for 10 May 2000. Updated every WEEKDAY.
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Filler God, that chart at the beginning of Fillerversary makes me want to put on my old tuxedo, curl up in a corner with the bong and Jack Daniels, and blow my brains out. You don't want to know how many of those rows 'n' columns I fit into. But anyway, to answer your question in the most general sense: since I started reading Filler, only three years ago I'm afraid (but I went back and read the archives, honest), I've gone from a promising hack to an accomplished freelancer, discovering that it IS in fact possible to infinitely subdivide and sell pieces of my soul, forvever and ever amen. Proof positive: I recently penned a masterpiece entitled "A Nasal Spray for Tooth Decay?" Once you get past the nice rhyme and question mark, there's nothing but crushed karma and bitter powdered spirit, with which I am pleased to mix the vodka of Filler every week. Goes down real nice. And if you ever agree to sell the movie rights, I'd like to play the pig, in a cage, on antibiotics. For scale. Cheers. Chris Mohney <cmohney@mindspring.com> Crushed karma and bitter powdered spirit? Now that's what you should be marketing. Loving my cage, Polly  Dear Polly, I have not been reading Filler for its entire four year run, but I have been following your weekly madcap antics for a good, long stretch now (as I read it in the morning, when I'm stretching.) Anyway, I can say that Filler has changed my life. Before I discovered your column, I was lonely and bitter; hanging out in bars alone searching the faces of the merry makers (whilst downing neat scotch) for the person who could penetrate my perpetual gloomy funk and fill my day with joy and sunshine and frolicking doggies. Yet all the women I ever found were cynical, detached, ironic to the point of utter obscurity and nearly as bitter as myself. This led to naught but brief, unsatisfying, soul-mangling encounters which set me back on the same ugly cycle of bitterness and neat scotch. Since I started reading Filler none of that has changed, but now I call all these women "Polly". Thank you. "It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail." -Gore Vidal Phineas X. Jones <animus@ais.net> Ah, frolicking doggies. The eternal dream. The underlying theme. Here's hoping you get some, some day. Er, some frolicking doggies, of course. In the meantime, stay away from the cynical, detached women. They're joyless, they burn easily, and they rarely own doggies, frolicking or otherwise. Joyfully tanning, Polly So many things HAVE changed: I stopped breaking out My metabolism changed so that now I GAIN weight My kids no longer think I'm cool My wife no longer thinks I'm cool The drug I was taking to speed up my metabolism so that I could lose weight made my heart have an irregular heartbeat My kids think I'm a fucking idiot My wife thinks I'm a fucking idiot The country I live in recently suffered an abuse of power by it's chief executive and his croney. I look forward to the totalitarianistic future where my government makes all the important decisions for me, removes my unsightly front door, rearranges my house and removes any unnecessary members of my family FOR FREE!! J. Hamhill Hmm. Perhaps you are a fucking idiot. Have you considered this possibility? Helpfully, Polly Dear Polly, When I first stumbled upon this little corner of the internet I was happily going out with a great girl, and working as an Internet Development Manager at an internet start up company. Now, after a couple of years of weekly Filler doses, my life couldn't be better. I quit the increasingly lame internet start up and now I'm a "new media designer" at an even smaller company. I design meaningful web sites for small banks and shoe companies. I dumped my girlfriend of 3 years only to start seeing some one else I'm even less interested in. Now, I'm madly in love with the girl I dumped, but she won't have anything to do with me anymore (duh!). I spend my days resisting the urge to call her, drinking myself into an unpleasant stupor, and planning moves to worlds major metropolitan areas (where I would instantly succeed and be happy). Thanks Filler! I look forward to more. Uncomfortably Numb (please forgive this reference to Pink Floyd. I am not a fan.) P.S. This is a true story. Ok, guys, listen up. Before you dump your girlfriend because you're bored and you think maybe there are dozens of exciting, fabulous women out there waiting to get their dexterous hands on you, ask your friends if you're with a real catch, who you're lucky to be dating in the first place. Chances are you've got a total babe on your hands and you don't even know it because you're sort of stupid. I've met more regretful, heartbroken men lately than I care to mention. Particularly since I'm the one who broke all their hearts. Bahawhawhaw! Joking, badly, Polly Subject: What's changed in your life since you started reading Filler? I started smoking out of a bong instead of rolling joints. Really. Mike Wow. I really am making a difference in the world. Feeling very important and special, Polly Dear Polly, Filler has changed my life in so many exciting ways. Since I began reading it, I've become trimmer and have lots more energy. I smile often these days. I met the love of my life, and we are happily married. I've begun to experience male multiple orgasms. I've enjoyed a promotion and two raises at work ... ... and it's all thanks to Filler! Thanks Filler! Regis Feldman P.S. I also no longer dump in my sleep. Wow, I've really changed your life, haven't I? How exactly did I ameliorate that shitting-the-bed thing? I should probably know, just in case I need to do the "How to Discipline Your Children Without Ritalin or Crystal Meth" speaking circuit once this gig is over. Just don't, uh, stop exercising while continuing to read Filler. We don't want to throw a control variable into this experiment, or I might lose some of that undeserved credit. Which I so clearly deserve. Entitled to many things, including multiple male orgasms, Polly Dear Polly, So, I realize that constructive insight isn't necessarily what Filler is all about, but I thought that it still might be worth writing to you. I really enjoy Filler, as well as your daily Suck columns, and I'm wondering how you got to where you are today. I'm 22, still finishing my philosophy BA - in short, I have no marketable skills and little hope of, or interest in, developing any. Most or all of the jobs that appeal to me seem impossibly out of reach - sexy, exciting New Media jobs like yours. I mean, I've never even been to the West Coast. Am I totally screwed? I think I have the talent and ability to do something, I might sometimes even have the drive to do that something, whatever something that something may be, but I don't know anybody doing anything that might eventually turn out to be that something, so, it's like, y'know? I mean, what do I do? Awaiting inspiration, Matthew Gearhart <gearhart@mail.utexas.edu> You are totally screwed. Just kidding. Decide on two or three jobs that you'd love to do eventually. Read a lot about those possibilities. Move to the best city for those things. Ask around. Eventually, you'll figure out how people get internships at such places. Get an internship. Before you talk to anyone at the place you want to work, though, develop a very specific idea of what you want to do. If you approach and say, "Gee, what a great place, I'll do anything for you guys!" you won't get a job. You need to at least sound focused. Sounding focused is really 90% of the battle, regardless of whether you actually are focused or not. The other 10% of the battle is wiping the sweat off your palms before you shake hands with your future employer. Now you probably don't want to do anything but eat cookies in bed and weep piteously. Perfectly natural. Why not spend the day eating cookies in bed and weeping, and then vow to get up tomorrow, get online, and figure out what you might actually be good at. Just remember, no job is sexy and exciting, least of all a new media job. Sexy and exciting is on TV. Just find something that you won't find utterly torturous, and use that money to pay the cable bill so you can get all the sexy and exciting TV that you deserve. Also awaiting inspiration, Polly since i started reading filler i ended up at a dot com. is that your fault? Christian Nutt Gamers.com Associate Producer :Dreamcast <christian.nutt@gamers-inc.com> Probably. Not quite as sexy and exciting as you might have hoped, eh? Not quite the dizzyingly glamorous scene you had hoped for, huh? Sorry. Slouching and squinting, in socks, Polly Hi Polly, It's difficult to know whether to congratulate or commiserate with you. I very nearly fitted with the table on the opening page, but it really is much worse. When i started reading suck i was a post-grad working on a dissertation, now i'm a post-grad finishing a thesis on something else that's not a lot different from the dissertation. Ugh. I promise to finish this year, but i also promise not to stop reading Filler. Or have the two been connected for the last few years? In which case i promise to stop reading Filler and will get back to you in the new year. Gary (Apparently, the only person in the world to actually walk into the Suck offices and ask to buy a T-shirt. Nice dog by the way.) <godard@hotmail.com> Ooo. Sorry Gary. When you stopped by the Suck offices, you left your book bag with your life story written in it, and I ascertained from the information therein that you'd have a great deal of trouble finishing your dissertation. It wasn't exactly rocket science figuring that out, what with your history of procrastination and bouts of hopelessness and depression. But what would the sullen do without grad school? Well, I guess some of them end up writing pointless cartoons instead. But what would the sullen grad student do without this pointless cartoon? I guess some of them would end up finishing their dissertations. Soldier on, son! Work out, drink stronger coffee, and vow to do more! These things keep me from sinking into an unproductive malaise on a daily basis! Still running against the wind, pausing only to trip other runners, Polly Completing a five year double major at two very different universities, in two unrelated fields, has brought insight beyond mere academics. I will abuse the five star notation as much as possible: **** College women cannot have sex. This is not to say that it is mechanically or emotionally impossible, just that they suck at it. Attribution: self-consciousness. *** Engineers cannot have sex, but are superior to those in the humanities, but worse than those in the arts. Attribution: social predication. ** Drugs don't kill people! People kill people. With bad drugs. Attribution: greed. * Kissing men is a whole lot like kissing women (especially when high as a kite), with the possibility of *stubble mesh* being higher in the former than the latter. Attribution: testosterone. ** Gentrification sucks, but its better than walking through a pool of bloody vomit upon which floats Lucky Charms. I'd rather a Starbucks employee clean it up. Attribution: health. **** Frat boys are indeed rapists and alcoholics. Sorority girls still want them. Attribution: stupidity. ** Race issues among students in the University of California are approximately nil compared to the rest of the population in California. Attribution: probably not affirmative action. *** Television is extremely harmful to the nuclear family as we once new it. Attribution: zombification. ***** Polly Esther may have a shitty life, but who the fuck cares as long as she keeps writing Filler. Attribution: selfishness. Love, Brandon in berkeley Thanks for the list, very nice. One addition, and an edit: ****College women don't like sex. Attribution: College men don't know what the fuck they're doing. And change the attribution on "Kissing men" from "Testosterone" to "The undying allure of bisexuality." I think you should either try harder, or try a new team. Respectfully, Polly Hi... About a month ago, someone wrote to you asking about Joey's ever-growing nose. No one was able to answer the guy's question, but I have a theory... (see attached gif) Good Fillerversary Filler, btw... Humberto <humberto@>puck.nether.net> Very nice theory. Conspiracy theories really do make most otherwise dull issues much more interesting! Look how worked up Mel Gibson got, for one. Now I can't wait until 2003. Polly Decline and Fall "...detailing the fueling up of the incendiaries, the cranking back of the catapults (For reasons not entirely known, obsolete technology is better than modern technology at demonstrating human ingenuity)" Because, as somebody observed (Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov?)(paraphrased), any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. William W. Hunt <whunt@gslis.utexas.edu> That's really true, whoever said it. In fact, the only real problem with Gladiator is that since digital imaging lets them do anything they want, you just assume everything is a digital effect. So no matter now what amazing thing you see on screen you just sit there saying to yourself, "Big deal! They're just doing that Computer Thing." Which turns out not always to be true. When I read the production notes, it turns out they really made 10,000 costumes and built enormous sets and used live tigers and had a zillion extras and fired a shitload of flaming arrows into the air at once, and so on. (And by the way, when is somebody going to do a parody of these idiotic production notes they hand out for movies? No matter how much of a piece of shit the movie is, the production notes always manage to make it sound like it was a bigger deal than the building of the transcontinental railroad: "In painstakingly reconstructing the '70s heavy metal milieu of Detroit Rock City, costume designer Daphnë Zorobel-Cumley went on a six-month search of pawn shops, secondhand stores and memorabilia fairs throughout the United States and Canada. 'Ace and Gene were very precise about the look they wanted,' Zorobel-Cumley says."). Anyway, we need to get back to the days when movies proudly announced how much money you could expect to see on the screen: "George Peppard and Sophia Loren and a cast of thousands in the most magnificent epic ever brought to the screen!" Yr pal, Bartel BarTel, "A woman archer/charioteer in gold breastplates clearly owes more to American Gladiators than to actual gladiators." You must've missed "Gladiator Night" on the Discovery channel (or was it TLC?). One of their historian talking heads said that female gladiators, while very rare, did exist. And, that they fought with at least one breast exposed. The movie's already got an R rating, so, really, they're showing some restraint in having their female gladiator with TWO breast plates. I plan on being first in line to see this movie - Russell Crowe in a toga! Yippeee!!! Kara Catherwood <kara@okstate.edu> Well, I can't say my reading in antique literature is truly extensive, but I've never come across a primary source that mentioned any women gladiators, certainly none as accomplished as that black lady who used to hand all opponents their asses on American Gladiators. I can't remember her name, and the only AG cast member who seems to get any mention on the web is Gemini (And what's up with that? Gemini was great and all, but shouldn't all the American Gladiators get their due?). In any event, I'm skeptical about these talking-head self promoters on the Discovery Channel. They're just trying to invent new angles on these very familiar topics. Call me old-fashioned, but I'm sticking to my position that the arena is no place for a lady! Yr pal, Bartel Fine piece - what was that passage about the Romans and plumbing, Oscar Wilde? I can never remember Pasiphae's name, but that's the way they get bull sperm for artificial insemination today, complete with rubber cow. It's true, that all the Roman empire movie epics are to be summed up by that tag of Horace's, "change the name and the story is about you." I thought Gladiator was on the long side, but certainly no disappointment - very similar, point by point, to the plotting of the 1964 Fall of the Roman Empire, the thinking-man's epic. As for female gladiators, they did exist, but they were a novelty - Juvenal reports watching them sticking boars in the arena topless, which is something Fox Network will be running about 2006, I bet. For more of the "good stuff" of the Roman games, check Will Durant's Caesar and Christ; the book has a long passage describing atrocities, perfect for repeating at cocktail parties. Glad to see there's a classics scholar among all those Sucksters, Richard von Busack <regisgoat@earthlink.net> Nobody is more opposed to long running times than I am, but Gladiator moved pretty quickly, and hell's bells, if you can't go over two hours in a Roman epic, what's this country coming to? It also had an element of suspense, which I had never seen at all in any sandal picture, and generally helped move the time along, which is, in the end, all we can ask of a movie. Juvenal was a great joker and woman hater. I think you're confusing his Satires with the latest trends in topless-woman pig-sticker underground video. It's like crush video, but twice as hot. The Roman toilet stuff is from Ulysses. Yr pal, Bartel These days you guys write long, rambling articles, just so you get a chance to say "Details is dead". This coyness is very confusing. Death of any Conde Nasty is a joyous occasion. When are you going to tip that champagne bottle on your dead homie's grave? shloo thululu <slatbartifast@yahoo.com> You got our number, all right. Yr pal, Bartel "Nobody was seriously writing Latin anymore when America was built. Even our most eye-moistening building inscriptions ("Neither rain nor snow nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds") use plain English to recall us to our better, ancient selves." eh?? what about e pluribus unum?? great essay still...how'd you get to see the movie before everyone else?? kK <keen@ulster.net> Before everybody else? I'm a fully-accredited member of the media, which makes me, by definition, more important than everybody else (Look it up, it's true). The hell with e pluribus unum. What about Roy Orbison's "Ubi Dubi"? Yr pal, Bartel Hey Bar - Suck is almost always good, but rarely great. I just wanted to drop you a line saying how much I loved your 'Decline and Fall' piece. Really first rate. You need to pad out the sections on the collapse of classical studies and the bit on how we use sword and sandal epics as a funhouse mirror and get this thing on the cover of the Atlantic. If you don't do it, you know someone else will. But it won't be as funny. Here's a starter question: dozens and dozens of movies about Romans, but where o where are our Greeks? (I'm still waiting for the Alcibiadies biopic starring Wes Bentley with Carroll O'Connor as Socrates). Anyway, good luck, excelsior, etcetera Jeff <ByronGato@aol.com> Well, there's Richard Burton as Alexander the Great; there's La Guerra di Troia, and Helen of Troy with Rossana Podestà as the face that launched a thousand ships (and she is pretty cute, but for my money there's something really pointless about a brown-eyed blonde). Steve Martin's Death of Socrates is a classic TV moment. And let's not forget Armand Assante as Odysseus, and Anthony Quinn's Zeus in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. For that matter, what about Anthony Quinn as Zorba the Greek? And is Jason and the Argonauts chopped liver? But in general, you're right: The Greeks are under-represented in film. Probably because they have a weird alphabet, and very little fascist appeal. And they did too much talking and not enough kicking ass. Then again, Roman literature is held in unfairly low regard. So nobody gets any respect when you come right down to it. We won't, either, when we're all gone. Sic transit gloria mundi. Yr pal, Bartel Bartel, Thanks VERY much for your brief praise of Barry Lyndon. I was beginning to think I was the only person - let alone cineaste - on the planet who admires that film. With that in mind, doublethanks for the link. Robert Anderson <roba@cadence.com> I think people psyche themselves out of enjoying Barry Lyndon. Maybe they're not expecting a Kubrick movie to be so heavy on plot and exposition. But it's a movie where Ryan O'Neal gets fucked up in a thousand different ways, and I consider that pure cinematic gravy. And that narrator is the cat's pajamas. Yr pal, Bartel |
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![[Tim Cavanaugh]](/fish/staff/images/tim.gif)
![[Phillip Bailey]](/fish/staff/images/phil.gif){kind=small}
