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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This week’s “Snide Remarks,” entitled “Wand for the Money,” is a fire sale on all the Harry Potter gags that have been lounging in the back of my mind the last few weeks. With the final book going on sale this Saturday, I figured now was the time to get rid of them. You can hear a recording of me reading the column right there on the page, or here, or you can subscribe to the podcast using this URL.

Speaking of Mr. Potter, if you have not already ordered “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” from Amazon for the low low price of $17.99, you only have until Tuesday at noon to do so if you want it delivered on Saturday. Amazon is even guaranteeing Saturday delivery — as in, if it doesn’t arrive on that day, you get your money back. So you can order it from them and rest assured you’ll have it on the day of its official release, just as soon as your fatigued, broken-backed mailman can carry it to your door after carrying 100 other copies to 100 other doors.

You can order it here. Not only can, but should.

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July 24, 2006, “I Was a Junket Whore”: Fifteen minutes of Internet fame — oh, and it cost me a job, too.

This one earned me 15 minutes of Internet fame, but it had far more lasting repercussions than that: If it weren’t for this column, there is a very good chance that right now I would be the full-time film critic at a major weekly newspaper. Yep, this column cost me a job.

I had been freelancing movie reviews for Portland’s Willamette Week for several months when the paper’s full-time film critic, D., called to see if I wanted to go on this junket. It seemed like it would be fun to do once, just so I could say I did it, and I made the arrangements with Paramount Pictures.

My understanding was that I was going as a freelance writer, not as an official Willamette Week representative, and that WW would buy my story when I got back. The story would be your basic interview feature, incorporating the conversations I’d had with Oliver Stone and his actors.

Meanwhile, D. had announced that he was leaving WW, and the paper was seeking his replacement. The other writer who had been freelancing for them wasn’t applying for the job, which meant I was the only applicant who already had a foot in the door. D. indicated that if it were up to him, I’d be his replacement. He put me in touch with K., the features editor, and I went in for a job interview. It went well, K. liked me, I liked her, she was less interested in my past (I’d been fired from a newspaper a few years earlier) than in my ideas for the future, and things looked good.

Later that same day, July 19, I flew to Seattle for the junket.

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Jan. 23 & 25, 2002, “Towed You So” and “Gus Mileage”: A two-part series on tow-truck drivers earns the wrath of an entire profession.

My editors and I fielded many angry phone calls and letters when the first of these, about a bad experience with a towing company, was published. Naturally, the column to elicit the most wrath we’d had in years would be a two-parter, and my bosses were not exactly thrilled at the prospect of getting more angry calls and letters after part two was published. So we had to tone part two down quite a bit, more or less ruining it but successfully staving off the torch-wielding mobs.

These were published in January. In September of that year, I bought a new car at Provo’s Kia dealership, trading in my old Hyundai. (You thought there was nothing lower than a Hyundai, but that’s only because you had forgotten about Kia.) Unfortunately, I accidentally locked my keys in the Hyundai there at the dealership, right at the end of the business day. I had to leave in a hurry to get to Salt Lake City for something, so I didn’t have time to wait for someone to show up with a slim jim and unlock the car. Technically, the car now belonged to Kia anyway and was their problem, not mine, and they were friends with a local towing company that they figured could come over and unlock the car for them. They sent me on my way in my new Kia and said they’d deal with the Hyundai. Just come back tomorrow to get your personal belongings out of it, they said.

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“Important” is a relative term, of course. Not one of these columns had any impact on the world outside of my life, and many of them didn’t even go that far. But they’re “important” in the sense that, if you were writing a history of “Snide Remarks” — and heaven knows why you would be doing that — these are the ones you’d have to include as key points in the timeline.

As I read over them, I see a lot of entries that involved my getting in trouble. This might give the reader the false impression that I love causing controversy and trouble, or that I am reckless and irresponsible.

There are 15 columns listed here, a few of which involved trouble. In my defense, those few aftershock-producing columns represent, what, 1 percent of all the columns I’ve written? Usually when I write something, nothing happens at all. Usually people don’t even read them, much less get angry about them.

But here are the ones that played a key part, for good or bad, in the history of “Snide Remarks.”

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I do not have a new “Snide Remarks” for you this week, but to stave off the unfathomable sadness that announcement would otherwise bring, I have something else instead: a special “Snide Remarks” 10th anniversary feature highlighting the “important” entries in the column’s history. Some never-before-told behind-the-scenes stories are part of this feature, including one about how a particular column prevented me from getting a particular job. Intriguing, no?!

I’m going to post it as a separate entry right after I post this. I do hope you enjoy it, and please watch for a new “Snide Remarks” next Monday.

This week’s “Snide Remarks,” entitled “Sein of the Times,” is now available for viewing. Usually there’s a Snidecast® recording of me reading the column aloud, but since this week’s is in script format — and since the characters are established characters with famous voices, rather than new fictions devised by me — I have forgone the recording this time. It would have required doing impersonations of all four “Seinfeld” characters, or reuniting the actors in my apartment, and neither scenario was feasible this weekend.

A few months ago, I reported that a student at Brigham Young University had written a letter to the editor of the school paper in which he swiped a joke of mine that I’d used in a “Snide Remarks” column in that very paper several years earlier. In the course of telling you about this, I also quoted (and made fun of) a letter that someone had written in response to the first guy’s letter, offended by some other, non-stolen joke he had made.

Well, the writer of the second letter has written to tell me this:

I googled my name for fun and was surprised to see that I’ve become “famous” for my “angry letter” in the Daily Universe. I just wanted you to know that Jon Harmon [the guy who wrote the first letter] happens to be my roommate and he wrote his letter so he could get out of a final…and I wrote mine as a joke to see if it would get published…I guess I suceeded in my endevor to appear as a “typical angry BYU student.” Just thought you might want to know.

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As foretold last week, there is no new “Snide Remarks” column today. You can well imagine my sadness over this fact. I’m on the road, on a bit of a “vacation,” you might say, except that I’m still doing some work. Just not “Snide Remarks.” So very sorry.

There probably won’t be one next Monday, either, but you never know. As I’m lazing about my parents’ house later this week, the mood might strike me and I might dash off an exceptionally witty bit of commentary. On the other hand, next Monday is Memorial Day, so not publishing anything would be a perfectly justifiable action on my part. It is all part of the mystery of being me!

I’ll still have some blog entries this week, more or less one per day as usual, so don’t forget about me entirely.

Finally, did you know that one (1) spider monkey weighs the same as 9.41 placentas? Or that it would take 720 giraffes’ necks to equal the Golden Gate Bridge? It’s true! These and many other important facts can be found at Weird Converter. Go amuse yourself there for a while.

Devoted reader Joe sent me photographic evidence of something shameful he did recently, which was to edit (some would say “vandalize”) the Wikipedia entry on Utah Valley State College to reflect something I said about it in a recent column. The joke was OK when I wrote it; somehow it’s much funnier when it appears in an official-looking context. It’s at the bottom: