Look, I could sit here and make excuses for not having a new “Snide Remarks” this week. But I respect you more than that! (As far as you know, anyway.)

Actually, I had two different columns on the ol’ word-processing assembly line at various times and was never able to massage either of them into a presentable condition. I’m all about quality, you know. So they will have to wait until next week.

As a minor consolation prize, please accept this list of four recent Film.com articles that you might find enjoyable:

Some Ideas for the New Hannah Montana Movie – They’re making one, you know. Not a concert film, but an actual movie. *shudder*

Three People Crazier Than Mike Tyson Who Need a Documentary – To experience the article the way I originally wrote it, change the very last word of the second paragraph from “murdered” to “raped.” See? Much more awful my way.

Hey, Internet! Stop Running Movie Photos That Don’t Show Anything! – Self-explanatory.

A Careful Analysis of Will Smith’s July Superpowers – He’s invincible!

And hey, did you see this video of Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly spoiling the ending of “The Dark Knight”? It’s funny, and they’re only kidding about the spoiling. (Contains PG language.)

You think “Dark Knight” fans are bad? You should have seen the fervor when Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” was released! That’s the shaky premise of this week’s “Snide Remarks” column, entitled “The Fanboys Respond to ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ 1595.” Enjoy and forsooth and stuff. Oh, and there’s not a podcast version because much of the effect is lost when it’s spoken rather than written.

For the holiday, in place of a regular-size “Snide Remarks” (or, more likely, in place of no “Snide Remarks” at all), we have a miniature one, entitled “The Signs of New York.” There’s no audio version because it’s really short and mostly pictures.

Happy Memorial Day!

(A message from Hillary Clinton.)

My fellow Americans, thank you for letting me take a few moments of your time to address the current situation.

There are some who would look at the comments posted about this week’s “Snide Remarks,” entitled “An Exclusive Interview with Indiana Jones,” and conclude that it’s unpopular. They would take all those negative comments to mean that a lot of regular readers simply did not enjoy this week’s installment.

I know that’s the conclusion the news media wants you to reach. They’ve been hammering it home over and over again. “Eric, forget it!” they say. “This column failed. You gave it a try, it didn’t work, and now it’s time to move on. You lost this one.”

Well, I say that’s a little premature. I don’t know about you, but where I’m from, we wait until ALL the votes have been cast before we reach a conclusion. I’d say Eric still has a very real chance of winning this one and declaring the Indiana Jones edition of “Snide Remarks” a success!

Has every “Snide Remarks” reader sounded off yet? No they have not. At the moment, only 34 comments have been submitted, and a full FIVE of those have been positive! How many regular “Snide Remarks” readers have not voted yet? Hundreds! Thousands, even! Who’s to say the vast majority of those won’t turn out in favor of the column? We don’t know until all the votes have been cast.

There were also some spam comments that showed up in the spam filter that Eric’s opponents are insisting should not be counted in his favor for the simple fact that they are spam and don’t have anything to do with the column. I say that’s undemocratic. Let ALL the votes be counted! The news media has already crowned the detractors as the victors here, so I know they don’t want the truth to come out. They’re afraid that if we count those spam votes, we’ll see what I already know: that most people LOVED the column and Eric has scored another success.

And consider this: Where people have liked the column, they have really, REALLY liked it. The victories, where they have occurred, have been by a substantial margin. That may be an important factor in the general election, when this column will go up against one of Dave Barry’s.

Frankly, I’m also disturbed by the sexist tone that a lot of the comments have taken. “Kinda lame.” “Not my thing.” “I didn’t laugh once.” Is nobody else appalled by this? Where’s the outrage here? If Eric were a woman and people had said these things, the news media would be hysterical with rage! As it is, since he’s a man, people can just say these hurtful things and nobody bats an eye. I thought we’d gotten past this kind of sexism in America, but I see it’s still alive and well.

In conclusion, let me summarize: Eric’s Indiana Jones edition of “Snide Remarks” is overwhelmingly popular and most people have loved it. In fact, it is the MOST POPULAR “SNIDE REMARKS” COLUMN EVER PUBLISHED! Thank you and goodnight!

I’m not gonna lie to you: Mississippi was a blast. I LOVED the Oxford Film Festival and the town of Oxford itself. I had a great time. I will tell you all about it in this week’s “Snide Remarks”…

… which is aaaalmost done but not quite. The sudden Mississippi trip threw my schedule (such as it was) out of whack, so now I have to whack it back in, or however that figure of speech works out. Stay tuned.

A now-former “Snide Remarks” reader named Andy sent this in response to this week’s column, “War Is Hell (at the Box Office)”:

Sorry Eric,

Not intrested in your politics. One too many ‘I’ve got serious things to say’ pieces. I just can’t take geo-politics from a guy who piles on teenage girls who like hor-sees.

Also, IT’S NOT WHY I COME TO A HUMOR-MOVE REVIEW WEB SITE.

Peace out, Craker

I assume he’s referring to the incident of Amber the Horse Girl.

I don’t know if he’s calling me a cracker (or “craker”), or if he’s signing his own name there. If it were the latter, “Craker” would probably be on the next line, not the same line as the “Peace out.” Then again, maybe all bets are off when dealing with someone who calls you (or himself) “Craker.”

As always in these cases, “I don’t come here to read your politics” probably means “I don’t agree with your politics.” Which is totally fine. Can we agree on Amber the Horse Girl, though? That was some funny shiz.

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:

Continue reading…

There is no new “Snide Remarks” this week. Believe me, I am just as traumatized by this news as you are. Well, perhaps slightly less, since I’ve had all weekend to get used to it, whereas you have been blind-sided by the news first thing on a Monday morning. But I have also had to live with the guilt and shame attendant on not producing a new column, and that burden is mine alone.

However! The next blog entry after this one is a new batch of Children’s Letters to Raven-Symone, so that should make everyone happy.

After all these years, I can finally say I’ve been published in the Deseret News! I never really wanted to say that, but hey, a byline is a byline.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a byline at first. The Des News inadvertently took part in a wee bit of plagiarism — a situation that has now been rectified with much apologizing, I assure you.

At the paper’s website, they have a feature called LDS Newsline, a blog-like collection of items of particular interest to Mormons, who make up approximately 70 percent of Utah and approximately 100 percent of Deseret News readers.

An occasional feature there at the Newsline is “Mormon Lite”: “Sincere (but occasionally feeble) attempts at LDS humor.” They are submitted by readers. An Erik Hyer of Layton, Utah, submitted this one, about a Mormon-themed chain of restaurants.

About a dozen sharp-eyed readers have e-mailed me in the last 24 hours, alerting me of this article’s existence, and of its uncanny similarity to a “Snide Remarks” column I wrote way back in 2000.

I was alarmed by two things. One, I had no idea my readership overlapped so much with that of the Deseret News. How can I change that?

Two, why was the Des News reprinting my column without attribution?!

Continue reading…

This week’s “Snide Remarks” is the latest installment of a regular feature, “Ask Eric Stuff 28.” The SnideCast® technology at the top of the column will allow you to listen to it if you don’t like reading; the podcast does exactly the same thing except on your iPod. Or you can use your eyes to scan the words visually, the way the good Lord intended.

Also, there’s been an update on the situation discussed in last week’s column, about the boys who might do 10 years in jail for smackin’ some girls’ booties. On Friday, the district attorney dropped the sexual abuse charges against the boys, which means the possibility of being registered sex offenders for the rest of their lives is gone. They still face the misdemeanor harassment charges, but at least some progress has been made.

And finally, if you were wondering how bad “Skinwalkers” is, you can read my review of it here. I gather no one was interested in seeing it anyway, though, since it made only [Edit: Final figures are in and are slightly higher than estimated; here are the correct numbers] $753,520 over the weekend. Its per-screen average was $1,011. Figuring each theater showed it five times a day, or 15 times over the weekend, that’s $67.40 per showing. The average ticket price in America is $6.55, so that means an average of 10 people attended each screening. Not very encouraging for the folks behind “Skinwalkers.”