“All I ask is one thing, and I am asking this particularly of young people who watch: Please do not be cynical. I hate cynicism. For the record, it’s my least favorite quality. It doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get, but if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen. I’m telling you, amazing things will happen.”

And with that, Conan O’Brien signed off and ended his tenure at NBC.

Conan came out of this debacle smelling like a rose. He went out with a smile, with wit, with charm and — in the last moments — with heart. I couldn’t help but think of how badly NBC managed this entire thing as Conan leaves with the fans, the public and the media on his side. NBC has put all of their chips on Leno, on the status quo. They’re betting on looking backwards, instead of forward, and it’s possible their blunders will cast a very long shadow on their ratings and reputation.

I look forward to the September and Conan’s inevitable new project, at which time he will be on the cover of every magazine in the country and he will emerge doubly victorious.

So I changed my tact and tried simple ridicule. Tommy J. really had something, because I ended up having a LOT more fun comparing this one particular nincompoop to a harmless teddy bear than I would have had vivisecting his delusional ravings with logic and reason. I started using his full name just for sport, but halfway through I wondered if I was subconsciously trying to Google bomb him in the hopes that someday some would-be employer would find his angry, racist, homophobic, ignorant sputterings and toss his C.V. in the trash.

(This exchange has been edited to include only the relevant barbs.)

Jason Brock: My evidence that Obama is a scumbag idiot is in his incredible lack of experience or qualifications and the mountain of scumbags, communists, tax cheats and felons that he surrounds himself with…Is this news to you?..He was put in office by the media who essentially donated $100s of millions of fawning coverage to him, and a $700 million dollar war chest cobbled together by the most filthy liberal bag-men America has to offer.

Jason Brock: Emissions reductions logically will cost both consumers and manufacturers handsomly. To claim that it wouldn’t is so astounding that only a blind eco religion faithful would claim it would not…Palin is correct. Developing alternative energies, and forgoing domestic exploration for fuel, is not only a fruitless endeavor but it is a massive sinkhole in search for the currently impossible…Of course there are many eco-industrialists who want us to believe otherwise because they stand to siphon off billions of dollars of taxpayer monies to fund bottomless research attempting to find something that doesn’t currently exist…All this predicated on a FAT LIE that the Earth is warming and it is 100% the fault of humans, based in a premise that Co2 is a pollutant…WTF?…I suppose H2O is a pollutant too?

Danforth France: She makes no sense at all. She’s misrepresenting several key facts in the first three paragraphs. The fact that one of her first points is that the “environmental agenda” will hurt our economy is a red flag that Palin, and anyone else who puts the word experts in quotes, is more concerned with short-term money-making than the truth. Palin and her ilk love to dismiss experts in any category because it’s easier to ignore their warnings and chase after the dollar. Ruin will always be more profitable than conservation. She’s basically full of shit. She’s asking that global warming data not be politicized while politicizing the data in the same breath. It’s a classic, pandering appeal to the ignorance (she calls it “common sense”) of her base, while using code words to delegitimize the honest, hard work of people 10 times smarter than her. Economic impact cannot be a legitimate counter argument against scientific findings. The fact that it costs money refutes nothing.

(Here’s where I make my turn.)

Danforth France: Oh, and Jason Brock is adorable.

Jason Brock: The relevance of the “what magazines do you read” question escapes me. I fail to see the “gotcha!” moment. What is the implication? That she does not read the leftist tripe masquerading as journalism? She clearly knows far more than Katie “I am a liberal whore” Couric. What has she said that “contradicts facts”?

Danforth France: If there was a plush version of Jason Brock, I would keep one next to my pillow. So cute.

Jason Brock: Danforth, please. Palin is absolutely correct in her indictment of the pseudo-scientists that are attempting to extract monies from the Fed by falsifying computer models to create a massive green industry. Global warming is a hoax of proportions unrivaled. Climate science has become a religion and all dissenters summarily dismissed as heretics, if they aren’t burned at the media/government stake.

Danforth France: When Jason Brock talks, I just want to pinch his cheeks!

(At this point he starts to ignore me and go after someone else in the thread.)

Jason Brock: Kevin, what do you smoke? What leads you to believe science and belief in God are incompatible? God created the universe and the laws of physics in it. You may think the Earth is an age incongruous with Biblical theory, on the other hand you probably believe that evolution is an incontrovertible fact. Which makes you as blindly faithful to an uproven speculation as Sarah Palin.

Danforth France: Jason Brock, come here so I can feed you a great big marshmallow! When you chew you look just like a little man!

(He continues to ignore me.)

Jason Brock: Eric, I read no magazines. I see right through them. They are by-and-large propaganda. I do, however, read some of the articles published in the liberal yellow-journalistic rags to keep on top of what the scumbags are pumping out into the small minds of the faithful left…If the stupid question was asked of me, I wouldn’t have an answer either. I read pretty much none of them literally, yet I know what they contain based on reading the articles online.

Danforth France: Jason Brock, if you don’t see the difference in the educational value of a magazine as compared to a tampon, may I suggest you aren’t using either correctly? Also, if I bought you a little cowboy outfit, would you wear it?

Jason Brock: Danforth, the worth of the most widely distributed liberal rags masquerading as journalism is about as valuable for education as a tampon, a used one at that.

Danforth France: C’mon, Jason Brock. At least put on the little hat.

Jason Brock: To fulfil your liberal perversion? You want a monkey, you got one and he resides in the White House. (lest some liberal think I made a racist comment, let us not forget how many times Bush was called a monkey) Palin makes Obama look like the Democrat party black community pimp he was. Mind you, his only qualification.

Danforth France: A monkey would be awesome! They are so smart and so much like us, if you believe the agenda of the liberal geneticists. But I’m happy with cuddling with you, Jason Brock, my little magical tickle bear.

Jason Brock: As for Andrew Sullivan. That marijuana addict homosexual activist is still claiming that Trig wasn’t Palin’s son…These are the type of scumbags who manufacture bullshit for the soul purpose of slandering Mrs. Palin.

Jason Brock: Eric, Couric is a Democrat party whore. Her intentions in interviewing Palin were not righteous. She was looking to destroy Palin and she got nothing. Couric reserves her softballs, or blowjobs, for her Democrat buddies…If you seriously believe that that asinine question of Palin demonstrates anything damning than you are a complete idiot, which is quite common of Palin haters.

Danforth France: Jason Brock, would you mind trying to get the last of the honey out of this giant, over-sized jar? Try not to fall into the jar, because I would just DIE seeing your little bear cowboy boots sticking out. JUST DIE.

Jason Brock: Remember Winnie the Pooh was always the character that got the other retards out of their predicaments…Which character most fits you, Danforth?

Danforth France: You wanna play dress up, Jason Brock? I thought you’d never ask! What a fun little darling you are!

(At this point, things seemed to die down. The end.)

But standing there, on the little platform, some feet above the sunken wreck of the USS Arizona, I can still remember considering the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and thinking we’d paid the Japs back pretty good. I remember I wished we’d all draw a line under everything and just be friends.

A vestigiolism is a noun or a verb that refers to an obsolete thing or activity that hangs on in usage to the point where it passes being an abstracted metaphor or fossilized word.

I’ve created it to foster legitimacy and shun embarrassment when saying things like, “Roll down the car window,” or “Dial 911!” Inevitably these idiomatics are said within earshot of some clever, clever boy who will attempt to bust your balls by pointing out that you do not, in fact, literally roll down a window, nor dial on your Blackberry. To this tiresome wag, you may now say, “It’s a vestigiolism, you life-draining pill.”

Then, dust off your hands with cartoonish satisfaction and be on your way. Unless you’ve called 911. You should probably wait for the ambulance.

This term may also apply to symbols. For example, clicking on a little icon of a floppy disk to save something. Depress your finger with your head held high, knowing you are selecting a vestigiolismic pictograph and you damn well know it. Then, explain to your niece or nephew what a floppy disk was and be prepared to rejoin, “No, Uncle Danforth did not ride a dinosaur to school.”

But the real enemy is the corporate interests who maneuver unseen, who influence congressmen, who pour millions into lobby groups. Money and assurances are how things get done in Washington. These meetings and phone calls and handshakes don’t get on the news and that’s exactly how these profit-motive forces want it.

I don’t know how to advise the reporters, news anchors and humorists to go after these companies and make it as interesting as zinging the conservative media’s buffoonery, but someone should try. If anyone is, it is probably the foreign press. I should go check. Excuse me.

Then read this email I sent her.

And I also took a swipe at this dork.

Needless to say, I am really fed up with these knuckleheads.

Any Facebook user surely has noticed the sudden crush of quiz results in their chunky, Fisher-Price-style “stream” over the weeks since the redesign. People groused, because it was annoyingly uninteresting to know where some dumb, time-wasting quiz had plotted what city your friends should live in. If you were like me, you tried to sniff out where in the new Facebook configuration you could turn off getting quiz updates. There was no such place. Here’s why.

Facebook needed to promise advertisers that use of certain third-party apps would be updated — no, advertised — to all of their friends by means of an automatic and mandatory status update stream, with no possibility of opting-out. Facebook needed to promise advertisers and its business partners (Facebook Connect enabled companies like Netflix) that if one friend used their service, all of their friends were going to know about it.

I wondered why the Facebook design was simpler than the previous stage, why so much functionality had been stripped away. I now have a dreadful suspicion it’s to hold you and all of your Facebook friends hostage, making you a captive audience for the surge of tacit user endorsements of Facebook apps and third-party services. If I was one such business partner, my first question to Facebook would be, “Is there a chance the users would change their settings so that our ads won’t get through?” Facebook’s response, “We’ll fix that.”

I had wanted a thing like Facebook to come along for a long time. As I was using the web over the years, I gave up on hosting all of my own content at my personal web site and scattered my stuff to sites that made it easy to post pictures, videos and blogs for my friends to see (flick, YouTube and MySpace respectively). Rather than use Facebook’s apps for my favorite movies and books, I waited for sites like Goodreads (where the books I was currently and just recently read had already been painstakingly entered with care) to somehow dovetail with Facebook automatically, so when I updated one site, it would update on Facebook. How clever that will be! I thought.

Same with Netflix. I’d been using Netflix for years, so I eschewed the Facebook apps where I could list favorite DVDs I owned and rate them. Why not just have a thing where Facebook knows my Netflix account already? I thought. Netflix has finally made its site enabled with Facebook Connect — just such a service — where any time I rate a movie on Netflix, my rating is automatically sent into the stream of every one of my Facebook friends. I gave it a dry run this morning, rating a recent Hemingway doc I had watched, then went to Facebook to watch it magically appear. When it did, I was depressed to see that my rating looked just as annoying and unnecessary as so many friends’ dumb quiz results.

Time was my rating might have gone to my Wall and sat there quietly, unobtrusively, noticeable only to someone who bothered to click on my profile and see what I was up to. But now, just like so much quiz fluff, it’s shoveled into Facebook’s new stream indiscriminately, rendered in the same large, childish font as my last status update, one more block of… nothing. Of crap.

This is where Facebook has let us down. In promising this busy stream of updates, they’ve assigned the same importance to my click of three stars for Hemingway with anything else I do on Facebook. The app that will publish this blog to Facebook gets exactly the same screen time as that one click to say “I Liked It.” With no ability to tailor, prioritize or emphasize content, the stream becomes a dull, dreary continuum of noise. The stream becomes a wash. It becomes all colors all the time, and that doesn’t paint a picture, it paints a ever-growing rectangle of blackish-brown.

In fashioning itself to please its business partners, Facebook has removed the configurable connectivity so many of its users cherished. The experience they claim to foster and respect has taken a backseat to their business model. By putting their business interests first they have diminished their user’s experience and they know it. But they don’t care. They’ll pretend they are listening to your feedback, but they won’t be. They’ll be cramming advertising down your throat. And I will have cheered them on all the way.

Guess I’ll have to try spending time with my friends in the real world again. Who wants to get a coffee?