Dammit Dave Barry

I read your most recent hilarious Substack posting about the bear-suited scoundrel(s) who successfully defrauded the California Department of Insurance.  I so wanted to post a comment.  I had the comment all ready, which I believe was:  Dave Barry you are so funny!!!

But?!  You won’t take a comment from me unless I am a paid subscriber!  Whatever happened to freedom of the press?  Free speech? And your minimum monthly subscription fee, is by the way, way way more in Canadian dollars. Way.

Look here, Dave.  You can post a comment on my Substack postings any time you want.  No charge. I would welcome you—indeed I invite you--to do just that.

See now, Dave, I am obviously channeling you, because notice all these darn exclamation marks making their way into the conversation. That’s because you are funny and exciting!!  I am funny, too, but in a rueful, head-scratching way.  More Canadian.

I think you should rethink your business plan, Dave.  You are only going to hear from people who will suck up to you by buying a subscription.  The rest of us are used to getting everything on the internet (mostly) for free.   We actually prefer it that way.

Couldn’t you at least offer a senior’s rate?

Don’t you realize that your voice is priceless?  That you actually generate an addictive substance, just straight out of your brain?

I think this whole paid subscriber thing is a sort of tariff, and we up here in Canada are fed up with this lousy tariff mania that some of you started down there. 

In our fine national anthem, which is actually singable by the ordinary person, unlike yours, we call Canada “our home and native land,” (although some sing “our home on native land,” also accurate), and we go on to extol it as “the True North, strong and free”! Free.  Since when did you have to pay to submit a letter to the editor, for example? After you paid for the stamp and the envelope and the notepaper. By the way, the first verse of our national anthem contains four exclamation marks, that’s how excited we are about our dear country.

I would like to freely give you my opinion, even my compliments on a nice piece of writing--but no. 

By the way, are you making any significant income from this paid subscriber business?  I might look into it myself, once my readership expands beyond my immediate family and close hangers-on.