The Rance Phenomenon

For those of you who haven't heard yet, there's an anonymous blogger out there called RANCE who is causing a stir. He claims to be an A-List celebrity actor that has both won and lost on the major awards. Some people guess at his identity (George Clooney, Owen Wilson, etc.) or wonder if he's a fake. Frankly, I don't care. Either ha makes this stuff up or he doesn't, but he can rant like Denis Miller and Denis Leary on an all-night coffee bender, and he can tell stories better and funnier than... than... help me out here...

Anyway. Suffice it to say that he's good. And people flock to his site in droves to read. It's amazing, because his site is on Tripod.com, home of the most annoying advertising and pop-ups in the history of the internet. So one of the most visited personal sites on the internet is one of the least user-friendly. Says a lot about his content. Here's his latest entry.

If you’re like me, you're always hearing me how some guy saw one of those slasher movies, left the cinema and blew someone else away with an AK-47. You reply that no doubt if it weren’t for the movie, the guy would have gone home and read the bible, ignored all those smitings therein, and gone on to found an orphanage. Then you get a million statistics that not only prove you wrong, but implicate you by your professional association.

Well, here’s one attempt at refuting the correlation between movie-going and violence: The country of Moldova has one of the lowest rates of movie attendance in the world, yet the highest rate of death by powered lawnmower (.45 deaths per million people (Incidentally, those cinemaniacal Lithuanians place a distant second, with .27 deaths per million. The United States is a sorry ninth, with .09 deaths per million people.))

I know this isn’t the foundation for a argument that would be considered substantive, but I’ve yet to receive a decent rebuttal. Or maybe I should just take a hint.