Save Some For Us.

August 27, 2002

OK so someone doesn’t like the fact that Soul Train decided to give the Aretha Franklin to Ashanti. So he puts up a petition. Petitions are not particularly effective but they do give people a chance to vent.

But in this case we learned something important about Soul Train. You see Rommel Zamora got a harshly-worded note from Soul Train (Warning: R-Rated language. Backstory and the original email available at Rommel’s site. I’ve provided a text version of the .eml here).

Now just read this note from webmaster@soultrain.com and let me know what’s wrong with it:

As for the, grossly, uninformed moron who came up with the, totally crude and clumsy, idea to initiate his own hate campaign and Internet rock-throwing attack against a perfectly honest, time tested and time honored process, which he very obviously has no knowledge or understanding of, whatsoever, we urge you to cease and desist from your malignant abuse and misuse of the services being provided by www.petitiononline.com and to, immediately, take steps, with the help and support of all Ashanti petition signers, to open your own Internet website, which should, appropriately, be entitled, “I’m a fucking loser, I’m not talented or successful, I don’t know shit about the music industry and I need to get a motherfucking life!!”

That’s right. Far far too many commas. Soul Train is a comma hog. A punctuation wastrel. In all things comma completely un-green. It’s the same case on this page which I’ve reproduced here in case it disappears:

It is our view that (with the exception of the majority of such e-mails received, which are in, full, support of our position) all such e-mailers should, not only be concerned but outraged, over the fact that a people, whose ancestry suffered 400 years of slavery, can be herded, so easily, into a, virtually, bottomless mud hole and be taught to sling such mud therein, on command, at parties who, essentially, mean them no harm, whatsoever.

Indeed, we at Soultrain.com, are very saddened to learn that, during an age when suicide terrorists have been able to level skyscrapers, in America, more than eighteen-thousand (18,000) mud-slinging, petition signers and a handful of, hateful and negative, e-mail writers, have nothing better to do with the precious time they all have left on Earth.

May we take this opportunity to make it very clear, that during an era when a number of Internet Web sites are visited or clicked onto by tens of millions of persons, worldwide, every single month and many, many TV outlets are viewed by tens of millions of viewers each day and each week, eighteen-thousand (18,000) responses to anything, on the worldwide Internet, cannot and must not be construed, in a relative sense, as a large number.

Just look at those commas! That’s quite an abundance of commas. There are so many commas there Soul Train hasn’t even left any for me. And that’s sad because it makes sentences really difficult to read for both of us. (I momentarily experimented with using apostrophes instead of commas but then realized I was robbing perfectly respectable possessives of their much needed punctuation. For without apostrophes who could tell a possessive from a plural. No one thats who. )

So let us all hope that Soul Train gets off the back of Rommel and white-owned BET and also lays off the commas. Because we, bloggers, desperately need, all, the commas, we can, get.

Posted in Music