To those who have asked me (or would have, if you’d thought of it), your eyes filled with hope and voices cracking ever so slightly, “Jim Bob Boy, will you ever post again on climate change?” I can only say, “Soon, dear hearts, soon.”
In the meantime, we have another shameless detour, this time compounding the sin by including an element of politics. That’s Politics with a capital P, and that rhymes with T, and that stands for Tool! Yes, friends, that’s right — I’m talking about He Who Shall Not Be Designated By His First Initial and a Drastic Truncation of His SurnameTM, although it rhymes with [cough]Horowitz! Those who have followed HWSNBDBHFIAADTOHS through his long career know that he started out as a devoted follower of the Black Panthers, then after a period of self-examination decided to get really silly. For some years now, HWSetc. has established quite a reputation (if that’s the word) as a critic of America’s left-leaning professors, and has set himself the arduous and thankless task of cleaning up Dodge. In the process, he has elbowed most of the competition off the short list for America’s Most Pretentious and Ill-Tempered Right-Wing Ninny.
HWSetc. has not had a good last week. In a series of exchanges with Michael Bérubé over several days, HWSetc. took blow after blow, falling then staggering to his feet and flailing wildly at random, only to fall again, while horrified spectators begged officials to stop the fight.
Now, with his disposition unimproved by that experience, HWSetc. has stepped into the ring again with an online poll in which readers can vote for the Worst Professor in America. Of course, to prevent ballot-stuffing, the page code checks IP addresses and prevents multiple votes from the same location and … no, wait, that’s some other poll. True to form, HWSetc. did nothing at all to try to make the poll more than an online stunt, and the results were … well see for yourself.
Bérubé asked his readers if they could band together and vote – vote, me hearties, like yer miserable scurvy lives depended on it — to make him the unquestioned Worst Professor in America. Bérubé’s readership responded with a will. Thanks to loyal readers’ dedicated efforts and a homespun PHP script or two, votes have been streaming in all night at an average rate of several per second. At time of posting, Bérubé has what might modestly be called a commanding lead, with 151,402 votes. The page itself was edited after someone twigged to the fact that the “Professor” and “University” headings were reversed, but t
The online Diebold continues to spin merrily as we speak.
Some things are almost, but not quite, beyond the reach of mockery. Fortunately for all of us, this one slipped under the wire.
Update: For a moment there, I thought that HWSetc. had actually detected and corrected a mistake, and I trembled at what that might imply. I see that the Last Days are not yet upon us, and that the current Worst Professor in America, with 254414 votes at the moment of posting, is “Penn State University” who holds tenure at “Michael Berube.” Why I thought that had been fixed, I sure don’t know. Dyslexic am I!
UpdateUpdate: The fun continues. HWSetc. realized belatedly that he does not, in fact, have billions of readers, and reset the poll. This of course was an opportunity for Bérubé to improve and extend HWSetc.’s very public pantsing.