Columns

Dear Editorbeing,

This article is submitted by Doc Logger (163/110) who was found wandering alone in the woods with third degree crouton wounds covering his body. Never again will Logger order the tossed salad at a charity dinner hosted by American League baseball pitchers.

Roll da flic, Zorch....

Dear Reverend Visage,

You'll be pleased to know that my missives have passed the "Moravsik Litmus Test." In last week's Snooz, the lead article was a thoughtful, and almost literate, critique by Bob Moravsik. As you can well imagine, my definition of hell is to have Moravsik agree with me on anything so I am much comforted by his screed. He suggested that I "go away and leave Fidonet to normal people." Had he accused me of normality, I would have been forced to challenge him to a duel with broccoli jello at 40 paces to avenge my honour. If I catch his drift, he views my writing as sub-normal and that I ought to stand aside so that his genius can properly illuminate his perceived wisdom for Fidonet. Poor Bob suffers from the delusion that the known universe will collapse if even more people started snickering at the absurdity of Peefour. His dogged determination reminds me of the Creationists who want to curtail the world of scientific inquiry because their team rule book already describes everything they need or want to know about the universe.

Visage, you'll be impressed by my reading material this week. For example, I read the policy complaint filed by His Zorchness against Ruth Argust for a variety of perceived Fidocrimes. The complaint was bundled with a dog's breakfast of files and cross-references, but the gist of it is that poor Zorch has his knickers in a knot because Ruth's mailer flies some sort of NC address in the handshake protocol. Even more amusing, one of the items on the complaint list was an accusation that Ruth has been fibbing. Sigh, try to imagine the depths of quicksand His Zorchness must be standing on to accuse someone else of being economical with the truth. What makes the complaint even more amusing is that it will eventually end up in the lap of Bob Kohl. Naturally, Kohl will be able to set aside his long history of personal enmity towards Ruth such that he can rule objectively on an appeal. And if you believe that, would you be interested in a lucrative investment in badger sperm futures?

It will also be a great shock to you that Bob "noted" Satti is still blissfully slumbering while Region10 devolves into a cacophony of policy complaints and torched NCs. Satti's somnolence must have something to do with the fact that he is so gosh darned busy with his newly acquired IC duties. Unfortunately, more than the usual rabble have started to pose pointed questions to Satti which he has been ignoring like the plague, but it does serve as an object lesson in how manifestly unsuited he is to whichever powers he presumes to have. Perhaps if he switched to a higher wattage coffee he'd be able to stay awake long enough to write a whole sentence in the Z1C echo.

For my Chautauqua this week I'd like to lead off with a quote from Stephen Fry, a writer after my own heart who doesn't treat fools kindly. This quote appears in Fry's book "Paperweight." Fry's essay was written in response to a huge volume of vituperative mail he received in response to a newspaper article. Evidently, Bob Moravsik's clones languish throughout society as a sort of dry-rot of the collective intelligence.

"I suppose letter-writers are driven by a kind of frustration. They are given furiously to wonder why this figure or that should be given a public platform for their facile and muddle-headed views. Without such a platform themselves, they have no recourse but to their writing desks where they pour out all the bitterness and accreted venom of a lifetime.... All I can observe is that no one challenges the rights of journalists and writers with whom they are in agreement. If we agree, we applaud the stout good sense and the witty disparagement; if we disagree, we froth and fulminate against the snide, graceless tone and the gratuitous insult and we question what business these writers have to be addressing the world in the first place."

I would say that my feedback on Snooz articles can be divided into thirds. The first and most satisfying to the ego are laudatory, the middle third say nice things but whose purpose in writing is to correct minor errors in the text - such as the number of people who found it ironic last week than in a paragraph railing against illiteracy that I would have incorrectly singularized a word that should have been plural; and the final third falls almost off the map. The most generous of the final third suggest that I ought to consider suicide as the quickest and most effective cure to Fidonet's ills. Others, offer to end my life for me - which clearly puts the lie to the claim that you simply can't find helpful people in Fidonet any longer.

The group of people who take such colourful exception to what I write are affectionately called the "How Dare You"s because that is the most frequent lead phrase to their spavined ravings. It is often remarkably difficult to discern which ox I've gored that leads them to such flights of scatological polemic. In concert, they seem to feel that injecting multiple naughty words into their missives will wow me with the strength of their arguments. Alas, most of them are no better at expressing themselves than Moravsik. The marvel of their diatribes is that while they are busy suggesting that my drivel be removed from the Snooz, it hasn't seemed to occur to them that they could submit their own articles and have their brilliance outshine my feeble attempts at satire or wit.

I also wonder at the assertion that "we have to have rules" as though that statement were self-evident. To what purpose, I ask? To shield us in a paternalistic sense from the barbarism of other sysops? Are all other sysops so cretinous that they must be whipped by compunction into submission? Perhaps it is a coincidence, but two of the most vocal rule mongers are lawyers. Lawyers, of course, are society's vermin whose sustenance is obtained by first writing rules, and then drawing an income from defending them.

One last ponder before I put this article to bed. Why is it that in the Excited States with their much touted protection of free speech that they have both a law that forbids the electronic interception of mail without warrant, and another law that forbids the transmission of encryption algorithms? If they had reasonable encryption, it seems that they also wouldn't have to worry about interception.

I must go, Visage, I have been invited to speak at the John Galt Society meeting taking as my topic: "Ayn Rand, Harmless Fruitbat or Dangerous Leftist?" I am sure to suffer grievous bun wounds from the projectiles which are launched at me from the dining tables. I go to the meeting with great hopes that I will finally meet the man who invented the electric artichoke steamer and then petulantly withheld this technological advance from society.

Regards,
Doc Logger,
Furlang Island,
South Pacific