Readers and writers blog

I was looking for two of my blogroll buddies the other day when the Internet threw me a couple of curveballs. Mike’s Circular File told me I wasn’t authorized to view it, and The literary thug looked like it had been mugged by Amazon book hawkers.

It was enough to make me say, “What th’. . .?”

Well, actually, what I said was what the Internet, in a usage that seems to me snickeringly adolescent, has acronymized as WTF. No, it doesn’t stand for Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. It’s shorthand for ‘What the f—,’ and I see it everywhere.

I prefer not to use the f-word or its derivative, WTF, in written discourse such as this on R&W Blog. Not that I have anything against the word ‘fuck.’ It’s just that emphatic words lose their power when they’re overused.

By the way, the best expletives of all time are found not in classic literature like Lady Chatterley’s Lover or on HBO’s “The Sopranos” but in, of all places, the old Popeye cartoons. You know, the ones where the squint-eyed sailor’s foil was not the latter-day Brutus but the mumbling, grumbling Bluto.

In their confrontations, both Bluto and Popeye threaten each other with phrases like “Why, I oughta . . .” and “Well, I’ll show you . . .” so far under their breath that the words are barely understandable — and never fail to make me laugh.

What’s so funny to me is that all the phrases are innocent but they’re all delivered in such an arch, roguish style.

Want a sample. Take a look at the 1937 cartoon Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves. It’s a long one — nearly 17 minutes — so you can shortcut it by moving the ‘play’ slider to the 8:00-minute mark where the mumbling-grumbling expletives begin. At the 9:40 mark, by the way, even the band of thieves starts mumbling and continues to 10:20.

Anyway, I’ve emailed Mike Pontillo to ask how I can get into his weblog again. I had a similar problem last fall when Mike’s Circular File originally was posted on our blogroll. It had something to do with a redirect function on Pontillo’s Internet service provider.

And poor Robert Lashley, a fine young poet and thinker at The literary thug. His site is now a billboard of Amazon books — ranging from conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg’s expose on Liberal Fascism to liberal pundit Cliff Schechter’s expose of The Real McCain — followed by blocks of words strung out in gibberish.

I don’t have an email address for Lashley, and I could kick myself for not copying it when his site was accessible.

I hope both he and Pontillo get back on cyberspace soon.

Today’s new offerings in our Works section:

• Chapter 22: Haight Street of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. By March of 1967, Gerard has become a hippie, consorting with a variety of free-floating women, but he knows the hippie movement is already over: “The music, long hair, beads, dope, bare feet, brown rice, free love . . . all that was nothing but advertising by people who’d already taken acid to get other people to take acid, and by then, the advertising was getting mistaken for the only thing that really went on. A few minds got blown on acid. That was it.”

• Chapter 10 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. After months of cautious waiting, Tess Dyer and Brian LaChance finally consummate their mutual attraction.

– Sid Leavitt