Thursday, December 29, 2005

Auld Lang Whine

In the spirit of getting things off our chests and cleaning out our mental closets in preparation for the new year, I open up the comments section below for your rants, raves, confessions, smears, etc., all protected by beautiful anonymity.

Have a story to tell about a co-worker you hate but you'd NEVER put it on your blog? Mad at your spouse? Worst date ever but the date reads your blog? Spill it!

Anonymous comments only.

23 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm really getting fed up with the treatment of little cicero on this blog. You guys take one of the only conservatives who visit this blog and make him out to be an extremist! little cicero is a great blogger, who is civil to all and stifled to none, and you should not only visit his blog as much as possible, but you all should listen whole heartedly to what he has to say, and consider yourselves lucky to have such an intellectual resource for your consideration on this blog.

Jess said...

Good one, Little Cic ... er, "Anonymous". Very funny! :-)

Andy said...

Well, that wasn't as racy as I'd hoped for, but thanks for playing.

tully said...

I don't do racy. Self-serving...yes, but never racy!

Anonymous said...

Okay, let me try: I want more people to read my blog!

Hmm, maybe anonymous posting isn't the best way to achieve that.

Anonymous said...

As a guy said to me in a bar once, "Dude, don't beg, it's not attractive."

tully said...

No, I'll prostitute myself for the sake of web traffic much less beg. The only thing I won't do is alter my opinions.

Anonymous said...

No, you needn't alter your opinions, Sis; hopefully, an education will do that for you. I'm also hoping it'll make you a halfway-decent writer.

Anonymous said...

I'm a regular reader of your blog and enjoy the variety of interesting topics you write about with such intelligence. I have one complaint though and I wonder if others feel the same way. I think your blog is worthy of great respect except for the entries where your explicit language detracts from the overall high quality of your blog. Do other regular readers feel the same way? Since you can answer anonymously, this would be a good time to express your opinion.

Andy said...

Well, I am something of a linguist. I am rustily fluent in German, can speak passable Italian, and had three years of college French. Additionally, I used to be conversational in Japanese and can at least say "Sorry, wrong number" in Spanish. I love languages, but I find English wonderfully expressive and versatile. An artist who paints in color shouldn't restrict his palate to only the happy primary colors, and I don't intend to limit my expressive options. Personally, I find a well-deployed F-bomb a lot less offensive than the smirking lies and half-truths emanating from our President on a daily basis.

tully said...

There are only two types of language, the decent and the indecent.

tully said...

To anonymous, an education may change my opinion (as it will yours) but outside of an education you may do so via the comments sections of my posts at little cicero. I never pretend to be fortified in my opinions.

Anonymous said...

Grammar is a *guide* for popular conventions of linguistic communication -- not a law. Grammar is a law for the intellectually uncreative and overly timid.

Open up one of those ol fashion newspapers from 1800, or even 1900. You'll discover all sorts of "issues" from purposefully bad grammar, silly spelling styles, and even a base, vile word here and there. Grammar, spelling laws? Please -- those writers and reporters had more important issues at hand: how to best communicate the story to their respective audiences.

Indeed, today's grammar and spelling fundamentalists are an oddity of the industrialized age, along with serialkillers and blacklung disease. They seeminly portend that ignoring grammar is some sign of the end times.

I wish.

Embrace strange conventions in your language, specially when they drive the point home; The future belongs to those of "poor" writing and speech, as it always has.

Ur futur is almost here.

rob@egoz.org

Anonymous said...

I've never posted an anonymous comment before, so now I must. My writing style will probably give away my identity in a trice, but whatever, this is fun.

Confession: I enjoy Harry Potter, after years of refusing to read it.

To the other anon up there who commented on explicit language, I agree. Besides that, explicit language is a cop out, there are better descriptive words out there and I am sure that a writer as good as you, Andy, knows them well. To add to this, you have said on a number of occasions that you are willing to accept the fact that you may be wrong, yet you have displayed no evidence to that point and are often quite rude when arguing an issue against someone. There's also the whole changing the subject thing instead of just discussing the point that the other person was making.

But on the whole I enjoy your blog. You have an excellent writing style and you cause me to think about my own worldview with more depth. Keep blogging!

Anonymous said...

Curse words are really just the easy way to get your point across. I can easily say "She's a b*#@h" but saying "She reminds me of a female dog in heat" seems much more colorful to me.

Andy said...

Well, thank you for your candid assessment. It is honestly appreciated. I will reconsider my choice of language in the future.

In my defense, I can't think of too many times when I've been shown I was wrong, but then I am a tad arrogant. But, this post comes to mind, and also this one, where even if I wasn't necessarily convinced I at least saw the validity of the opposing argument.

I apologize if I've been rude. I confess, Little Cicero and my dear friend Jon exasperate me on a regular basis, and perhaps I don't respond as maturely as I could. There are probably others I've been insensitive to.

Thank you for your comment; my new year's resolution will be to work on that.

Anonymous said...

In the spirit of beautiful anonymity, there is some thing I would like to say before this year ends: I am infatuated with you. You have beguiled me since you first began blogging. You are enchanting.

tully said...

That last comment wasn't me, just in case Andy's mom thought it was. I don't want to get her hopes up for nothing (she wants me to be her son-in-law, so she said!)

tully said...

Don't feel too bad about the rude language as it concerns our feelings. I was much more offended by someone's remark that I made frequent spelling errors than your saying "f#@k you" It really just brings down a very good blog and disrupts the honest flow of ideas more than anything.

Anonymous said...

Please ignore those comments about your occasional use of "bad language." Sometimes a well-placed profanity is the best way to get your point across. Every post isn't about well-reasoned argument on topics of eternal significance; sometimes it's just about the aggravations of everyday life. The variety of your posts, in both subject matter and writing style, is one of the attractive things about your blog.

tully said...

David, most of us are drawn to this blog for the very reason that it contains well-reasoned arguments. If I want to see aggravations of daily life I can look at my own life.

Andy said...

Little Cicero, you are one of my daily aggravations. I say that with love.

tully said...

Now you sound like my mother...and father, and brother, and other relatives, and friends, and teachers...