for 23 July 1999. Updated every WEEKDAY.

Just thought you guys might
want to see the letter Jenni
of JenniCam fame wrote me
after I informed her she was
the subject of my fake
interview this week:

Not sure how I'm supposed to
respond to that sort of
portrayal. Am I supposed to
be flattered or amused or
offended? If it weren't so
entirely off base, I'd have
found it quite amusing. Your
writing style is quite funny,
I just wish I had some idea
why you wrote an interview
repeatedly insulting me and
then emailed me a
"congratulations."

I was just having some fun!

Lance Martin
<lancemartin@coastalnet.com>

Sorry, Lance, but we're on
Jenni's side this time.
Suck's interviews are 100
percent real. That may be why
they sometimes fall flat. But
we don't make them up and
don't suggest that you do.
The idea of inventing an
interview — especially
with a person who leaves so
little to the imagination
anyway — seems
mind-bogglingly pointless.

Yr pal,

BarTel

Hey,

I idolize Susan Faludi as much
as the next lass, so when I
read in yesterday's Suck that
New York and LA both "have
unattached-women oversupplies
in the six-figure range," I
thought to myself: I could
really go for some polenta
right now. And then I
thought: That seems kinda
high.

Anecdotally speaking, I
couldn't swing a cat without
hitting several unattached
guys when I lived in New York
(which was all of 18 months
ago). Plus, I managed to find
a high-quality, completely
unattached guy in New York
who was, for all intents and
purposes, withering on the
vine for lack of suitable
companionship.

But never one to rest on my
anecdotal laurels, I raced
over to the US Census
Bureau's fact finder Web site
(www.census.gov), which
yielded this demographic info
about Manhattan in 1990:

Never-Married Men: 288,272
Separated Men: 24,629
Divorced Men: 43,418

Total: 356,319

(I've omitted widows of both
genders because the problems
of the elderly don't concern
me and they certainly don't
concern Suck's readers and,
frankly, aren't we all
happier that way?)

Never Married Women: 282,934
Separated Women: 37,723
Divorced Women: 69,964

Total: 390,621

Two things: It is completely
fucked up how many more
divorced women there are
than men. What's up with
that? Are the divorced men
moving to Akron, Ohio, or what?
The difference between
these two numbers is 34,302.
That's the mid-to-low five
digits, not six, and it's not
numerically possible to round
it up to six unless you're
blind, drunk, or both. It is
a bit of an oversupply, I
grant you, but nothing to run
home crying about.

Moreover, I would go so far as
to theorize that a certain
percentage of those women are
never going to settle down
and so are not really
competitors. Take Martha
Stewart. She lives in New
York: Who could she marry? I
submit that there isn't a man
in the Tri-state area who
could keep up with her. Men
will always need wives, while
in some cases, all women
really need are dates.
Therefore, any demographic
crisis, real or imagined, is
not so much a crisis as a
demographic bump in the road.

A much bigger problem, from my
point of view, is the advent
of computers as the salvation
of the geek. (I can
practically hear the sarcasm
from here: Oh, computers
benefit geeks, do they, Kate?
Boy, read a paper in the last
20 years? But give me a
minute to flesh out my
thesis.) In olden times, the
geek suffered because of his
or her obsessive love of the
unconventional (and it was
much more likely to be his,
in my experience). It might
be fencing or ham radio or
science fiction, but whatever
it was fueled a complete
submersion in the subject
matter, which then became a
stand-in for what nongeeks
obsessively love: social
success and fiscal
well-being. The geek thus
lived on a fault line: On the
one side, he could do
whatever he loved but it
wouldn't be materially
rewarding, and on the other
side, he could act like a
nongeek and make enough money
at the credit union to pay
his bills. In walking between
these two extremes, many
geeks could attain a
Buddha-like middle way.

Then came the day when what
the geek loved most became
materially rewarding.
Suddenly, there was no
contrast between what the
geek wanted to be and what,
according to society, the
geek should be. Now, if only
geeks could have maintained
their charming, geeky low
self-esteem and loyalty to
fellow geekkind, everything
would have been fine. But the
geeks became drunk on their
success and decided to take
for themselves the plums of
"normal society": social
success and material wealth.

In the blink of an eye, we
have tech guys gossiping
behind each other's backs,
buying thousands of dollars'
worth of electronic toys (and
titanium boxes to keep them
in), and worst of all,
talking about their
electronic toys as if this
were actually an appropriate
stand-in for interesting
conversation. Oh, for the days
when a man might be wooed
into talking about Led
Zepplin's references to the
work of J. R. R. Tolkien or
recounting the plot devices
of every Jackie Chan movie
ever made! Now it's nothing
but Mac versus PC, PalmPilot
versus Windows CE, Lara Croft
versus Pamela Anderson and so
on until you want to gouge
someone's eyes out with a
plastic stylus. And worst of
all, every mistake these
idiots have ever made in their
lives — getting kicked out
of college for brawling on
their frat house lawn, failing
to get a college degree after
six years of trying — now
becomes part of their grand
master plans because it has
delivered them to this moment
of triumph, these stock
options, this corner office.

And there's so many of these
imbeciles, there's no way to
avoid the reality of the
situation: Some of them will
actually breed and pass on
their profoundly aberrant,
quasi-geek identity onto
future generations. A
once-glorious, beautiful
nation of geeky talent
mutated into a slimy mass of
arrogance and rationalization.

Kate Powers
<katepowers@jellyvision.com>

It's true, overconfidence in
nerds is becoming a major
problem for women today.
What's worse is realizing your
date will never marry you or
realizing your date will
never stop talking about the
lame fight he got into with
the sysadmin about whether
dexterity or charisma are
more important for a chaotic
evil thief in Dungeons and
Dragons? Join normal society
long enough to notice your
date is falling asleep
in her crème brûlée.

Then again, this in itself is
a fantasy game since no one
actually goes on dates
anymore. Or maybe our
charisma is at an all-time
low.

At any rate, thanks for the
free thoughts replete with
statistical research.
Remember: You'll never be
arrogant and loaded if you
keep giving this shit away.

Dearest Sucksters,

"... that were actually shot
in Belgrade, Tehran, Ottowa,
and other hot spots, where
the locals relish any
opportunity to wipe their
asses with our colors, not to
mention our bogus ..."

Not to belittle the
flag-burning efforts of the
Yugoslavians or the Iranians,
but I think it demeans them
slightly to include a
nonexistent city in a list of
pyromaniac rabble-rousers. I
can't imagine you would be
referring to the lovely, if
dull, capital of Canada.
Certainly the boffins at Suck
who are slaving away at the
coal face of online
journalism would not have a
problem spelling the three
syllable name of America's
largest trading partner.
Rather, you are probably just
using your American
spellchecker (with the
Ebonics plug-in), wherein if
enough people spell something
wrong, it's got to be right!
Who needs the "u" in colour
anyway? It just confuses
things!

By saying this, I am not
suggesting every Canadian can
spell or that we are beyond
the odd ytpo. I am just
trying to highlight the fact
that when you had loftier
goals and were burning down
your White House instead of
some faded piece of spun
cotton, I imagine Ye Olde
Suck.com didn't refer to your
capital as Woshington.

Ass-wipingly yours,

The Nit-picking Canuck
<jeff_bertram@prqa.co.uk>

PS Now where's that bunny? I
need a hit.

Oh, shut your piehole.
Today's Hit and Run
contained everything our
target demographic is looking
for in a publication: home
and garden news,
spirituality, politics,
entertainment, and just a
hint of romance! Get off your
weird, pinko flag-burning
"trip" and be grateful
somebody brings you such
top-notch entertainment day
after livelong day.

Yr pal,
BarTel

Dear Tim:

Even though I realize you
have officially declared
bullshit on The Baffler, I
like it. In small doses, of
course. Naturally I waltzed
to its site only to
discover it calls it its
"web site" [sic]. I once
castigated you for
unnecessary criticism of
Baffler quotation marks. I
take it all back.

In regards to invisible
fencing, I have a real,
electric fence around my own
property to keep out giant
horned rats (deer, to you). I
have had real people —
allowed to vote, drive, and
buy guns in this country —
ask why I just didn't
install one of those
invisible fences around my
property instead. Oh well. I'm
actually toying with the idea
so I could let the cat wander
loose — it's really too
dangerous otherwise. Do they
work? They always seemed
rather cruel to me.

I'll give my love to L. Ron
when I see him. He was a
pretty good pulp writer back
in the dear dead days of pulp
fiction. Pity he rose to his
level of incompetence.

Alan S. Kornheiser
<askornheiser@prodigy.net>

I was going to insert some
scare quotes into that
reference so it would say
we're sad to see it made it
"online." But then it
wouldn't be clear whether we
were "actually" scare-quoting
or just "mimicking" its
"inimitable" style. At last,
we don't know whether we're
the victims of irony or the
perps. That endlessly
spiraling wheels-within-wheels
"loop" is the real "danger"
of scare quotes.

Did your neighbors actually
believe you had an invisible
fence? I've been thinking of
this kind of thing, as my
bringing up The Invisible
Man in our last exchange
prompted me to go back and
reread The War of the
Worlds. You will recall that
in the excellent George Pal
film of that book, the
Martian fighting craft was
surrounded by transparent
force fields. It made a great
effect — in a movie whose
nearly 50-year-old effects
have aged beautifully. But
in the end it's unfortunate
because any movie made from
this book should be a costume
picture set in 1898. The most
interesting thing about the
book is that the Martians —
repeatedly described as
being so intelligent they
make us look like little more
than amoebas — have
equipment that is basically
about 15㪱 years ahead
of our own: poison gas,
armored vehicles, flamethrowers.
At the end they're working on
their Flying Machine. That
would have made a great
movie — WWI aliens versus
Boer War humans. And it's
public domain.

I think there is now enough
continuity in our exchanges
that we could do our own
version of a Slate Breakfast
Table. Of course, we'd have
to pepper our posts liberally
with those bogus little Slate
correspondent compliments:

"Dear Alan, Thanks so much
for putting into words
exactly what I was thinking
myself."

"Dear Tim, How refreshing to
see someone finally taking
such a sensible approach to
this unnecessarily contentious
issue. As you noted so aptly
in your book ..."

Yr pal,

Tim

Today you wrote: "... were
actually shot in Belgrade,
Tehran, Ottowa, and other hot
spots, where the ..."

Is "Ottowa" a reference to
the capital of Canada?

Joe Savoie
<jsavoie@unionenergy.com>

It's a transcription from the
original Ojibwa dialect, from
which the name of your
capital city is derived. Your
browser must not support the
diacritical marks we use to
ensure proper pronunciation
of the Algonquian tongue.

1. Yes, I'm Canadian.

2. No, this is not a rant
about your treatment of
Canada.

3. It's just a comment on
your typing ability (or your
ignorance, I can't decide
which — oh wait, that was
a rant). Do a search for
Ottowa and replace it with
Ottawa. Not that I'm that
mad — at least you
didn't say Toronto.

4. The most recent American
flag-burning attempt here was
by a Kansas Baptist minister
(Reverend Fred Phelps) who
decided the federal
government's recent
legislation extending
common-law marriage (and the
legal privileges pertaining
thereto — i.e., emergency
care authorization, death
benefits, etc.) to homosexual
couples violated the "will of
God." This dude and his group
of cronies were going to come
up and march on Parliament
with signs like "God hates
gays" and burn both Canadian
and American flags ... what
an asshole.

www.ottawacitizen.com is the
URL for one of the stories; a
search on the Ottawa
Citizen's site for "Rev.
Phelps" finds them all.

Dan Brackett
<dan.brackett@home.com>

Don't worry. The creative
spelling of your nation's
capital (admittedly a big
snafu) was corrected in a
matter of microseconds. But
not, of course, before dozens
of your countrymen had
streamed out of the woodwork
to berate us. Several of
these rapscallions even
taunted us with references to
"Woshington." Only your
letter showed the true spirit
of cooperation that NAFTA was
intended to promote. (Unless
NAFTA was intended to let us
get the better of our
neighbors to the north by
trading rejects like Fred
Phelps for superstars like
Mike Myers.)

One actual question, though:
What is the law of your land
regarding burning of the
Maple Leaf? Also, would the
Reverend Phelps be subject to
minimum content regulations
(i.e., for every three US
flags he burned he would be
required to burn one Canadian
flag)?

Subject: L. Ron Hubbard's
Battlefield Earth

The wacky thing is that this
is actually a pretty decent
piece of sci-fi.

Don't get me wrong: I think
LRH is one of the greatest
con artists to ever grace
This Mortal Coil. He was
brilliant and not held back
by those petty conventions
the rest of us mere mortals
call ethics.

He even admitted he created
Scientology on a bet and as a
sucker trap. (Sucksters
should appreciate that!)

But here's the sucker part of
Battlefield Earth. Many of us
hard-core SF types liked it
so much we were tricked into
trying to read his Mission
Earth Dekalogy. This is
undoubtedly his second
greatest scam next to
Scientology. And he even had
the ultimate laugh because it
raked in most of the geld —
AFTER HE WAS DEAD —
for none other than his
favorite religious order.

Critics and fans tried to
find some redeeming social
value but failed. Like people
who didn't smoke pot in the
late '60s, anyone who
actually made it through all
the books has got to have
some weird, antisocial
tendency to them. I made it
through about five books
before I decided I was being
had. My wife plodded on and
made it through eight before
throwing up (er, her hands)
and declaring, "This is
nothing but fucked-up
bullshit." (A typical
critical review.)

Back to Battlefield Earth:
Like many great pieces of SF,
I can't imagine how they are
going to make it into a
movie, not without about a
$500 million FX budget. Maybe
they'll just splice in
Saturday Night Fever outtakes
and some e-meter noise and we
Unclears will just get
hypnotized. Isn't that how
the Thetas usually do it?
We'll walk out of the theater
and discover we've all
mysteriously joined the
Church of Scientology and put
all our assets in
nonrevokable blind trusts
with the C of S as the
beneficiary.

Keep up the great vacuum!

Sid Sidner
<ssidner@hotmail.com>

L. Ron is an easy guy to
blame, but if you want a real
SF serial offender look no
further than the universally
beloved Frank Herbert, whose
Dune trilogy went on through
about 15 or 16 books. Toward
the end he was tormenting
readers with BrigaDune and
Mod Emperor of Dune and Dune
It All Night Long, all of
them going on at length about
the inscrutable philosophy of
Muad Dib and other literary
sleeping pills. Of course, he
doesn't have a street named
for him in LA.

I, too, was surprised to see
that BattleAxe Earth was
being brought in for a cool
$70 million, given that a
movie like Saving Private
Ryan can cost $60+ million
and be praised for its
budgetary restraint. Maybe
Travolta is working for scale.

Yr pal,

BarTel

The Shit

"Gary's Trajectory," A Wanderer in the Perfect City, Lawrence Weschler, Hungry Mind Press, 1998 The Parallax View, Alan J. Pakula, Paramount Pictures DVD, 1974 Rogues to Riches: The Trouble with Wall Street, Murray Teigh Bloom, Putnam,1971 Actual Air, David Berman, Open City Books, 1999 Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist, Peter Hall and Michael Bierut, editors, Princeton Architectural Press, 1998 Canary-wing parrots, Dolores Street, San Francisco Super Shitty to the Max, Hellacopters, Man's Ruin Records, 1998 Request magazine (any issue after June 1999) On the Road to Vietnam, Bob Hope, Cadet 4046 vinyl, 1964 The Flying Ballerina, Drums and Tuba, TEC Tones, 1998 Dino, Nick Tosches, Delta Alpha Publishing, 1999 The Soft Bulletin, The Flaming Lips, WEA/Warner Brothers, 1999 Big Red soda