by David Bloomberg
I recently picked up “Weird Al” Yankovic’s latest album, Running With Scissors. Yeah, I’m a little behind. Actually, I hadn’t gotten Bad Hair Day either until now, either. The problem is that I’m old, don’t pay attention to today’s music, and thought that I wouldn’t “get” the parodies. But then I saw Al on a couple VH1 specials and went to see him live, and I remembered: You don’t have to know the originals! Sure, in some cases, it’s funnier (for example, some of his older songs like “This Song’s Just Six Words Long” and “Achy Breaky Song”), but “Amish Paradise” and “Pretty Fly for a Rabbi” are still hysterical, even though I’ve never heard the originals at all. Also, of course, his own originals obviously don’t depend on anything else.
OK, by now you’re asking yourself what the hell this has to do with Teemings. Well, I’ve forgotten. No, wait, now I remember.
One of the songs on Running with Scissors is “It’s All About the Pentiums.” If you haven’t heard it, you don’t know what you’re missing. If you have, it’s pretty obvious that Al spends some time on the net. Considering that in one VH1 special, he called himself the king of the geeks, this shouldn’t be terribly surprising. But some of the lines in this song really make it clear. In particular, it’s pretty clear that he has spent time on message boards or newsgroups. He says things like, “I never feed trolls and I don’t read spam,” for example. Where else do you hear about feeding trolls except in a message board or newsgroup environment? The SDMB has certainly had its fair share of trolls (the king of trolls is still he-who-shall-not-be-named), and SDStaff Ed and I even wrote a Mailbag Article (now called Staff Reports) on just what a troll really is.
On the message board, trolls can get in the way of a good discussion. This is why Al says he doesn’t “feed” them. Indeed, if you ever see “DNFTT” in a message, that means “Do Not Feed The Troll” and is a sign that whoever posted it is calling out somebody else as a troll and suggesting that others not respond. Generally, such DNFTT messages end up getting ignored while the troll gets fed. Ah well.
But here at Teemings, we don’t have to worry about trolls. The editors make sure that any trolls who show up are starved and left for dead. Indeed, last issue we rejected an article that might have been considered a trollish post had it been left on the message board. In response, the author got very annoyed and started a BBQ Pit thread about it on the SDMB. Alas, he acted like a troll there as well.
We try to be fairly loose about what we accept, but we always keep in mind that this ‘zine is for fans of the Straight Dope, and the Straight Dope is all about fighting ignorance. We won’t publish articles that make claims the author cannot back up. It’s just that simple.
So we’ve come quite a distance in just a few paragraphs, from Weird Al to trolls to fighting ignorance. Let me go back to Al to wrap up, from “Your Horoscope for Today,” on the same album:
“Try to avoid any Virgos or Leos with the Ebola virus.”