Seems that another fellow blogger has lost his freaking mind. Yes, the already unstable Shut Yer Blog, whose derisive attacks on cultivators of Internet detritus have always sounded unhinged, has now unleashed a torrent of insults at the two or three people who procrastinate just long enough each day to comment on his antisocial postings. You might say that anyone who chooses to comment on a blog whose very nature is to dis the weak-minded and the pretentious is asking for trouble. But there is a major difference between the execution of SYB’s directive (Blogs suck. Nobody wants to read yer fucking diary. So just stop. God, blogs really suck.) and his piss-poor decision to betray the very people who support his irreverent endeavor. After all, the digital crapsicles that SYB chooses to eviscerate on a semi-daily basis are composed by people he has never met and would never want to; he’s simply launching bombs from afar like a good American soldier and not worrying about whether innocent lives are destroyed in the process — but are shitty bloggers truly innocent? Now, though, he has chosen to eat his own, in a way you have to assume is amusing to him, and two of these victims are people SYB knows fairly well, while another is a woman who has dutifully posted comments on his blog for the past few weeks in a misguided attempt to feed SYB’s deranged ego. After discovering that he was savaged, The Macek Collective wrote to me, asking, “Has SYB skipped a Haldol dose or what?” Let’s just assume so and end this tired ramble with: Shut Yer Blog, TAKE YOUR PILLS!

AJS UPDATE #1 CIRCA 2:49PM ON 02/22/05: WELL, IT APPEARS WE HAVE ALL BEEN DUPED BY AN IMPOSTER, AND WHEN I SAY “ALL,” I MEAN THAT ONLY I HAVE BEEN DUPED, BECAUSE I THINK I MIGHT BE THE ONLY PERSON WHO READ THE SHUT-YER-BLOG COMMENTS-IN-QUESTION WHO DIDN’T NOTICE THAT THE E-MAIL ADDRESS USED BY RICO THE IMPOSTER IS NOT THE SAME — AND INDEED IS A SNIDE ATTACK ON THE REAL RICO, I.E. RICOTHESQUIRREL@IHAVENOBALLS.COM — AS THE ONE USED BY RICO THE SQUIRREL HIMSELF. I WILL LEAVE MY ORIGINAL POST INTACT, HOWEVER, BECAUSE I THINK IT SHOWS WHAT AN OBNOXIOUS DOUCHE I CAN BE AT TIMES, SOMETHING EVERYONE HERE NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT ME. IN PENANCE, I URGE YOU ALL TO TAKE A MOMENT TO GO TO THE SHUT YER BLOG SITE AND DENOUNCE THE IMPOSTER, WHO STRANGELY KNOWS SOMETHING ABOUT MY E-MAIL ADDRESS THAT HE THINKS IS IMPORTANT. THANK YOU.

I must also say the following: It is my half birthday today, which means I have only six more months until I leave the demographic that advertisers covet most. Guess I’ll have to start boning up on my CBS programming.

WHY I’M ANGRY TODAY
The untimely demise of Hunter S. Thompson. He, along with the dearly departed George Plimpton, was a founding father of participatory journalism, a writing format that AJS supports and has benefitted from, though in far less readable ways. As an minor-league Hemingway scholar, I was enthused by a note in Thompson’s obituary that he retyped Hemingways’s novels to see how they were structured. That he chose to shut it down in a similarly blunt way isn’t as inspiring, but suicide does seem a noble solution for a man whose life, in vitality, was larger than the subjects’ he wrote about but who had lost the capacity to outshine. Still, such a unique voice will be missed.