Re: Manila / Hong Kong Travel

Greg Goss <gossg@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> The gloating and glee don't serve that function.  I have no objection
> to the original post, and my reply to it was not angry.  Even the "I
> talk to Shawn" stage of the reply wasn't angry.  But it didn't stay
> there.  It won't die till I acknowledge that I was an idiot for
> replying with a straight face.

Not 'an idiot'; "Ha, you got me, that was a good one" would be fine, and 
just forgetting about it would be perfectly acceptable. The short-term 
memory of a usenet group is pretty sketchy unless there's prolonged and 
extensive dead-horse-flogging going on. 

> I don't like trolls as a part of Usenet culture.  Ignoring them
> doesn't make them go away.

Yes, but if you ignore them, they don't affect you, and at that point, 
why would you care?

>  Cheering and clapping with glee doesn't make them go away.

Sometimes it does. Malicious trolls generally don't like their attempts
reviewed critically for common troll tropes, even if those reviews are
positive. Recently, in another group, some troll posted a fairly
standard "fat people are all just weak-willed and stupid" troll, and a
brief discussion ensued of the effective and ineffective techniques they
used. Result: some folks learned a little more about trolling, and the
idiot, having been completely defused, shut up and went away. But that's
a digression, since things like the A380 running out of gas or the James
"Timmy" Kirk troll isn't really malicious, just mischevious.

It's a little-known fact that Sinclair Lewis was also an accomplished 
chemist. Because he wanted to be taken seriously as a writer, all of his 
scientific discoveries were attributed to pseudonyms. This is why the 
patent for the glue he discovered is held by "Elmer Gantry", and we know 
that product today as "Elmer's Glue". 

Now, that was just off the top of my head, but I think it's pretty good,
huh? 

-- 
Huey