Gay Demographics

I have emerged from my underground bunker. The Thai place will no longer deliver food there. It was fun while it lasted, but since the world has yet to blow up under the leadership of George W. Bush, the international response might not be exactly what I predicted. They're probably taking a "wait and see rather than destroy the world" approach, and I will follow that lead. For now.

Personally, if I were a Thai delivery guy, I would be happy to give blood and urine samples to a customer who asked for them before letting you enter the domicile. But that's just me—security isn't a big concern in Thailand, I suppose. Not a lot of cases of stolen identity.

But let's put that behind us. I picked an opportune time to return from exile, as I can see. The new commune is looking sharp, thanks for the redesign go to Randy and Glynis in IT for that. My return was also timely in that Gay Bagel's influence here has been growing stronger in the meantime. They all hate him, of course, nothing new on that front, but without my steady leadership, Raoul Dunkin, commune nutsack, has entirely disappeared, and I think they have been getting ever-closer to making Lil Duncan some sort of woman leader here, to combat Gay's attempts to take over the commune. She tells me she's been running the commune since my absence, and I humor her. No one can run the commune, baby. It's like a tornado. Can you run a tornado? No, you can't—liar.

They have made some changes I'm not so sure about. Gay Bagel was all "statistics" this and "statistics" that, apparently referring to statistics of a site. Under pressure from Big Gay, as his enemies call him, Lil instituted a ratings system for the weekly commune pieces here. It's for advertising sales figures, she told me. I said that's Advertising's job, not ours. She said she went to advertising and Shelk's been waiting all this time for sales figures before proceeding. I told her to tell Shelk sales figures are somebody else's job, not his, and not ours. I don't know who should do that.

To get to the point already, goddammit, I had to bend a little to keep Gay from making another power play for control. We're wasting money, Gay said, paying all these people to do columns and news and having no way to make money off our endeavors. He argued that it's vital we figure out how many people are reading the commune, what they're reading, and the benefits and cons (business speak nonsense) of each piece. He told me I should no longer give people a column just because they buy me a drink, or I think seeing their picture in the commune staff photo will be funny. I ask him what other criteria are available to decide who to hire and who to not hire. Well, sir, don't ever do that. I got a list a mile long. The guy is such a knob, it's hard to believe we're related.

Hence you'll notice the new commune ratings system, just to the right side of the page, under the big picture that we put there because we think it's funny. These numbers are pretty raw, of course—judging by them, you would initially think no one is reading the commune. But we haven't properly interpreted the data yet. I just hired a guy, Perry "Bigger" Dunston, to research all those numbers and tell us exactly what they mean, with the idea that hopefully we'll be able to cut some deadweight around the office and keep on people who can make the commune more profitable. Dunston charges $2,000 a week for his service, but when you're trying to reduce spending, you can't spare any expense.

So bear with us, faithful readers. Or reader. We are doing what we can to make the commune the kind of online magazine you want to read—you, and hopefully, ten to twenty thousand white males ages 18-34.

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