Exactly, Little Hawk. No one can be a virtual bully unless you allow them to. Why would you?

I can only imagine that what Martin finds funny in his bit is how easy it is to mess with people--he seems to make a point never to try hard, never to be very sharp or interesting, in his routine. There are other posts when he is maybe just himself, has opinions, says things, but that's a different line.

I once had to review a couple of books of short-stories that were so awful I had trouble imagining they were written in any kind of earnest. It was a personal crisis in a weird way. I had to review them, I'd said I would, so I couldn't do the easy thing and ignore them. But as I dutifully plowed through them I began to imagine they were artfully contrived to be really terrible--they had to be. And I didn't know what to think of them, quite. Bad stuff can be as interesting as good stuff, in it's way. It's all the stuff in between that dulls our senses, makes us dull.
   
   So, sincerely. Other mudcatters who piss me off are the ones who offer parroty-mediocre "observations" and never risk pissing anyone off by saying what they really think they think. Even those who we disagree with, violently, mean more to us than that. A bigot is better than a stealth-bigot, for example, I think. If your views make you sound wrong, it's still right to try to say them properly.

The problem with the Favourites thread is that it's hard to answer--you forget who all said what or whose name is which. I forgot Peg and McGrath and Bobert--although I have trouble with Bobert because I get drawn into his style but then can't do it, myself, I can't even bring myself to order a po'boy sandwich at the Hoka in Oxford MS so I have to order something other than what I really want--and John in Kansas who probably doesn't reciprocate it and others who I can't mention now because they've said nice things to me and so it's too late to bring it up.

This thread has gone a long ways without many real answers to the question, which is really a fair question to ask, I think, among grown-ups.