In my review of “The Ant Bully,” I cracked a joke about how the wasps “should have had snooty New Hampshire accents — you know, WASPs.” I shouldn’t be surprised that EVERYTHING can be offensive to someone, but I wasn’t expecting this kind of response….

Dear Eric,

Thank you for writing the review on this movie. It was helpful.

However, I resent your comment made about those “snooty New Hampsire accents.” Please, this was really not necessary. Make your review and stick to that, as you do well. However, when you throw slander, bias and prejudice to an entire state, you just offend people.

As you pointed out in your review about that movie, there were certain elements that didn’t even need to be there. Do the right thing and remove the crass remarks about the people who live in the state of New Hampsire. They just don’t need to be there.

Thank you,

Bill
Wakefield, NH

Dumbfounded that someone could actually be bothered by such an innocuous remark, I replied:

This is a joke, right? You weren’t ACTUALLY offended by my reference to “snooty New Hampshire accents,” right?

Bill from New Hampshire responded:

Offended? To be honest, it takes a lot to really offend me. So I’m not going to say I was offended when I really didn’t take it personally. But, I did think it could have gone without saying. I don’t know you, and you don’t know me. So given that you write a public article like that, and me not knowing the author well, I just thought it was a out-of-place. Any link of a general population as ’snooty’ or to a click of people called “WASP”s is just not really needed. I don’t like that association personally.

Please consider this nothing more than a friendly request to remove or alter those remarks. There are no threats that I would ever attach to such a request or ever will. It’s completely in your court to do anything as you see fit.

I personally would just like to see the comments removed.

Thank you for your response and your consideration on this. And thank you for the movie article. I hope to see this movie with a couple of special young girls in my life this week.

Bill seemed like a nice enough guy, but I just couldn’t figure out what the big deal was. I responded:

Well, I was going off the fact that there ARE a lot of snooty WASPs in New Hampshire. That’s not to say all New Hampshire residents fit that description, just that it’s a common perception with some validity. The reader will read it and think, “Yeah, I know what he’s talking about.” Someone might make reference to a “hick Kentucky accent” or a “surfer dude California accent.” And the people in those areas, if they are honest, would say, “Yep, there are a lot of people around here who talk like that.”

I guess it just goes to show that no matter how benign a joke is, there’s always someone, somewhere, who will be bothered by it…

His next reply began to shed light on what the big deal was:

In your comments, you mention WASPs, as the acronym to associate to the insect. Clever association, but you linked in my state there with the acronym. Do you understand what WASP stands for and what they did? The acronym stands for While Anglo-Saxon Protestant. It was a group that frequently touted that the “white race” was the supreme race. They were racists. They also had ties with the KKK.

Although I may fit the physical description of WASP, I certainly don’t care for anything this group stood for. Put in the word “NAZI” v.s. “WASP” and the connotation that goes along with that, and you get the feeling a New Hampshire person might get by being associated with that group.

Ahhhhhh. I replied:

It sounds like the whole problem here stems from a misunderstanding of the meaning of the word “WASP.” I don’t think the general association most people have with that term is the same as yours, i.e., the racists, KKK, etc. I think most people, when they hear “WASP,” just think of white, upper-middle-class Americans. I can see why you would object so much to the term if its connotation for you is racism, but truly, I don’t think that’s how most people take the term.

And his reply:

I assure you that I have no misunderstanding of the meaning of the word wasps as in “W.A.S.P.”s. Which is the association you make in your review. You are a little younger than myself, and so for your generation, that may be the case. Ask the opinion of those you may know, who are 10 years older or more than you, if they would mind that association, and you might get a different viewpoint than the one you have.

It is an acronym as I have already stated for this group. And although to your generation, you may not be aware of this group, those older than you are very much aware. There are some people that still adhere to this belief system.

In any case, I promised that I would not really put anything further on this request and I am not. You have made your decision. Just adding more to the dialog and information.

On a side, it may prove to be an interesting social experiment. To see who reacts in what way to this verbiage. In talking with a younger lady last night, she had no idea what WASPs meant. This adds to your viewpoint, and also to mine.

All right, folks, I’m putting it to you. When you hear “WASP,” do you think of racism or the KKK? Or do you just think of Eleanor Roosevelt? (Well, maybe not her specifically, but that type: white, upper-class, maybe snooty.) I’m perfectly willing to be wrong about this. If the term has a different connotation, a much more negative one, than I’m familiar with, I’d like to know about it.

About a month ago, I wrote a brief blog item on the show “So You Think You Can Dance?” Included in my remarks was this paragraph:

The name “Jaymz” is such a trainwreck that I think if I ever met him, I would only want to slap him. However, I found some unexpected glee on his bio page on the show’s Web site. First, in his own words: “My girlfriend was diagnosed with a disease called ‘Endometriosis.’ ” The disease is capitalized and in quotation marks because evidently Jaymz thinks it is a title. “Endometriosis! The Musical,” perhaps. Second, his girlfriend’s name is Mekenna. I bet it’s pronounced the same as McKenna, but spelled differently because her parents thought it would be cute. Did you know that having a dumbly spelled name is one of the leading causes of “Endometriosis”? How does that make you feel, Mr. and Mrs. Mekenna’s Parents?

Well, guess what. Yesterday I got a MySpace message from Jaymz himzelf! (Why a MySpace message instead of an e-mail? I can only guess it’s because he didn’t want me to have his e-mail address.) Here is what it says:

So my girlfriend thought it’d be cute to google our names together and guess what popped up! Your blog! Amazing right? Thanks for taking the time to write about us. Aren’t we beautiful? We can’t help it. And I thought Eric was spelled Erik. hmmm….Maybe your parents thought it’d be cute to add a c at the end instead of a k because then you would come before the other Erik’s on the roll call in school for sure! Maybe they thought it’d make you feel special and lets be honest you are pretty “special”. And anytime you wanna meet me in real life to slap me in the face let me know because I’d love to let you. From what I hear, writers are really good fighters. Well my friend, PEACE OUT!!!

Regards,
Jaymz and Mekenna
(That’s prounounced James and Mckenna if you didn’t understand)

Good for Jaymz, responding to my snotty blog item with more snottiness! He could use some work on his form — “Eric” isn’t exactly an uncommon spelling of the name, and in fact is far more common than “Erik” — but I admire his moxie! It’s a shame that being named Jaymz, no one will ever, ever take him seriously.

There is some question as to this really being Jaymz who wrote to me, though. The tenor of the message sounds right, but the MySpace page it came from says that Jaymz is only 14 years old. Profiles for users that young are not viewable unless the user accepts you as a friend. Is Jaymz fibbing about his age in order to keep his account closed to the general public? Or is this someone who merely WANTS to be Jaymz and is already acting as if he were? Creeeee-py!

‘Twas a swell birthday I had Saturday, a swell birthday indeed. To my Jehovah’s Witness friends, of whom I have none, let me say that you don’t know what you’re missing.

The morning mail arrived with two items. One was an envelope bearing a card accompanied by a check for a generous sum of money. This was from my parents. The other was a large package from my friend Lisa Valentine Clark, member of the Garrens Comedy Troupe (back in the day) and a funny, lovely woman. The package contained: a box of Wheat Thins, a box of Chocolate Fudge Pop-Tarts, a bag of Oreos, a container of the Wal-Mart store brand of little chocolate donuts, and a loaf of Grandma Sycamore’s white bread. You wonder what these items have in common, and it is this: They are my very favorite TV-watchin’ foods! Lisa Valentine Clark has watched countless hours of TV with me, so she knows which snacks I favor.

(You are perhaps also thinking: Grandma Sycamore’s white bread? What, does Eric just sit there and eat plain, unadorned bread, right out of the bag? The answer is yes, yes he does. It is delicious. And to both predict and answer you next question, yes, the Wal-Mart store brand of little chocolate donuts is my favorite, even better than Hostess. They are fresh, moist, and have just a hint of dark chocolate. They are divine.)

At 11 a.m., I had lunch at Typhoon in downtown Portland with my friend Rob. I had rarely eaten Thai food before Rob started making me do it a year or so ago, and now I like it very much. I like it especially when someone else is paying for it. And I believe it is best to eat at Typhoon as often as possible now, before a massively destructive typhoon strikes someone in the world, kills thousands, and renders the restaurant’s name distasteful.

Later in the afternoon, I paid a visit to my friend and movie-critic colleague Dawn Taylor. Dawn used to be a pastry chef, and she had kindly volunteered to bake me a birthday cake, from scratch, using the finest recipe she could discover. I gave her only my very basic cake guidelines — chocolate, and no nuts of any kind — and off she went.

The finished product was a devil’s food item, and to reiterate, it was made completely by hand from scratch. It is without hyperbole that I say it was the single most delightful thing I have ever put in my mouth. Moist (but not too moist), dense (but not too dense), chocolatey (but not too sweet), and baked to complete perfection. I wish I could share it with all of you. In fact, the next day, when it was gone due to my eating it and sharing it with others, I wished, addict-like, that I could have more, more, MORE of it. Regardless of what sins Dawn may have committed in her life — and boy howdy, that’s a long list — I am confident she will go to heaven despite them, based solely on the merits of this cake.

I enjoyed a slice with Dawn and her husband, then went to dinner with my friends Mark & Mark (but not the Funky Bunch). They had left choosing the restaurant to me, and as they are both prosperous and generous, I knew the sky was the limit, menu-wise. Yet I am a man with simple tastes. In discussing our dining options with Mark, I said, “You know, I actually would really just like to go to the Outback, but I’m afraid you’ll make fun of me. You guys are all hip and trendy, and the Outback is so ordinary. Are you going to mock me behind my back? ‘Oh, the Outback? What, was Olive Garden closed? Couldn’t get a reservation at Red Lobster?’” Mark assured me that such was not the case, and that he and Mark sometimes eat at the Outback themselves (but not, I am given to understand, Olive Garden or Red Lobster).

It was a fine, steaky dinner at Outback, and then we went home to eat more of Dawn’s cake, then to digest a bit before heading out for a night on the town, the town in this case being Portland.

Somewhere in all that, my parents and my sister and one of my brothers called. Two other brothers and a sister were in absentia, though I’m sure their birthday wishes for me were implied. A few friends called with greetings, while others e-mailed or sent MySpace messages. The friends who failed to remember it was my birthday, despite my having remembered theirs, will forever live in the toxic cloud of my smugness.

But truly, it’s nice to feel loved and appreciated now and then, to have all these people in your life, some of whom only flit in and out occasionally, step up one day out of the year and make you feel all fuzzy inside. It is also nice when they mail you food, or make food for you, or take you to a restaurant and pay for your food.

In March 2004, Eric D. Snider’s “Snide Remarks” relaunched as an online humor column, available only to subscribers. People actually had to PAY to read it. What’s shocking is not that Eric pulled such a stunt, but that people actually went along with it.

But now, after 2 1/2 years of exclusivity, the gates have been flung open and “Snide Remarks” is once again FREE, completely and totally. That includes access to the archives. That includes all future columns. Even if someone comes along and tells Eric, “I will pay you to write this column,” Eric will say NO. “Snide Remarks” is meant to be free, available to all people at all times. Eric is thiiiiis close to being a socialist.

Maybe you were once a “Snide Remarks” subscriber. Maybe you never did subscribe, even though you love “Snide Remarks.” Maybe you are a friend of Eric’s and have been waiting all this time for Eric to give you a complimentary subscription. MAYBE YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT “SNIDE REMARKS” IS. Maybe you are a unicorn. What do we care?

The point is, you can now visit EricDSnider.com each Monday to read a new edition of “Snide Remarks.” Since it doesn’t cost money anymore, the only possible reason you could have for not reading it is that you just don’t like it. Which is totally cool with us.

Now, Eric is going to take a break this Monday, Aug. 28, because he has been writing for 129 weeks straight and wants a vacation. But that means there are 129 archived columns waiting to be perused, columns that were once bond and are now free. Plus there are the 375 columns from before that, some of which you may have missed or forgotten.

So go ahead and spend the next eight or nine hours browsing the “Snide Remarks” archives. And then come back next Monday, Sept. 4, to read a fresh, new column. It’s free! Just remember, you get what you pay for.

Sincerely,
The Laotian kids in Eric’s sweatshop

P.S. So that you don’t miss a column, there is a mailing list you can join that will send each new “Snide Remarks” to you the moment it is published. You can sign up (for free, duh) here.

P.P.S. Spread the word! Lots of people used to read “Snide Remarks,” and lots of them lost track of it over time. Help us get the word out about the new liberation of “Snide Remarks.”

P.P.P.S. The e-mail sent out to subscribers announcing the end of their subscriptions is here.

No Friday movie roundup this week, not because I forgot to do it (like I did a few weeks ago), but because I am swamped with other writing projects that require immediate completion. Nothing interesting, believe me, or even particularly profitable. Just necessary.

I have just enough time to plug “In the Dark,” a weekly e-mail of all the latest reviews, DVD releases and other film-related merriment. It is free and you should subscribe to it.

And now I must labor on dull, unprofitable writing projects that I should not have committed to in the first place. Excelsior!

About once a month, someone e-mails me to ask whether the old Garrens Comedy Troupe CDs are still available. Sadly, the answer has been no. One of them, “The Garrens Comedy Troupe Live!” (1996) was mass-produced and was even available through Deseret Book for a while, but no more. The other, “Songs of Love and BYU” (1999) was more of a homemade production, and there are no remaining copies for sale. A previous release, a cassette-only thing called “Songs Only a Mother Could Love” (1994), is even rarer, for obvious reasons.

But we have good news! My brother Jeff, who was the Garrens’ business manager for about five minutes before the group disbanded in 2001, recently found a cache of 20 copies of “The Garrens Comedy Troupe Live!” in a closet somewhere. For real, all this time we’ve been telling people there are no more copies, when in fact there were 20 copies hiding from us.

We’re selling them for $12 apiece. Once these 20 copies are gone, the CD is officially out of print and no longer available, so now’s your chance. If you were at BYU between 1993 and 1996, or know someone who was, you might especially want to grab a copy.

Details are on the merchandise page. Get ‘em while they’re lukewarm!

Some books I’ve read recently and can recommend to you. The links in the titles take you to Amazon.com, where if you buy anything — even if it’s not the item you originally clicked on — I get a tiny kickback. So click on a link and do a lot of Amazon shopping, is my point.

“Fablehaven,” by Brandon Mull. With J.K. Rowling about to wrap up her Harry Potter series, the world needs a strong new children’s fantasy series, and I believe “Fablehaven” has every right to be it. Set on a Connecticut preserve for “whimsical creatures” (fairies and brownies, as well as less peaceful beasts), the first book in the series has two children, a brother and sister, visiting their grandparents, who are caretakers of this magical land. Naturally, there is trouble. Mull creates an exciting, imaginative new world, and writes with wit and intelligence. (For once the kids actually talk and act like KIDS.) It’s a few pages before the magic kicks in, but once it does, it’s a fantastic and thrilling read.

“The Brief History of the Dead,” by Kevin Brockmeier. The genius of a good book is in the intangibles, the deft turn of a phrase, the subtle but powerful command of the language. That’s what this intriguing, contemplative novel has going for it, along with a fantastic premise. The chapters alternate between two locations. One is the “city of the dead,” where everyone goes after they die to dwell for a time before finally moving on … to where, no one knows. (No one knows for sure what determines how long they stay here in limbo, either.) The other locale is Antarctica, where a woman is on a research expedition and has thus missed out on the virus that has wiped out most of the world’s population. It’s a sweet, sometimes comical book about life and death and important stuff like that.

“King Dork,” by Frank Portman. Tenth grader Tom Henderson is a misfit and an outcast, forever coming up with band names for his would-be rock group (starring him and his one friend) and trying to stay under the bullies’ radar. He finds his dead father’s copy of “Catcher in the Rye” in the basement, and some notes scribbled in it send him on a search for clues about his old man’s life. The novel is hilariously written from Tom’s point of view, with trenchant observations about high school, rock ‘n’ roll and life in general. One of my favorite funny books of recent months.

Bob Garfield of National Public Radio’s “On the Media” program interviewed me Thursday morning for this week’s edition of the show. It was a 20-minute interview, but (and not being a regular listener, I was unaware this would happen) it was edited down to about 7 minutes. They’re professionals over there at NPR, though, and didn’t edit my comments out of context to make me sound stupid — that is to say, if I sound stupid, it is because I actually sounded stupid.

You can find out when your local NPR affiliate airs “On the Media” by going here, or you can just go to the “On the Media” site and listen to the interview there at your leisure. (Here is a link directly to an MP3 of my segment.)

[EDIT: It's too late to hear it on the radio now, of course. Go to the site to listen. They have also added a transcript, if you prefer reading over listening.]

The topics were my “I Was a Junket Whore” article, my subsequent blog about Tim Nasson’s shady journalism tactics, and journalism ethics in general. Bob was a friendly and well-prepared interviewer — again, they’re professionals over there at NPR — and I greatly enjoyed the experience.

(If Bob is reading this, though, he should know that he mispronounced “Willamette.” It’s Will-AM-ette, not WILL-am-ette. You can remember it because “Willamette” rhymes with “dammit.”)

If you’re wondering how the recording sounds so clear when it must have been a phone interview, the answer is IT WASN’T. They arranged for me to go to the local NPR affiliate, Oregon Public Radio, except they were booked up that day, so I went to another recording facility in SW Portland and they had a link-up and satellites were probably involved and it was very high-tech.

At last the day has arrived: Today “Snakes on a Plane” stops being “eagerly awaited” and starts being the only movie this summer that has been exactly what you expected it to be.

I’ve been onboard with the whole SoaP thing for a year, ever since I discovered there was a movie with that title. The title, as you know, says it all. When you inform someone that there’s a movie coming out called “Snakes on a Plane,” that person has one of two reactions. Either it’s a skeptical, disgusted “Really?,” or it’s an excited “Really?!!” The latter group is who I want to be friends with.

Or who I WANTED to be friends with, anyway. Before long, looking forward to SoaP got to be so hip it was unhip. It went mainstream. It lost its luster.

I am glad, then, that upon actually SEEING the film, my zeal for it is renewed. It’s a fun movie, and it’s exactly what you’d expect a movie called “Snakes on a Plane” to be. You have to admire that.

New Line did not screen the film for critics. Now, when a studio doesn’t screen a film in advance, that almost always means the movie is so bad that even the studio knows it’s bad. And considering how good studios are at deluding themselves, that’s saying something.

But New Line’s official reason for withholding SoaP was that since its pre-release popularity had been fan-driven, they wanted to let the fans — not the critics — be the first ones to see it.

Fair enough. But it demonstrates yet again that Hollywood has no idea how to deal with movie critics. The prevailing attitude among the studios is that critics don’t like horror movies. Hence, of the 20 movies so far this year that have been released without pre-screenings (or with only last-minute Thursday night screenings), 10 have been horror films.

The thing is, we DO like horror films — when they’re good. (We do have that stipulation.) The reason we keep bashing the horror flicks isn’t that we just don’t like the genre. It’s that the ones we’ve been seeing have been lousy.

A few months ago, in accordance with the “hide scary movies from critics” policy, the outstanding horror/comedy “Slither” was released cold. It flopped. Yet nearly all of the critics who eventually saw it loved it. So there’s a case where if they had screened it in advance, opening day would have been full of positive reviews encouraging people to see a movie that they apparently weren’t considering otherwise. Hiding it from us hurt the film’s box office, and it’s all because studio execs can’t distinguish between a good horror movie and a bad one.

The same applies to “Snakes on a Plane.” The New Line thinking holds that Movie Critics and People Who Are Looking Forward To SoaP are two separate, mutually exclusive groups. But in fact lots of my fellow critics and I were eager to see it, as giddy as anyone else over the absurdity of the title, the big, silly grins we would surely get from watching it.

Of course, as much as I try to insist that movie critics are regular movie fans, too, there are always going to be snotty critics serving as evidence to the contrary. But I think they’re in the minority. Among the couple dozen critics I know and interact with personally, I can only think of two or three who are the pretentious kind. Most of us are, you know, normal.

* * * *

I caught SoaP at a 10 p.m. showing last night with my pals Dawn Taylor and her husband Patrick. The theater was packed, almost entirely by people younger than ourselves. This was an enthusiastic crowd, to say the least. Whenever they felt too much time had elapsed without a snake appearing onscreen, they would hiss, as if to coax the snakes out of hiding. Everything Samuel L. Jackson did was greeted with roars of approval, and when he finally uttered his already-famous line — the one that’s only in the movie because the filmmakers went back and added it after Internet message boards practically demanded it — that line being “I have had it with these m*****f****** snakes on this m*****f****** plane!” — he got a standing ovation from some of the crowd.

In general, I do not like audience shenanigans, and in truth many of the snake-related things they were yelling grew tiresome after a few minutes. (Luckily, most of them realized that, too, and they stopped.) But I was delighted by one particular instance of audience participation. In the film, a stewardess tries to put two young passengers at ease by telling them a famous rapper is onboard. She says, “Do you know who’s on the plane?” At that moment about 75 percent of the audience yelled with one voice, “SNAKES!!” It was pretty awesome, actually.

* * * *

Apart from the business with the snakes and the plane, there are two wide releases today. One is “Material Girls,” starring not just Hilary Duff, and not just Haylie Duff, but Hilary AND Haylie Duff. OMG is right! Alas, it was not screened for us, though the trailer alone is enough to make me despair of ever knowing happiness again. A review will appear sometime next week.

The other new release is “Accepted,” a surprisingly funny teen comedy. The ads for it are silly, though: “From the studio that brought you ‘American Pie,’” they say. From the STUDIO?! From the writer, from the director, OK. I’ll even accept a “from the producers.” But the studio? Studios are vast, multinational conglomerations that release dozens upon dozens of movies, often with little or no creative input from the studio heads whatsoever. Observing that “Accepted” is from the studio that brought you “American Pie” is like saying tacos are from the country that brought you Pancho Villa. It’s true, but neither product has anything to do with the other one.

These reviews and more can be found in this week’s edition of “In the Dark,” a free and sassy e-zine that’s sent to your mailbox every Friday with reviews, DVD releases and other movie-related stuff. If you haven’t subscribed, you should, won’t you?

Ryan Ritchey from The Flux interviewed me Thursday for his weekly podcast. The subject: The junket whore article, of course, and Paramount’s reaction to it. It’s the Aug. 11 edition; look for it here.