Strangely, I'm not sure that most men are aware of "the Pain of Being a Man" themselves. I asked every guy I know about this secret man-pain thing and they all looked at me like I was pulling their, uh... legs.

WOMEN GET "BOTHERED"

"Bothered?" I hear you asking. "What hell does that mean?"

Dunno. I mean, I know what bothered means. It's that gnawing little feeling of contempt we get when other people don't have sense to be more like us.

What I don't know is why botherEE would naturally assume that her botheredNESS was of teensiest modicum of interest to botherER.

The opening phrase "It bothers me that..." smacks of a woman freshly empowered by her personal assertiveness coach, stamping her little foot down on any and every subject which arouses her miff... price of bananas, holocaust, video rewind charges, etc.

Dear Ms Cox,

It bothers me that you compare price of bananas with holocaust in which six million yaddas were yadda yadda'd and yadda yadda yadda.

Yadda,

Barbara J. Moral Compass At Large

Bothered schmothered. Incensed, irate, fuming, outraged... those are emotions that get things done. Bothered is a scrawny little turd of a response, notable mainly for its prissy self-importance.

Bothered isn't a strong enough emotion to fuel much of an effort, so about only place you'll see it is on call-in radio shows, at PTA meetings and in hastily dispatched email.

In above case, for instance, Barbara might have enough passion to dash off a "bothered" email, but I doubt you'll find her tirelessly stalking geriatric Nazis throughout darkest Argentina armed with a car battery wired to a set of nipple clips.

Though I doubt her husband gets off so easily.

IN SUMMARY

I live in an idyllic part of America where polite motorists still honk and give each other finger rather than less cordial hail of gunfire.

On information superhighway, however, only regional barriers are language-based, so it's not so easy to remain insulated from baser natures of our fellow travelers.

Or our own! I'm sure we've all been known to pop off a few rounds at our fellow netizens now and then.

Hell, it's half fun!

AltaVista ( http://altavista.com ) is another great resource if you're looking to get something for nothing. A quick search for "404 Not Found" provides roughly 5688282 nil-filled opportunities right off bat. Why not surf through some sites you missed first time? It's your big chance to miss all of them over again. AltaVista's best match for 404 Not Found, a site so much more Not Found than any other Not Found site that's not even funny, is a little site I like to call http://www.weatherwatchers.org/bbs/wx200board/index.html - containing nothing whatsoever. It's easy to why AltaVista lists this one first. The rest, while just as empty, are somehow less vacuous.

Here's another tip for voyagers into void: if you find a database-driven site that returns error message, "document contains no data", be sure to bookmark it. You'll want to see it again and again. After all, you can't buy that kind of Nothingness for any amount of money. Think about it: There could be anything there! Absolutely anything at all, but instead there's Nothing. And you know, Nothing is really much rarer than something because as soon as anybody stumbles across a place that's no place, they make it someplace, ad everything's all over place everywhere, leaving practically no room at all for Nothing.

This is an alarming trend, but, with vigilance, one which can be reserved. If you've taken from vanishing reserves of Nothing, it's high time you started giving back. It's time to erect your own empty space online, your own digital shrine to The Great Void. Act now, before it's too late. Remember, we have everything to gain - and Nothing to lose.