By DAN VALENTI

PLANET VALENTI News and Commentary

(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, TUESDAY, SEPT. 4, 2013) — As we begin another semester, we marvel at the predictability of certain aspects of Pittsfield’s poisonous politics (and, brothers and sisters, THE PLANET happens to be work on what may be a doozy of a humdinger, one that has saturated the sponge such that the poison can be seen streaming out in an overflow). You’ll want to know every detail, and you’ll have to get it here, because this is the kind of enterprise story that the Boring Broadsheet and the rest of the local mainstream media won’t touch.

Recent shot of THE PLANET. As you can see, we’re “back in the saddle again.”

Let’s present the Reader’s Digest version of the last couple days, when readers trying to get on THE PLANET found it, as one e-mail correspondent termed it, “out of orbit.” Technically, we were. Several factors linked in a confluence, among them being travel, a weekend followed by a national holiday, and the need for technical housekeeping “backstage.”

During this time, we received numerous questions via e-mail, phone, and Facebook about THE PLANET’s status. During one phone call, with a city official, we made the prediction: Guaranteed, in the rumor mill and on the online cesspool of Topix, fiction writers would spin this status as “proof” of some mysterious activity. Sure enough, later than same night, some cretins with too much time and equipped with technology beyond their ability to use it productively claimed that “they” got to THE PLANET — “they” most commonly being identified as our Right Honorable Good Friends, the mayor and the high sheriff.

We hate to disappoint the misguided, lost souls who for some perverse reason get some kind of satisfaction from spreading lies, but THE PLANET’s two-day retreat came about because of the routine reasons cited above. A website such as this, which so much traffic and so many posts, needs to be “brought in the shop” for maintenance. That’s all it was. With the weekend and Labor Day, the PLANET NERDS on the tech staff decided the perfect time had come.

Persons of stable character probably figures as much. At minimum, they did not offer it up as “proof” that we had been “bought off” or somehow “convinced to play D&D,” as the handful of fat white guys did,those who feed their beer bellies and live on Topix to make up for the lack of a “real” life. They eat Doritos the way a locust devours grain, wear their baseball caps backward, and provide the rest of us with the barometer for measuring both contentment and peace of mind,

As Gene Autry might put it, THE PLANET is “back in the saddle again.”

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“Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne’er succeed.” — Emily Dickinson, “Success is Counted Sweetest,” first two lines, (1859, 1878).

“OPEN THE WINDOW, AUNT MILLIE.”

LOVE TO ALL.