I recently wrote this blog about the 1975 TV version of Tom & Jerry — which I abhor, especially compared to the fully animated classics that preceded it. In the blog, I mentioned a T&J fan who has taken the exact opposite stance. He has devoted a comprehensive website to the ’75 T&J series, and he makes it clear that he prefers the later TV version of the duo over the earlier theatrical cartoons.
I really seem to have set this guy off. He left me a long message at the end of my blog about how he would defend this series to the end, and he did the same thing on Facebook (where I had left a link to my T&J blog). Apparently, I have deeply offended this man, and I just want to say:
It’s only my opinion.
We all, happily, have the right to like or dislike whatever we want without having to face a firing squad because of our choices. There are people who absolutely adore cole slaw, while to me, it looks, smells, and tastes like cardboard covered with a garish amount of mayonnaise. Some might agree with me, but does that make it a fact? Of course not. It’s an opinion. And if you want to ruin a good hamburger by placing it next to a side of drippy cole slaw, that’s your prerogative.
A while back, I wrote this blog about opinions. One of the things that our currently divided country forgets is that it’s okay to disagree. I did not create a campaign to wipe out the TV version of Tom & Jerry for good. I didn’t deface the guy’s website. I merely said that I disagree with it. End of story.
When the movie Monty Python’s Life of Brian was first released and caused an uproar among the ultra-religious, film critic Gene Siskel gave a rave review to the movie on his TV series (the one with Roger Ebert) and said, “I feel bad having to defend it…Do [religious leaders] think people who have deep, personal religious faith will have that faith shaken by a 90-minute movie? How shallow. How patronizing. How insulting to people of faith.”
I think that applies to all such disagreements. Opinions are opinions. Don’t feel as though you have to give the Internet the scorched-earth treatment to defend your favorite book, movie, whatever. If you don’t agree, let it be.
So, would you like to know how technologically inept I am?
One weekend in Feb. 2019, my computer had an Internet connection, but I couldn’t get anything to come up on my computer screen. As is the way of all non-savvy computer nerds, I quickly deduced that the best way to get everything going again on my screen was to purge everything I could think of. By mistake, that included the user ID and password of my WordPress account.
When I tried to get back into my WordPress account, WordPress asked me for my user ID and password. I had forgotten my password long ago (I only use a few thousand of them), and the user ID was an email account that I had deleted long ago after it got hacked. WordPress informed me that, unless I could send them an email message from my user ID’s account, they would not be able to send me a new password, and therefore, I would be locked out of my own account.
And so it went. My access to four-and-a-half years of blogging and several hundred blog subscribers were suddenly locked behind bars. (I imagined hearing a loud “cha-ching!” from the TV series “Law & Order.”)
So I’ve decided to try and make lemonade out of my WordPress lemons. I am resuming my blogging career on this “sequel” blog.
Of course, I still have a “history” of previous blogging that I’d like to reference on occasion. So be forewarned that now, I will often hyperlink to my previous blog. For example, if I’m writing about Charlie Chaplin, and I want to reference a Chaplin movie review from my old blog, I will link to it like this. So please note that, obviously, if you go to that hyperlink, you will have to press the “Back” button on your computer keyboard in order to return to this “sequel” blog.
If, by chance, you know anyone who followed my previous blog but is not aware of my current situation, please let them know so that I can restore some of my old readership. And of course, please feel free to return to and reference my previous blog, whose URL is listed on the masthead of this blog.
Thank you for bearing with me through a quite troublesome situation.
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