for 1 May 2000. Updated every WEEKDAY.
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Where Is Thy Sting? Hi. I run www.superiorcommercial.com (pardon the dust; we're redesigning our homepage) which caters to architects and interior designers. Mind if I hyperlink to suck.com? It only means more hits for you. Rhett Waldman <rhwaldman@msn.com> Sure. We'll fit right in with the links to "Altro slip-resistant flooring" and "Allstate rubber base and stairtreads." I couldn't help feeling this was a cheap scheme to get your URL mentioned on our letters page, but to tie this back in to today's essay about Easter — can you design me a bunny on a crucifix? Destiny  Subject: Claymation Jesus Yo Destiny! Read your little article about the commercialization of Easter, and you didn't even bother to mention the claymation special ABC had about the life, death, and life of Jesus on Sunday. God, it was cheesy. I caught the part where he was up on the cross, and I just started whistling "Always look on the bright side of life!" It was pretty funny. Love, Long <long_hard_2huj@yahoo.com> Yo, Long Hard 2huj @ Yahoo . com! And congratulations! Yours is the first email we've ever received containing the subject line "Claymation Jesus." When I was a kid, we were stuck with innocuous Claymation-type productions like "Here Comes Peter Cotton-Tail." Vincent Price played the egg-delivering bunny's arch-nemesis — Iron-Tail — and if I remember correctly, Peter saved the day by traveling back in time and dumping all his black eggs as Halloween souvenirs. So exploitative Easter specials have really come a long way. (If ABC's Sunday special was as tacky as you say, why didn't they just air Monty Python's "Life of Brian" instead of unconsciously reminding viewers of it?) Oh well, render unto Nielsen the things which are Nielsen's. ABC's broadcast of "The Ten Commandments" dominated the Sunday prime time schedule earlier this month, handily beating both the Lakers vs. the Timber Wolves on NBC and "Malcolm in the Middle." Maybe there is a market for religious programming after all. I hear they've already released old episodes of "Davy and Goliath" on DVD... Destiny Destiny, I was raised in the exubriant light of sarcasm. For many years now I have been trying to escape it's grasp, without luck. Miss sarcasm? Most assuredly, but I believe without it a significant portion of my waking hours could be used for good wholesome purposes. Like ... As you can see I'm still thinking about that. But do you think in general, sarcasm as a way of life is going to give way to another social philosophy? Where would we be then with nothing but sarcastics views and criticisms to flail about at all who will listen. Getting berated and snuffed for our lack of societal couth? I will undoubtedly hang on to the old ways surrounding myself with throwbacks who understand. All this means nothing, but it was worth saying. <spoonhead7@aol.com> Where cutting-edge social philosophies are concerned, sarcasm is so 1987. As the internet outmoded conventional forms of humor, sarcasm was replaced by "New Irony" - a first-person view of reality that responded with the exact opposite of the intended meaning. It's sort of like rain on your wedding day. Except not really.... After the advent of the web — the graphical portion of the internet — it was in turn replaced in the mid 90s by "Way New Irony." This is where you say exactly what you mean, but you do it in a funny Bill Murray voice, so you can deny that you're serious if anybody gives you any flack about it. Rendering your world in increasingly subtle shades of detachment, Destiny Subject: You Sir, are a HACK! You are a hack, sir! A hack, a hack I say. A journalistic hack. Hack hack hack hack. And no, I do not mean that in any way that has anything to do with breaking into computers. Having finished reading your screed on suck.com, I found myself attitter at the engulfing amorphism of it all. Have you not one iota of bistillary? Are you unashamed of your blatant canards? I have also read your AOL watch, and I am not quite even sure where to begin. Are you renumerated for your tired hurrahs and groaning syllogisms? I should hope not. Give us a lift. Mug Bandit <mug_bandit@yahoo.com> C'mon, Mat. Quit using big non-words and trying to confuse me. Renumerated? Meaning, renumbered? Now that you're humor editor at OneDemocracy.com, you've apparently got a lot of time on your hands. Are you taking a break from writing Elián jokes? Seriously, it's good to see you're continuing the ongoing performance art-style parodies of the net flotsam who send angry letters to the editor using freebie Yahoo accounts. My favorite one was the e-mail you sent GettingIt.com pretending to be an outraged Irishman, complaining about their review of NBC's "The Magical Legend of the Leprechauns." "What, just because we're not as p fuckin c to care about as African Americans, native Americans and Jewish Americans doesn't mean Irish Americans didn't come here to escape our own little genocide..." But most of all, I loved the stories about how you sent digital photographs of your co-worker's stolen mug with taunting e-mail signed "The Mug Bandit." Good to see you've resurrected the persona! I haven't seen "The Mug Bandit" since we worked on that practical jokes column for GettingIt.com — " Digital Cameras for Assholes." Anyway, this pseudonym-assault is probably fitting retribution for Suck's unmasking of your role in Mother Jones' April Fools hoax. Long live the Mug Bandit! Destiny Dear Destiny, ". . . in the end, using the Web is its own act of faith. Users silently cast words into a void, believing that they'll be heard and answered." If the communion wafers at my childhood Catholic church had been half as tasty as the daily bread doled out at Our Lady of the Sacred Suck, I might still be a believer. Excellent essay — but when will you be issuing the mea culpa? Thank you for being my favorite father confessor and most vicious virgin mother. My only question: T. Jay Fowler — Man or Messiah? Oh T. Jay, when will you come? Matthew Gearhart <gearhart@mail.utexas.edu> Mea Culpa? Er, I'm a protestant. All these funny Latin words freak me out.... But ironically, someone called me a "vicious virgin mother" just last night when I cut them off in traffic. Thanks for the mail, Matthew! I'm pretty sure T. Jay is just a man — though I've never seen him, and have been told that he works in mysterious ways. Anyways, the local paper ran an interesting quote a few weeks ago. Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow once told The New Republic that "it seems clear we are about some Great Work here — the physical wiring of collective human consciousness." Every time you read a web page, you're already part of a vast ocean of humanity and creativity — but Barlow also seems to be agreeing with the spiritual implications of your internet experience. To paraphrase Walt Whitman, "In the web pages of men and women, we'll see God." Destiny Whenever I read suck I am blown away by the number and quality of hyperlinks from the stories to various subjects. How do you do it? Do you just sit for hours in front of altavista or do you have some system for tapping into those pages that most reflect the zeitgeist at any one time? I do tedious commercial research and would love to make documents as rich in links and tangential information as those that you make for a gag. Tell me the sleight of hand, and I'll promise to take the secret with me to the grave. Adam Jasper <adam_jasper@altavista.com> No, no, no. Let's try it again. Whenever I read Suck I am blown away by the number and quality of hyperlinks from the stories to various subjects... Most of my inspiration comes from answering letters from readers like you, Adam Jasper! Seriously, it's that magic mixture of procrastination and e-mail that is the web-surfing experience. I guess I'm always searching for that elusive synthesis that lends meaning to baffling new phenomena of the 21st century. This never-ending mission of laughter and outrage: to dull the jabbering din of mass media pundits with something mysterious and new from beyond their reach — and to combine random web pages into something meaningful. Conjuring the talking zeitgeist from beyond the net, summoning the ghost in the machine — this is my destiny. Wasting time — yours and mine — is not just a goal. It's an obsession. Tedious research rich in links? I can see it now. "Some people say zinc oxide is boring..." Destiny Kids Are People Too Subject: "The Eliad" That is simply a brilliant way of describing this whole, sorry mess. Please patent it before some smarmy Newsweek writer like Calvin Trillin decides to co-opt it. Ever faithful, Dave Rosow <rosow@fas.harvard.edu> That Mr. Trillin does get a lot of mileage out of his wryly liberal everyman routine doesn't he? If only I knew the difference between him and Lionel Trilling I'd really be the cock of the walk! I may be the first person to come up with the term "Eliad," but that's the kind of phrase that belongs to all of us. Still, I'm kind of hoping Andy Rooney will steal it before Trillin does. Yr pal, BarTel To the Bartelissimo, Brilliant. Simply brilliant. And they still haven't asked you to appear on "Crossfire" yet across from Buchanan and Novak?!! They're just being unreasonable. As unreasonable, say, as a Cuban expatriate living in south Florida? Naa. Hell hath no fury like a licensed hair-stylist. Have you seen The Onion's "schedule" for Elian for April 21? If not, please do. Paul Miazga <paulmiazga@usa.net> p.s. I'm using my brother-in-law's computer, and if you can tear yourself away from the up-to- the-minute bulletins on CNN, I'd love to hear from you. What's most disturbing to me is that there's no V-chip to exorcise from this "epic" tale any of its over-exuberance. Now just imagine if the mother of that "Cuban boy" is posthumously named to the GOP ticket for 2000... Oh, I tried doing that pundit face-off thing, but I just came away bruised and dejected. Buchanan seemed to be coming on a little too "chummy" during our first post-show office get-together, but I thought nothing of it. Another time, I was doing my afternoon stretch when suddenly I felt a pair of hands reaching right between my thighs from behind, and Pat's voice over my shoulder calling "Hut Hut Hut!" There were other incidents — men's room gooses, lots of hugging, more double entendres than I can remember. The last straw came when I made the mistake of wearing my biking shorts into the office. Pat pointed right at my groin and in front of everybody in the office called out "Hey, somebody's smugglin' grapes around here!" I complained to Bernard Shaw, but he just gave me the grossest wink and said I needed to use all my "assets." That was it. I gave notice the next day, but I still hurt. Yr pal, BarTel Quite a story, I enjoyed it. By the way, are you a jew? <Highonamt@aol.com> I tried, but the rules are a lot more strict than I thought. Between secretly manipulating the interest rates and pretending Jackie Mason was funny, I just couldn't keep up. And the secret handshakes? I could never keep those things straight. And of course every time you screw up there's somebody telling you that's exactly what "They" want, and we're going to be wiped out after 6,000 years of survival just because of something you did, yada yada... So I became a Scientologist instead. The food's not nearly as good, but if you've got to have a Holy Land it might as well be Southern California. Yr pal, BarTel You neglected to mention that young Elian will most certainly be doing a little of his own mythologizing upon his return to Cuba. The bare facts alone will ensure him top dog position in the schoolyard hierarchy, a little embroidery will keep him there for years... Regards, John Carney <Johnc@spatialinfo.com> It's true. In junior high I knew a kid who weighed about 250 pounds at age 12 and minced and lisped in a way that, well, to be blunt, set him up for a lot of abuse from his fellow students. Then he got sent to military school (I believe his mom was trying to, you know, make a Man out of him), and he escaped! When he got back into town he was full of stories about abusive officers, hair's breadth 'scapes from the institution, run-ins with the cops and so on. For a couple weeks there, he was the school bad-ass. Yr pal, BarTel Wonderful! Brilliant! That was by far the best Elian piece I've read and without a doubt the first one to rightly blame it on the two-faced boy. I know that if I lived in Miami (sure proof that I had died and gone to hell), or had I been trying to get through the Lincoln tunnel here in NYC on Saturday (ditto), I would have been wishing that the sharks hadn't stopped with mama. I had been hoping he'd get run over by a car for the last few weeks but hopefully your predictions that the show is over will be accurate. name and email withheld Well, I certainly don't wish any harm on the boy, but when you're writing a review, you do have to point out if one of the performances doesn't quite cut the mustard. In that respect, I think the widely-despised Marisleysis isn't getting a fair shake. Obviously, she's phony as a three-dollar bill, but at least she's in there giving her all in a bravura method performance. I'll always give actors points for over-the-top effort. Yr pal, BarTel Beautiful People Bailout "Equity stake in Radish"? Too beautifully obscure, but it made me laugh out loud, being from Dallas... Andrew Hime <hime1@gte.net> The question of whether Radish was too obscure a reference actually occasioned some discussion in the Suck newsroom. Sadly, because I'd rather be dipped in liquid nitrogen than listen to bands, I wasn't really able to come up with any other band names. So I went with Radish. Luckily, as it turns out, since your letter was the only response this entire issue received. Still, Radish lingers on as incontrovertible proof that a favorable writeup in The New Yorker can not only fail to help your career, but actually destroy it. Now turn that radio down! Curmudgeon Hit & Run Thank god someone has the courage to encourage flag burning and book reading. Without brave souls like you, the flag waveing illiterates who run this country might actually turn their attention to arrested minor drug criminals like me. Ciao Ben <bschwabe@mit.edu> Good to hear from you, Ben! This is a special moment in your life, and you're spending it at one of the finest institutions of higher learning in the eastern United States. Be proud! Stay in school! Say no to drugs! Captain Flagg Aficionados of Hong Kong cinema will of course instantly recognize the fellow pictured on the "Hi Girls, Anyone Want to Chat" page as funnyman Bobby Yip (Yip King-Sang). There's plenty more of him to be had at http://welcome.to/bobby-home. Dave LaDelfa <dave@limitedsector.com> See? We recognized the prank even without an advanced degree in Hong Kong cinema! Don't underestimate our ability to smell a rat, even when it's the year of the dragon. Mr. Lee Gents: Really sad, to read such a ... tiresome SUCK column today. SUCKing on media tit would be a verbal kindness ... And I ... a fiathful reader since ... yegods '95 or was that '96 ... dispite your recent fagocentric anti-Catholic tirades ... any decent ex-catholic certainly finds THAT no fun ... but we all do get old ... Ray Hartman Spokane, WA <rayhart@uswest.net> Fagocentricity rules! It raises the bar on interior design! It raises the bar on personal hygiene! George Lincoln Warhol Nutso Letter of the Week I am beginning to discover new ideas and realities about life. One of them is that women have evolved much faster than men. So fast, that they easily control us. A man never really wins an argument with a woman that he is attracted to - unless she lets him for her own personal gain. Why have women gained so much power??? They have managed to eliminate man's only natural power, violence. So much that everyone views violence as a bad thing, and can not even associate most violent acts as being good in nature. If man ever wants to regain control, he will have to take it by force. Man will once again have to use violence to control the women. Sounds bad, right? It's not really. It's just the man's ace of spades in the game of life. Whereas the women have sex as their ace of spades. Women use sex to win arguments that they are losing, and use sex to control the men. Sometimes I wonder if women even like sex as much as they act like they do, or if it is just a big erotic secret among women to keep men under control. Not crazy but what if I was, Zack <keyszd@SLU.edu> Good to hear from you, Zack! This is a special time in your life, and you're spending it at one of St. Louis' finest institutions. Respect the cock! Speak truth to power! Hit me with your best shot! Gray Bruises |
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