In no particular order:

1) Nick Smith sent me a note claiming he was a 17-year-old kid and would I please stop picking on him. I suspect he’s not a real guy – a prank engineered by someone who fully realized how stupid he looked. Alas, my attempt to replace Languatron as my online arch-enemy was not to be.

2) As at least two commenters have noticed, the Shatner’s Toupee blog is gone. Simply gone. It had been essentially inactive since the summer, but it came back on New Year’s Day with a message that it was about to rise from the ashes. And then it was yanked off the web entirely. I have no idea why. It is not, however, lost forever, as the Internet never forgets. I have no idea who was writing it, although I did send them a message and offer my services to keep the chronicle going in their absence, but I never heard back. My Esteemed Colleague suspects Shatner’s people objected and it was yanked. I’m not willing to go that far in my own theories, but it’s a mystery why he or she would feel it necessary to remove a tremendous amount of well-written content, rather than just continuing to leave the place untended.

In any case, I have wept for the lost Shatner’s Toupee all this while, yea, and I shall weep a while longer.

3) Languatron has completely isolated himself from all human contact, so there’s little point in my carrying on our feud, which began well over a decade ago. That said, he continues to rage against the massive anti-Galactica conspiracy at his own blog, wherein he made an admission that’s worth noting here.

Languatron, AKA Andrew Fullen, has written a number of self-published vanity “books” lamenting the vast anti-Galactica conspiracy, and many of us have taken to reviewing them on Amazon.com. In every case, however, each negative review has been matched, word for word, with a positive one from people who sound strangely like Languatron himself. This is quite a feat, because to be able to review a book multiple times, you have to have bought something from the account used for the review, making it hard for people to dress up in sock puppets and give themselves five stars. That means Languatron was willing to buy a bunch of crap under fake names just to bump up his ratings. Those names included:

Joshua Remington Vegas, Danny Flapjacks, Debbie Miranda McAllister, Roll Fizzle-Beef, Ronald D. Lunkhead, TwoBrainedCylon – a name he stole from one of his critics, RGrant Losing bets extraordinaire, Bold Bigflank, Alberta Larsononi Von Eick, Gripe Bransford Singher-Moore, Butch Crackheap, Ronald Remington Meyer, Blasphemous Butt-Hockey, Black Tower Fuzzy Slippers, bookreader, Dash Canyon, Tad Udowitz, Jameson Claymore, Ron Meyer CEO of the Universal Corporation, Russell Udowitz Sanders, Walter S. Langley, Dank Thistlenads, J.T. Charmichael, RGrant nickname Slab Bulkhead, and, of course, Stallion_Cornell Moist Box, as well as Stallion_Cornell My Moist Box is your Moist Box.

Phew.

Well, Amazon.com finally figured out what was going on and deleted all of them.

Languatron, therefore, has put them all back online at his “Fortress of Doom.” He claims that “Universal Studios and Amazon.com didn’t like all of the favorable and legitimate reviews the books criticizing Universal Studios were getting on Amazon.com.” He goes further, claiming that Universal studios “posts fake, negative book reviews,” including mine, with the following explanation:

“The negative, fake, and stealth marketed written reviews of the books remaining on Amazon.com have an air of desperation about them, don’t they? (1) They don’t sound like real, legitimate reviews (2) the reviews sound like they are all serving a singular agenda (keep the books from getting read at all costs)…(3) And that the personal lives of everyone who wrote those negative reviews would be seriously modified not to their liking if the books were read.”

In the interests of countering Universal Studios’ monopolistic control of the web, I offer you Lang’s “legitimate” reviews for your perusal.

4) My columns at the Deseret News continue to be printed. Please read them.

I actually had something to say here, but my housekeeping has taken up 680 words. So I’ll post it tomorrow. Until then, this is Bold Bigflan Thistlenads, signing off.