1. I was in college, reviewing a visiting band for the school paper. After paning the band and the opener, I spent the rest of the piece just taking the piss out of a goofball who was dancing all over the place like a maniac, making an ass out of himself and grinning like a goon. This generated a piece of hate email from him that I found amusing then, but today, thinking back, I was such an elitist, humorless bastard when I was 20. I mean, I didn’t even know that dude, didn’t have a grudge or anything.
2. I was working at my first job as a reporter for a small county paper on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and was assigned to attend and write up a 4-H Fair. I had no desire to do this, and so afterward wrote a scathing, mocking article about how stupid it all was and how I didn’t get the importance of seemingly endless cow contests and crowning of the 4-H queen. Twas a brutal, heartless thing to write in a rural area by a suburbanite, and I guess I thought my editor would edit it into something less inflammatory. Joke was on me. The 4-H director or whatever sent us an equally sarcastic letter to the editor, but the outcry should’ve been harsher, I think.
― Raymond Cummings (Raymond Cummings), Friday, 5 May 2006 13:06 (nineteen years ago)