowd, the liberal equivalent of Ann Coulter, at least to the extent of giving me a profound headache nearly every time I read anything she writes, has this to say about the textbook stickers, and in this, she seems to be speaking for nearly every kneejerk, un-reasoning left wing non-intellectual in existence:

“On eBay, you can even find replicas of the warning stickers that a Georgia county put on science textbooks to warn that evolution is ‘a theory, not a fact’.”

This is in the context of an editorial in which she declares that, as always, everything conservatives have ever done is appalling and bad and not at all nice, and this is just one more example, and They Must Be Stopped.

Look, I’m only going to say this once:

Anytime a conservative, or a group of conservatives, especially a conservative school board, for the love of sweet baby Jebus and his beard-bedecked pappy, actually uses words like ‘open mind’, ‘considered critically’ and ‘studied carefully’ in connection with ANY GODDAM THING AT ALL… much less what their kids are studying in school… I am going to throw a party, declare victory, and retire from the field.

Beyond that – listen, you smooth-skinned monkeys – Evolution IS only a theory.

In fact, it’s not even just one theory. It’s a whole BUNCH of different theories, some of which vary enormously in detail and even underlying concept from each other.

The first two sentences printed on those stickers are the absolute truth. The remaining sentence is cogent, reasonable, sane… even, in my opinion, wise… advice, to anyone, on any subject.

So quit bitching about the goddam stickers. We have kids busy dying in countries they shouldn’t be within a thousand miles of. There is more important stuff to worry about than, you know, conservatives insisting that their kids think critically about something.

NOW SAY IT IN ENGLISH, STRETCHO

Elsewhere on the same editorial page where I found Maureen Down clucking about evolution stickers, Lisa Simeone, who lives in Baltimore and hosts National Public Radio’s World of Opera, had an editorial entitled “My friends no longer speak my language” which is every bit as snide, pompous, pedantic, and empty headed as you’d expect from someone who, you know, hosts National Public Radio’s World of Opera.

Ms. Simeone’s essential joke, which was rather threadbare and tattered at least twenty years ago and which she works to a point where you could read fine print through it if you wanted to in the ensuing six or seven paragraphs, is to keep bringing up examples of various acquaintances of hers (they can’t be her friends, at least, by my definition, I don’t mock my friends before an audience of thousands if not millions of strangers) who use phrases she finds annoying.

One friend, according to Ms. Simeone, exasperates her no end because she no longer has ‘back problems’. She has back ‘issues’. “I’m never sure whether she’s talking about her anatomy or her Newsweek subscription”, Ms. Simeone goes on to snark, in a way she almost certainly thinks is witty, and if so, she’s half right, too.

Another ‘friend’ aggravates the crap out of Ms. Simeone by insisting on using the word ‘conflicted’ instead of ambivalent. Now I personally only know about four people in real life who could use the word ‘ambivalent’ properly in a sentence, and who are so un-self conscious about their high falutin’ vocabularies that they actually might do it without intentional pretension, and I’m one of those people, and all four of us probably got beat up a lot in high school.

This same woman irritates Ms. Simeone even more by insisting on being ‘proactive’. Ms. Simeone notes “I can understand she’d want to be active as opposed to reactive, but proactive?” This is simply ignorant prejudice on Ms. Simeone’s part. While I’m not fond of the word ‘proactive’ either, it has a very specific, very different meaning from the word ‘active’, and in fact, it is precisely what her friend wants to say, in the situation that Ms. Simeone is describing. To bitch because this person is using the precise word that describes what she wants to do, instead of a different word that doesn’t even remotely mean that, is somewhat childish and very nearly stupid.

In fact, around this point in the editorial I started to get the idea that what Ms. Simeone is really narked about is that she hangs around with so many people who are more articulate than she is. But maybe I’m wrong. Let’s see:

In her next paragraph, Ms. Simeone is carping about another acquaintance of hers who decided to raise money to help the victims of the recent tsunami. Ms. Simeone’s pal in this case uses a whole bunch of words that Ms. Simeone finds egregious and objectionable – “utilize”, “monies”, “impact”, “very real situation”, “juncture”, “substantive”, and “prior”.

Okay, I’m going to admit, I’m a little on board here. Anyone who describes a global cataclysm with a death toll nearing 200,000 to date as “a very real situation” could probably use a brisk shoulder shake or two. However, the rest of those words are just, you know, words. Perfectly valid English language expressions of perfectly valid, not particularly sophisticated or difficult, objects and concepts and actions.

Ms. Simeone, however, seems to find these words offensive and obnoxious. “Um,” she snips, with truly misplaced, but nonetheless utterly exasperating, condescension “I think she wants to use her skills to make sure money and help get to the people who need them most, especially now, before things get worse.”

And, you know, that’s a better way to say it, because, you know, it’s… um… dumber, I guess.

Ms. Simeone then advises us gravely that she knows someone else who is always going on about “begging the question”. She doesn’t like the way he uses this admittedly elliptical phrase. She believes it should be used only in an entirely different fashion. I believe it probably shouldn’t be used at all, because it’s unclear exactly what it means, other than from whatever context it may be in at any given time. But I think someone using someone else’s use of such a highly subjective phrase as an example of incorrect word use is, well, unconscionably arrogant. I can live with arrogance, if the person demonstrating it has some right to do so, but I am at this point coming to the conclusion that Ms. Simeone pissing and moaning about the way other people use the English language is very similar to a Tampa Bay Buccaneers fan whining about the way other football teams, which is to say, the ones that will be in the Super Bowl tomorrow, play football.

This same fellow continues to exasperate Ms. Simeone because he teaches management seminars, and in those seminars, he insists that people do not have ‘skills’, they have ‘skill sets’. And whenever someone questions whatever this fellow is teaching, he calls them ‘judgemental’, and remarks that either ‘you’re a team player or you’re not’.

Now, she’s got me two thirds of the way with her here. I’ve never liked anyone who uses the word ‘judgemental’ as an insult, or worse, as a quick way to shut down open debate. ‘Judgement’, as in, the capacity to reason about something and come to one’s own conclusions, is not a bad thing, and should not be used in a pejorative sense. And while I certainly agree that one is either a team player or one is not, the context that such a statement is always delivered in gives the overwhelming impression that if one isn’t a team player, one should immediately have one’s nose cut off and then one should be sewn into a bag with a wild animal and thrown into a river. And that makes me crazy, too.

However, the phrase ‘skill sets’, while perhaps a bit fulsome, strikes me as a pretty good one, and a more useful one than just plain old ‘skills’. Language is, or at least, should be, a precision instrument, especially when someone is trying to teach something to someone else.

About an acquaintance who wants to move out of the suburbs into the city because their neighborhood is too ‘homogenous’, Ms. Simeone simpers “I guess they don’t like their milk.” She also does not approve of the fact that her acquaintance’s children don’t have a ‘sex’, they have ‘genders’.

Ms. Simeone closes her obnoxiously close minded and stunningly ignorant editorial with the following paragraph:

“I know – maybe they can go in with J. and all grow their monies together, thus using their substantive skill sets to be proactive and impact the very real situation in Indonesia even more. That is, as long as they’re not conflicted about it.”

Apparently, anyone who does not speak to Ms. Simeone in tried and true, time tested and use proven cliches and catechisms is some kind of reprehensible and indecipherable semantic deviant, and should be immediately clubbed to death like a baby harp seal.

Okay, here’s my thing on all this, if I haven’t made it clear up until this point:

Having a large vocabulary is not a bad thing, regardless of what the current Administration’s opinion polls say and Dubya’s speechwriters believe. Eloquence is an excellent trait, and being articulate is an admirable capacity. It’s obvious, of course, why I think this, but, nonetheless, I do think it, and I will continue to think it. I will also continue to think that anyone who thinks otherwise, as Ms. Simeone clearly seems to, is a dumbass and a dimwit.

Of course, in Dubya’s America, being a dumbass and a dimwit isn’t anything to be ashamed of. In fact, being either seems to very nearly have become respectable, and being both at once is approaching laudable. One apparently cannot be a real honest to God American if one can actually utilize words like conflicted, or proactive, or impact, or substantive.

Or, at the very least, one cannot be a friend of Lisa Simeone’s and do so, without, you know, having her make fun of you in public, using very small words.

MY BELOVED CORPS

God loves the Marines, because we kill everything we see.

So says that scary drill instructor in Full Metal Jacket, the only movie I have ever seen that got the military experience pretty much right.

Lt. General John Mattis is getting a lot of shit from my ‘fellow’ liberals these days, especially the ones on the Council on American-Islamic Relations. (Which is a pretty retarded name, since I’m fairly sure that some Americans actually ARE Islamic, but, you know, never mind.)

Why is General Mattis getting slapped around? Well, because he said some admittedly fairly stupid things. To wit:

“Actually, it’s a lot of fun to fight, you know. It’s a hell of a hoot. It’s fun to shoot some people. I’ll be right up front with you. I like brawling. You go into Afghanistan, you’ve got guys who slapped women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.”

Nihad Awad, executive director for the previously mentioned organization with the fairly retarded name, opines “We do not need generals who treat the grim business of war as a sporting event. These disturbing remarks are indicative of an apparent indifference to the value of human life.”

To which I say, DUH… he’s a Marine, you dumbass. He’s supposed to be a moron who is utterly indifferent to the value of human life. If you’re not a big enough moron with a pronounced enough indifference to the value of human life when you join the Marines, well, they train you to be that way. They deprive you of sleep, run you into the ground, and beat you until you are sufficiently stupid and murderous, and then they keep doing it until you are fanatically and enthusiastically stupid and murderous. What the hell do you want from people who take pride in being called lifetakers and heartbreakers? Sensitivity? Political correctness?

Now, look… I think General Mattis is pretty much a toxic, gibbering lunatic, too. I’m not defending him at all. I am simply pointing out that, you know, the guy is not only a combat Marine, he’s pretty much the Alpha Male Pack Leader Big Dog Silverback Gorilla Combat Marine. Of course he’s nuts, and I mean, seriously fucking bananas, in a deeply and dangerously psychotic manner. You think if we invade someone else’s country to steal their oil and set up more invasions of other countries we’re not supposed to be messing with, we’re going to put Jean Luc Picard in charge? Screw THAT. We don’t want a treaty. We want a great big pile of corpses in burnooses. This guy will get us that. Stop acting so shocked.

Honest to God, I would have just the tiniest bit of admiration for the Bush Administration if they would just come out and say something like that, just once. “Yes, he’s whacked in the head. You kind of have to be, to shoot strangers day in and day out just because some rich pretty boy who chickened out of his own chance to fight in a war points you at them and tells you to. That is, in fact, exactly the kind of general we need; if we didn’t have generals like that, we couldn’t have wars, and that would suck, because we really like them, as long as none of us personally, or any of our kids, have to actually fight in them.”

Well, okay, I wouldn’t expect them to put it quite like that, I guess…

MAMAS, DON’T LET YOUR BABIES GROW UP TO BE SOUTHERN

A while back, Mike Norton mentioned on his blog this idiotic law someone got passed down here requiring American flags of a certain size in every Florida classroom. He didn’t seem to know who was responsible for the law, though. If you go to http://www.tampabaylive.com/stories/2004/12/041206flags.shtml , you will find out, among other things, that it was state Sen. Mike Fasano, R-New Port Richey (which is just across Pasco County, where I currently live, from me) who led the flags-in-classroom charge, and that the law itself is known as the Carey Baker Freedom Flag Act, named for the Eustis lawmaker who spent a year serving in Iraq. (I hadn’t realized we had any elected officials anywhere in America who had served in Iraq. But I guess it’s okay if they serve in a body that doesn’t get to actually vote on whether we go to war or not. That doesn’t violate any ethics committee by-laws, or anything.)

But that particularly feeble minded law is old news. Here’s some fresher stuff: In some goddamned town named Estero (and I have no idea where that is, except that it’s in Florida somewhere close enough to where I live that this got in the local section of the paper), Brad Devlin, a 17 year old high school junior, was suspended from school for a week. Now, being suspended from school for a week is pretty serious on the Estero School District scale of punishments; this is the same discipline meted out to students who bring a knife to school, or who start a fight. What did Brad do?

Well, Brad has… or had, rather… his own sports commentary show on Estero High School’s closed circuit TV network, and during a show, he ad libbed a little bit. A pre approved script saying that the girls’ soccer team had ‘really kicked some booty’ inspired Brad to quip, right after he read off that bit of deathless prose, “I love booty”.

Brad won’t be allowed to return to his sports broadcast show, but he has stated “I’m going to ask, beg my teacher to still do field reporting. That way it’s not live, so any teacher can look at it first.”

In other norts spews, Tampa Firefighter Captain Al Suarez thought it would be a grand idea to have a couple of strippers come by the station and pose for some sexy photographs using various pieces of firefighting equpiment as props. He ordered four of the firefighters on duty at the time to tape garbage bags up over the windows during the impromptu photo shoot, so feckless neighborhood types wouldn’t peek in and get the wrong idea about our faithful boys in slickers. When word of the photoshoot got out (because the strippers posted the pics all over their paysites, and, you know, apparently someone in City government likes to frequent stripper paysites and recognized the backdrop of the photos), Suarez then browbeat, threatened, cajoled, and pleaded with all the firefighters who had been present at the occasion to keep silent. He said they’d all get fired. He offered to pay their bills if they did get fired. He begged them to be stand up guys, and insinuated dreadful things would happen if they weren’t. He probably didn’t leave any blow up sex dolls with duct tape over their gaping, rounded mouths on the pillow next to them while they were sleeping, but it sure sounds like he would have if he’d thought of it.

Now, here’s the thing about this last – despite my obviously overly sarcastic tone, I honestly don’t really think having a couple of strippers over to the fire station to pose nude with the big red pumper in the backdrop is something someone should be fired for. Oh, the cover up, yeah… it sounds like this guy was seriously out of control and badly needed to take a chill pill. But the act that set the cover up in motion… I’m sorry. I just don’t see the harm.

This also goes back to the teen age sports commentator declaring his love for booty to his entire high school. I mean, come on, now. Firefighters had some cute chicks in and took pictures of those cute chicks naked. Some kid declared that he loved booty. In both cases, the response was very nearly to get some rope and have a good ol’ fashioned lynchin’. And what the hell for?

I, personally, also love booty. I do. And I suspect I loved booty when I was a high school junior, except, you know, I’d only ever seen it at a distance through fabric, or as represented in various furtive glimpses through a classmate’s stolen Playboy or Oui, at that time. Nonetheless, I cannot for the life of me comprehend what is the big deal in saying “I love booty”.

Similarly… and I realize I may lose some people here… I like naked women. Honest to god, I do. I like looking at them (you know, when they are good looking, shapely naked women, as many strippers are, and I presume these were, because you wouldn’t expect a Tampa Fire Captain to invite ugly, skanky, tattoo covered, peroxide blonde strippers to come by the station and destroy his career) and I sure wouldn’t mind having them drop by my work place sometime to take off their clothes while I took pictures of them posing in front of my computer or the main bulletin board with all the “this month’s birthdays” and “perfect attendance” announcements on it.

Now, I understand that having a couple of naked strippers draping themselves all over the computer equipment and telecommunications devices at the call center where I ‘work’ (we’ll have to use that term loosely in this context) would be unprofessional and counter productive, because the customers calling in to have various defects corrected on their bills would not get the service they both desire and deserve, when all the guys in the call center were drooling too copiously to speak coherently, and all the women in the call center were screaming at the top of their lungs “GET THOSE SKANKY DISGUSTING STRIPPER HO SLUT HOOTCHIE MAMAS OUTTA HERE” while, simultaneously, slapping the crap out of whichever three male employees happened to be within arms’ reach at the time.

But, a fire station is not this kind of environment. First, other than the strippers themselves, I am sure the only other female being in that fire station was maybe a cat. And despite the various angst ridden statements that are now being given by the various firefighters that were present for the photo session, I seriously seriously doubt that any of them had any qualms at all when these chicks showed up and started taking their clothes off. All of them are now claiming they left the room as soon as this happened, and they protested to the Captain that it just wasn’t professional, but I simply do not believe a word of that horseshit is true, for the excellent reason that Tampa is not an enlightened enough city to tolerate openly gay men serving as firefighters. So I am absolutely as positive as I can be without actually having been there (and if they’d invited me, I’d have showed up) that nobody felt harassed by the presence of good looking women in little or no clothing in the workplace, nor was there any sense that the workplace had been made into a hostile or toxic environment for these poor civil servants who were forced, entirely against their will, to remain there under protest against these arduous and utterly onerous conditions.

Beyond that, when the firefighters are in the fire station, they aren’t doing much work. What we generally pay firefighters to do, most of the time, is sit around on their asses playing cards. We want them to sit around on their asses playing cards, and we happily write checks out to them on a biweekly basis in exchange for them sitting around on their asses much of the time playing cards, because every once in a while, some building somewhere arbitrarily bursts into flames, often times with people still inside it, and then these guys put down the cards and get up off their asses and, with some skill and great courage, proceed to put out the fires and save lives.

Still, the fact of the matter is, they don’t do this very often. Most of the time, they sit around doing not a helluva lot. And in all honesty, I cannot see what the big deal is, if they happen to sit around looking at hot women with no clothes on occasionally.

I mean, seriously, if I thought for a second that a naked chick leaning against the pumper truck was going to delay Ladder 51 from getting the hell out to a blazing old folks’ home for one solid minute, yeah, I’d be all outraged and uproarious about this stupidity, too. But I do not even remotely think this is the case. I suspect that if these strippers were naked, kneeling, and in the process of administering the most skilled hummers in the history of humanity to six different firefighters at once, if the alarm bell went off, those chicks would be sprawling on the floor of an empty fire station, slack jawed and empty mouthed, two and a half seconds later. Maybe with some rubber soled bootmarks on various parts of their anatomy if they happened to sprawl the wrong way, too.

Oh, I know, I know… these firefighters weren’t on their own time. They were on the clock, they were drawing a check, and the public signs that check. They weren’t in the privacy of their own homes, or off duty in a strip club. They were in a publicly owned building, erected and intended for a vital public purpose. The public has the right to expect that any and all activities that take place among on-duty civil servants in public buildings adhere to reasonable community standards of professionalism and decency.

It’s just, you know, I don’t regard looking at naked chicks as either unprofessional or indecent, and frankly, people who do think so make me tired. If a bunch of firefighters were printing $5 bills in their spare time on the clock and on City property, or running a chop shop, or forcing Guatemalan immigrants to stitch up their hoses for twenty cents an hour and all the refried beans they could eat, sure, I’d be all over the bastards if they got caught. (Well, I probably wouldn’t be outraged about the counterfeiting. I never could understand why the Hardy Boys were always messing around with counterfeiters who set up their operation in the Old Mill. I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t print their own currency if they thought they could get away with it.)

But this isn’t anything like that. This, and the 15 year old who loves booty, just comes down, essentially, to people behaving in a manner that indicates that they like sex, and doing it in a way that allows other people to punish them for it.

I simply don’t feel people should be punished for liking sex. That strikes me as stupid, and, well, kind of dangerously narrow minded, as well. Not to mention either hypocritical or insane, since the people wagging their fingers either like sex themselves, or, you know, they’re nuts.

I’m not even going to say ‘boys will be boys’, because I think that’s a really foolish and sometimes perilous thing to say. But I am going to say this: if I have a job that requires me to run in to the burning building that all the sane people are running out of, and I do that job, for a lousy $41,000 a year, assuming I’m lucky enough to land one of the few full time firefighter positions any community actually has… could I please look at naked chicks when I’m not running into burning buildings? If I want to, and they don’t mind? Would that be all right?

And, you know, can I say “I love booty” without having someone break their foot off in my ass, too?

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.