With stuff like this, I'd say Tom is pretty lucky to have seniority at the J-S. If Witrado was the one pulling this crap, his butt would be kicked to the curb pretty quickly. The J-S has been cutting jobs left and right lately, and if Haudricourt wasn't a vet, the J-S probably wouldn't mind cutting one more. I realize being such a high-profile writer for the only paper in town is likely a tough gig because you're always ticking someone off, and some days you're not going to be in a very good mood. However, everything I've ever heard about him indicates he's a bit of a frosty guy in general that doesn't like to be questioned. That comes from his blog comments, e-mails he's responded to, and just the way he's always presented himself. Even in his "apology" he was acting like a bit of a jerk, saying he "didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings." I can't even imagine the vast amounts of crappy e-mails he has to sift through every day, but the best way to deal with that is to ignore the stuff that is blatantly written to get under your skin and take everything else as constructive criticism...but maybe that's just easy for me to say because I'm a mellow guy. I agree that the best thing would probably be to just shut the comments off altogether. Now that Tom has publicly stated that he's not going to respond to anything that gets posted in the comments, we're going to see all kinds of people trying to provoke him, and it's only going to further dilute what was already a pretty diluted discussion forum.