riverman wrote:

BTW, what's happening with GetLost mag? Leslie seems to be napping a
lot
these days.

There is a new issue of GetLost out, which features "Life in the
Congo, Part V" by one of my favorite contributors.

http://www.getlostmagazine.com/

Poor Leslie has had her hand full for the past couple of weeks. Some
bat aficionados on the Yahoo newsgroup World Bat Line discovered the
bat fishing parody in the previous issue of GetLost

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/worldbatline/

The World Bat-liners disseminated a campaign to deluge Leslie with
letters of complaint. Actually, they tried to deluge me with letters of
complaint, but their e-mails were directed to Leslie, who forwarded the
most irrational of them along to me. The letters were about evenly
divided between bat folk who believed that bat fishing was an actual
sport and bat people who thought that the ill informed general public
was ignorant enough to believe that bat fishing was an actual sport.
All agreed that I was a horrible person.

Leslie of course has managed to turn this lemon into lemonade, and a
forthcoming issue of GetLost will likely be the special Bat Issue.
Perhaps she'll run my response to the letters of complaint in that
issue. I tried to be gentle and diplomatic in responding, but being
called an "American republican asshole Bush-ite" by some overly
sensitive English sissyboy was too much.

My response in part:

**

The Editor at GetLost has forwarded me many of the letters she has
received complaining about the Chiroptera Fishing parody, and I have
visited the controversy on the World Bat Line on Yahoo Groups.

The bat fishing satire may have been funny, or maybe not (one man's
humor is another's cause for apoplectic rage), but that anyone could
have mistaken it for anything but tongue-in-cheek given the abundance
of verbal and photographic clues is funnier still. Let's recount:
photos obviously taken in broad daylight...references to "licensed"
Chiroptera guides, wedging a thumb in the bat's mouth to facilitate
removing the hook, being checked for histo and cirrhosis, Northern
Long-eared bats renown for their fight, the bat anglers traditional
Guinness....

Despite the obvious over-the-top nature of the piece many of the
complainants swallowed the story hook, line and sinker ("I shall be
looking into exactly where this is happening and make sure county
and/or state authorities are notified"). Others less certain that bat
fishing was in fact a "fast growing sport in the mid-Atlantic
region" took pains to caution "the general public is not very
bright". Oh silver-footed irony, stealing to explode a laugh at
one's feet.

You may have noted that Dave's e-mail response explained that the
reference to him was a joke about a Pallid bat that latched onto his
thumb when we were mist-netting bats in Arizona in 1988. Perhaps I
should further explain that my first exposure to bat conservation was
more than 30 years ago, researching bat populations in West Virginia
caves in 1973; I wonder how many of the bat aficionados enraged by this
parody could have spelled "bat" in 1973, even if they had been
given the A and the T and helped to make the "BUH" sound.

However well deserved my spanking may have been (oh, harder, harder!)
the writer who accused me of being an "American republican asshole
Bush-ite" went too far, and I demand satisfaction.

Vernier calipers at twenty paces at dawn!

**

The whole brouhaha was vaguely reminiscent of some rbp responses to the
Paddler Saved By Bacon parody.

(Hey Myron, send me your current snail mail address - I have
something for you as the African representative of the Menacing
Duckheads)