There's a cartoon in the January 22 New Yorker of a man and a woman watching TV in their living room. The man turns to the woman and says, "Well, I guess this means we'll have to start feeling our own pain again." I laughed for the first time that day, a day that had been filled with the insolent young salesmen at my firm yapping at my heels like spoiled puppies, their frat boy hubris spurting up over the collars of the financial world uniforms, their Dale Carnegie eagerness bubbling up from the dull, shallow lagoons of their eyes; with endless phone calls and tiny stresses and other people's halitosis filling the tight, warm aisles of city buses and scalding my lungs like some kind of organic Agent Orange; with narrow-hipped broadbacked women and the metropolis awash in sidewalk spittle and the elastic in the waistband of my favorite sleeping shorts finally giving out.

I'm one of those people who doesn't like change. I'm a stasisphile, a disciple of lethargy, an adherent of inaction. There is nothing more idiotic to me than change for its own sake. I don't trust people who move their furniture around more than once every three years. Are they afraid of things getting too familiar? I don't want a new and different pair of sleeping shorts, or a newer, more imbecilic president. I had just reached an apotheosis of affection for President Clinton when all of a sudden his long reign was over. I wanted to run my fingers through his bushy white helmet of hair and wrap my arms around his Polartec enshrouded torso and gently kiss him on the cheek and murmur, "Oh, Mr. President, I feel your pain." I want to take Paula and Monica and Barbra Streisand and Eleanor Mondale and crush their tiny exoskeletons between my fingers and then take Bill to the playground and buy him an ice cream cone before he takes me home and cradles me in his puffy southern limbs while we watch Infant Skull Surgery. Then we make love -- it's the first time I've ever done it with an Arkansan, and he likes it a little rough. We pick safe words. Mine is Oprah, his is Henry Waxman.

Like the recent Presidential coup d'état, the changes at Epinions are unwelcome but hardly unexpected. You can imagine the Epinions junta's dismay when they gave us construction worker's hardhats and we turned them upside down and started using them as soup bowls. Humans constantly adapt things to uses for which they were never intended. Creative people, like horny people, are incessantly in search of outlets. Humans are social animals, and the formation of a sense of community is inevitable when they are allowed to gather and communicate.

Why would I try to post a book review on Epinions when the book is nowhere to be found, there is no ability to search for a book, and Epinions is not allowing anything to be added to its database? I wouldn't, because I can't. Amazon may not pay, but at least you can locate the friggin' book and see a picture of it.

OTHER CONS:

Members' reviews only visible in batches of 5.

What happened to the "Interests" section? My Ivana Trump quote is GONE.

Goodbye, Love/Hate list, a snapshot by which we could instantly judge others and ascertain whether they met our standards. Now we have to use their 15 word Bios for this.

Ugly new interface, bold face Arial font. Won't win any design awards.

Comments section is horrifyingly ugly.

When responding to a comment, you should be able to view the comment you are responding to.

PROS:

More comments visible per page view.

President Clinton looks so hot with his head of white hair. He just gets better and better looking every day.



Recommended: No