Dad used to use old military tricks on us kids on the hockey team. At one point, he would try to create peer pressure so that we’d police each other, instead of him coming after whoever did something silly. And, yes, kids do silly stuff.

What he said was, if one of us shot a puck to the boards after he whistled, we all had to skate around the rink. Then he’d whistle, and send us on our way with: “One lap … by request of Risto.” Or whoever the person responsible was.

You would have to be a real jerk to do that again. We didn’t have many genuine jerks on our team. None, in fact. So, by mid-season, nobody “requested” anything anymore.

We also have the Risto Revenge, defined as “an act of revenge which only hurts the person doing the revenge, because the revengee doesn’t know or care about the revenge.” Definition by Wife. She should know.

Example: Risto goes to a store to buy a pastry. He likes pastry. He goes to the same store, across the street from his apartment, and buys the same type of pastry on three consecutive days. On the fourth day, as he walks in, he sees the person behind the counter put a pastry into a paper bag, for him. Risto is annoyed, so he doesn’t buy pastry, but a sandwich instead. (Immediate revenge). As he walks out with his sandwich, he decides to boycott the store for a while.

I know that Duane and the rest of them filthy rotten people behind all that spam don’t know or care about my site, or me, or you, so my little revenge won’t do much good. But what else can I do? Except:

“By request of Duane and all the filthy rotten evil people behind spam, the comments are now closed”.

I appreciate your comments, though, so if you’d like to give me feedback, please use the Facebook tools that Mark “Zuck” Zuckerberg has given us.

Thanks, and sorry.