Oh, That Southtown Thing...

Those who missed it or couldn't get the link, here you are.

And now for our reply.

Mr. Janssen, the reporter who penned the story, seems a decent enough fellow, aside from being a member of the media. We communicated via e-mail and struck up a wary rapport. He confessed to being way left of our politics, but much of his writing seemed to make the effort to be fair. His questions were thought provoking to us and we replied over the course of a week. We felt the final piece was a bit choppy, but given the medium of our conversation, that isn't surprising.

We'll take issue with the following parts of the story though:

• We don't eat doughnuts with anything near "regularly" - that seemed a little too cutely stereotypical.
  
• We should have guessed someone would try to dissect us with a computer program. We'll continue to not admit to being male or female; white, black, brown or other; multiple persons or multiple personalities
• Though we'd like to take credit for the "Mope-rah" label affixed to Mary Mitchell, it was a reader of ours who came up with it - we just gave it front page play. And let's face it, if the shoe fits...she kind of earns it every time she writes
  
• We're not sure we hate all the people he lists - but we do have a total and complete lack of respect for many of them. Most of them we wouldn't compare to prostitutes as that would be an insult to the girls who actually work for a living. But hate?
• He missed our Blackhawks infatuation, but the less said about that, the better
• The Hampton sign issue, Mr. Janssen credits us with mobilizing officers and the national press into covering the issue. In our letter, we called it a group effort that we played a role in - we had a blog to use; we made contact with NYPD Rant and did a number of combined posts; John Northern and a number of others were very active on the site keeping everyone abreast of developments. We don't want anyone thinking we took undue credit for getting the issue killed in committee. Lots of people helped and we said so
  
• The descriptions of some of our fellow bloggers as "less successful imitators" is his wording, not ours. We know how much effort it takes to put this together and it's only a hobby for us. We wouldn't presume to know what other people have going on in their lives that might preclude them from being as prolific as we are lucky enough to be.

We're still laughing at how he smacked the "official" boys around. According to Mr. Janssen, he contacted Pat Camden for an on-the-record comment and Pat got a bit huffy and hung up on him.

And Seiser still runs it. He runs it all.

(corrected for spelling)