Buttock-Stab Gangs Target U.S. Cities!

Okay, full transparency: This special auxiliary Sunday Gene Pool has nothing to do with “buttock-stab gangs.” There are no buttock-stab gangs, as far as I know. The reason I wrote it is because I am in a bit of a snark exchange with my Substack guru, Biff Wellington, who expressed the opinion that my LAST Sunday special auxiliary Gene Pool would have gotten even more eyeballs if I had had a more exciting and provocative headline on it than “Sunday? Funday!” Is this one exciting and provocative enough for you, Biff? Let’s see how this one hits.

No, today, as in all special auxiliary Gene Pools, I am writing to beg for your questions to use in Tuesday’s Gene Pool; and, like all Gene Pools asking for something, I am going to be giving something back.

We’ve had great luck with prior calls for your Most Humiliating Moments, and Large and Small Questions about the meaning of life, and those subjects will be forever open and live. Today’s additional question is:

Do you have a pet peeve, something that really annoys you, but that, when you really think about it, is kinda petty and grumpy and even a little shameful? In my case it involves cashiers — the nicest kind, the kind who make it their job to know their repeat customers and engage in cheerful and witty banter during the transaction, brightening their days. I find myself resenting these pleasant people because I am further back in line and they are delaying my transaction with pointless smalltalk, dadgummit. For the same reason, I dislike people ahead of me in line at the post office who want to buy stamps, and care what kind of pretty pictures are on the stamps, and want to see samples of what’s available.

Please send in your offerings here, today or Monday. If you fail to send any in, I will sic the Buttock-Stab Gangs to your city or town.

In return for your kindness, here’s my giveback for today, based on a reader question that just came in.

Q: Would you like telling us the story of the time you got in an edit war on Wikipedia because the picture in your article was too ugly? I think that would be a hilarious story to tell here.

A: Delighted to, I had almost forgotten it. Here is my old column, improved and updated. It was titled Dear Wikipedia: Please Change My Photo….

---

I am not a handsome man. Here is the caricature of me that generally accompanies this column, drawn by Eric Shansby

It depicts a comically disheveled, mop-headed, pasty-faced, clueless, pudgy, bulb-nosed schnook, and it is actually quite flattering. In short, I am under no illusions about my appearance. Stretching mightily for kindness, a reporter from Texas who once profiled me said my hair belonged to someone “with a complete lack of vanity.”

But I have a small vanity problem now. It involves the photograph that accompanies the Wikipedia page about me. As I write this, it has been there for more than a year, despite my persistent and occasionally devious efforts to delete it. The photo was taken six years ago at a public event after I had been walking around for three hours in the hot sun, still feeling the effects of double knee-replacement surgery, pain etched in whatever facial features remained after swelling up from meds and bed immobility. I was distended and sweaty and scabrous and pink. It is not a good photograph, even for me.

I asked some of my friends to describe it. My editor, Tom the Butcher, said I resembled "a wheel of overripe cheese." My friend Pat Myers said I looked like "Super Mario's mug shot after the crack raid." My comic-strip collaborator Horace LaBadie instantly linked me to a photo of "Siku, the runny-nosed walrus" who had been cured by veterinarians of a parasitic infection that caused her to ooze quarts of snot. Rachel Manteuffel said I am a Muppet, specifically "the Swedish chef after a squid-explosion mishap." (Remember these are my friends.)

I tried asking Wikipedia to change or delete this picture. No answer. So I did what any user can do, and deleted it myself, on seven occasions — which, yes, was in blatant and shameful contravention of all Wikimedia Commons policies blah, blah, blah. (One is evidently not allowed to alter one’s own entry.) But my change kept getting nullified by administrators. The picture kept crawling back, indestructible, like the hissing cockroach it is. Finally I started begging, leaving pathetic pleas for administrators in the Wiki “history” pages, exposing my soul to the army of earnest 17-year-old volunteer Wiki cops out there. In return, I got lectures on proper user behavior.

If I am not vain, why do I care about this photo? It is mostly because I use my Wikipedia page as a shorthand bio. Sometimes, if I am trying to coax a reluctant person to talk to me about something I am writing, I will link to my profile. It’s a pretty accurate description of me, for better or worse. I don’t want these people wondering if I am also a bloated corpse that has just been fished out of a lagoon. (Or Khalid Sheik Mohammed, rousted from hiding, in custody, also photographed on a bad day. That was the image my artist chose. )

So here we are. My last resort, in the pages of The Washington Post.

With luck, some kindly Wikipedia administrator is going to kill the photo and maybe substitute another, one in which I am merely conventionally ugly. But it is also possible that this column will serve as a clarion call to every smart aleck and wisenheimer and cyber-vandal out there. Anyone can make ephemeral changes to my Wikipedia page, any time.

I considered that before writing this column. I don’t particularly want to spend a week being depicted as Yoda or Donald Trump or the Selfie Monkey or Steve Buscemi’s foot. But what the heck. The truth is, they’d be improvements.

Postscript: They changed it. I am now merely conventionally ugly.

See you on Tuesday. Please send in peevy stuff, and other things, now. I will use the best of them. This is the same button as above:

Or share this post.

Or help us out, with a pittance.

Or comment below.