Feedback to the feedback.

I learned that one of my favorite former Orion columnists had a unique way to respond to every contradictory feedback. He would send back short emails that said (and I quote here): "f*ck you."

Well, I'm more creative than that. So, here's my first response to feedback given to my Orion columns.

This is in response to my column on bad bicyclists:

Write something with some substance. If you want to rant about trivial affairs i suggest you go to www.geocities.com and get a website. No one needs to hear about the ways you will get back at those pesky bicycle riders: "I'll clothesline you with a metal rod.", "some even pedal slower, like they want me to lose my temper and leave an impression of my car's grill tattooed on their forehead.", "I believe all drivers should get to a keep a metal rod especially for these morons." If you are going to write immature pieces at least make them humorous.

Chris J

Well, Chris, I appreciate the feedback. Oddly enough, I have created several Geocities websites since 1997. I was even bold enough to press my HTML luck with Angelfire on at least three seperate occasions. I think I even went with Homestead with the website for my old band in high school. Heck, maybe you'll even find this blog, or my personal blog on a different blog site.

I'm not totally sure if this is just your first time reading my column, or if you've been a loyal "reader o' Robert" since Week 1, since that was only the second time I didn't write something with a political bent to it. The first one was Week 2, when I talked about mosquito bites. If you run a search of my name at the Orion's website, you can find all the articles I've written thus far in the semester and a half I've worked there (25 at last count).

Something else I found quite interesting: you say no one needs to hear about it, yet you read it. Not only did you read, it hit enough of a nerve with you to compel you to type out that message with several grammatical errors to me and quote three of my one-liners, including not the first one, but the last seven words of the column! Evidentially what I'm writing is grabbing readers' attention. That's what columnists are supposed to do. So, since it's evidentially working, I may just have to write about stuff like this a little bit more.

And I was chuckling quite a bit while I was reading it. That's all that mattered to me. Whether you laughed or not was arbitrary.

Heart U Chris, and keep reading! Otherwise, I'll clothesline you with a metal rod.

-RL

P.S. Nice cheap advertising for Geocities. I'm sure Yahoo! will have your check in the mail right away. Also, let them know that they need to let people copy and paste text from a Word Document into PageBuilder, and that the click-off ads don't play nice with Firefox.