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Stoopid? I know you are, but what are you?
By Gina Spadafori
January 31, 2010
Blogger and novelist John Scalzi’s “Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008
This last week, the LAFD’s daring and heroic rescue of a drowning dog triggered a lot of the hate mail. My response, outlined in this blog post, was a Facebook fan page to thank firefighter Joe St. Georges that now has more than 5,000 members. The L.A. Times poll says 98 percent agree with what the LAFD did, and firefighter St. Georges himself has been buried in appreciative cards and letters, including these abso-freakin’-lutely 
adorable ones from second-graders in Northern California, picture sent to me by their teacher, Kerry Forni, who also has flat-coated retrievers, which is how she knew where to send the shot.
All this pro-pet news really drove the haters nuts, to judge from the volume of hate we vaporized this week.
The rest of the hate I figure is a full moon thing. Love the ones that say, “All you people ever write about is pets.” Hello? Look at the top of the page. “Pet Connection.” What on earth did you expect to find here? An historical analysis of the Nazi occupation of Poland?
But here’s what has really made me guffaw — what a great word, huh? — this afternoon: There’s one regular hate-spammer who lands in our spam filter at least three-four times a day. His ho-hum refrain, coming from different e-mail addies but always the same IP address (and the same misspelled words) is this: Pets are stupid. People who love pets are stupid. People who love pets hate people. Blah blah blah blah blah.
You never see this nut-case’s comments, because they go straight into the spam filter, as I said. Every few days Christie or I glance through all the spam for porn and mail-order pharmaceuticals looking for real, on-point comments that have accidentally landed there. We liberate those, and then we hit “delete all” and zap the rest. We barely glance at what this dope writes. Frankly, his comments are worse than stupid: Stupid can be amusing, but boring never is.
And yet, he keeps on writing it, apparently never, ever noticing that no one ever sees it.
Seriously, dude, not even the stupidest pet is that stupid.
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Well, he seems to have met the minimum threshold for the definition of insanity. Kind of sad and pathetic, actually.
Comment by Susan Fox — January 31, 2010 @ 5:41 pm
*LOLOL* I think Susan hit the moron right on the head with her comment.
Comment by Social Mange — January 31, 2010 @ 5:51 pm
“Stupid can be amusing, but boring never is.”
I have got to remember this, and use it in conversation. It’s just too good not to steal!
Comment by David S. Greene — January 31, 2010 @ 7:56 pm
Imagine having to sit with those folks at holiday meals.
Comment by Mary Mary — January 31, 2010 @ 8:09 pm
I don’t know, Gina. The lab I grew up with NEVER learned- and she lived to be 17- that she could not walk through sliding glass doors the way she did screen doors (which, in case you’re not wincing yet, was the ‘head on’ approach method. She went to my grandparents ‘home in the country’ when she was about 2 when my mom was diagnosed with cancer and not up to dealing with two kids under 5 and a lab puppy on top of it, and for most of her life, we just resigned ourselves to lab-sized holes in the corner of the screen doors she had access too…..
Comment by Cait — January 31, 2010 @ 9:18 pm
That’s weird. I met Scalzi this summer at our local SF Con; didn’t know about the blog, which is pretty entertaining. He was on a couple of con panels with Perfesser Chaos.
Comment by H. Houlahan — January 31, 2010 @ 9:42 pm
Just learned a new word this morning which comes at a perfect time for this post. Ignoranus - a person who is both stupid and an asshole.
Comment by VJ — February 1, 2010 @ 5:48 am
Heather, I’ve only met John once — at Book Expo America a couple years back, where we were both there to be at our respective publishers’ booths for book-signings. He was walking through the convention hall and I almost literally bumped into him, which is amazing considering the number of people at those things.
But … he and I go way back. He was at the Fresno Bee when I was at the Sacramento Bee, and back in the day there was a primitive instant messaging network that linked the three Bees (the third being Modesto). We would sometimes IM, and he was riotously funny and thoughtful even then.
He wrote a book, I wrote a book. He wrote another, and so did I. He then left his Bee to work for AOL in Virginia, and I left mine to work for an AOL content company in Davis (the Veterinary Information Network, which at the time was a private service within AOL, space provided by Steve Case himself in exchange for VIN running the Pet Care Forum, which I ended up doing, and Christie ended up doing after me).
As for his “Whatever” blog, well, he pretty much started the whole bloggy thing, starting on AOL and then going out on his own.
I’m not a Sci-Fi reader, but I love his books. Look, any book (“The Android’s Dream”) that starts with death by fart is going to be entertaining. I hope his “Old Man’s War” series ends up as a movie someday.
Very talented fellow, for sure. And not just funny. Read this, written after Katrina in response to the criticism of people who didn’t leave New Orleans. (I heard this from my own dad, who didn’t exactly grow up rich: “Why didn’t they have the sense to get in their cars and get out of there? Now *I’m* supposed to pay to help them out?”
Uh, dad, ever driven in the gas station on payday with fumes in the tank? I know you have. Can’t you remember?)
He is also a pet-lover, who started an Interwebs sensation by taping bacon to his cat and posting the picture.
Comment by Gina Spadafori — February 1, 2010 @ 7:09 am
Since the direction of my animal blog has taken a new direction I don’t get so many.
But my other blogs can be a different matter and I recently began just blocking any nasty sorts from accessing my domain completely after abusive and vulgar comments.
You can do it via the ISP.
Just got a weird hate email via the contact form.
*sigh*
I happen to live in the United States where, allegedly, freedom of speech is a given.
Plus, I really have come to the realization that when you rock people’s worlds, you are doing a great job.
It is just some scream louder than others…
LOL
Comment by Ark Lady — February 1, 2010 @ 7:44 am
A former co-worker of mine, the astonishingly gifted and brilliant Deborah Blum (now a professor at the University of Wisconsin) won a Pulitzer for reporting on the issues involved in research on primates. (The newspaper series became the book, “The Monkey Wars,” and it’s a great read, as is her new book, “The Poisoner’s Handbook.”)
When “The Monkey Wars” appeared in The Sacramento Bee, she was ripped and praised by both animal-rights activists and by primate researchers. She figured that meant she’d done a good job.
I think many writers actually LIKE their hate mail — well, not the scary stuff, and yes, the boring stuff is tedious to wade through. But if you’re pissing people off, you’re getting through to them. And maybe that leads to somewhere good. If it doesn’t, at least the hate mail proves you’re being read!
Comment by Gina Spadafori — February 1, 2010 @ 8:06 am
I have one sitting in spammer/hater purgatory right now, and every once in a while I peek in to see what he’s doing. Periodically, he’ll try to post another comment, most of which now say “let me out of here” and “hello, are you even listening to me?”.
Poor sad, lonely little hater. Maybe they should form a club.
Comment by FrogDogz — February 1, 2010 @ 8:54 am
I like the visual of a spammer/hater sitting cross-legged in a very small, reinforced cardboard box, complaining, occasionally banging on the sides, but otherwise not getting out.
Comment by David S. Greene — February 1, 2010 @ 9:39 am
Mike Royko used to write an annual column reviling tiny dogs.
He said he did it purely for the hate mail, which was even better than the hate mail he got from gun nuts — but the gun nuts edged out the tiny-dog defenders for using more different colors of crayon.
Comment by H. Houlahan — February 1, 2010 @ 10:45 am
Oh, Mike Royko. I used to read his column when I was in high school. It was the only thing I read in the paper besides the funnies (and the occasional music review).
Comment by Mary Mary — February 1, 2010 @ 10:56 am
Here’s one of my favorites:
http://tinyurl.com/y9uksn2
I am slightly biased. I flew out of Heathrow the same morning the El Al screeners found that bomb. I had no idea what was up until I landed in Cleveland to find my Mom in hysterics about it.
It’s easier to laugh when the terrorists are both incompetent and cowardly.
Comment by H. Houlahan — February 1, 2010 @ 2:26 pm
There are 5 blogs I try to check daily - Dolittler, Pet Connection, 2 mystery writers, and Whatever. How cool it was to see John Scalzi’s name at the start of this post. Great minds think alike!
Comment by KateH — February 1, 2010 @ 3:19 pm
Thank you Heather. I miss Mike Royko. He always told it like it was and never pulled any punches.
Comment by C.L.H. — February 1, 2010 @ 4:43 pm
What I most love about hate mail is the grammar and spelling accuracy.
Comment by Rochelle Lesser — February 2, 2010 @ 3:44 pm
Dude’s still doing it, too!
What a MORON. :)
Comment by Gina Spadafori — February 3, 2010 @ 11:58 am
Or, in the immortal words of Bugs Bunny,
“What a maroon!!”
:)
Comment by K.B. — February 3, 2010 @ 1:08 pm
You see, it all started in 1938, when Germany annexed the Sudentenland…whoops, sorry - wrong blog.
I think you should highlight a ‘best of’ every week; the highest low-point any hater has achieved. The simply best-worst, most illiterate, pretezel-logic piece of toxic waste that the troglodytes can think up. Then we can all take pot shots at it and make even more merciless fun of them.
This way, if even a tiny morsel of their muddled thought makes it through, they will have just a bit of tiny tiny tiny hope that some more message may eeke out, and they’ll work really hard generating more daft batshit nastniess - and maybe they will burn out. Or run out of things to say. Or die of simple exhaustion.
Comment by Dr. Tony Johnson — February 5, 2010 @ 8:12 am