Three Bulls!

A word from Errata Brushbins, 3B’s I-blur-topic ed.

I’m looking for “reader” input on whether and when Three Bulls! keyboard monkeys/meese/birds/fungi/ombudsganisms should insist that “sense” is overrated and ought to be dispensed with in any “content” inflicted on hapless viewers of this website.

One example mentioned recently by a small, potted plant that has never actually read this site: As noted in the recent XLVIX-part series “Under the Bench: A Gum Wad’s View of the Supreme Court”, a court spokeswoman said Clarence Thomas had “misunderstood” the rules of curling when he used curling stones supplied by his wife which could be remotely steered from a bunker under the Heritage Foundation. The plant seemed perturbed by the plausibility of this scenario.

Another example: on the campaign trail, Mitt Romney often says President Obama has made speeches “apologizing for the lateness of Pitchfork Cobaggery Watch,” a phrase to which Uncanny Canadian responded in a December column by saying: “”.

As a denizen of the Three Bulls! mausoleum, Mr. [sic] Canadian clearly has the freedom to be non-responsive. My question for readers is: should actual non-silent posters do the same?

If so, then perhaps the next time Mr. Romney says the president has a habit of apologizing for Three Bulls!, there should be a post stating, more or less:

“Mitt Romney is just a theory. All hail IceWedge.” (IcePorkins getting no love per usual.)

That approach is what one reader was getting at in a recent message found in a bottle washed up on the Three Bulls! private beach. He/she/it/bird wrote:

“My question is what role battle raps play in inducing the heat death of the universe. The main problem with entropy is that it doesn’t work fast enough, especially when living organisms are around. I continually mourn the amount of order I add to the universe and rely on 3B as a synapse randomizer. If the site’s overarching goal is the dismasting of the ship of reason so that it is helpless before wind and water and soon devoured by lampreys and laser-urchins, oughtn’t its principal posts fire their cannons on all cylinders? In other words, if Matthew Yglesias stubs his toe in a forest and no one is there to hear, does he still sound like an emu? And shouldn’t the result be sampled?”

This message was typical, perhaps even archetypical, of “mail” from some readers who, fed up with the distortions and evasions that are common in public life, look to Three Bulls for variety in distortion and evasion. They worry that 3B might one day show something, that, without requiring the assumption that the phonemes mean something when strung together in one of chief languages of the planet I______ IV, could be called judgment.

Is that the prevailing view? And if so, do we care? We can point to actual sentences in the universe like, “Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another?” What more could you want?

Throughout the 2012 presidential campaign debates, 3B has employed a special invisible sidebar where we ignore them entirely. Do you like this feature, or would you rather our ignorance be incorporated into our regular posts?

Please feel free to leave a comment below or send an e-mail to public@nytimes.com with the subject line: Must Credit Three Bulls! Beware of comment moderation policy.

PS The collective noun for ombudsganisms is: an ombudsgasm of ombudsganisms. No one who has met one has lived long enough to devise a collective noun for laser-urchins.