Brave New World

By "Bob's" beard, I thought the previous year was a hard one.  This six months has seen an astounding amount of activity and strangeness.  Around here at Hellblazer.com, we have a saying: "More Surreality".  Careful what you wish for I guess.

So we're getting to the feedback a bit early this time.  We had piled up enough bugs on the windshield that we decided that it was time to take the metaphorical car through the wash and clean things out of the site's black hole.

Susan was the first to wander to close to the event horizon and posed the invitation: "Hi, Where are you during the day? Let's have lunch sometime soon."  We naturally performed the necessary rituals and made the appropriate invocations and we're pleased to say that lunch was indeed had.

Alex Arcury was next to fall victim to our fiendish plot and posed the interesting question: "Did you really had intercourse with a monkey - the one owned by that old witch Queenie, the mother of Chas ??? Please comment on it...i am dead curious to know more about it... Thanks, Johnny"

John, himself, replied with:

"With respect to my sexual habits, yes.  After what's her face, the succubus, I could have sex with a parakeet and I wouldn't have noticed (although the parakeet would).

Not proud of it, but what the hell."

Our friend Matt Magus returned with another kind comment: "I wanted to drop you a line to thank you for cataloguing certain pages on Alexa. Because my ex-girlfriend and html programmer (the one we call Jen) has changed the html so many times, I don't have all the old images. It's also kind of like a little trip down memory lane for me. Also I'd like to say that you are too good as (a) writer (s) to lie dormant. Awaken and give us all something to smile about."

John again replied with:

"<heh>  Although we'd absolutely love to take credit for archiving your past, we cannot do so.  The credit is yours.  We're not associated with Alexa....  Your pages are archived for posterity due to their popularity.  Enough people liked them to come to Alexa's attention, and the rest - as they say - is history.

We're still writing.  A lot of half finished pages are lying around waiting for some more inspiration and time.  Also, most of us are geek programmers, and constantly writing in another sort of language.

As to inspiration, it's been lagging a bit.  Melancholy mood swings are our trademark, and it's been sometimes hard to finish the work that we've started.  <sigh>  Discipline, discipline, discipline.

Know of any Muses that are looking for work?  We could use one.

Anyways, thanks for your kind words, and keep up the good work yourself. You're one of our sources of our inspiration to keep plugging away at it and a standard to which we like to keep comparing ourselves to.  This is a weird hobby to have, and thank "Bob" others are so afflicted so that we don't feel like we're the only ones who have this disease."

We received a nice letter from the Rick of the Ha-Ra club in San Francisco: "Hi, I just stumbled upon your article about the Ha-Ra. And after reading it I just wanted to say how honored and flattered I am that you took the time to write the piece about the place. My dad Ralph opened the bar in 1947. He met my Mom in there in the fifties. I grew up in the bar and was adopted by many of the customers growing up. The smell of soda guns and cigarette smoke was my first impression of the bar. When I was nineteen when I started tending bar at the Ha-Ra. I've been there 18 years now. I have spent a lot of highs and lows of my life in that bar. The bar and the customers have always been like a security blanket for me. So I can totally relate to your view of the club, and wanted to say thanks for the kind words."

Finally, "entivore" dropped by to also praise the site: "Extremely cool site, though I don't know why you are so hard on the libertarians. This site rocks, though, just look at all those cool symbols and colors man!"

We replied with:

"Many thanks. I guess we're hard on libertarians because most of us used to be libertarian. Kinda like being an ex smoker. Ex smoker's have such bad reactions to smokers because they have already been there and done that... (doesn't give them any higher moral ground, just a bad reaction)

We don't hate 'em, we just think they have a higher burden of proof. :)

After all, all rights are made by humans, and all rights imply a group - i.e. if you're the only person on earth, why do you need rights. They are intrinsic to groups.

But we won't bore you after being so nice to us.

We hope you had a good time on the site, and hope everything is wonderful on your side of reality..."
 

Again, we thank you all for the comments, both good and bad.  We'll be posting them as we see 'em, so keep them coming.

Cheers

February 20, 2002