First, let me say I love youse guyses' stuf'. Assuming I have you sorted out correctly, Michael is enough like me (in macro-details) to be my long lost twin (same age, boyhood in Anglo-German-settled American small town in flyover country), and Friedrich could be that wise, kindly mentor I wish I'd had who might have introduced me much earlier to the beauties of art, literature, and cinema that I've never seemed to have time for.

That being said, maybe you're getting these people finding you accidentally (when they're looking for websites intended for gentlemen of refined and specialized tastes) because you're using the wrong word? My dictionary (the usual Merriam-Webster New Collegiate) simply says "blowhard" is a synonym for "braggart." I keep thinking "blowhard" OUGHT to mean what I think you think it means (self-important gasbag pundit who bores everyone in hearing by expound on subjects he doesn't know enough about to have a justified opinion), but it apparently doesn't. (And I know you're using it self-satirically.) I know this because I needed a word recently that meant exactly that for my translation work and thought "blowhard" would fill the bill. Then I looked it up... Maybe "gasbag" is the word?

Whatever the word is, I expect to find my picture next to it when I look it up, so please take all this in good humor...

Posted by: Dwight Decker on September 19, 2002 1:37 AM