To non-members and non-regular readers

Elaine's not interested in your rants on Noam Chomsky.



None of us are. But while working on this edition, we were discussing various e-mails that come in. Some kook e-mails Elaine repeatedly on the "truth" about Noam Chomsky. For the record, Elaine reads Chomsky (we all do) but he's not one of her heroes (that would be Howard Zinn). But this one man repeatedly e-mails Elaine wanting her to post all of his thoughts on Chomsky's betrayals or "betrayals."



Short history, Chomsky's an academic. He does a balancing act highlighting what he thinks is the most important. Over the years he has missed things. He will do so again. We don't think he's "in the bag."



If you do, there's a thing called Blogger/Blogspot. You can go there and start your own site at no cost and share your own thoughts. You may be right. But we're not interested in running your "tips" at any site. We don't know you. We don't agree with your whispers.



Elaine was explaining how those repeated e-mails make her leery of noting anything that comes in on an event she doesn't know about or from a person she doesn't know.



Which got us all discussing e-mails.



At this site, "Unity" can stop e-mailing. We're never going to reply and they've been wanting us to provide them a link for almost a year now. We're never going to do it. We're not interested in the right of center.



Voice of America wants desperately to get some attention from Rebecca. Apparently the "sex" in her blog's title captured their attention. She doesn't link to known government propaganda, none of us do, but they persist in attempting to get the propaganda out.



Mike's noted that he's sick of the pack hounds that circle around their own candidates. When he blogs about a politician that they don't like, they descend with their 'helpful' e-mails containing the 'real' truth about Bill Richardson or Dennis Kucinich or John Edwards. The real truth is that people with crushes on candidates should probably be sending their resumes to The Nation magazine and stop boring people who haven't endorsed any presidential candidate.



Cedric notes that even with the comment option, the racists still prefer to e-mail "proving what chickens they are and that even they know they couldn't state publicly what they state in e-mails."



Betty only checks her public e-mail once a month (the racist threats bothered her, she announced over a year ago that she would only check once a month). Like Kat, she has a private e-mail available to community members. Kat just notes that Reba McEntire's small number of fans are "as vocal as they are uninformed. And apparently they are very, very slow readers since they all wrote in last week about a 2006 CD review."



Wally checks more often than that ("daily") but only has the time to read "three or so e-mails" a day. If you're sending something to him that was on something that happened a day or two prior, it's probably not getting mentioned in that day's jot (done with Cedric) because they're dealing with breaking news (in a humorous way). If your an organization he likes (there's one in particular), keep sending, it reminds him to check the site for stuff to include in the snapshot. But if you've found a story three weeks old that angers you, "Why are you bothering a site called 'The Daily Jot' to begin with? Four e-mails this week were on Afghanistan. Have Cedric and I ever written of Afghanistan? No. We're covering Democrats and Republicans in public office and running for public office primarily. And we're covering that day, so don't bore me with something that's three weeks old or not in the area we cover."



That really is a common complaint. Rebecca has the loosest format and can and does cover a number of topics. The Common Ills covers Iraq.



The public account for The Common Ills is worked by C.I., Ava, Jess, Dona, Shirley, Martha and Eli. And it is just amazing the things that come in there -- by the thousands -- each day. Can you shout out to this, can you shout to that? "I'm writing about the humpback whale and would really appreciate a link." Are there humpback whales in Iraq? Then why are you e-mailing?



For all sites, if you are wanting something noted, you need to be clear in your heading. "With all due respect" usually offers none and gets deleted at all sites because it is a popular title of spam mail. If you have an event you want promoted this won't guarantee that it will be but noting in the headline when it is may get the e-mail read.



At The Common Ills and The Third Estate Sunday Review an automated reply goes back to every e-mail we receive. That's because C.I. won't be part of anything where someone who writes doesn't at least get an automated reply knowing their mail was received. The auto reply here often leads to snit-fits from university professors who reply to the auto reply along the lines of, "You think you're too good to write me back! I'll have you know . . ." We'll have you know that your e-mail to an auto e-mail saved us reading your original e-mail.



In your world, every e-mail you write may be otherwise immediately answered. In our world, we're busy. The account for this site -- unless Ty is taking a break -- is only worked by Jim, Dona and Ty. Ty works full time, Jim and Dona are in grad school. All are busy and have other things to do besides respond to every loon that writes. We don't respond to everything period. (That's true when Ava, Jess and C.I. are helping out as well when Ty is on a break.) We do have a feature entitled "Mailbag" where we try to respond to our regular readers as well as a few of the funnier crazies.



The reply time at The Common Ills is even slower. First of all, due to forwarding of e-mails (both Jess and Rebecca's e-mails were forwarded for laughs), we don't feel the need to reply to most in e-mail form as a community. But if something needs to be read by C.I. (forget replied, just read), it goes into a folder. C.I.'s reading those as quickly as possible. When an issue flares up in the community, that puts the reading of the public account on the backburner. As a result, Ruth will reply for C.I., Kat will, Jess will, etc. The e-mails at the public account not read by C.I. are part of a summary. Martha and Shirley do a report where they tabulate the number of e-mails, the topics, the complaints or suggestions. Jess tends to just pass on a brief summary verbally and Ava says the bulk of what she reads at the public account isn't worth writing let alone passing on.



Every week Ava and C.I. are on the road speaking at campuses. Most weeks, one of us tags along with. They don't have time to be reading all the e-mails let alone replying. Currently, they get back home Saturday afternoon and turn around and hit the road on Monday. C.I. and Ava weren't in the mood for the public account yesterday and didn't bother to check it until about three this morning. At which point they found a reply to an auto reply where an e-mailer had a snit fit about "you think you are too good to reply to me" causing us to point out all the professors (true, some of them are our former professors and know that they are) who respond that way. To save yourself some embarrassment -- an auto reply is "automatic." It goes out "automatically" to all. It goes out instantly when your e-mail hits an inbox.



The e-mailer had e-mailed asking for a link. To what? Who knows because no one's going to bother to read an e-mail from someone who wrote on Saturday and then wrote back on Saturday because he got an auto-reply. If you visit The Common Ills even semi-regularly, it's no surprise that C.I.'s on the road or that Saturday is the trip back home.



You should know something about the site you're e-mailing.



Which is why sites do not e-mail back saying, "I just linked to the article" or anything else. It's assumed that if you're e-mailing, you're checking the site. That's often not the case, as with Mike's whiners about politicians, but that's really not our problem.



Regular readers of any site (anyone using the public site at The Common Ills is a reader and not a member) are read. Many drive-by e-mails are interesting and, here, we try to note them when we can. But Jim's stance has always been, "We're posting, not running a pen-pal club." Which is why replying to the e-mails was a distant second even before e-mails started getting forwarded around.



If you see an article you like or an event you want to attend (or wrote an article or are organizing an event), you can e-mail. But if you're not specific in your title, you're not helping yourself get read.



Specific includes stating what you are writing about. A New York Times reporter once had a hissy fit in an e-mail to the public account of The Common Ills that C.I. mispelled his name (yes, it was a male). A typo may or may not be a typo and most will never be corrected. In this instance, it wasn't a writer who covers Iraq and C.I. hadn't created a name for him (a la Gordo, Dexy, et al). The man was having a fit. So we stopped everything (this was the summer of 2005) and all searched to find where the man was mentioned at The Common Ills. We were honestly surprised C.I. didn't know. C.I. can generally pinpoint something down to a week if not an exact day. The reason C.I. couldn't, it turned out, was C.I. didn't write about the man. A long excerpt, from another site, mentioned the man in one sentence. That was a copy and paste from that site. It was credited in a "___ at ____ notes . . ." After it was located, Jim e-mailed that site to ask, "Did you know you misspelled ____'s name and has anyone pointed out it out to you?" The reply back was, "One letter? It's a typo. That was over a year ago" (it was over six months after C.I. had quoted it that The New York Times reporter showed up to whine) "I'm not worried about it but no one's complained."



Several hours were spent locating the thing the reporter was having a hissy fit about (apparently the letter "t" is highly important). And in the end, C.I. hadn't spelled the name, C.I. hadn't even mentioned the man. But still he showed up, in a screaming e-mail, about his missing letter. But he never wrote the site that C.I. was quoting. Get a grip.



It's also true that some paper's bylines sometimes include middle names or initials of reporters and sometimes don't. If your paper didn't include it, take it up with the paper, not with The Common Ills, another frequent whine from reporters to the public account of that site.



The biggest advice is that you take the position Dennis Hopper's character advises in Black Widow, pretend you're talking to a child. By that we mean, explain what you're writing about. If there's something that comes in to this site which puzzles us enough to note it in coversations, C.I. can usually narrow it down and say, "Oh, they mean ____ that went up ____." That's done as we're working on the edition Saturday night and Sunday morning. You may have e-mailed Monday. No one knew what you were talking about.



Be specific in your title, be specific in your e-mail. (We're not asking anyone to be brief. We realize that passions are involved in many issues. We would never say that in writing to any of us you need to limit yourself to a certain word count.) A drive-by last month came in on an event and the person copied and pasted the details and then wrote themselves, "This is interesting." Ty read that e-mail, agreed to himself that it was interesting and went on about his life. The drive-by wrote this week whining that it didn't get mentioned. Why should it? You wrote, "This is interesting." That's all you wrote. Yeah, it was interesting. It had nothing to do with anything we'd written about before or wrote last month. You didn't ask for it to be included (if you had it would have been included in a "Mailbag" feature) and you only wrote "This is interesting." The equivalent of all those people forwarding around cat photos and Biblical scriptures.



The more specific you are, the better the chance that you'll be noted. That's in terms of your e-mail heading, your message and whom you decide to send it to. That's so basic we shouldn't have to explain it but apparently we do. Something you may think is very basic may need explaining as well. Remember that when you e-mail.