Small, but it just goes to show that creator entitlement and pomposity extends far beyond fandom.

Background: Sylvia's Enchilada Kitchen is a Mexican restaurant in Houston that gets critically lauded at every turn. Also, the Houston Chronicle runs a newspaper segment where people can air their grievances against a restaurant wherein they had a bad experience. Also also, the owner/operator of Sylvia's can't take criticism.

Hilarity ensues. (WARNING: There's some race!fail in the comments, so read at your own risk.)

( Sylvia's response to the complaint below )

BigAl posts book reviews to his book blog "Books and Pals." Recently he posted an honest but critical review of Jacqueline Howett's "The Greek Seaman," giving it a two star rating because of its "numerous proofing, typo, and grammar issues."

( Jacqueline Howett is not amused. )

Who's in the mood for a good ol' academic tussle?

1. Professor Steve Fuller writes a book called Dissent over Descent: Intelligent Design's Challenge to Darwinism.

2. Professor AC Grayling reviews the book for New Humanist magazine.

It is sometimes hard to know whether books that strike one as silly and irresponsible...are the product of a desire to strike a pose and appear outrageous (the John Gray syndrome), or really do represent that cancer of the contemporary intellect, post-modernism.

3. Fuller responds to the review.

I wish I could repay AC Grayling’s compliment by naming an exotic mental pathology after him, but regrettably his review of Dissent over Descent displays disorders of a much more mundane kind: he has merely failed to read the book properly and does not know what he is talking about.

4. Grayling responds to the response.

Steve Fuller complains, as do all authors whose books are panned, that I did not read his book properly (or at all). Alas, I did.

5. Forum fight!

Over on Dear Author, Jane posts about an author overreacting to bad Amazon.com reviews

The author's fans are quick to point out that Jane is just jealous, a meanie, has no life, etc. And the author herself responds. The comments have been deleted, but breecita saved them

( Pro making ass of herself under the cut )

Whiny pros! Whinier fans! Passive-aggressive smilies!

All we need is a flounce, a sobbing vow to Never Write Again, and/or a pseudocide.

ETA: Thanks to carlanime, a prequel of sorts.

ETA2: Crap, wrong link, wrong potential post. If anyone wants to write up about possibly fraudelent conniving, lying, soul-bonding-is-my-religion! roommates from hell, drop a line.

(But it can't make him use the shift key consistently.)

Giles Coren would like you to know that "a" is very srs bsn:

3) And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed 'a' so that the stress that should have fallen on "nosh" is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable. When you're winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can't you hear? Can't you hear that it is wrong? It's not fucking rocket science. It's fucking pre-GCSE scansion. I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and i have never ended on an unstressed syllable. Fuck. fuck, fuck, fuck.

I am sorry if this looks petty (last time i mailed a Times sub about the change of a single word i got in all sorts of trouble) but i care deeply about my work and i hate to have it fucked up by shit subbing. I have been away, you've been subbing joe and hugo and maybe they just file and fuck off and think "hey ho, it's tomorrow's fish and chips" - well, not me. I woke up at three in the morning on sunday and fucking lay there, furious, for two hours. weird, maybe. but that's how it is.

It's just his letter, but oh, it's so tasty and I love "academic" wank on a Sunday, don't you?

Wank of the SF book reviewing variety- which pretty much automatically means, "Pretentious genre debate and flashing-credentials variety."

Paul Kincaid, a British SF reviewer, writes a review of the non-SF novel The Wild Girls for the SFSite. The review is pretty tepid, and was essentially only done because the author, Pat Murphy, has also written SF novels.

Literaticat, an American on LJ, disagrees.

( It's a MIDDLE GRADE novel, people )

The SF Blog Torque Control reports on both the review and the response, and the blog editor gives his own opinion, which falls solidly on Kincaid's side. This inspires a comment thread in which people from both sides show up to argue about what "middle grade" (a US book categorization that does not exist in the UK) should mean, and whether a UK reviewer is obligated to be familiar with the US book market's labels before he reviews a book.

Kincaid then responds with a quiet but decisive takedown of Literaticat's opinion:

( This is patent balderdash )

Will there be further developments in the exciting saga of what we should call this marketing category? Stay tuned!