This morning I’m looking at feeds in my RSS reader and I come across this terse entry from scripting.com:

Don’t you laugh when a literary nobody and venture capitalist uses a word like “stupid” to describe a science fiction giant like Ray Bradury.

The choice phrase “literary nobody” is a link, and I click on it and find myself in the midst of a bunch of comments on some weblog. Scrolling down, I find a comment by Dave Weiner, the author of scripting.com, which starts by dismissing the author of the blog entry he is commenting on as a “literary nobody” and then creates some twisted analogy intended to defend Ray Bradbury.

For those who don’t know, Ray Bradbury has been making quite a stink recently about the title of Michael Moore’s latest movie, “Farenheit 9-11,” an obvious play on Bradbury’s “Farenheit 451,” a book which many of us read as a defense of freedom of speech and the press. We’ll all have to wonder about that interpretation now though, because Bradbury seems to think that, contrary to centuries of literary tradition, no one should be able to borrow or play on the title of someone elses work the way he himself has, with, for example, Walt Whitman’s “i sing the body electric.”

So, Bradbury’s deeply hypocritical snit is reason #1.

Reason #2 is Dave Winer’s defense of Bradbury, which is both lame ( why can’t we call a spade a spade? Literary giant or not, stupid is about the nicest thing one can say about Bradbury’s behavior on this subject ) and insulting. I’ve often seen Weiner complain that people who disagree with him resort to personal attacks. Hard to imagine why.

It seems that Winer may have regretted his comment as he has since removed the link. Still, regrets are one thing, not being a jerk in the first place is quite another.