I've said this a thousand times: coffee is muck that you drink to stay awake. Drinking coffee with a naked mermaid on the cup that costs ten times as much is just pretending that the muck is something special, and so is the person drinking it. The same is true of Havrilesky.

And as we all know, love is statistically false. So I couldn't love Havrilesky. I will not allow you mind-controlled zombies to drive me into making death threats to her, to prove how much I dislike her. There'd be no point in killing her; there are a thousand lousy columnists out there, writing for the "free papers" in your town, amidst the ads for AIDS clinics and tattoo parlors, all of them equally pretentious and ignorant. Any of those spongeheads could step into her overpriced stilletto's and you wouldn't notice the difference.

Remember the first episode of Mission: Impossible? Briggs, the original mission chief, said of their target, "Assassination is out as a matter of policy." It wasn't simply that, back then, assassination was not done by Americans (ask Castro; he's on Hav's speed-dial). It was that the policy, not the person, had to be discredited, thus the long and dangerous missions.

If I love anything here, it's intelligence, the liberty of the soul. It exists in just about every other department in Salon, except the television columnist. Havrilesky is the one black spot among this site's columnists. The war goes on.

You understand, don't you, that their appearance on Montel will be sandwiched between a woman with her face built upside-down and a guy who can fart the National Anthem?

It wouldn't matter if TEAR appeared on the comparatively upscale Oprah, because they'd be noticed less than the boxes of genuine Tiffany chocolates hidden under the audience's seats.

The talk-show hosts - all of them - are circus acts. This would do less for their cause than distributing booklets to junior high and high schools and having trained counselors from the organization talking about the issue. It isn't glamorous. It isn't show-bizzy. But it would get far more information out to the people who need it.

Now, of course, all educators are frauds who don't give a damn about their students, any more than Geraldo cares about the Klansmen he regularly interviews. Which is why the use of outside agencies - such as the rape counselors who are already active in almost every state of the union (sorry, Tennesee) - people who are actually confronting the problem on a daily basis - would be the people to contact the students.

If TEAR distributed their flyers and discussion guides on their web site as PDF Acrobat documents, they could be downloaded by anyone in the nation and Xeroxed at the school for the cost of paper and toner. That's where public support would come in; collecting enough money from door-to-door contributions to buy a ream or two of paper for their local schools for producing these flyers. God knows the schools don't have enough paper for daily work, let alone a frivolous use like flyers to help their female students with rape.

The "hi-fi" gear these guys praise was horribly wasteful on energy. The purists who still run tube amps can probably heat their living rooms with them, and vacuum tubes burn out, making a mess. Without getting into a discussion of what a Class A amplifier is, the supposed "best" amplifiers even waste twice as much power.

Even with transistor amps - hated by the purest of audio purists - there were heavy power transformers that wasted energy. Some even used transformers in the final output stage of the speakers. There was a common name for a lot of these amps: "boat anchors."

I once subscribed to a magazine of audio purists - the kind of people who built their own amps and gear, who modified old broadcast turntables to spray deionized water and photo cleaning solution with gentle scrubbers to clean old vinyl LP's. One of the projects they most prized - for which they also sold construction kits, was an amplifier bragging, "100 watts, 100 dollars, 100 pounds." You would have to reinforce your apartment floor to run two of these - that's right, that is a mono amp and you'd need two for stereo.

Rather than whine about the energy-wasting but "mellow-sounding" amps of the 1950's, these people would do better to concentrate on changing the sound of current, energy-efficient technology. For instance, if you listen to music on your computer with the popular Winamp player, you can get plug-in expanders to counteract the compression of recorded music. It makes even recorded audio books sound more lively and comfortable. (For you techies, get the VST plugin for Winamp, then look for free VST audio compressors/expanders on the Internet.)

Father Charles Coughlin outright promoted Nazi beliefs and even praised Hitler in his radio broadcasts of the 1930's and 1940's. The hierarchy of the Catholic Church couldn't silence him (some people say the Church didn't want to silence him) but he eventually went too far, was gradually marginalized, and wound up a simple parish priest again.

And among the people who went too far, I have to include John Lennon's "more popular than Jesus" remark. While technically correct, it was a stupid thing to say, intemperate about people's deeply held beliefs, and it devalued every deeply felt statement he made thereafter.

I say, keep reporting loudly every stupid thing Limbaugh says or does. Keep recording his shows so he can't flush his comments down the memory hole, and make them available to the public. Every loony statement will peel off a few more of his listeners as they realize how pointless he is. I was almost going to say, make sure he has a steady, cheap flow of Oxycontin, but I don't think he needs any assistance with that. He hasn't reached the Don Imus point yet, but keep the faith; he will, he will.