The most evil man in the world

There have been many times in my life where I've been wrong - especially when I was a kid. I used to think that Prince sucked. I have since seen the error of my ways (even though I don't count myself as a big fan, I've come to appreciate him.) I used to think that Independence Day was a good movie. I even used to believe that there once was a talking snake. Pretty sure that's wrong.

However, there have been times when I've been so right that I've been practically ahead of my time. A prime example of this was when Michael Bolton used to be a big star. It was my contention that he sucked monkey balls. I submit exhibit A as proof of just how right I was:



Still not convinced? How about this?



How 'bout this shit?



Now, you didn't actually sit all the way through that crap, did you? My apologies if you did - I only expected you to listen to it long enough to realize what horrific crap it was. That should have taken about the first five seconds of the first video.

Years ago, my friend Scott and I created the War on Bolton website, which was basically an Anti-Michael Bolton page - not to be confused with the Anti Michael Bolton Society, of course. The title of the page comes from something that I had said back when he was popular for his "When a Man Loves a Woman" cover. I had said that if he ever did a Beatles tune, I'd personally declare war on him. Of course, he did just such a thing, covering "Yesterday," which is only the most covered Beatles song ever - Mike can't even be original in his unoriginality.

We worked on it when we both had a lot more time on our hands than we do now - not that it really took a lot of time to piece together. Still, I got most of the work done when I was "working" at a cybercafe in San Francisco. Once it was up, it didn't take long for us to start getting some traffic. It even garnered enough attention for me to be interviewed on some internet radio show, and I even got to plug the site on some basic cable show called "Screen Savers."

Most of the feedback, much of it can be seen by viewing the guestbook, was positive. It's pretty cool, because we had people from all over the world check it out. Obviously, traffic has died down considerably, and now we get about one or two messages a year.

Of course, we have had our detractors. Most of them went on about how we obviously didn't have lives, since we had "all this time" to create a website. It's as though they thought we needed to turn a crank all day and hire a staff to keep it up. Once it was there, we pretty much just left it there, with only the odd update here and there.

Some of our detractors were genuine loons, especially a chick named Linda Gallo, who honestly believed that Bolton was reading her messages to Usenet. She compared us to the terrorists - and she wasn't being ironic. She would also talk about how Michael Bolton's security would soon be knocking on our door. Good times. I don't know what she's up to now - probably in the loony bin, I'd bet. (It would be awesome if she posted a comment on this blog!)

Bolton's star has faded - so much so that when he's part of a joke answer on one of my quizzes, many students will ask, "Who's Michael Bolton?" My response to them?

"He's the most evil man who ever lived."

Long live the War on Bolton!!!!!