Bobbi And The Marketdroids

Got another one. This one purports to be a quality-based search engine/listing service for blogs and they sent me a burbly letter with made-up words of either praise or slur (couldn't tell from context) for my little petroglyph-boulder of screeds with plenty of bizzaroid robotic-looking touches tellin' me to sign up now and expect scads, scads, scads of traffic. When I replied with a short note, the first paragraph of which read "No," in its entirety, why, they wrote right back with even more BS and puffery.

Okay, jerk: Get. Lost. You just set your bar to near-infinite height. I'm a big fan of capitalism but by Rand and Barnum, effing content-light salesmanship infuriates me. I'm not buying you, I'm not gonna be signin' up 'cos you are so effing charming or clever, or because I like the color of the product or even that it is a fridge or truck or vacuum cleaner with a leather-upholstered humidor; if I wanted a humidor, I would read up about them on the Web and go buy one. Prolly online.

Just gimme the info and step the hell back. Fine, fine, wear a nice suit; I'd appreciate it if you were well-groomed and if the brochure photographs were nicely-composed and on glossy, heavy paper, but gimme a chance to get good notion of the actual product; let me decide if it does anything I want at a price I'm willing to pay.

Or, shucks, go ahead, work your supersalesmanship on me. Schmooze and emote and prattle all you like.

And lose the sale.
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My little, small-time blog is a little, small-time blog. Years ago, there was a big dustup over big ideas in Comments here and I was chided for choosin' friendship over ideological purity. A guy who should know pointed out this blog would never amount to much.

Well, tough. I'll continue to make the same choice the same way. It's a huge world, filled with people who (IMHHO) mostly have the wrong slant on things, but I can get along with most of 'em and when I am forced to chose, I prefer to stick with folks I know or have general reasons to like over persons with whom I have little in common other than aspects of our political philosophy.

If, as some Deeeeeeeeep Thinkers avow, "everything we do is politics," put me down as a member of the tolerating-your-weirdness-if-you'll-tolerate-mine party. --Or tolerating it as long as you leave off hard-selling me what I don't know that I want and doubt I can use, anyway.
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Update: an excerpt from an e-mail received from another marketdroid this morning:

I think a guest blog post that illuminates the the advancement of our understanding of childhood development would be interesting for your audience. If you're interested, I would love to write something for you and perhaps start a friendly dialogue. What do you think?

I think that would be just peachy -- if you will let me redecorate your bedroom, on your dime, in, oh, "Early Spanish Inquisition." And do up your front garden to match.

This is my blog. I don't do "guest posts." Go getcher own, they're free. Y'know what ain't free? The few eyeballs that look at this blog -- who arrive here not expecting some blather on childhood development from a stranger. "Childhood development?" Not my baliwick. They're little monsters, savages, barbarians. I avoid them. I'm grateful some small fraction of parents (like you!) can rear 'em up so they become civilized but really, until they're like 25, 30, 35, if it was up to me, I wouldn't even bother to name 'em and I don't much care to interact with them unless they are really good at being proper Victorian children: quiet, well-behaved and out of the way, a bit less bother than a cat.

Fates alone know what kinda pre-version these people might actually be huckstering, that they want on my blog to do it. Surely it can't be anything proper or decent.