Thinking 'bout The People Upside-Down In Japan

I subscribe to lots of mailing lists - Volkswagen lists, guitar lists, computers lists, etc. Problem is I really don't have much time to read the (sometimes hundreds of) emails that come through every day, so I usually just get them in a daily digest form and give them a cursory glance to see if there's anything useful to me in that particular one. I glanced through one of the Volkswagen lists the other day and was surprised to see a reference to "Bob Hoover's blog". Bob Hoover is as close to a guru as you can get in the Volkswagen community. He made a great number of posts to the Volkswagen lists & groups in the burgeoning days of the Internet that were full of practical advice, useful tips & tricks, and were a great read to boot. These became known as "The Sermons of Bob Hoover" and were greatly prized by many Volkswagen enthusiasts and were collected on web sites, hard drives, passed around on bulletin boards and newsgroups - at one point, an aftermarket supply house was even selling a CD-ROM with all them in text file format. The Internet being what it is, for every 100 people who enjoyed and were helped by these essays, there would be one wiseacre who had to chime in and tell Bob that he was wrong, or that wasn't how Dieter (the $100-per-hour mechanic at the local Haus of Imports) did it. One thing made abundantly clear in Mr. Hoover's writing is that he doesn't suffer fools gladly in real life, so you can be damn sure he wasn't going to put with the electronic version of a jackass - he quietly asked people to take down his postings from web sites, stop selling the CD-ROMS, and greatly reduced his on-line presence in general. It is my understanding that he was perfectly willing to help you if you asked, but he was (understandably) miffed at people slinging unsolicited criticism at him for what was clearly a labor of love. The sermons still popped up occasionally on a bulletin board or a hastily-authored web page, but they never lasted very long. I was glad to see that Mr. Hoover has created his own blog and has posted the original sermons, which range from eminently practical to entertaining to philosophical. Check 'em out.