Mose Varty-Seppanen wrote:Thanks for misunderstanding and for your abrupt and mean response.
Bradley R. Weissenberger wrote: [Based on your post, I do not understand why you would have any expectation of cordiality from me.
Okay, I apologize. In my replies to you I was just reacting instinctively to your aggressive tone. Of course I couldn’t have expected you to be aware of any mitigating circumstances leading me to misunderstand the meaning of your avatar image but, I did start my initial post with an expression of enthusiasm for your friend's quote about Tom Waits. I would've thought that this might've implied at least in some way that I was not posting a reply to your post with any negative intent.
Mose Varty-Seppanen wrote: Bradley, I don't know whether this has been said before by others here and not that it's any of my bid'ness but I hope you won't mind if I offer this opinion: Your latest avatar is really not nice.
No offence intended if she's a member of your family or a loved one.
Then the above couple of sentences to me seemed dumbly blunt sounding. Throw in the use of the colloquial Americanism “bid’ ness” and the obviously absurd reference to her being possibly a family member or loved one, then I assumed the humorous intention was obvious. It turned out that I'd assumed wrongly. Probably all my posts sound dumbly blunt.
Bradley R. Weissenberger wrote:You made it public business. You should have sent a personal message to me like the other few folks who commented on the avatar.
Made it public Business? Jesus! I was trying to make a joke. I initially didn't realize that the avatar was a photo of Terri Schiavo. Please forgive my ignorance but I live in Cyprus and this story received very little coverage here. I don't read newspapers that often because the English language papers show up here a day or so late and are way overpriced and the English language papers published here are utterly crap.
However, I care a little bit that you missed the simple point of this horrible avatar yet still felt compelled to pass judgment.
When you let me know that I'd missed some simple point, I looked at the image again, thought for a few moments trying to figure out what I'd missed. It then occurred to me that this might just possibly be a picture of the women in a persistent vegetative state that I’d remembered hearing mentioned for about ten seconds once or twice on the news here last year. I wasn't actually terribly interested in this story either. You might find that callous, I don't know. I couldn’t recall her name off hand so I searched the phrase “let her die” in AltaVista, found the name, put it in an image search and immediately came across the photo in your avatar.
I initially saw your avatar as a picture of a rather plain woman, in bed with a sort of vacantly happy expression to which you had added the cigarette to humorously imply it was post-coital. I assumed that you had chosen this image simply for its vaguely amusing ugliness. I didn't pick up on its macabre, black humor and possibly offensive aspects and didn’t think that to make a comment about it in jest would illicit the prickly reponse it did from you. I didn't think it seemed like I was passing judgement, I thought I was making conversation with a mild humorous dig. Hence no private message because it seemed unimportant.
Although I don’t have my location next to my user name, I do think you were wrong to automatically assume that either I’m an American who’s alarmingly out of touch with relatively recent American current affairs or else that the Terri Schiavo case was quite the same big noise everywhere else in the world that it was in the U.S.
Anyway, Whatever. I sincerely apologize for any offense I caused you.
Mose Varty-Seppanen wrote:MVS
Bradley R. Weissenberger wrote:That's "MV-S".
Thank you. How silly of me.