Where's Elvis?
Giambattista said:
And here you go again, complaining about my alleged "ego stardom"! Seems I'm more popular than even I know.
At least three backroom issues?
Please unleash a minor torrent of hints.
Well, here I'm pushed up against confidentiality boundaries and also trying to formulate clues that don't read like a tacit indictment.
But there was your suspension.
Right after you got back, of course, was the test-marketing discussion, which resulted in one of my colleagues trying to chastise me over a bizarre interpretation of the discussion contrasted against the fact of your return.
And then a colleague raises the avatar issue, which essentially had everyone scratching their heads. Some of my fellows felt your intention with the avatar was a deliberate attempt to troll, goad, and inflame. The
it's-your-right-to-make-yourself-look-like-a-racist-idiot counterpoint, however, is longstanding and the nearest thing to a practical standard we have on the subject.
Suddenly, there is a public thread, and you are (understandably, under the circumstances) cautious about giving up your leak source.
I don't know specifically what you asked James; I don't know specifically how he responded. But at some point, you had your confirmation that the question had arisen. And we now have the public thread.
Indeed, if you check
Trippy's response to S.A.M. earlier in this thread—to which
you took exception—I would suggest part of his outlook that you disagree with is based in the back-room process I'm describing.
But, as you noted in
#29:
"I wasn't being terribly serious, and I don't care all that much ....
.... I was just mentioning it sarcastically, not crying, like Trippy seems to think."
Part of Trippy's perception was based on the fact that someone took you very seriously in the back room, and immediately on the heels of that strange episode we get the back-room question about your avatar, and then someone leaks to you the fact that such a thread exists, and we end up with the public discussion.
The only thing that tells us this thread wasn't an intended outcome for some arcane purpose is that
nothing about it would make sense in that sort of deliberate context. That is, the guiding hands would need to have left the building—and the galaxy—some time ago.
It's just a strange sequence of events. Thus:
Seriously, I'd like to know as well.
Well, yeah. It's just ...
strange. Even compared to the usual strangeness around here.
One or two pages of honest, if not angrily divisive, political grievances, then equals twice as many pages of something or other like this "Avatar" thread.
It's enjoyable, I think. But I's soo queer like that.
And as long as we're on the subject, have you idea where the word "queermo" comes from? I mean, I get it, and how it's used, and all that, but whence comes it? A lot of the really stupid words my generation knows (e.g., dillhole) have obscure etymologies that I can actually comprehend, but I have no idea what the "mo" is in "queermo".
But ...
If you could explain this "pretense of importance"... ballet is enjoyable as well.
... all I mean is to look at us. We're just "shooting the shit", maybe even folding our colored bandanas for our back pockets at this point. I don't know. But the underlying discussion of offensive avatars is long dead, and has been even before the administrative interest in this thread was known to us.
But I throw a silly line at you—something about whores and patsies—and you ask the obvious question with that hint of self-righteous melodrama, and I give a flippant wave of the hand:
Don't worry about it.
And then we're off, meandering through a boneyard that doesn't even equal a skeleton of a conspiracy theory, and having a
gay old fine time about it.
But stick in some moronic carny in North Carolina and his "shoot the alien president" game, or whatever the hell it was when you went all
douchey LaRouchey on us ....
That's what I mean by a pretense of importance. If we're eyeball to eyeball about something symbolic—the price of gas, the Libyan adventure, or whatever—we could probably still be just as flippant and relaxed in how we address each other, but we would perceive each other much more gravely.
Is this that sense of self-importance I mentioned above? This invention of yours that you have many times recently ascribed to me and my motivations?
Actually, no. That's a manner and tone about your argumentative method. We all do it to some degree. Like any generally human trait, it's just more or less pronounced in people according to diversity. Compared to some people, you're a minor diva. Compared to others, not so much. When I raise the point with people, there are various reasons why. People's sense of self-importance is one of the major distractions around here.
