The Annotated Daffydoug
What follows is an e-mail I received from one of the nominees for the Brooksy, Daffydoug. I have added footnotes, but otherwise it is exactly as I received it. Enjoy.
Let me see if I have this correct now: One lucky contestant, if the stars are right, gets the coveted Magic Circle Jerk award, with all subsequent rewards and priveledges intact. 1
Those priveleges include #1; one hundred green backs out of your own pocket,* #2 one hundred bucks to spend at Penguin as, I assume, an honored "Penguinite" 2
Ahhh! But here's the catch!: The person, whoever they may be, is cleverly put into what you hope will be an "uncomfortable" little paradox. That paradox, reeking of the "genius" that conceived it, is this: If they take the money and give an acceptance speech, then they are, in a sense, admitting to their dumbness. If they don't take the money, then you imagine them at home , biting their lower lip, thinking, "Oh wretched man that I am! Oh, Woe is me!! " 3
This ensuing thought, this imagining, I presume, helps you, my facinorous friend, to get your rocks off. 4
Another way of saying it is this. You are attempting to put them in a position analogous to that of Quasimodo, in the classic old film "The Hunchback Of Notre dame", starring Charles Laughton (sp)5
Remember that scene? The hunchback was crowned "King Fool", and the mob laughed at him, he being the only one to not realize the intent, gladly clowned around and paraded himself with the crown on his head, little realizing that he was a laughing stock, and even further not realizing that he was just making himself look more stupid. 6
That's the basic intent of your ploy, is it not? (Oh sorry, I forgot. I'm supossed to be so abysmally stupid that I can't even see through it. No way could I EVER concieve of having your astonishing perspicacity, my acuminous little friend! Do you wish for me at this point to do my impersonation of Mortimer Snerd or Beaky Buzzard? Your option, my orgulous, bovaristic young nemisis.. 7
Hell, you ARE one sly dog, aren't you? Aren't you proud? You are such a genius that I don't see how you can stand to look at yourself in the mirror without kissing your image!. When Wile Coyote called himself "super genius", he must have been thinking about YOU! 8
Seriously, man, I can almost SEE the little horns growing out of your head! How deliciously sardonic! How delightfully cardosian of you! You sly dog, you!! How long will you continue to regale us with your rapier like wit? How long will you continue to endear us with your eloquence an undeniable charm? Oh yes! When it comes to wit, you are undeniably the king! As Anna said to the king "Yes your majesty, no your majesty, tell us how high to go your majesty. Don't let us off of our knees your majesty. Give us a kick if you please your majesty!. Oh!! That was GOOD your MAJESTY!! " 9
Is your mama proud, or WHAT? After all, you've made your self KING of your own blog! 10
Now pardon me for a minute , while I go and throw up. 11
O.K. I'm back. Let's see, where was I? Oh yes! We were talking about your incredible ingenious plot to make me squirm. O.K. If it makes you feel better, here goes: (Drum roll please.) 12
I can feel the pain allready. OH MY GOD!! It's piercing through to the very depths of my inner soul! I feel it!! Oh PAIN!! Oh AGONY! Oh excruciating, hellish TORMENT!! God SAVE ME!! God SAVE me!! I'm In HELL! ARRRRGHHHH!! 13There. Did you get your rocks off yet? 14
I'll tell you what, Mr smart ass, here's one for you. I'll take your little wager, and I'll sweeten the pie. Here's what I'll do. Since my intelligence, and subsequently, my IQ has apparently been called into question by he who has set himself up as judge over his fellow man. Let's do it this way. If I win.(And IF a frog had wings he wouldn't bump his ass when he jumps) But I'm saying IF I win, I'll offer you a little challenge to see how godamn smart YOU are. 15
And I'll do it publicly, right on your blog site.(Providing you'll give me access.) (But of course you won't, because you don't have the guts.) 16
That's right. Let's settle this like real men do. With a little duel of wits, a little battle of IQs, as it were. And I name the terms, which I shall refrain from naming until the time come, should I win.. 17
Do you read what I'm saying? Well read my lips. I'll say it slower. PUT your Money where your big mouth is!. 18
That is, IF you think you are man enough. Personally, I don't believe in my heart that you'll go for it. I don't think you have the guts. No, I really don't. Why do I think that? Simple! Because people who talk about other people behind their backs, as you have done about me, are usually cowards, and blow hards, who can bloviate for endless hours about someone they despise, but are really, on the inside, whited sepulchers, clean looking on the outside, but on the inside, really just full of "dead men's bones" and other kinds of vile things. You are, in fact, full of the gall of bitterness. Bitter, bitter, bitter to the marrow of your bones. In fact, this is the very kind of bitterness and hatred that usually MANIFESTS ITSELF in the later years of a person's life as cancer, arthritis, arthersclerosis, or some other equally foul and vile disease. (Which, by the way, serves very nicely to illustrate how hideous and ugly these kinds of spiritual sicknesses really are. In other words, cancer is the very FACE of bitterness! All I can say is this: Keep on planting the seeds, and sure as the sun rises, in season, you'll get your harvest. May be ten years down the road, may be twenty, may be when you are very old, but it WIll happen. You can take it to the bank. Make no mistake about it. Ther'es an eternal law built into the earth that says that a man will harvest EXACTLY what he plants. Call it Karma, call it the "circle of Life", call it what you will, trying to buck it is like trying to jump out a ten story building and saying "I'm not gonna get splattered when I hit the pavement., because I am IMMUNE to that law!" The rest of us will just laugh as they are scraping you off of the pavement with a spatula. 19
Son, you "strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel" You are in fact, blinded by your own strife and bitterness. That's right. I said STRIFE. 20
If you don't understand those sayings, then I would suggest you go some place,do some EXTREMELY deep soul searching, and gain a little wisdom, because as of now, you have demonstrated precious little. In fact, in the whole grand finiculatum of things, I would say, as George Baily said to Mr Potter, that you don't amount to much more than a "scurvey little spider." 21
BTW, Let's see if you have the guts to post this letter on your blog. Go ahead! I want all your little toadies to read it. UNEDITED! 22
*One hundred bucks out of your own pocket!! Hmmm. They used to say that cats and dogs are the dumb ones, but but I see them getting free meals and board, I see people bending over to pour FREE food into their little bowls. Don't cost the cat anything. It's FREE. Hmmm. Now let;s think here. Who's the one doing the serving here? And who's getting free stuff? Who's REALLY the dumb one here?? It's a no brainer. 23
Don't matter though, because even if I do win your little contest, you won't ever give me the money. I don't believe that YOU are even THAT dumb! In fact, I will NEVER believe it until I see the money in my hand, providing I win your little "contest" 24
Annotations:
1. First, it's not the Magic Circle Jerk award, it's The Magic Cafe Golden Idiot award, aka The Brooksy. Second, and this is going to be an important theme in my critique, if you're writing an e-mail defending how intelligent you are, please, send that shit through spell-check. You don't want to be spelling privileges with a "d" in there. Now, granted, I misspell shit all the time, but I'm not trying to convince anyone how smart I am.
2. Again, it's privileges, try not to misspell the same word twice, in two different ways, two words away from one another. It's unbecoming. And while I understand you might not be up on your Civil War era slang, the term is greenbacks. One word. If it's two words you have the adjective "green" modifying "back" and it makes no sense.
3. Hmmm, no, I didn't imagine anyone like that. Not until I got this e-mail, I mean. After reading this panicky, defensive e-mail, I do picture Daffydoug sitting home, shaking his fist at the sky, cursing me, cursing life, cursing this whole tainted orb.
4. Yes. I'm masturbating to this right now.
5. I like that only once in this hideously misspelled e-mail does he whip out the old "(sp)" trick. It's so funny and insufficient. It's like walking through a city that has been demolished by an earthquake and saying "Hey, that stop sign is crooked!"
6. Yeah, that was a sweet scene. Hey, do you remember in the remake of Dawn of the Dead how that one guy was shooting the zombies from the other rooftop and the other guy said he should shoot Burt Reynolds and then the first guy shot the zombie with a mustache? That was awesome too.
7. Misspelled words: supposed "supossed," conceive "concieve," nemesis "nemisis."
How could he misspell these simple words yet accurately spell perspicacity, acuminous, orgulous, and bovaristic? Well, obviously, he's poking around some website or book devoted to obscure words. That can be fun, and it can be fun to try and drop them into conversation because the words themselves are a conversation piece and we can all enjoy how varied and specialized the English language can be. But when you try to make yourself seem smart by using them over and over again, oddly enough, you actually end up sounding really stupid. Strange how that works. Maybe it's because trying to make yourself seem smarter by using long or unknown words is a standard thirteen-year-old thing to do and most thirteen-year-olds are pretty stupid.
8. I doubt that. I wasn't born yet. And he's a cartoon. Oh, and usually when someone calls himself something, he's thinking of himself.
9. Can someone please get their copy of the 2004 Word-A-Day calendar and tell me what the fuck cardosian means? Thanks!
10. I don't think my mother knows that I write a blog. And I didn't have to make myself king of my blog, I'm the only one who writes on it so I guess I'm king by default.
11. Okay.
12. Brrrdddddddddttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt
13. Look, I understand you're trying to be facetious. And you're trying to imply that you're not really affected or bothered by all of this. And that's great, that's the way it should be, you shouldn't be bothered by a stranger saying you're a dope (or multiple strangers in this case). But if I had to guess which nominee was most bothered by this whole thing, I'd guess it's the one who sent me a 17k e-mail telling me how little he gave a shit about it.
14. I'm getting close. Don't stop.
15. I really think "smart ass" should be hyphenated. And the phrase is "sweeten the pot" not "sweeten the pie" although that does sound tasty.
16. I won't give you access, not because of a lack of guts but because people don't come to this site looking for your bullshit. They get enough of it at the Cafe.
17. I'm guessing it's a vocab competition.
18. You can see my response to his challenge in my reply to this e-mail.
19. In an e-mail full of dumb paragraphs, that one distinguishes itself without much elaboration. But why stop now? First, is writing about someone on a public blog really considered talking about them, "behind [their] back"? And why am I bitter (bitter, bitter to the marrow)? Because I think Daffydoug makes some dumb post on a message board? Well, fuck, Daffydoug, I'm not the only one who thinks it. The many, many people who wrote in to say what a dumb motherfucker you are seem to think it too (oh and that includes some of the staff at your beloved Cafe). What a cunt, what a Daffycunt. He's so self-absorbed that he thinks anyone who doesn't like his Magic Cafe posts is bitter and is going to get cancer! Oh, and did you not know that cancer is a "spiritual sickness" that only "bitter" folks suffer from? It's true, Dr. Daffydoug says so. So if you have a sweet aunt, or a loving parent who suffers or suffered with cancer, it's because they're bitter, miserable people. Daffydoug HAS to believe I'm bitter. He can't conceive of someone who is happy and has a lot of good friends and is active and kind to people and, at the same time, happens to think Daffydoug is a complete moron.
[Update 2015: Sadly, I believe Daffydoug, has dealt with some cancer issues in his family since he wrote this email. I don't know how those situations resolved themselves, but I truly hope things worked out for the best. And I hope he didn't exacerbate the problem with his poisonous, evil attitude about such situations being the sufferer's fault.]
20. Did he say strife? Wait, I guess he did.
21. I bet when Mr. Bailey said it that he spelled scurvy correctly. As far as finiculatum goes, he's got me stumped. He must be very intelligent to be able to look up an obscure word and then use it. Or maybe he made it up. Perhaps it's the Contrabulous Fabtraption of Professor Daffydoug.
22. Dear little toadies, I hope you've enjoyed daffydoug's e-mail. I was going to edit it to correct all the awful grammar and spelling mistakes but DD wants you to see it unedited.
23. Yes, Daffy, you are as smart as a cat or dog. I do not doubt that.
24. Oh my! Aren't you a bitter, bitter, bitter little man. Watch out, you're going to get cancer if you don't chill out a bit. Why would I lie about giving the money? How would that benefit anybody? Whoever wins will get paid via paypal so there will be a record of it.
For the sake of completeness, what follows is my reply to Daffydoug.
Doug,
I'm sorry you're so offended. Ultimately it was supposed to be all in fun. To quote my site: "I'm actually hoping that whoever wins has a good sense of humor about it and enjoys the whole thing."
And no, you're not supposed to be "so abysmally stupid" that you can't see through my "ploy." My ploy, as you describe it, was completely outlined on my site, so there's really nothing to see through.
I don't need to get into a battle to prove who's more intelligent. If someone wants to do that they can judge us by our past output. And honestly, I don't care if you think you're smarter than me, you may very well be. I don't care. I wish I did; it seems to mean so much to you.
I know you need to think of me as bitter or power-hungry or whatever, and I know no amount of remonstrations will convince you otherwise. But the truth is, I'm very happy, and I write the site because there is a group of people out there who seem to enjoy it. But it's a very small part of my life, and I'd be perfectly happy if nobody liked. I don't need that kind of validation.
I'd honestly love to post your e-mail, unedited, on my site. I'm really happy to post people who disagree with me. But I'll give you a day to rescind that offer because I'm sure you'll agree when you reread it that the tenor of your e-mail makes you sound kind of silly.
And there's no E in Brooksy.
Take care,
Andy
