My Dinner With David<br><br>

   by Chris 'Frobozz' Angelini<br>
   cangelin@mnsi.net<br>
   <a href=http://www.eyrie.org/~frobozz>Chris's Website<br><br>

   My association with David Gonterman was a brief but tempestuous one, 
filled with sturm und drang, signifying very little.  In the mid 1990s, on a 
lonely little private chatserver which will remain nameless (though I can 
state with utter truth that it never went by the name of Fred), several of my 
friends and I gathered together to have a spot of fun. Being fans of MST3000, 
each and every one of us were rip-raring to do a group MiSTing of something 
for our own amusement. This was long before we'd even discovered that there 
were hordes of like-minded fans on the Internet and that we were basically 
reinventing the wheel; but really, when friends get together to do something 
fun, who cares how many other people have done it before you? But I digress. 
The fellow hosting our event brought up two tasty crap-filled treats for us 
to bash on: a wretched little fiction called Little White Dojo, which is 
powerful enough in its crapulence to bring even a Mexican wrestler to his 
knees; and the as-yet unknown to us American Kitsune issue #1, which is 
strong enough in its evil to tag out said Mexican wrestler and fight for him. 
Little did we realise the deep hurting that would follow...<br><br>
   Our MSTing practice went something like this: the host would spam about a 
paragraph's worth of text and we'd have roughly ten seconds to shout out 
comments, riffs and death rattles. In retrospect, on a scale of 1-10 this 
method probably rates a 15 in 'Ways Not To MiSTify Fiction'. But gol' durn 
it, it was fun! I was having terrible connectivity that night and only got in 
a few riffs overall, something which will become mildly ironic below (and 
when I say mild, I mean if you blink, you're likely to miss it. My life is 
not an O Henry story so cut me some slack).<br><br>
   After surviving the horrors of LWD, we turned our attention to American 
Kitsune #1. Within the first ten minutes, we had two people drop out from 
sheer inability to *stand* the prose (sic) which was streaming past their 
horrified eyes. Those of us who survived (much like in nuclear war, the 
survivors envied the dead) shuddered and decided to put this experience 
behind us, although yes, it was plenty of fun while it lasted. My friend 
collated the MiSTing and tossed it into a private FTP account, to which we 
all had the password.<br><br>
   Note, my friends, a private FTP account. Private. As in the opposite of 
public.<br><br>
   What happened next still boggles my mind. We receive email from one of 
David's partners in crime (who has since mended his ways) that our MiSTing 
has been found on FTP and boy-oh-boy, is Davie mad at us (for those of you 
who are fans of 80s comic sketches, this is a lot like telling Eddie Murphy 
that Michael Jackson is mad at him). He's had it up to here with us (he has?) 
and essentially came off sounding like he was delivering a Cease and Desist 
notice. Being fairly savvy about what someone could and couldn't do to harm 
you on the Internet, we shrugged our collective shoulders and spent the bulk 
of our time searching for the leak in our system. We never found it -- 
personally, I suspect someone in our group mailed the MiSTing to someone 
else, who mailed it to someone else, and so on and so on; and ultimately lied 
about having done no such thing -- and so we went on about our merry 
business.<br><br>
   But never fear, you lovers of Justice! For we evil MST-3kers had our come-
uppance! Do not mock David Gonterman, for he is dull-witted and quick to 
anger. I still remember the fateful night when his retribution struck down 
upon me. For you see, he had taken the only step possible to him. David 
had... killed us all off in one of his stories.<br><br>
   I believe in parody, invective, satire and other means of commentary. I 
believe that applied properly, they can change the world. I can't believe 
that a twenty-year-old with a fur fetish can have his Sailor Scouts blast me 
into pieces in fiction and then seat himself on the same throne as George 
Bernard Shaw. So, this turn of events was little more than quite amusing to 
me. Further, at the end of the story that he'd written to kill us off, he 
said something along the lines of... and I quote...<br><br> 

 <i>Sailor Coyote says:  I'm afraid that Forbozz and his cronies
 haven't figured out yet, but I'll use their example to set the
 moral for this chapter:  Do not flame us Native American Spirit
 Guides if you don't want them to pull some nasty tricks on you,
 like put your sorry butts in the Fanficts that you are trashing,
 heh-heh.</i>  <br><br>

   Well let's see, that's not quite the lesson that I took away from this 
little episode. The lesson that I learned was "if you don't proofread, you're 
going to look like a total prat". I don't know who Forbozz is; maybe he's the 
evil twin brother of my on-line persona, Frobozz. Davie did give me the best 
laugh that I'd had in months, however; I wrote him but he never answered 
back. I suppose dead men don't send email, neh?
(Oh, and that irony I told you about? It's that he singled me out as 
ringleader when I actually had a very small part in the MiSTing. See, I told 
you not to expect much).<br><br>
     After this event I did grab all 11 chapters of American Kitsune and 
started to MiSTify them -- but that's about when I discovered Web Site #9 and 
the fact that someone had already beaten me to the punch. As I was just doing 
my MSTings out of a perverse desire to put them in an FTP archive to see if 
our bloodhound would sniff them out, I never got past AK#3.<br><br> 
    However, after this, Gonterman always had a special place in my heart. 
It's the same part of my heart that I clogged forever when I ate that 
Greaseburger and fries at the local DQ. I read everything of his which was 
given the ol' SOL treatment and I was rarely disappointed.<br><br>
    It's too bad that he's trying to remove himself from the records. Were 
this me, I'd probably try to embrace my past and use it as a humorous 
touchstone to 'when I didn't know better'. Trying to erase the past only 
makes others work harder to preserve it. Accepting your mistakes and moving 
on -- those are the signs of wisdom. It's too bad Sailor Coyote spent too 
much time hiding the spellchecker and not enough advising Davie, isn't it?
<br><br>
   Peace and love, friends,
Frobozz