Rant-Man's Notebook

By Jim "Rant-Man" MacQuarrie

We Get Mail

Sometimes this page just writes itself, y'know? You may have noticed (as the occasional e-mail from my reader reminds me) that I haven't been updating this page with any regularity in a while. The reason for that is, I didn't want to turn this into just another blog cluttering up the internet, full of idle chitchat about what I had for breakfast and other nonsense. The solution to that is to write pieces that actually have a theme, a topic, or at least a point. Sadly, that takes a little effort, and, well, I'm a lazy sack. Paradoxically, I'm also pretty busy most of the time, and lately, Monkey Spit is the first casualty in the battle for the unforgiving minute.

But as I say, sometimes the page just writes itself. Take this week for example. We get a lot of e-mail sent to all the various addresses you'll find on the Monkey Spit pages, and almost all of it gets routed to me. We use what's called a "catch-all" address, so if somebody sends to any random address at either monkeyspit.net or monkeyspit.com, it ends up in my e-mail. As a result, I get between 1500 and 2000 e-mails a day, of which roughly 800 come to Monkey Spit addresses. About 790 of those are offers for little blue pills, the opportunity to use said pills, offers to refinance my house, and other miscellaneous opportunities to purchase things no rational human would want.

You may be asking yourself, why doesn't Louie handle all this mail? True confession time: Louie doesn't exist. When Craig and I started Monkey Spit, it was purely as a place to run the Fourth Wall comic strip. We hoped that eventually I'd talk my friend Jonah into running it at CBR, and thought that if we built up an audience for it, he'd be more likely to go for it, but it hasn't fit in with his plans and now I've pretty much flaked on drawing it. But I digress. As we created and solicited content for the site, we suspected that we would need to insulate ourselves from it a little bit. We might anger people we know, or we might have to turn down a submission from a friend, or we might just want to have somebody else to direct irritating people to. So we invented Louie. We named him Louie after the king of the monkeys in the Jungle Book, and that was that. Why am I telling you this? Because Louie frequently responds to the e-mail, as you will see in some of the samples to follow.

Anyway, as I was saying, this week in particular, we've received a steady stream of odd e-mails asking weird questions, even more than the usual ones. About four times a year, we get mail from people wanting to buy our Bonsai Cows. asking about where to buy manatee meat, or other such notes indicating that somebody believed one of our fake web pages. Rant-Man also gets a bit of mail, sometimes from people helpfully offering corrections or additions to my "So You Think You Know Everything" page, and sometimes from people offering suggestions for topics. Like this one:

Dear Jim,

I'm pasting a copy of an e-mail I just sent to a group of people debunking another one of those forwards people send on mindlessly. I thought you might be interested in it.

Randi

I don't know who originally composed this. I found it posted on a couple of right-wing websites. I just want to say that this item has no business being forwarded. The numbers in it are totally inaccurate.

SafeStreetsDC reports that Washington, DC, with nearly 600,000 residents, had 262 murders in 2002. That's a homicide rate of 43.6...just about half that claimed by this post. According to the Washington, DC police department, in 2003, there were 247 homcides...a slight decrease in fact. The number dropped even further in 2004 to 198. THAT, assuming no change in the population, is a homicide rate of 33.3. That 80.6 rate claimed is 242% of the actual rate.

But wait...there's more. Not content with lying about the numbers, whoever originally composed this item also misled about the nature of the deaths. Note carefully that the figures I've cited are the total homicide rate, not the "firearm death rate" referred to by the writer. Presumably the figures I found includes knives, ropes, tireirons and everything else people use to inflict mayhem on each other. The "firearm death rate" would be even lower than those cited above.

Beyond the outright deception of this, using one tragedy to justify another is poor logic.

One unnecessary death is too many, no matter where it happens.

Randi

----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, June 09, 2005 10:58 AM
Subject: Hummmm
Interesting Statistics If you consider that there have been an average of 160,000 troops in the Iraq theater of perations during the last 22 months, that gives a firearm death rate of 60 per 100,000. The rate in Washington D.C. is 80.6 per 100,000. That means that you are 25% more likely to be shot and killed in our Nation's Capitol, which has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation, than you are in Iraq. Conclusion: We should immediately pull out of Washington, D.C

Okay, there it is. Now you know. I'm fairly ambivalent on the whole Iraq thing; there were reasons to go in that had nothing to do with the WMD, but the Prez did a really bad job of convincing me that it had anything to do with 9/11, which was after all the whole sales pitch. But I don't buy the "war for oil" argument, either, since I'm still paying scalper's prices to fill up the Canyonero. But in any case, whether one is in favor or opposed to the American presence in Iraq, cooking the books to sell you case is just stupid. Sure, some gullible twits might believe you, but others won't, and you are a lot more likely to turn off your supporters than to win converts to your cause. So don't do it. And don't believe everything you read. Even if Aunt Agatha forwarded it to you.

That was actually the only smart e-mail I got lately. Here's one that's more typical:

I would like more information about your Partridge Family cover band. In reviewing the website it seems the band hasn't been active since 2002? Please let me know if the band is still working and if any plans are being made to bring the show to New York.

Thanks,
Ed

Ed is of course referring to Get Happy, our fictional Partridge Family tribute band. The page with the lengthy disclaimer at the bottom explaining that it's fake. Well, if you can't be bothered to read the fine print, you're fair game in my book. Louie responds:

Ed,

I haven't heard from Gordie (the founder of the band) in a while, so when I go your e-mail, I called him to ask the current status of Get Happy. Here's what he told me:

"The band is inactive at the moment. I'm working part-time in the bass department at Guitar Center and taking some classes at the community college. Larry (Keith) is working for a telemarketing company and doesn't have time to perform anymore. Tiffany (Laurie) and I went out for a while, but she left me for a guy who sings in a Whitesnake tribute band, and last I heard she was pregnant. Jeff (Chris) dropped out of high school this year. I sometime see him hanging out in front of the skate shop with the other stoners. Brittany (Tracy) is 15 now, but I don't know what she's doing or if she's in a band at all. The last time I saw her she was a total goth. Cindy (Shirley) met a guy in a chatroom and moved to Michigan to live with him."

Gordie said that he still drives the Get Happy minivan, and spends most of his free time writing new Partridge family songs to be ready for the day when he'll be able to recreate his band. I wish him well.

Thanks for your enquiry.

Louie

Surely that was silly enough to tip the guy off, right? Nope.

Louie,
Thanks for the info. Should anything like this be happening such as a Monkees tribute band, Beatles, Wings, Osmonds, please let me know.

Regards,
Ed

I almost feel guilty for that. Almost. Anyway, moving on... Here's somebody who read my page about Real Superheroes:

Hi - I have been trying to find a picture of Captain Sticky online - a vague memory of the '70s and '80s... Do you happen to have one you could email me?

Thanks!

Gary

So I spent about half a minute at Google and then wrote back:

Gary,

I don't have any pictures of him, but I know how to find them... This is why God gave us Google.

Here's a picture of Captain Sticky with Stan Lee: http://www.newsfromme.com/archives/2005_01_29.html

MacQ.

I should have expected to get something like this next one. We have this page called "The Center For Vanished Celebrities," based on one of those "Have You Seen Me?" pages that show photos of lost kids. Ours shows has-been celebs who have dropped off the public radar. The last one on the list is Michael Jackson, with the explanation that he has obviously been replaced by a seriously disturbed lookalike. Naturally, what with Michael's recent publicity stunt, we should have seen this coming. Somebody took exception to the remarks, and brought their prodigious vocabulary and language skills to bear on us:

To: <missing@monkeyspit.net>

i think yo are been knob heads to michael you should grow up and leave him alone you nasty little cocked dumbness

Well. I don't know about you, but I'm certainly not one to take a thing like that without replying....

Dear {Name deleted}

Thank you for your charming and eloquent note. Your mother must be proud of your dignity and class, not to mention your social and literary skills. A person with your communication skills is well qualified for a career in either the housekeeping or food-service industries. Your razor-wit has reduced all of us to tears. (Our eyes water when we laugh at people.)

I understand your displeasure with our satirical remarks about Mr. Jackson, given the recent publicity his legal adventures have garnered in the press, but in this case your anger is misdirected. The page that engendered your ire was posted on our site on July 29, 2002, long before his latest misadventures began. If we were in fact the vindictive and petty sadists you suggest we are, we would surely have updated the page at some point, supplementing it with all sorts of salacious details about his dubious personal proclivities. We didn’t, because we really don’t give a wet slap about the pathetic hermaphrodite; we just saw an opportunity to make a joke and went for it.

If you didn’t like that one, you probably didn’t much care for this one either: http://www.monkeyspit.net/4thwall/020304.php

Yes, he was acquitted. So were Robert Blake, O.J. Simpson, Errol Flynn, Fatty Arbuckle, and dozens of other celebrity-defendants. “Acquitted in a court of law” only means that the prosecutor couldn’t prove it, not that he didn’t do it. Everybody knows that Michael Jackson is a child-raping freak, and your vulgar abuse won’t do anything to change that fact. If our page offended you, then you should probably consider why you feel the need to defend such a slimy creep. Perhaps you should talk to a qualified mental-health professional about that topic, certainly long before you have any children of your own, lest you pack them off to Neverland to their eternal regret.

Thank you for writing.

Best,
Jim MacQ.
Monkey Spit!
http://www.monkeyspit.net

And finally, to end on a positive note, there was this. I got about three or four copies of a solicitation for a website selling stuff. It happened to be stuff that I like, so I went to the site and checked it out. Then I went digging for the "contact us" section and sent this note:

You have great products, and I would happily buy them, except for one thing....

I just received two e-mail solicitations from your company at addreses that are only used on our website, never for business correspondence. This means, whether you intended it or not, you have become spammers. You are mailing unsolicited ads to unverified addresses.

I never do business with spammers. Ever.

Please remove all addresses at the monkeyspit.net and monkeyspit.com domains from your mailing list immediately. We do not wish to receive any further solicitations from your company.

Thank you.

A little bit later, I got a reply:

James,

First, I apologize for the emails.

In an attempt to market our website, we have used a third party to send out emails. In the contract, they have guaranteed us that each and every address has agreed to receive email solicitations. I am not sure how your addresses were included in this list if someone did not request them to be added.

Please send me the addresses so I can take this up with our 3rd party company. Not only is it a violation of our contract, but it is also extremely embarrassing to Shackman.

Once again, I offer my personal apologies. Please let me know if there is anything I can do for you in the future.

Regards,

{name deleted}
B. Shackman Company

Now, that impressed me. Here's a guy stepping up and taking responsibility for the actions of his company. Good on him. So I wrote him back:

I have since deleted the e-mails, but I believe the two addresses in question were "missing@monkeyspit.net" and "misterfrosty@monkeyspit.net".

Explanation: My e-mail server is set up to catch any and all random mail sent to any nonexistent address at my domain and redirect it to me. I take advantage of this fact by occasionally using fictitious addresses on some of my satirical pages. Since these addresses are only used in reference to the page on which they appear, any correspondence sent to them referencing anything other than the content of the page on which they appear is virtually guaranteed to be spam.

Your ad company clearly acquired a list (or generated one) of addresses that appear on websites and made no effort to verify them.

Thank you for taking the time to address this issue. I will have to take a second look at your catalog; my wife loves vintage paper goods.

Since the V.P. at Shackman was a straight-shooter, I'll go ahead and promote his site a little. If you like vintage art and paper goods, check out The Shackman Store. They have some really great stuff, and a pretty responsible management.

Tell 'em I sent you.

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