E-mails. Jim, Dona and Jess help Ava and C.I. (and Eli, Rachel, Martha, Shirley, Heather and who knows who else) with the e-mails at The Common Ills. I read the bulk of the e-mails here with a little help from Jim and a lot more help from Dona. (When I'm on vacation, Ava and C.I. read all the e-mails that come in here.) And last week was a nightmare from volume alone. By Wednesday morning, there were 4,500 e-mails on "Of stupidity and NPR (Ava and C.I.)" and Jim forgot to keep track Wednesday afternoon so Dona and I stopped keeping track but as the e-mails continued to come in on it (and seventeen have arrived so far today on it), it has easily become the most e-mailed on piece in its week. (Ava and C.I. have other articles that have received more e-mail but not in one week.) The bulk of you were thrilled with the article. Three of you were not.
Fred L. Hammond was one of the three who was not thrilled. From his e-mail.
First, I want to state that I found your post to be very interesting but not very accurate nor very thorough. If you had read my blog you would know by looking at my about page that I identify myself as Serenity Home and also give my real name as Fred L Hammond. I am a minister serving two Unitarian Universalist congregations within the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, one in Mississippi and one in Alabama. Serenity Home is a loose translation of my name. Fred literally means 'peace' and Hammond literally means 'Home on a hill.' I translated this to Serenity Home. So Laura Conway crediting the blog to Serenity Home is an accurate thing to do.
Ava and C.I. read three posts on your blog. You may identify yourself as Serenity Home -- possibly as a drag name? -- but, no, only in your crazed mind does "Serentiy Home" equal "Fred Hammond." Grow the f**k up. Crediting the blog means crediting it's title and your blog's title is across the top of your home page: A Unitarian Universalist Minister in the South.
Second, if you had read my blog you would have noted that I listed the dates when these programs aired on Fresh Air. They might have been repeats but they did indeed air again on the dates I mentioned because I listened to a few of them in Alabama where I live. These programs were taken directly from Fresh Air's website as found on their website. So to call me dishonest is a disparaging comment on your part. Further I do listen to Fresh Air on as regular a basis as I can. So to state I do not listen to Fresh Air is a speculation on your part and is false.
No, you didn't and stop your lying. I don't know why you want to insist that other people read your blog and then want to lie about what's actually up there. You were dishonest. We'll give you one hint, Serenity Queen, the Clinton broadcast is from months ago and, we checked, it didn't air on your NPR in July or, being far too kind to you, June. Quit lying. You tried to cook the books and you got caught.
I did not fudge the list. Again, you are calling me a liar when if you had been thorough in your own journalism you would have found these shows listed on the website just as I did. Who is being dishonest now? These were the shows that were listed on Fresh Air's website as recently aired and their dates of these shows being aired last. Here are the sources to collaborate my claim:
No, your 'sources' (weblinks to various installments of Fresh Air) do not collaborate your claims.
You make many claims and only offer four weblinks and pretend to forget the Clinton report you included in your list. The one that's months old. You cooked the books, admit it and quit lying. And before you try to change your posts, let me do you a solid, one gay guy to another, I already took screen snaps. So you can start dealing with reality or you can keep lying.
For someone who seems to feel it was Ava and C.I.'s responsibility to know your entire history before writing about your distortions, you seem unaware that, among other articles here, we've publisehd "Terry Gross Hates Women (Ava, C.I. and Ann)" and "Terry Gross Still Hates Women (Ava, C.I. and Ann)" -- or that Ann regularly tracks Terry Gross' sexism as her own site. In other words, while bemoaning that everyone isn't insane enough to declare Serenity is Fred, you don't know the first thing about the site you slam.
Third, I am not an individual who offends easily over the use of individual words. Word usage is for me about context and not about the individual word. And in the context of how Louis C.K. is using the word F[word edited by me, Ty]got in his show and I am not afraid to spell it out, is not offensive to me. Not to this gay male anyway. So again you are making a presumption based on your stereotype of what gay men should and should not find offensive. And because you can not believe that a gay male would not have found the use of the word f[ibid]ot used in this story offensive, must then mean that I did not listen to the Louis C.K. interview. What arrogance!
You are presuming to speak for everyone, Cracker. This Black gay man is very offended by the use of f**got. Nor am I alone in that offense. But you're a liar. Ava and C.I., based upon your poor job of 'reporting' what took place on various episodes and when they were aired, made the call that you hadn't listened to the programs. You want to argue that you did.
Fine, then you're a bigger liar than I thought you were. Your a liar because you say you heard the repeated use of f**got and you then took it upon yourself to blog that the show was pulled from MPR because of that episode but you refused, REFUSED, to inform your readers of the non-stop use of that term during the broadcast. That makes you a liar.
What arrogance from the big old Cracker Queen.
I really love it when White people e-mail thinking they can dictate the terms to me. And, yes, I was being sarcastic. Now Freddie, excuse me, Queen Serenity of the Desert, e-mailed his reply on Sunday and a lot of kooks did. One got an e-mail from me that started off nice and ended with me demanding an apology.
I had, he informed me, insulted his organization and taken the position that it was an arm of the government and it was this and was that and -- And, it was just too damn much from one e-mail. Take me to task for what I say. I never wrote one word about the organization. Let me repeat that, I never wrote one word.
I did plan to write many words today but I got a calmer e-mail from the man and I'll let it be water under the bridge.
Some e-mailed to criticize "Was it all about gender? (Ava and C.I.)" running in the same edition as "Editorial: She broke no law" -- fourteen of you felt a defense of Lindsay Lohan negated a defense of Lynne Stewart. "Lynne's a real political prisoner and Lindsay's not," wrote one long term reader. Ava and C.I. didn't claim Lindsay was a political prisoner.
As was explained last week ( "Roundtable" -- and C.I. noted it at her site the day before), Ava and C.I. were asked to cover a series of topics and agreed to. Among those topics were Lindsay. They know Lindsay. They were asked by a performer who'd worked with Lindsay on a film -- a friend of Ava and C.I.'s -- to write something on the issue. Now C.I. had already called out the attacks on Lindsay the week before. Which is why ___ thought she and Ava might write something on it. They were asked to and they realized it was a topic they could cover. But what they especially realized, as they informed us what they'd be doing in the pitch meeting before we started writing, was that Lindsay fans would be reading. And they did. Lindsay fans found it via blog searches and Googles and shared it and passed it around and we had 1355 e-mails on that piece from readers we'd never heard of (thank you to Jim for counting that up). They came strictly due to the Lindsay piece. They read other pieces including the Lynne Stewart piece.
Lynne Stewart is a political prisoner. If you think repeating that over and over every week is going to help her (we think it might), then you want as many people to hear it as possible. Tackling the Lindsay issue allowed readers who might never encounter Lynne's story the chance to learn about it.
Ava and C.I. hate their Lindsay article. Long term readers shout out, "They hate everything they write!" True. But they really hate this. Saturday an actor-director friend was over waiting for them to arrive (flying back from Boston). He was playing around on one of our laptops. When they walked in, greetings were exchanged and he said to wait a second because he was in the middle of their Lindsay piece and they both immediately exclaimed, "Read anything else!" That was the last of four pieces they wrote last week (wrote by themselves, they helped write all the pieces except "Highlights") and they were exhausted. It's a strong article, regardless of what they think.
And I would encourage our regular readers to remember that many times they came to this site via something similar to Lindsay Lohan. In fact, the biggest draw has always been Ava and C.I.'s TV articles. That's what drew you here. Don't second guess Ava and C.I. If you're puzzled why the edition includes a strong editorial in support of Lynne Stewart as well as an article decrying the sentencing of Linsay Lohan, e-mail and ask why. But don't assume (as one did) that they're "blowing their political credibility." They would laugh at that idea and would say, if they had any credibility, the best thing to do would be to blow it.
The Lynne Stewart editorial was very important to them and to many of us. Including a piece on Lindsay, a piece on Joan Rivers, a piece on this and that, to increase the likelihood that a large number of visitors would stop by was genius.
We're taking a breather in the middle of what is obviously going to be a long writing edition. This goes to Joan's e-mail which predicted that this week, "despite protests to the contrary, you'll be leaning on Ava and C.I. all over again." Joan, we have their TV article written. And? They've roughed out -- by themselves -- four articles that we're going to fill in. We hoped to do those ourselves and had various attempts that just didn't work. They were too heavy with background and sunk as a result. As of right now, Joan is correct. But that doesn't mean that we didn't try to avoid it.