Posted 1:48 PM by Angie Schultz

Nurse, Order Up Another Gross of Butterfly Nets

Ye gods and little fishes. What's with all the public nuttiness these days. Is it the heat? Whatever it is, I blame Bush.

First, Chris Matthews (who is he again?) gibbers and drools in a manner I haven't seen since the days of my youth, when crazy old neighbors would rant about how the Commies put fluoride in the water to prevent the Birchers from discovering that aliens had ordered the Kennedy assassination. I'm still not quite clear on why Imus was OK with it all until Matthews started in on Joe Lieberman. Then, suddenly, he was embarrassed.

Secondly, I was going to post an oh-so-amusing little morsel about the Gordian Sock Puppet knot that Seixon stumbled over (Allah admitted that he couldn't keep the players straight all the way to the end, and I was going to post a fun little logic puzzle to help everyone out), but then Seixon started getting death threats and creepy email (allegedly!) from ex-CIA moonbats.

Said moonbat has a history of nasty emails to people who mention his sacred name. Kinda like the devil was supposed to do.

So I chickened out, not so much in genuine fear for my safety as a desire to avoid hassle. Mostly, though, it was because Niles would get mad at me if we started getting calls in the middle of the night. We get enough communiques from outer space as it is. (Haw haw! A little in-joke there for Niles. Pay it no mind.)

Finally, Deb "Nutty Professor" Frisch has started hassling Jeff Goldstein again. Now it's Jeff who made sexual remarks about his son, according to her. She also posted a (brief, mild) taunt in the comments, which I saw with my own two eyes before Jeff wished it into the cornfield.

UPDATE: Yeesh. See here, if you dare. Scroll down for more. No longer mild. Not safe for work, small children, or the sane.

Back in when I was reading Usenet, in the Late Cretaceous, I realized that it was harder than you might think to know who was really crazy.

For example, if I guy posts "I AM DOCTOR GOD AND I OWN THE USENETS AND YOU MUST OBTAIN MY PERMISSION TO POST!!11", well, it might be amusing once, depending on context. Depending on your temperament, it might even amuse you for hours. But when someone posts stuff like that hour after hour, day after day -- I'm talking hand-crafted posts, now, not automated spam -- for months, then you just gotta wonder if he's crazy. Because he must be spending eight hours a day just writing loopy posts. When does he eat, sleep, work?

My interest, at that time, was in identifying the crazies so that I wouldn't mocking those who were genuinely mentally ill. But where does jackassery leave off, and truly sick begin?

The person in that case was a woman who continually posted crap about Bill Gates and Microsoft. See here for example, and here and (alleged) details of her suit against Gates here. Those incidents were from a decade ago, and more, but she's still at it! See here.

That's the google cache for her site. I didn't want to link directly, because I didn't want to end up in her referrer logs and get deranged email from her. Is she just, colloquially, a nut? Or really, truly mentally ill? And should the mentally ill be allowed internet access?

Anyway, if the world's richest man can't keep a loony off his back for fifteen years, what hope do Goldstein and Seixon have?