I wrote a “Snide Remarks” column in June that dealt with renewing my driver’s license, and somehow horses were involved, too. Accompanying the column was the picture seen here, of a minor British royal falling off her horse during an equestrian event. I included this caption: “She and the animal were both uninjured, but I don’t care, because that’s an awesome photo anyway.”

This cavalier attitude struck a nerve with a reader named Amber, who discovered the column five months later and posted three very angry comments (#60-62) on it. She also sent me the following scorching e-mail, from a return address of “beautyofhorses@[something].com”:

Have YOU read my posts ERIC!!?!?!!?!?!??? If you have you can tell that I’m pretty pisted off!!!!!!!! All my friends are too and they all [swear word] HATE YOU now!!!! How rude is it to post a picture of an inosint horse and rider getting injured and then say I DON”T CARE!!!!??!?! [So she read the part of the sentence that said I didn't care, but missed the part of the same sentence where I said they weren't injured. That is some seriously selective reading.] YOU [swear word]!!! It’s people like YOU who kill animals and the environment!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Maybe I should post a picture of YOU, yes YOU ERIC doing something painful and say “well I just wanted to post this picture because it is a good picture,but I don’t care that Eric’s hurt. I DON”T CARE!!!” [Fine with me! I'll send you some.] That’s what YOU did with the horse and rider!! Horses are amazing, beautiful animals and deserved to be treated with respect unlike YOU i may add!!!!!! SHOW A LITTLE RESPECT FOR OTHER THINGS IN YOUR PATHETIC LIFE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and to think I used to like this site!!!!! HA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I [swear word] hate it now!!!!!!!!!! I bet A LOT of other people do now too!! [How can they fail to, when you make your arguments so convincingly?] Oh ya and the driving learn how to drive YOURSELF [swear word]!!!!!!!!!!So please e-mail me back SOME kind of response.You should read my posts too. THEY might scare away some potential ericsnider site lovers!!!! BYE

P.S.I’m right to be doing so too!!!! Even though I didn’t put this letter in THE ANGRY LETTERS SECTION I want this to go STRAIGHT to YOU!!!!!! [I do wish more readers shared her foresight and labeled their correspondence as "angry" when appropriate. It would save my staff so much sorting time.]

Per her request, I replied to her e-mail. This is what I said:

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People have been posting stupid messages on the Internet for as long as the Internet has been around, maybe longer. I always thought it would be hard to single out the single stupidest message.

Until now.

As you know, I often post dumb e-mails written to Raven-Symone by fans who don’t realize the address they’re using is not actually her address. I post those e-mails here in this blog. On Saturday, someone named “Shanae” stumbled across one of the batches of Raven e-mails and posted the following comment. Read it carefully.

hello whoever this is,

i just wanted to say, you are so SICK TO ME. i mean you are saying raven fans are idots and they are not. that is making raven look like a bad person. raven if you ever read this you just lost a fan because of this fake person. i thought i should become a fan of tia and tamara mowery. i am just saying, whoever you are,since the people that write to the FAKE E-MAIL ADDRESS are stupid,you are just making yourself look like a bigger dumbie. i am so sorry raven for saying that but it is true. if you ever get the time, look at what this person is saying online. look at what your number 1 fans are saying. nobody should even e-mail you because of this stupid person. i dont even care if you show this e-mail to your friends,family,and husband this e-mail because it is not going to hurt me. you can thank this SICK PERSON FOR ME WRITING THIS LETTER.thank you and have a nice day or night. i am still going to be a fan but you are my 3rd favorite person in the world.

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I got this e-mail today:

Well eric the George Lopez was funny my family really enjoyed it. The caveman show is a total waste of film nothing funny about,they should had left it just has a commerical. Let me quess your white thats why you are so lame white people just dont get it. Maybe you should join the caveman cast your just as stupid has the show!!!!!!!!

First, let’s pause a moment to bask in the sweet, aromatic irony of someone who writes like this calling anyone else “stupid.” Mmmmm…. refreshing.

Now, then. I assume “the George Lopez” means “The George Lopez Show,” and the strange part is that the only time I have ever mentioned that show on this website was in passing in a blog entry three years ago. Why get so worked up about it now?

As for “Cavemen,” I talked about that more recently — long enough to say it wasn’t very good. Which means I agreed with this person. So why is he or she yelling at me?!

Finally, while I am white, and while I agree that white people are lame, I don’t know that being white is why I’m lame. I have other qualities that contribute to my lameness. Let’s not limit it to just skin color.

Just as my review of Tyler Perry’s “Diary of a Mad Black Woman” elicited angry letters, so has my review of his latest, “Why Did I Get Married?” My conversations with other film critics lead me to understand that I am not alone. The e-mail’s sender line says “Latricia Latricia Jenkins,” so apparently she’s named Latricia twice. Good for her! Here’s what she says:

Your review of Tyler Perry’s Why did I get married, is why talented Black film producers will always have a hard time trying to break through mainstream. [It's even harder when they're not talented, which is why Perry's success is so impressive.] Your comments were absolutely ignorant and not true. [Not true? You mean I got my opinion wrong? I actually DID like the movie?! Crap.] But what can you expect when you still have ignorant and pathetic people in 2007 still hanging nooses around trees. You critic are unbelievable, especially when it comes to Black folks.

We critic may be unbelievable, but what’s even more unbelievable is that someone with enough brain power to read a review and write a response could actually think that disliking a Tyler Perry film automatically makes a person racist. I didn’t like Woody Allen’s last movie, either. Does that make me an anti-Semite?

(When I wrote back to Latricia² and asked her that, she did not reply.)

After I reviewed “Hairspray” in July, I got this e-mail from a reader named Jeff:

I can’t believe you made it through whole “Hairspray” review, even mentioning Amanda Bynes by name, without making reference to that 40+ year old creepy guy that hosts a fan website in her honor! Perhaps you didn’t want to detract from an otherwise glowing review….

Then, when I gave a much more negative review of the Bynes vehicle “Sydney White,” a commenter named “ClobberGirl” once again invoked Creepy Guy:

Where’s that creepy Amanda Bynes fan site guy? Someone should show him this review. I bet he’d say more hilariously crazy stuff for us if we did.

Alas, as subsequent commenters noted, his site is no more.

If you’re just joining us, Creepy Amanda Bynes guy, aka Robert Mackey, sent me three e-mails in 2006, each vigorously and angrily defending the object of his obsession, who was also the subject of his website, “Amanda Bynes NOW!”

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Whoever said Marc Anthony looks like this guy is a liar.

Readers have posted some interesting comments on my review of “El Cantante.” Four people (so far) have completely misunderstood my very easy-to-understand review, one just seemed really angry, and another went off the deep end entirely.

“El Cantante” is a biopic about Hector Lavoe, a salsa singer who started in New York in the 1960s, rose to fame in the ’70s, and burned out in the ’80s. What I said about the movie was that it failed to “show us why the performer was so beloved.”

I went on: “To put it bluntly: Why should I care who Hector Lavoe was? ‘El Cantante’ does nothing to answer that question.”

My intention was not to say that Hector Lavoe wasn’t worth knowing. The opposite, actually: He probably has an interesting story, and there were probably some excellent reasons for his popularity. But the film fails to convey any of that.

The first comment came from Eddie, and he wrote very thoughtfully and sincerely.

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Someone named Kellie wrote me an e-mail with no subject line and no indication what, exactly, she was angry about. But her message was clear:

All of your comments are stupid you are an A-HOLE who do you think you are some big time movie director you say one line and make 1 hundred versions of it and call it a review you are an idiot and you should get a job at a donut shop you dumbass loser

The only part I take exception with is the implication that working at a doughnut shop would somehow be demeaning or undignified. On the contrary, what nobler profession is there than a purveyor of delicious doughnuts?!

Our other angry letter comes from a gal named Julia. She was so upset by my nine-year-old “Clash of the Titanic” column (which consists of a shortened, satirical script for the movie “Titanic”) that she didn’t even read the other angry letters already posted in which people said exactly the same things she wanted to say. She posted a comment on the page, and then sent me an e-mail directly:

you are heartless! so many people were killed! i am very into the titnaic, i read books on it. [Titnaic: of or relating to Titna, goddess of voluptuous women.] i loved that movie, and you are a sexist pig to say that women just watch it for Leonardo. [Yes, sweetie, that's very cute.] Yes he is extremely hot, but it is a touching movie and i would watch it even if he were ugly. [I wish there were a way of proving that. I really do.] do you have any idea what that was like for those people? [For who, the actors? Probably kind of hard, but overall a fun experience, I guess.] they were on the ship, the lifeboats were gone and they knew they were going to die. [Oh, THOSE people.] they sat in there and froze to death. and now they are shaking in their graves [shivering?] knowing a freak named Eric is out there making fun of them! how could you think that is funny in the least?! I watch this movie every sunday night and cry every time. and if you don’t, i am quite sure you have no heart you bastard!

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Against all odds, “Transformers” has become the latest touchstone in America’s culture wars. People who love it say the critics are stuffy and out of touch. They are angry about it, in fact. To them, a failure to appreciate “Transformers” bespeaks a greater failure — the failure to relax and have fun. Who would have thought a movie about giant space robots would tap into such deep-seated resentments?

I gave the film a negative (though not scathing) review. So did dozens of other critics. Almost all of us have subsequently been beset with comments such as these:

You losers should stick with watching “The English Patient” and old Daniel Day Lewis movies…

Well it is a summer movie isn’t it? People go to them because they want dessert. They don’t want Citizen Kane. It’s not because moviegoers are dumb or unintelligent (though some are), they’re just in the mood to be entertained.

Those are from my review as it’s posted here on this site. My friends Dawn Taylor and Scott Weinberg have been the targets of similar sentiments. So has nearly everyone else who panned the film.

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[In lieu of the weekly "Snide Remarks" Classic, today we bring you a special anniversary feature. There will be more special features in the weeks to come, leading up to the official "Snide Remarks" 10th anniversary on Sept. 29, which is recognized by most major religions as a high holy day.]

Almost since the beginning, one of the most entertaining parts of “Snide Remarks” has been the angry letters that people sometimes write in response to it.

The perception is that I get these letters frequently. In truth it’s been ages since I got one. Ever since the column became online-only, where it could not assault unsuspecting readers from their morning newspapers, it’s been read pretty much only by people who like it, or who at least know what they’re in for.

But back in the old days, when it was in The Daily Universe, the student paper at BYU, angry letters were commonplace. In fact, of the 64 columns I wrote for the Universe (1997-1999), 22 of them got angry letters. That’s 34 percent! BYU is a hotbed of righteous indignation, and probably always has been.

I wrote 305 columns for the Daily Herald (1999-2003), of which 57 inspired angry letters. That’s only 19 percent, although it’s worth noting that the Herald’s website allowed people to post anonymous comments during much of that time, and nearly every column got at least one negative comment. In fact, there were some people who hated “Snide Remarks” so much, they read it every single time it was published, just so they could comment on how much they hated it. I AM NOT MAKING THAT UP.

(I only wish that, when the Herald administrators redesigned the website a couple years ago, they had not deleted all the old threads of anonymous comments. Many of them were classic.)

In all, 81 columns have elicited angry letters. Here I have chosen my favorite eight. I hope you find them as entertaining as I do.

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My reviews are posted over at DVD Talk these days, and my take on “Spider-Man 3″ elicited this strange response. I’m classifying it as an “Angry Letter” not because it’s particularly angry, but because it’s nearly incoherent, which is an attribute I associate with angry letters.

I read your review of ‘Spider-Man 3′ and can similarly recognize that you were not even a Marvel comic casual observer. Anytime a filmmaker steps outside the boundaries of what an epic was created to be does it become disheartened by it’s viewers. Spider Man III was believable and greatly followed the traditions of its creator. If it fails at the Box Office could only your tapestry of a double-minded review have merit or recommendation.

OK, then. Following is a list of words that, judging by their

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