Much to my personal amazement, people are reading this column, heading over to my virtual Ponderosa at www.operative.net and saying good things. To paraphrase The Russian in the recent Punisher #1, "You'd be surprised who's happy to see you. You'd be amazed." I am, and I'm very thankful.

Anyway, last week I spent some time talking about some of the good things in life. That's probably enough of that for a while.

I discovered early in my career that people (readers and editors) are a lot less interested in what I have to say when I'm being positive. I have written passionate essays, extolling the virtues of this, that and the other thing and always to a mere trickle of reader response and but a few requests from editors to do more. On the other hand, when I vented my spleen and set my sites on writing something to damage someone's careers, I was often hailed as a hero in scores of fan letters and deluged by call after call from new publications and editors looking for some of my poison pen (or pixel, as is the case in the digital world). I became a hatchet man, and it's a reputation I still hear about once in a while. Good work if you can find it.

These days, however, .jpg files pay better than .doc or .txt ones, so I'm not very deep into my journalism writing. Still, the cries come from Usenet: "Say, Hannibal, can you lay some smackdown on that beyotch Frank Tieri?" Or, "Hannibal, I believe you should riddle Howard Mackie with lyrical gunfire." And so on and so forth. So, without further ado, let's layeth the smack down on Six Things That Don't Rock. At All.

2) Certain Guest Posters on Internet Message Boards: I personally don't understand the logic in letting guests post on boards anywhere. In my five years of experience on the Web, I've never seen any overwhelming positives created as a result of this privilege, which often clutters the boards with full transcriptions of songs, profanity and meaningless slurs against the people actually discussing the topics at hand. I've read some insightful posts in my day, and I know some regulars post as guests when they're away from their own machines...but still...

4) Cell phones: The idea of people being able to instantly reach help in emergencies, or to communicate and handle things on the run is wonderful. However, the jackass in the sport utility vehicle trying to dial Tommy Tang's for a table while driving 45 miles per hour in the fast lane is the reason Texas residents are allowed to carry concealed weapons. Several municipalities have put forth referenda to ban driving while talking on the phone, but personally I believe that dialing is just as dangerous. No love for hands-free speakerphone models. Not to mention how many elementary school kids I see walking home past my house, chatting on neon models. There's danger from radiation and carcinogens that add to my resentment of these annoying convenience items, of course, but it's the general erosion of common courtesy that really gets me. I've lost count of many times a nice dinner out has been shattered by some cretin shouting into one of these miniaturized talk boxes. A pox on the lot of them.

6) Microsoft: When I was growing up, I was horrible at math. I mean, adding and subtracting, okay, that's stuff I could do with the money I could reach. Algebra, calculus...they may as well have been speaking Hindu, trying to convey these ideas to me. So, with less than stellar math grades, I was barred from computer classes, despite having a very big interest and actually knowing a smattering of Basic. I was ten at the time. I didn't set finger on a computer keyboard until I was 17, a Mac Classic. I joined the newspaper staff because they got out of class a lot. At first, it was cool being able to type my words (I was writing, even back then) and edit them so cleanly and, when the layout guy got too slow, I learned Pagemaker in a day and started helping out. Within a month, I was the campus Mac guru, even the principal had me work on his system when he couldn't figure it out. So I came out of high school thinking it was a Mac world, and was immediately stunned to discover the computers that denied me so many years before now configured with what looked like half the Mac's guts, cloistered amongst the engineers and math geeks. Time went on, I stuck with writing and page layout, moving into it as a profession. I switched to working in plain text or in a word processor called Nisus Writer, because Word became a resource hogging crashmaster after its lamented version 5.1. Time and time again, I'd be thrown in front of a crashy, buggy Windows machine and asked to work hobbled. Time and time again, IT professionals would pooh-pooh Macs and end up needing me to use one when work had to be done. I've seen study after study about how unreliable Windows is, the security and programming flaws, the difficulty to use, and seen the limitations of Windows versions of applications like Photoshop first hand. I say with no equivocation that Microsoft is the creation of infernal powers and Windows is the devil's OS, and Office is his proudest achievement. The "selection" of a Microsoft-friendly chief executive and the newly limp Justice Department means that the antitrust violations that shattered US Steel and laid low the robber barons of old are highly unlikely to affect the world's most powerful software company. Put together, all of that really sucks. Innovation in the computer industry (not to mention the Web industry; God, the suffering I have endured at the hands of .ASP pages and their devil browser) has become very uncommon and pretty much everything about Microsoft out and out, I say it again, sucks.

That's all for now. I'd love to go into how gangsta rap is not hip hop, Puffy is a big fat idiot, and Brian Azzarrello's picture of the Black experience is laughable at best. No time. I'm penning this on the way to two barbecues held in protest to the lies and suppression that is mainstream American culture. Oh, and one where they're actually celebrating, but that's with friends of the wife...