I suppose I'm known for my occasional rants against the idiotic subjects many Mudcatter choose to post about. The alignment of the moon and stars is not quite right for me to make another rant, so I won't. I don't really mind anything that gets posted here at Mudcat - as long as it's posted in moderation. Birthday threads and healing threads and prayer threads bug me mostly because they're always the same thing, multiplied exponentially. There's nothing essentially wrong with them, but the quantity gets mind-boggling. Even the World Trade Center discussion has reached the point of saturation.

So, where do we go? Which direction do we take things to try to keep some semblance of sanity? How do we keep ourselves from smothering in our own Spam?

I think we have a problem with people who have a compulsion to create threads. I don't have solid statistics, but I'll betcha that a very small number of Mudcatters create a very large number of threads - and many are on topics that already have existing threads. If one thread draws a number of posts, then some idiot has to start a copycat thread that draws repeats of the posts from the first thread. Soon, our cleverness seems to start fading into babble.

I noticed a sad message from somebody who claimed to have been insulted by the way some Mudcatters had reacted to him, and he seemed to be saying that he was leaving us. Maybe it's not so bad he's leaving. I checked his posting record - and he had never once posted to a music thread, and yet he started seven threads on the World Trade Center in a two-day period.

Generally, I think that if you create more than a couple of threads a week, you may have a problem. Obsessive-compulsive disorder, or narcissism, or something Freudian. Next time you start a thread, ask yourself if your starting of the thread is going to make thousands of people think you have a really kinky sexual disorder. If you stop to think about that for just a moment each time you start a thread, maybe that would balance out our thread-creation process a bit. Hey, maybe we could have a little window that pops up the third time in a week a person starts a thread, and require them to pass the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory before allowing thread creation.... (that test really bugged me - why did it keep asking me about my bowel movements?)

But, anyhow, since I wasn't going to rant, what I meant to say is that I've found some very satisfying music threads amidst the much this week - Even if you have nothing to contribute, take a look at some of them. In fact, if you have nothing to contribute to a music thread, please resist the temptation to post.

-Joe Offer-