The Earl of Oxford is NOT Shakespeare, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a lying, stinking, hairy harridan and/or beast who should burn in fiery...

So...I came across this cartoon:
..and it got me wondering how many late nights I spent in flame wars in comment boxes. Seriously, I could have written another JP2HS book, or actually learned how to play Scott Joplin, in the time I spent feverishly pecking out a reply to someone's faulty logic, false statements, or fantastical crap. (The image is from here, by the way - kudos).

The funny thing with the internet is frankly, you'll never run out of morons. (Stop smirking, you.) If you take the number of human beings with access to a CPU, multiply it by the lowering of educational standards, divide it by the amount of offices whose firewalls don't block blogger.com, and add to it (five times) the amount of people who won't let go of an idiotic and patently false idea..wait. I got lost there. Well...in any case, there's a lot of codswollop out there - not even including politics. Let me think of a few:

• Saying the F word is a valid retort.
• American Spirit cigarettes are healthier.
• The Harry Potter books are from hell.
• Making laws against guns will stop crooks from getting them.
• There has ever been any such thing as a Just War.
• The media (any media) is capable of being impartial.
• high self-esteem will make you a better, kinder person.
• Swine flu will kill you.
• Killing is always wrong.
• Comic books have the potential of being great literature.
• It was a good idea to ret-con Spider Man's marriage.
• Mayonaisse is a good "default" condiment for a Whopper.

...And that's just off the top of my head, at 12:30 at night! And even as I typed them out, I had to bang my head against the desk a few times to stop myself from inserting rebuttals!

Now, if you imagine what other views are held (quite fervently) by people out there, and your head will literally start spinning at the potential for human folly.

Most of us just ignore these things. I do, too. But if you are (like me) a rather stubborn, opinionated person, there comes a point, every now and then, that you have to put your foot down and just say NO!

...And that's when you spend two hours NOT snuggling with your fiance, but instead composing an eloquent reply in a comment box that no one asked you for and nearly no one will read, and you oversleep the next day and get reamed by your boss, and you never convince the other person anyway because you were so filled with self-righteous piss'n'viniger that your opponent is more interested in pursuing Option A on the list above than in actually listening to your points.

At that point, you need to get a blog.