Monthly Archives: January 2006

Don't you miss him, too?

I was poking around my bookmarks in an attempt to distract myself this afternoon and found myself at James Wolcott’s place. He’s got an item up there right now that talks about the rhetorical excesses of some dip who writes for the National Review. It seems that Andrew Sullivan, who is still not being directly linked from any Web site that I have any control over, used the word “fellatial” to refer to someone else’s writing. Personally, I’m more than happy to compare sycophantic writing to a hummer; I think it’s funny. But J-Pod goes all non-linear over this point (which is odd, if you consider J-Pod’s posting history and his proclivity to express a subtle, wink-wink-nudge-nudge interest in teh gay).

Wolcott, however, said this: “Shouting in caps like a crazy person, Podhoretz is understandably…”

And you know what the very first thing I thought of was?

UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS.

If you came late to this party known as thu Innernet, you probably don’t get this joke. That’s fine; I’m making this joke for about six people out there, all of whom will think that we had a much higher caliber of kooks and nutters on Usenet than we do on the Web today. Whether that was a self-selecting thing, or a concentration thing, or a representational thing is a question for another day.

I never thought I’d be in the position of saying I missed people like Serdar Argic and Robert McElwaine, but here I am. At least everyone thought they were nutty…