As you may or may not know, on Thursday I had a lengthy surgery. I returned home a few minutes before the Sabbath began and, still in serious pain and against my wife’s nudging, sat down in front of my computer and logged on.
I’m sure that know what’s coming next. You should have listened to your wife!
My wife’s argument was that there was nothing important that couldn’t wait til Saturday night — after the Sabbath. The truth is, she didn’t know the half of it.
I admit to being a news junkie. The guy that I shared my room with had CNN on. I listened. I knew, more or less, what was going on in the world. The reason I wanted to logon, though, was to check my e-mail; to see how many folks missed the main site I publish not being updated on Friday and how many wished me success with my operation and healing. After all, it gets lonely sitting in a basement. While you can monitor how many folks visit your site and access your articles, there really is a missing human element to living much of the day in cyberspace. Simply put: I wanted to see who cared.
About that apology …
Instead of finding the mail I desired, I opened one letter after another wishing me to die and to do things to my body that I care not mention here. This, mind you, as my body was being put at risk during surgery.
What triggered this flood of hate?
I run three sites: JewishWorldReview.com, JWisdom.com (in beta) that offers daily “Godcasts” that are linked on JWR and the mega-blog, PoliticalMavens.com It was this site, that was the source of the hate.
While I was hospitalized, mysteriously, the PoliticalMavens site started sending out newsletters at the rate of one a minute. A few readers claimed they received a thousand copies.
Instead of contacting the hosting company to alert them, they CC-ed me on letters sent to various ISPs (Internet Service Providers) telling them that I’m a spammer. That I was purposely harming them and that they should see to it that I’m shut down.
Yes, if I was being deludged by unwanted e-mail, I’d be furious.
But Maybe it’s just my nature to give folks the benefit of the doubt. I’d wonder why, pray tell, would a site that WANTS readers purposely anger them? More importantly, why would people, who gain daily from a site, not recognize a technology glitch for what it is/was? Yes, BE ANGRY, but be destructive?????
So, yes, I apologize. Although I’m not sure these wonderful people will even be reading this note.
In the mean time, we have stopped the Political Mavens daily newsletter.
Today, is my father’s firstyahrtzeit, anniversary of death. It is a day of special merit for his soul. If you can, please do an extra act of kindness in the merit and memory of Yehuda ben-Leib Hirsch. This could be holding a door open when you are being rushed, not getting angry when you are justified, wishing somebody a “good morning” or “good night” — basically, anything you feel comfortable doing. It would mean so much to me — and will benefit
my dad.
