User:Professor Von Pie

I am a senior American, and have absolutely no credentials except that I am old now, have done most everything worth doing, I have seen great and not-so-great people come and go, and I retain facts and experiences like Shelley Winters retains water. (Anyway, she used to.)

My interests are politics, human rights, queer rights, animal rights, women's rights, my rights, everybody's rights. I believe there's room for all of us without having to step on toes.

My favorite quotation, and I wish I could remember who said it, is: "You hate the one who makes you lie."

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April 11, 2009: I think I'm just about done here, the Mickey Rooney contribution being my last. Even when I wrote, "According to his official website..." it was not counted as a reference.

After several years and hundreds of contributions, I have concluded Wikipedia is a failure and an embarrassing cringe because it is based on two premises: 1) Writing is neither a science nor an art, so anybody is qualified to be a writer or editor; 2) Those who have command of the English language and possess information will gravitate here.

My experience is that both premises are faulty. Those who are attracted here are often not the sharpest knives in the drawer, which is understandable since there is no renumeration. But what gets my goat- to use an old expression- is the lack of talent, plus the unalloyed joy of jockeying for position. Clearly, it requires no great experience- life experience nor educational experience- to have the control of an editor here.

I spent a lot of time on Wikipedia; it is but one of my activities to fill my retirement. But the bottom line is this: the bureacracy, and the result of those who occasionally follow me around and cite various rules... this is not what writing is about and never has been what writing is about. Anybody can cite this rule, that rule, Paragraph this, Subsection that, but that is not WRITING. I'm going to stop right here because what I am trying to impart will sail above some people's heads, and let me tell you, it wouldn't be like climbing Mt. Everest. Writing is, in fact, part science, part art, part concrete, part abstract, and no, it is not for everyone.