My pal Craig

“I honestly believe that I’m smarter
than most of my friends, and am genuinely surprised when they know words
outside of everyday vocabulary. I don’t think I’m better than them, just
smarter.”

Ah, the furtive frolics of Internet
bulletin boards and chat rooms. The illicit things we learn! They’re the
confessional booth, the pasted-up hate letter, the murky back barroom of our
computer-driven age. Purge; but hide. Tell your secrets; preserve your secrets.

The phenomenon that is Craigslist
(www.craigslist.com) has come to Rochester. The site is expanding like a
mushroom. Print newspapers are having a hard time competing with it for
classified ad sales and community listings. (Hence Seattle Stranger alt-weekly editor Dan Savage’s T-shirt, pictured.) But the
“rants and raves” are the most damn fun. It’s open and anonymous, consensual
and frisky.

There are the in-and-outs. People jump
on to post their darkest secrets, like the one above. Just to say it out loud.
Just for the sweet relief.

And then there are posters who want
more than just a one-night stand. People who post often, and under tags like
“Rochacha” or “Rottenchester.” These, you get to know a little. Rottenchester
is perhaps the most prolific and endearing poster on Craigslist. His notes
include a detailed description of his failed attempt to trim his pubes with a
pair of sewing scissors (Fiskars brand, in case you’re wondering), an ode to
summer mornings, a really analytical probe into Wegmans’ egg farms, and — the
most charming — a roundup address to various posters of the previous few
weeks who were never answered. His writing reveals him to be well read,
thoughtful, impetuous, angry, and with time to spare. Maybe you know him. Maybe
I do.

And that’s just it. For all the
wondering about who these anonymous posters are, sometimes you peer down to the
keyhole and find an eyeball staring right back at you.

Rochacha and Rottenchester got into it
a couple of weeks ago over City Newspaper
and the D&C’s Insider. They
spoke to us. They advised us. It was weird. Not as weird as it could have been,
considering we are a newspaper and get anonymous comments all the time. But
weird to just be surfing the whole wide anonymous Web and see a big old “HEY
YOU” that’s actually addressed to you. And it was just luck. These people have
no reason to believe we’d actually be reading. They just wanted to say it out
loud, I guess.

— Erica Curtis

Batman, unlicensed

As an upholder of justice, Batman has always
been a bit suspect. And since Frank Miller reinvented him in The Dark Knight Returns, he’s been an
out-and-out renegade. So it shouldn’t have come as any surprise to find a cheap
Chinese knock-off Batman action figure at the Public Market, among the almost
ripe watermelons and cucumbers for pickling.

He’s not exactly the anti-Batman, or the Caped
Crusader from the Bizarro World. Still, there’s something unnerving about this
unlicensed toy. He’s a shadow of a shadow, an illegal doppelganger manufactured
in some Chinese trash factory.

The so-called Black Batman has prowled around
the fringes of Asian junk culture for decades. The earliest version I know of
is in a Japanese comic book (again, unlicensed) from 1961. But I’m sure he goes
much farther back, probably predating the American superhero.

Is he a Taoist immortal updated with bulging
chest and flex-o-matic arms? How long had he been lurking there at the Public
Market, right down the line from the fried dough booth? What exactly makes him
the “Desert Attack Batman?” Surely it’s not just his Missle Flightpack and red
plastic ray-gun. What desert? Who will he attack? What makes him any blacker
than the American version? Is there some mysterious Asian racial reference I’m
missing?

I wondered all these questions. I stood in the
crowd listening to people haggle over peaches and string beans. Then I shelled
out my three bucks and took him home to get ready for my own “New Batman
Adventures.”

Strangely, I’ve never opened him up and sent him
on a mission of vengeance. But I can feel it: The time will surely come when he
will be unleashed.

— Th. Metzger

This article appears in Aug 3-9, 2005.