Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:/The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

–An Essay on Man

Later, peace, and all other such civilities.

Sure. And in that spirit:

Not hate, but glory, made these chiefs contend/And each brave foe was in his soul a friend.

-Pope

Thanks for the input, nevertheless. Wasn’t trying to convince you.

Just the editors.

Berry

P.S. Could we still be friends, and maybe, er, I could buy you a virtual beer or something? We could pour some out for Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. Your call.

I’m not uptight. I just didn’t think the post was funny. Rap Geek humor *can* be. Herbert Kornfeld was funny. Larry Bud Melman being in RUN-DMC videos was funny. This wasn’t. Sorry.

Sheesh.

Can’t we all just get along?

Now, please exit toward the Uptight Door that opens into Pseudo-Intellectual Hall.

Meet me by the flag pole for a dance off!

Berry

The poorly executed ‘rap’ dialect is corny. Bronx slang from twenty years ago combined with west coast cholo culture from fifteen years ago combined with agrammatical idiocy (“I be slingin’ some”) that has never existed anywhere except perhaps the minds of white mockers-of-rap.

Lesson number one on satire, even gentle satire: you need to know something about the object of your goofing. Try again, please.

What is the new deadline time? Are is it not yet set?

A few weeks after we began the Fantasy Friday contests, we realized that our original deadline of 4pm EST was excluding our West Coast readers from participating throughout their full day, so we began specifying instead a 5pm PST deadline in each week’s post. This week, we made a double goof: first, we only said “at the end of the day” and neglected to specify the hour; then, it was my turn to declare the contest closed, and I was late doing so — and felt it would therefore be unfair to exclude anyone who entered before a winner was named.

Worse, we foolishly never realized, until you just drew our attention to it, that the original 4pm time has continued to be referenced in the page’s permanent sidebar, even at the same time that we’ve been giving the 5pm PST deadline in the weekly posts for a couple months now.

We’re going to leave the sidebar as is for a day or two, so anyone who reads this exchange understands what we’re talking about — and then before next week’s contests, we’ll update it to correspond to the correct deadline.

Again, my apologies to any who may have been confused or confounded by my twofold error.

Very interesting that you’d toss your rules out/or change them after starting the game.

Perhaps you should do away with them all together so you don’t have to bend them.

My students always want me to change the deadline after they’re off and running but I never do. Deadlines need to be observed, even in the writing world (virtual or otherwise).

We’re going to have to give top props to Barry and his GangstaFic movement, for the simple reason that we really want to see what it looks like when the remix generation takes over — replacing live readings with the likes of, say, MC Dr. O spinning a 12-inch vinyl of Atlas Shrugged through an effortless segue into a digital sample of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.

Drop us a line at primebooks@gmail.com, Barry, to claim your prize.