Saturday, May 10, 2008

Some Things Are Forever

There may not always be an England, but it looks like there'll always be a J.P.Picks. One by one out of the woodwork there invariably crawls a presumably vote hungry, astonishingly blatant sycophant eager to laud even the worst boilerplate posted by Grady Harp, the Maestro of the preposterous vote totals. The likes of Bette Dravis ("Keep your Pen Hot"), " Daniel Perez" ("Oh, Grady"), and Cindy Tardiff have kept alive the tradition of the remarkable J.P.Picks; one after the other, they too have unconvincingly oohed and aahed, only to disappear and cut short one's enjoyment of their shameless flattery. But there's no need to despair - after any short lull, a newbie on the rise is certain to appear as successor. The latest to fill the role is one ken O' connell. Anyone in need of a laugh is advised to check out his comment at the foot of Harp's review of the recent Bob Dylan movie. It's fully Picks-worthy.

8 comments:

Stanley H Nemeth said...

I hope that Steven A. Peterson and H.Schneider don't feel neglected that I inadvertently failed to include their names among the successors of J.P.Picks on the Grady Harp threads. Their non-inclusion was a grave oversight on my part since each of these gentleman has in fact brought Pick's-like commentary to the classical stage. They simply comment "great review" or "fascinating" and expect any readers to see the elegant genius of their judgments. Further explanation for their so concluding would obviously smack of pedantry.

Malleus said...

:-) The saga continues. Ken's message, I think, was somewhat tongue in cheek. Overall though, I think the amount of Quality Commentary(TM) has grown recently.

PS. Where's Barb?

Stanley H Nemeth said...

Malleus:
You may be right about Ken after all, though my reading of his comments tends to be less charitable. I deplore what I see as his tendency to try to escape responsibility for whatever heavy-handed, "unpopular," apparently irony-free remark he might make by his addition of an impertinent "lol" or smiley face after the fact. My suspicion is that, far from contributing to rational discourse or witty diversion, he's just trying to have things both ways. Thus, if a comment of his gets slammed, he's positioned himself to claim he had his tongue in his cheek all along. He uses language, in fact, the way Japanese uses verbs; reserving them till the end of a sentence, a speaker discerning a displeased hearer can suddenly reverse the entire direction of his thought, overturning everything he's just said. It's no surprise that the Jesuits, as a consequence, dubbed Japanese the Devil's language. To the frequently coarse, irony-challenged Ken, whose Amazon persona is that of a belligerent man of the people and implacable foe of the well-informed (A case in point was his indisputably rude, smiley-face-free questioning of Steven Hedge for daring to suggest the possession of some expertise in Shakespearean drama, a questioning since deleted by Amazon), to such a Ken, I recommend that he'd fare better if his yea were yea and his nay nay. He should leave attempts at irony to the masters.

Sea Foam said...

I think you all have a point with Ken. I think he often speaks with his tongue in cheek, but I too wish he was more upfront with his intended comments.

Cathy said...

I'm still curious as to why Ken had a mass deletion of comments, but came out relatively unscathed -- still able to post -- yet Steven and Barbara were deleted and banned (at least I assume Barbara was banned, we haven't heard from her). I do know that Steven and Barbara's comments were deleted on the same day.

Malleus said...

C'mon people, go easy on Kenmeister. That's his style, everyone's got some style... He did unprovokedly bite you in the ass a while back, and that was evil, and for that he'll be punished by God in due time. I wonder what will Grady's punishment be... chained to a "Vote" button in saecula saeculorum?

Stanley H Nemeth said...

Sisyphus had to push a stone up a hill, only to have it fall back and find himself required to push it back up again, for all eternity.
Grady's punishment, I suspect, will be similar, the torture of actually having to read and then reread the hundreds of bad self-help books and even worse first novels he's given his usual five stars to.

Malleus said...

And also review them again and again and cast 500 votes for each and every one of them.