Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  Where can I find Trolling Fundies?
- Recreant/Miscreant

Dear R/M,
  Any time a website comment warns you that you’re going to hell, you’ve met a Trolling Fundy. Whenever a forum post compares the discussion topic to Sodom (or its less famous, but still rockin’ sister city, Gomorrah), you’ve met a Trolling Fundy. When your blog host suddenly deletes hundreds of journals and communities that post fiction with naughty words in, chances are they did so at the behest of one or more Trolling Fundies.

  Trolling Fundies - short for “fundamentalists” - lurk around areas of the Interweb that they consider unsavory, clucking disapprovingly and keeping careful notes about exactly how many times Draco spanks Harry’s bare ass in your fan fiction community. At best, they’ll prissily opine about the danger to the souls of those who share your particular interest. At worst, they’ll take it upon themselves to report you to whatever authority is at hand. If your forum or blog host handles content inquiries as badly as Livejournal/Six Apart’s recent mass banning kerfluffle, the Trolling Fundy might cause you serious inconvenience.

  Unfortunately, there is no surefire way to guard against an infestation of Trolling Fundies. Unlike cockroaches, which die when you stomp on them, Trolling Fundies have a nasty way of returning after being banned/blocked/publicly ridiculed. The sad fact is, if you want to maintain a public presence online, and you aren’t willing to keep it G-rated, you’re subject to attack by Trolling Fundies. Welcome to the Internet in the new age of morality.

[x-posted from Ask The Little Bald Bastard]

  I got to the Huntingdon station on the Market-Frankford line at about 2:10 this afternoon. Typically, I missed the train by about 45 seconds, but that’s a different rant. When I got to the top of the stairs, the booth which usually houses the helpful*, attentive** SEPTA employee was dark and empty. A cardboard sign stuck in the window read “USE BIG GATE TO LEFT,” and included three helpful arrows for riders like myself who, on the verge of heatstroke from walking to the train through the soup that is the summer in Philly, had a little trouble focusing on the words.

  I live and die by the Blue Line, so I’ve observed plenty of SEPTA’s worker drones. I know that they’re usually stuck in a tiny booth by themselves for hours at a time, and I don’t begrudge one of them needing to take a bathroom/snack/smoke break, especially when they leave the gate unlocked so riders who show up while they’re out of the booth can get to the platform. They get to take care of their basic biological functions, and I save a token. However, when I reached the gate area, the newly-returned attendant was berating a man who was having trouble going through the gate. He couldn’t get it to open, and she was rudely directing him to the open gate. Which was on the far right. The best part? Her parting shot at he went through the gate was “that’s what it say on the sign!”

  Apparently, the transit organization can’t even afford to hire people who know which hand makes the “L” when you stick out your thumb. I am suddenly in favor of casinos, if the state will promise to dedicate some of the revenue to ensuring all SEPTA workers have a first grade education.

*unhelpful **inattentive

  Click on the picture if you want to join in the fun.

  So I was doing some blog maintenance, adding tags to old entries. I didn’t realize it would republish huge swaths of my archives in one shot. Sorry to everyone whose feed readers/friends pages were overloaded with my drivel. I’ll go back to three posts a week now.

  Cats that look like Hitler.

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  Why oh why? Delilah?
- Anonymous

Dear Anonymous,
  Samson has been asking himself the same question since Long Ago, BCE. Delilah was Samson’s wife; she coaxed him into revealing that his long hair was the secret of his Herculean strength, and then gave him a quick trim and betrayed him to his enemies. Fortunately for Samson, Old Testament God (before he got all New-Agey and lame) was cool with guys who bludgeoned hundreds of non-believers to death, so he got his revenge in the end.

  I always think of this story when Trolling Fundies decry the morals of modern entertainment. Here’s a tale prominently featuring thousands of beating deaths. At the end, the hero commits what can only be called a low-tech suicide bombing; he pulls the Philistine temple down on himself, killing “many more as he died than while he lived.” (Judges 16:30). But if someone says “fuck” on TV, the world will explode and we’ll all be cast into hell. Or something.

  When I was a kid, I had a set of View-Master discs featuring illustrated bible stories. The only thing more awesome for a pre-adolescent boy than a picture of hundreds of beating victims and their jawbone-wielding assailant is a picture of hundreds of beating victims and their jawbone-wielding assailant in 3-D!

  In other news, Wikipedia has an entry for hair. Seriously? Does anybody sophisticated enough to look things up in an online encyclopedia not know what hair is?

[x-posted from Ask The Little Bald Bastard]

I stopped wearing t-shirts that were wittier than myself a few years back, but this new design has me pondering a reprieve on the ban.

Webcomics OG Jeffrey Rowland (When I Grow Up, Wigu, and the semi-true journal comic Overcompensating) has a designer’s eye and a zeitgeist radar that’s visible from space. His t-shirt designs are consistently among the smartest and most visually appealing product to crawl out of the shameless merchandising whore-factory that is the sole means of revenue generation for most webcomic artists. If you’re a t-shirt guy or gal, and my endorsement means anything at all, you’ll buy a shirt (or twelve) at Topatoco.com. My birthday is in October.

  When it’s hot and humid - as if it’s EVER hot WITHOUT being humid in this town - the back of the bus smells like ground in BO rinsed in stale urine. Then again, so does most of the city. When the exhaust is the best-smelling part of your commute, it’s time to buy a gas mask.

  Two boys, alike enough to be brothers, approximately 10 and 12 years old, respectively. Both of them were built like a “before” picture on an ad for some fad diet. Big, round bellies had completely engulfed the waistlines of their shorts; slabs of boy-breast that would have failed the pencil test even if a small dog were substituted for a trusty #2.

  How does that happen? Is there not a single adult in their lives that thinks “maybe these boys shouldn’t need training bras?”

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  Why are Tom and Jerry so mean to each other?
- Jennifer

Dear Jennifer,
  The struggle between a physically powerful oppressor and a diminutive but intellectually gifted challenger is as old as the biblical story of David & Goliath. And considering the liberal ways that the bible borrows from previous mythology, chances are it’s considerably older. William Hanna and Joseph Barbera simply transposed the ageless struggle into the anthropomorphized animal oeuvre and added modern household instruments of torture to the combatants’ arsenals.

  Alternate Answer: Because cats like to eat mice, whereas mice generally prefer to remain uneaten. Duh.

[x-posted from Ask The Little Bald Bastard]