Correspondence from an Idiot

Posted by Ben @ July 9th, 2010 2:00 am. Filed under: Oh Yeah? Let's See You Write A Better Petition!,Unreasonable Demands,Wait a minute... this isn't a petition! — Tags: Mr Francis Guidera —

What is the world coming to when a couple of Honest Joes like me and Andrew can’t even mock someone’s intellectual level without being threatened with lawsuits, eh? Last week I received a wonderful email from Frank Guidera, whom you may recall objected to people objecting to the visit from the Grand Master Paedophile himself. Here’s the email:

To: Ben Paddon
From: Frank Guidera
Subject: Your remarks on your But Sir website.

I just googled my name, for fun, only to find you have my name on your website, remarking on my rejected petition.

I demand that you remove my name from your website, because your website claims by it’s title that I, as someone listed on your website, am under-educated, which in more simple terms means you are accusing me of being not educated enough to form a valid opinion, essentially saying I am stupid.

I am going to speak to a union solicitor on Monday, and will find out if I can sue you for deformation. I am happy not to take this course of action if you have removed my name and links to my rejected petition from your website by 23:59 on Friday 9th of July 2010. If not, I will attempt to take legal action against you and will seek damages.

Fun fact – I live in the US, which is also where this website is hosted. I forget about the specifics of the UK’s archaic libel laws, but here in the US you can’t claim libel based on someone else’s opinion, whether the opinion is factually based or not. So when I express my opinion that Mr Guidera is a slaw-jawed dunderninny and that this email only serves to underline his inherent dunderninnity… well, there’s really not a lot he can do.

Still, I decided to talk some reason into him. Sort of.

To: Frank Guidera
From: Ben Paddon
Subject: RE: Your remarks on your But Sir website.

Hello Frank.

The title of our website is “But, Sir…”, which to me doesn’t seem to be implying or suggesting anything. Yes, alright, our slogan is “We the undereducated petition the Prime Minister…” which is a sort of a pun, or play on words.

You’re also rounding down “undereducated” to mean stupid, which is a little bit silly. I mean, I myself am comparatively undereducated when you consider the jobs I’ve held over the last few years. I mean, Project Coordinator for the broadcast division of a large multi-billion dollar entertainment company? I got a D for my Mathematics G.C.S.E, for Glod’s sake. Such things should not be allowed to happen, but there we are.

While you’re at it you may want to consider talking to your solicitor for me concerning McDonald’s “I’m lovin’ it” slogan. I’ve been to McDonalds and I didn’t “love it” at all. Indeed, I found their food to be barely tolerable. If you’d run that by him to see if I have a potential case I’d be very grateful.

Turrah!
~Ben

He wasn’t happy with that at all.

To: Ben Paddon
From: Frank Guidera
Subject: RE: RE: Your remarks on your But Sir website.

Your URL is wetheundereducated.com

Your statement at the top of the webpage says, we the undereducated petition the Prime Minister to…

And your ‘about this site’…

The British Government, bless their little cotton socks, have a website where any member of the public alert enough to operate a computer can start an online petition to the Prime Minister. This blog charts the dumbest of them, as they are submitted.

All of this indicates that you have picked out what you feel are petitions by people who are ‘alert enough to operate a computer’ and have submitted the dumbest ones.

I have asked nicely. I am now contacting your hosting provider, to complain that your site that they are hosting attacks me personally, and many others too. The last time I had to do this for some colleagues that a customer decided to publicly insult, the website was down within 24 hours and the user was banned.

You can always beat me to it and take it down yourself, You may not think this is serious, but hopefully your hosting provider will see things differently.

Enjoy the rest of your day.

Oh, shit. Frank has actually had sites taken down before. He means business.

To: Frank Guidera
From: Ben Paddon
Subject: RE: RE: RE: Your remarks on your But Sir website.

Hey Frank.

I have to ask: Did you watch last week’s Doctor Who? It’s airing two weeks behind here in the US but everybody back home who’s seen it tells me it was the dog’s bollocks. WHich is good. I had my doubts about Matt Smith but he’s been fantastic this series and I can’t wait to see what else he’s capable of.

Anyway, back to business.

I’ve been doing a little research in the ladybird Big Book of Law, and it turns out that what we’re doing on our precious little website is based on what lawyerticians like to call “opinion”. The great thing about opinion is that everybody is entitled to one. So if I think, for example, that your petition about giving Christians the right to discriminate against homosexuals is dumb then I’m well within my rights to say so! Isn’t that grand?

That said, I did get that information from a book. I inherently distrust books (did you know books outnumber us 35,000-to-one? It’s true! I read about it in a… waaaaait a minute…) so I’m inclined to want to run this one by our legal council, Sgt. Andrew Theodore Taylor (Retired), whom I have copied in on this email. He’ll probably be asleep right now as it’s the start of July, but he’s usually awake by the 5th or 6th. Then begins his grueling hike up Ben Nevis to plant a single flower for his fallen comrades in World War II, which he claims ended in 1957. That always seemed odd to me, but then he does have medals, and he tells some strange, oddly-specific stories about the war that don’t quite line up with reality. Although, he was born in the 70s. I’ve never really asked him about that, nor about that strange device he keeps locked away in his legal cabinet…

…Anyway, I’m sure you’ve got a lot more Googling to do, so I’ll leave you to it.

Take care!
~Ben

Andrew’s still a lawyer, but now he’s a time-travelling soldier. It’s true! Or maybe I made it up. Honestly, it’s difficult to keep track. Despite that wonderful email, Frank was undeterred:

To: Ben Paddon
From: Frank Guidera
Subject: RE: RE: RE: RE: Your remarks on your But Sir website.

Done and done.

Contacted your hosting provider with my complaint.

Now, you have a top 10 list of people posting petitions. Some might say that is stalking… I certainly wouldn’t be comfortable with someone monitoring my postings to a government website purely to take the proverbial out of me on another website. Stalking is definitely is against the t’s and c’s of IX Webhosting. And then there is the defamation. That is also against the t’s and c’s of IX Webhosting.

You have posted many defamatory remarks… and I quote your website…

One word: Vigilantism. That one word (five syllables, eleven letters) is reason enough not to put this information out in the public.

I think the government should give out the details of everyone who posts a stupid petition on the ePetition page, for “lawful safety reasons”. I mean, what if they’re going to do something stupid that could cause me harm? By putting these palpably idiotic peoples’ details out there I can be sure to avoid them and thus avoid injury.

Mmm… so the petitions you select are some of the dumbest, therefore the persons posting them are ‘palpably idiotic people’.

Now, it’s late here in blighty, and I can’t spend the rest of my evening chit chatting with you on here. I am sure you are busy too, managing trillion dollar projects whilst entertaining the masses at the expense of others.

See, you forget, we British folk are ALL masters of sarcasm. And whilst it is the lowest form of wit, for some reason, we all seem to get a kick out of it, don’t we?

It was great chatting with you, but from this point onwards, let’s not waste each other’s time any further. I have asked, you have replied with sarcasm, I have contacted your hosting provider, now it’s up to them.

Yes, it is up to them. And considering Frank emailed them on July 3rd (the date the above email was sent) and they’ve yet to contact me about it, I’m going to go ahead and assume that our wonderful hosts – IX Webhosting, should you be curious – have decided not to uphold Frankie’s claim on the grounds that he is quite evidently two letters short of a Countdown Conundrum.

Still! I had one more reply for him:

To: Frank Guidera
From: Ben Paddon
Subject: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: Your remarks on your But Sir website.

Sarcasm? I think you’ll find what i was doing was banter, sir. As a Brit myself, I was trained from the age of 2 to spot the difference.

Incidentally that list is a number of the Top Ten people we’ve mentioned on our site. It’s automatically generated based on the number of times a post is tagged with a person’s name. If that’s stalking then what do you call it when I peer through the window of the people over in apartment 309?

Enjoy your weekend. It’s July 4th tomorrow and my building is right next to the park where they’ll be doing a fireworks display, so I don’t expect to get much done.

Love and kisses,
~Ben

It’s been nearly a week and I’ve not heard from him. Presumably his team of Big City Hot Shot Lawyers™ are putting a case together as we speak.

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