Once when I was kid, my family went swimming on a beautiful sandy beach with clear water on the Wisconsin River. From out of nowhere, nasty flies called sand flies zipped in, giving us sharp, painful bites, then zipping away.

No doubt the sand flies had their reason, but to us they seemed like malicious creatures which came to a beautiful place and irritated people just because they could.

The Mudcat is afflicted with quite a few people, mostly men, whom I think of as The Sand Flies. This thread has a lot of Sand Flies right now. They don't care about music, they don't want to help anybody, they just want to vent anger or display their supposed superiority.

Examples:

A catter writes about being attacked on the way to a folk club. She asks for sympathy and advice. Somehow the thread gets turned into another diatribe about Margaret Thatcher.

A catter writes about playing guitar on a remote island. Almost immediately somebody is posting about Shell Oil.

A catter posts a link to a YouTube of himself playing music. It will either be ignored or will start a round of adolescent hazing behavior.

The Mudcat used to be a place to get new tunes to play. But now I have several interesting new tunes I could share, that I got from a book from 1814. Chances are overwhelming that nobody will respond in any way. And there's no guarantee that they will be harvested for the DT.   Why should I bother?