for 28 March 2001. Updated every WEEKDAY.

Tim Cavanaugh
Special Guest Editor

Terry Colon
Art Director

Heather Havrilesky
Senior Editor

Joey Anuff
Publisher

Hey Polly —

Are you a Brownie?

"Make new friends but keep the old, Make new friends but keep the old,

One is silver, and the other gold"

Apparently this little ditty came to us through the wisdom of "an idealistic American girls organization known as the Brownies."

Alex
<alexshusta@yahoo.com>

Oh those little sluts. Don't tell me about those Brownies, with their overtly sexual uniforms and Siren-like rhyming couplets and their provocative dessert treats. Talk about your pedophile-incited organizations. Where would you turn, if you had a thing for little girls with marshmallow melted all over their stubby fingers?

God I'm in a gross mood. On days like this I should write for The Practice.

Absolutely foul,

Polly

So you went out with a guy who dated Uma in high school? Why, he must have been a NMH graduate, like me, but about six years older. Isn't that a little old for you? Shouldn't you be dating younger, more virile men? The kind of men who can pull your rickshaw all day, if you know what I mean.

Ciao,

Ben
<bscwabe@mit.edu>

What is that, some sort of special school for brainy aristocrats whose parents can afford to pay multiple thousands for each teacher to personally blow each student and reassure him that he's dyslexic or he has a learning disability and therefore he really shouldn't have to work nearly as hard as those smelly underprivileged kids? No, special brainy aristocratic children need extra time to take the SATs, so they can blow off their Kaplan course and spend the afternoon sucking down bong hits instead.

It's really not fair to dislike people because they're rich brainy slackers, though, is it? After all, isn't that what we all want to be? Just without the khakis and the bad haircuts and the MIT email addresses.

I'm sorry, Ben. You know I care deeply, despite my prickly exterior. It's been a tough day, and you're an easy target. I know you can take it.

Or at least that's the excuse most of my friends use after they rip me to shreds.

Entirely unencumbered by dignity,

Polly

Important question...

Is Polly a Good Girl, or a Bad Girl?

Suavely,

Ralph Ward
<rward@boardroominsider.com>

Oh please. What's a good girl, like one with clean panties and a crucifix around her neck? And a bad girl is mean and naughty with garter belts and ?

Infantilizing language like that makes me feel all angry and brutish, like this woman I saw on Taxicab Confessions who said, "I wish I had a dick so bad, 'cause then I'd be all the time sayin' shit like, 'Shut up and suck my dick!'"

Nothing really spells total disdain and disrespect like those words, don't you agree? Not that I'd actually want to have such a vulnerable appendage around all the time. Anyway, suck my dick.

Bad as in good,

Polly

would it be possible to gather up all the people who are going to respond to this installment of FILLER by emailing you clever, rhyming verse and have them collectively stuff it up their ass?

or, as usual, is it too late already?

p pavlak
<meanie_apolis@hotmail.com>

Gee, so bitter. Did someone tell you to suck their dick in iambic pentameter this morning, or are you just unhappy to see me?

Vulnerable appendage,

Polly

The eerie synchronicities abound. Let's see: Ben Schwabe of MIT went to the same high school as Uma Thurman AND another one of my best friends coveted the contents of your pants from afar during your undergrad Duke days.

And he never Once wore a docker. In fact, he loved his Chuck Taylor Hightops so very very much that when the sole finally tore off of one, he wore a flip-flop underneath the top part.

And didn't get a whole lot of action at the time.

Great WXDU DJ, though. And a fine citizen. He's a labor organizer now.

Ain't that *somethin'*?

Anna Boroughs
<acboroughs@yahoo.com>

One of your best friends coveted the contents of my pants? That is somethin'. Did he know there was a vulnerable appendage jangling around in there?

Well, fine citizens are rarely fine, huh? At least he never once wore a docker. That's more than we can say for dear old Ben.

Guaranteed 100% dignity free,

Polly

"the forces that most effectively drive [BeliefNet] are the same ones that propelled George W. Bush into office — the millions of Americans who take seriously the notion that Bill Clinton was a figure of unprecedented vice and immorality in American politics, that our moral crisis demands answers bigger thanourselves, that we need to take a cold shower in our spiritual traditions."

I'll grant you that this is an effective description of the forces that drove W. into office, but I find it hard to believe that those forces — Messrs. Scalia, Thomas, Rehnquist, and Kennedy, and Ms. O'Connor-- are the ones that most effectively drive BeliefNet. If they rely on those five people for most of their traffic they're in worse shape than you think.

In other words, don't you think "propelled" is a little bit strong for someone who backed into the White House the way W. did? His popular-vote loss wasn't even the smallest of the last 40 years. (Kennedy-Nixon 1960, Nixon-Humphrey 1968).

Matt Weiner
<mcwst5+@pitt.edu>

Thanks, Matt.

It's true that if we lived under a different Constitution, George W. Bush might not be President right now. It's also true that that would be a good thing. It's even more true that we should make a Constitutional amendment eliminating the electoral college, and most true of all that we should make a constitutional amendment requiring that the entire Bush family be paraded through the streets of Baghdad naked in cages.

However, since Bill Clinton is the only recent Democrat who's been able to win under the current system, and since it's going to be a long, long time before the Democrats can find a candidate with anything like Clinton's skill, it's smart to stop viewing Gore's loss as some kind of judicial error and start assessing it as a loss. If Gore hadn't been such a fuckup, if Bush hadn't gotten a ton of votes (more than Clinton received either time, and possibly — if we recounted every county in every state in the country — a majority), the case never would have come to the Supreme Court in the first place.

yr pal,

tim