April Fools!

A couple months out of date…

From the April 1 Twitter blog:

Starting today, we are shifting to a two-tiered service: Everyone can use our basic service, Twttr, but you only get consonants. For five dollars a month, you can use our premium “Twitter” service which also includes vowels.

Unfortunately, the post had to be withdrawn from the Hebrew and Arabic versions of the site, because no one understood the joke.

(Not really. I made that last part up.)

In the past, I’ve defended a wide-open policy regarding blog comments. I’ve always let anyone post any on-topic comment they wanted. So, I’ve filtered out spam; but any vagrant who wanted to throw in his two cents, no matter what they were actually worth, I’d leave his comments up there, along with the constructive and supportive comments from regular visitors.

The reason for this policy is my belief in free speech. I believe that the best antidote to bad speech is more speech. On my political blog (if I ever revive that project), I will keep that wide-open policy, because that blog is about debate. Similarly, BeTheStory.com is about writing and being a writer, and what makes a “better” writer is a matter of opinion. So I will keep the same policy there as well. If you think my views on Twilight are narrow-minded and wrong-headed, you are free to say so. Just be aware that you will be wrong.

However, as I’ve reached out to new sources of blog visitors, this blog has collected several severe and useless comments, and I’ve rethought that comment policy, at least as pertains to this blog.

Every time I drove down Route 3A through Burlington, MA, I’d see a huge storefront with the words “Used Book Superstore” posted over it. I always wanted to peek inside. I mean, a used book superstore? Who ever heard of such a thing? There are large book retailers, like Barnes & Noble. There are smaller, used book stores, like Annie’s Book Stop, specializing in a narrow segment of books. (In the case of Annie’s, they specialize in modern, fast-moving, mass-market paperback fiction.) But how do you combine the two? How do you make a used-book superstore work?

So I always wanted to peek inside, see what this mutant retail outlet was all about. But I never found time. Until a couple weeks ago, I felt restless, and I remembered the Used Book Superstore. And I spent way more time than I intended, browsing through a massive spread of titles, all cost-effective and pre-read. I even found a couple of Holly Lisle’s titles, which I naturally snatched up to add to my collection. I found a copy of the complete X-Files Book of the Unexplained, which because it was “paperback,” only cost $1.99, all 688 pages of it.

But one of the more apropos selections of the day turned out to be Scott Adam’s The Joy of Work: Dilbert’s Guide to Finding Happiness at the Expense of Your Co-Workers.