Hi Mike,
I just read Mark Kernes’ reply to my email to you, and here are my thoughts.
I’ve always found Mr. Kernes’ prose to be corpulent; with a lot of adipose tissue surrounding very little lean meat. So where’ the beef in this?
There’s not much, I’m afraid. But there is obfuscation, irrelevance, and threats. The fat cats at AVN really want to put a lid on this, don’t they?
In the first paragraph Mr. Kernes seems to think I’m a lawyer correspondent In my original email I didn’t address any legal issues, I just presented my view of the events. I didn’t use any legal terminology, though once I used the word “malice”, but it was not in a specific legal context. Mr. Kernes is hallucinating lawyers here. He also accuses me of paranoia, which is hyperbole on his part. Would I be paranoid if I (like many others) thought MatrixContent (the prime suspect in the Acacia mailing list scandal) had sold my name and address to the enemy?
The second paragraph is a bloated exercise in irrelevance.
In the third paragraph he repeats the paranoia charge, this time marrying it with “lawyerly”. His prose is not just portly, but also turbid and inelegant. He then rambles from the subject of reputation, to oxen being gored, to remedial math. His orotund style seems to smother whatever it is he’s actually trying to communicate. I won’t bore you by reviewing the rest of his reply, but I must ask him a favor: please stop capitalizing words to create emphasis; it’s very annoying.
I can’t believe Paul Fishbein told his leviathan of letters, Mr. Kernes, to reply to my email. I thought their best tactic would be to ignore you and your website, and just let this die down and be forgotten and forgotten quickly as most people in the adult biz have abbreviated attention spans.
But no, AVN themselves are keeping it going. And after setting their counsel, Mr. Cambria, into action, they move their journalistic heavyweight, Mr. Kernes, off his steatopygic rump to keep this ball in play. Do they need the publicity, or something?
AVN just doesn’t get it, do they? A quick poll of my Internet friends and associates finds that most now think AVN has something to hide, because of how they reacted to the revelations that Acacia may have acquired their mailing list. Most people I spoke to (and you and I) don’t believe AVN would willingly cooperate with Acacia, which reveals a lot of goodwill towards AVN. But having Mr. Cambria come out swinging, and having Mr. Kernes follow up in his typical swagbellied style was just fatuous.
I’m now finished with this subject. I’m too busy to be constantly trade barbs with gargantuan talents like Mr. Kernes, so this will be my last email about this matter. As far as I (and many others) are concerned, AVN should do some real reporting on the Acacia issues. Perhaps they could show some leadership. What about sponsoring a seminar where the companies involved in litigation with Acacia could share information with the people who recently received the “final notice” letters? Or perhaps they could do some investigative reporting (admittedly more effort than reprinting press releases) on how Acacia operates, and the story behind the dramatic rise (and slow fall) in their stock price this summer, despite posting a big loss at the end of June? What about it, Mr. Fishbein? Something? Anything?
Leadership?
Cookie Guy
Ok this guy has a vocabulary…and a valid point, I too would like to see AVN pick up the ball and take a stand on this.
Dirty Bob Writes:
Mike:
I think you really OOPSED on this one. You posted this comment today:
“First I find it highly unlikely that AVN would choose to sue anyone over all of this. The fact is Cookie Man and others came to the same conclusion independently, to say the information came from AVN is not any more a lie than it is to say it didn’t come from AVN. I am sure that AVN protects this list but the possiblity that it leaked out covertly is certainly within the realm of believability.”
The OOPS has to be this part: “to say the information came from AVN is not any more a lie than it is to say it didn’t come from AVN.”
C’mon, Michael. It either is a lie or it isn’t. You can’t say both. It either did or did not come from AVN. There is no middle ground. If it leaked out from someone at AVN, as you suggest the possibility, then it did indeed come from AVN – although not officially. If not, the same goes. Period.
For the record, AVN is very possessive of it’s property and name. I personally doubt that this information was released on purpose, and I see no way it could have been accidental.
Dirty Bob
Actually it isnt an oops.
