After a few modifications, my massive permutation generator is churning away here at work (and hopefully not running out of memory this time), so I thought I'd grab the opportunity for a quick post.

Recently some members of the community have been besieged with hate mail regarding recent (or not-so-recent) posts. Somehow, I've never been on the bad end of an attack about anything I've said, even with my frequent inflammatory statements. The closest I ever came was when Swing Dancin' Amy misunderstood the wording of one of my posts and kindly inquired as to whether I had mental problems.

But I've never received any spiteful e-mails, which isn't necessarily a good thing. The goal of any columnist is to present their viewpoint in a way that sparks their audience to think about an issue and formulate their own opinions on it. When someone fires off an incisive missive, it shows that they not only feel strongly enough about the opinion presented to take the time to write about it, but also that they've read over your column or post and thought about the issue hard enough to formulate a cohesive argument.

The worst thing a journalist can do is to report only "safe" opinions that don't spark any sort of controversy or debate, because a boring journalist is an unemployed journalist. So Rachel, while you're certainly entitled to be upset at the response you got, keep in mind that it just reaffirms your journalistic abilities, which is the path you intend to take anyway (unless you go into copy-editing, in which case rather than reading this post for content you've noticed that I not only started a sentence with the word "But", but that I commit the cardinal sin of the comma splice on average of about one every three sentences).