I Am Not e. e. cummings
I am not e. e. cummings. For a few days in the spring of 1973 I thought I might be, and started writing little poems all in lower case. After I had the good sense to reread the poems, I stopped thinking that I was e. e. cummings. However, LiveJournal, as good as it is, thinks that I am e. e. cummings. Mr. Cummings didn't use capital letters a lot, but he didn't begrudge them to other people who struggled with issues like how to start a sentence about cummings without using a capital C at the beginning of the sentence.
So. I do not write poems all in lower case. I am not j. p. duntemann. I am not jeff duntemann. I am certainly not jeff_duntemann. My name is Jeff Duntemann. LiveJournal, however, forbids me to be Jeff Duntemann. It would allow me to be jduntemann, or jpduntemann, or grouchycontrarian. Because I need a good RSS-capable mirror for my primary journal site, I bought a LiveJournal account, and grumbled while begging the system's gracious permission to be jeff_duntemann, which is not my name and makes me look a variable in a bad C program.
And that brings me, by the way, to the point of this rant: Hey! You out there! Yeah, you, whoeverthehell wrote the username management code for LiveJournal, you are an inferior programmer! (And I'll bet I know what language you code in.) You are an adolescent, lower-case character fetishist with untreated pimples and an emotional age of about 15. So boy, I'm a-callin' you out. I dare you to stand up here and explain to us grown-ups why there cannot be upper-case characters in a LiveJournal username. Or that much-despised ASCII character 20H, which as a character-of-space ought to sue for discrimination under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
And boy, I don't think you're man (or programmer) (or poet) enough to do it.