IN WHICH WE SHUT DOWN EARLY FOR THE LONG WEEKEND AND ADDRESSED SOME MORE COMPLAINTS

It’s Memorial Day weekend! If you’re American, you know what that means. If not, I’ll explain it to you: no one will be working Monday (including us!), Hollywood will make a lot of money off of some really atrocious movies (in this case, one about menopausal bitches who are still way too worried about their vaginas and not worried enough about having any awareness of the world around them, and a Disney movie about Persians with absolutely no Persian or even vaguely Persian-looking cast members), and there will be lots of barbecues and drinking and smoking weed. Which is different from most American weekends ’cause it’s longer, and there’s more barbecuing.

But before we take off for the next 72 hours, we’d like to take this opportunity to address some of the more fatuous reader complaints we’ve gotten via e-mail recently . So:

• At least two of you demanded that we take down the “R.I.P. Paul Gray” header and replace it with last week’s “R.I.P. Ronnie James Dio” header. One of you called it “embarrassing” that we “dumped” Dio, and one of you said that you “expected more” from us than to “disrespect” Dio and “overshadow” his passing “with the death of some druggy.” This is incredibly insensitive, and we’d like to take this opportunity to remind you that a) death is not a competition, but still b) more people will attend Paul Gray’s funeral than will attend yours.
• No fewer than twenty of you e-mailed us to ask why we haven’t written about the Westboro Baptist Church’s plan to protest Dio’s public memorial service this Sunday. And we have written about it. The headline was “Nutcases to Protest Dio’s Funeral.” Maybe you just started reading MetalSucks this past Monday (the article was published last Friday), or maybe you thought there were some other nutcases protesting Dio’s funeral, but, nope. That’s what that story was about.
• A musician, upset that Vince implied that his band wasn’t exactly setting the metal world ablaze, e-mailed me but not Vince and told me to – and this is an exact quote – “lick our sack dog dick.” To which I’d like to say, a) you should please look at the byline when deciding where to direct your vitriol, and b) what the fuck is a “sack dog dick?”
• A publicist is really, really upset that we won’t go to a hip-hop show this weekend. This publicist has obviously never actually looked at our site. That being the case, I think I can safely say “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, Publicist, I hope you get a yeast infection!”, since she’ll never actually read this.
• One of you seems confused as to why I haven’t been fired. Just to clear it up: Vince and I co-own MetalSucks. We can’t be fired. Sorry.

Next week we have two album streams and a video debut, and hopefully no prominent members of our community will die. ‘Til then, have a lovely weekend, and we’ll be back on Tuesday.

-AR