Open letter to Senator Clinton

Dear Senator Clinton,

Always remember: The Caseys are patient. Very patient.

An open letter to a just and benevolent God

Dear God,

Thank you for adding Alicia Witt to the cast of Law & Order: Criminal Intent.

Yours,

Matter-Eater Lad

Air travel open letters

Dear TSA,

Thank you for not trying to take away my Tastykakes, which would have forced me to go all sippy-cup on your asses.

~

Dear lackwit parents who, having made a big show of telling your children to speak softly out of consideration of the other passengers on our plane, proceeded to demonstrate that those remonstrations had all of the weight of Soviet protections of individual rights by ignoring your children's shrieking and then taking out a laptop and playing insipid videos for them WITHOUT THE BENEFIT OF HEADPHONES, thus forcing everyone in the vicinity to listen to it whether we wanted to or not,

F*** you.

F*** you rotten.

P.S. If you can afford air travel, you can afford this.

P.P.S. Why did you name one of your daughters after Elizabeth Berkeley's character from Showgirls?

~

Dear Senator McGovern,

In a just world President Gore would happily lend you, as an esteemed former president, Air Force One whenever you traveled between DC and the Midwest. Sadly, we pretty clearly do not live in such a world. It was still fantastic to meet you.

One more open letter

Dear everyone who read my ID badge, did a double-take, and asked me how my name was pronounced last Monday,

No, I'm not related to Paulie Walnuts. His name is spelled and pronounced differently. Also, he's NOT REAL.

Open letters inspired by a week of grading AP exams

Dear student who took the question about the War Powers Act as an opportunity to complain about evolution, secular humanism, Nancy Pelosi, and gay people:

You did not get a poor score on this question because of your political beliefs. You got a poor score on this question because you didn't answer the question. At all.

~

Dear student who took the question about the War Powers Act as an opportunity to complain about George W. Bush, Mumia, the military-industrial complex, Fox News, and John Bolton's moustache:

You did not get a poor score on this question because of your political beliefs. You got a poor score on this question because you didn't answer the question. At all.

~

Dear person who stood behind me in line for lunch on Tuesday:

Thank you for taking the time not just to bump into me every five seconds that I stood in front of you, but for taking the time to invent new ways of bumping into me. Most people would not show the person they're annoying that level of personal attention.

~

Dear Tom Jones,

I think I showed remarkable restraint in not working lyrics from that other Tom Jones' body of work into conversation until we'd worked together for five days.

~

Dear student who answered Question 2 in Latin, Question 3 in Spanish, and Question 4 in cartoon form:

I appreciated your explanatory note that you didn't care about this exam because "Berkeley doesn't care how you do" and that your school still made you take the test. However, a number of points must be made: First, your cartoon incorrectly depicted West Virginia as siding with the Confederacy during the Civil War. Second, while my Latin is rusty at best, I am fairly certain that you mistranslated "United States." Third, one of the readers at my table is a California high school teacher and told me that enough good AP scores could allow an incoming student to arrive on campus as the equivalent of a second-semester sophomore. Annual tuition, fees, and housing at UC Berkeley total $20,777 for in-state residents and $39,461 for non-residents. So, clearly, someone there cares at least a little bit.

~

Dear Burger King manager and friend who were making some sort of extremely complicated transaction involving a small TV set, lots of small bills, and a truck in the parking lot, all across the counter while I stood waiting to place my order:

I saw nothing.

~

Dear residents of Daytona Beach and assorted visitors:

Put a shirt on. Please.

~

Dear Daytona County Convention Center,

You are the Battlestar Galactica of convention centers. The ship, not the show.

~

Dear Daytona Beach Hilton,

In retrospect, I'm not sure why I took such glee in abusing your policy of replacing any and all toiletries that have been opened, moved, or touched with brand-new ones while leaving the originals there. The pile of hotel toiletries I must now fit into the medicine chest in the bathroom looks cheap and tawdry.

Also, three computers in a sixteen-floor hotel do not really constitute a business center.

~

Dear Conrad Hilton,

I hope you don't get the news up there in whatever afterlife you've found yourself in.

Another open letter to my fellow Netflix subscribers

Dear fellow Netflix subscribers,

Thank you for easing up on your viewings of The Wire long enough for us to get the second disc of season one. Now, I must ask, WHY ARE SO MANY OF YOU WATCHING ST. ELSEWHERE?!? The bloody show's been listed as "Long Wait" since before New Year's...

Respectfully,

Matter-Eater Lad

An open letter to my fellow Netflix subscribers

Dear fellow Netflix subscribers,

WHY ARE SO MANY OF YOU PICKING NOW TO START WATCHING THE WIRE?!?

All best,

Matter-Eater Lad

An open letter

Right Honourable Tony Blair
10 Downing Street
London, England

Dear Mr. Blair:

Last night I watched the programme Green Wing on BBC America. It had been advertised as a hospital comedy, similar in tone to the superb American series Scrubs. However, this was a blatant lie, as Scrubs is funny and Green Wing is not. It is, in fact, like a humor Dementor, in that the show seems actively to suck whatever comedic instincts or abilities the actors and scripts may have initially possessed into a Lovecraftian nethervoid. I would go so far as to say that the show was so bad that it came off as an imitation of Scrubs made by someone who cannot tell why the Joe Don Baker film Mitchell is a bad movie and William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A. is a good one, but instead thinks they're very similar in quality because they are both set in Los Angeles and have car chases in them. Similarly, both Scrubs and Green Wing take place in a hospital and involve set pieces, deliberately nonrealistic behavior, and absurd situations and characters. But on Scrubs such things are accomplished with charm and wit and panache and emotional truth, while on Green Wing they are done with shrieking and stupidity and clumsiness and every single word uttered by every single character on the show rings false, including "the" and "and."

As you are the democratic leader of the United Kingdom, I would like you to give me the hour of my life I wasted on this show back.

I remain, etc. etc.

An open letter to the Teasdalian pepperpot who sat behind me at Bad Santa this weekend:

Dear Pepperpot,

Thank you for your running commentary throughout Saturday's showing of Bad Santa. Had you not been sitting behind me, I would not (to take just one instance) have known that actress Lauren Graham appears in a TV series called Gilmore Girls, nor known that you thought she was "so cute." In fact, you were even kind enough to repeat your observation of her cuteness no less than four times during the film. This knowledge affected my moviegoing experience in ways which I am sure you cannot even imagine.

I do have a few questions, however. Throughout the film, you made frequent exclamations about how shocking you found some of the events and behaviors depicted. Given that the movie is a black comedy about an alcoholic, sexaholic department store Santa Claus planning the latest in a series of Christmas Eve heists, I must ask, which part of the title "Bad Santa" did you not understand? Did you not expect that the film would address the less savory side of the life of an alcoholic department store Santa? Were you thinking he would be a wacky drunk, in the Nick and Nora Charles tradition? Did the advertisements for the film featuring Billy Bob Thornton, as the titular bad Santa, vomiting, cursing, passing out, stealing things, and so on not communicate this aspect of the film to you? Or did you simply assume that all of those scenes were staged expressly for the film's advertising, like that ad for Dirty Rotten Scoundrels fifteen years ago?

Clearly, you possess remarkable and unique cognitive capacities. Please contact me regarding medical research for which I believe you would be well suited.

Very truly, etc.