For Jim Rix’s 80th Birthday (on January 15)

Jim’s Most 

Famous Column?

By Moristotle

Jim Rix’s wry, witty discourse on the Greek legend of Psyche and Eros, “Thirst Satyrday for Eros: Understanding Eros (subtitled ‘...merits ardent investigation’),” was published on Saturday, September 6, 2014. Over eight years later, on December 28, 2022, our administrative staff received a notice from Blogger unlike any other we had ever received in our almost 17 years of posting, to wit:

Your post titled “Thirst Satyrday for Eros: Understanding Eros” was flagged to us for review. This post was put behind a warning for readers because it contains sensitive content...Your blog readers must acknowledge the warning before being able to read the post/blog.

    The notice advised us, if we were “interested in having the status reviewed,” to take the following actions:

Please update the content to adhere to Blogger’s Community Guidelines. Once the content is updated, you may republish it at [prescribed address]. This will trigger a review of the post.

    So, two days later (on December 30), after republishing a revision of the post, we “filed suit” with Blogger, claiming in our defense as follows:

Dear Blogger Team:
    After carefully reviewing the September 6, 2014 post that has been flagged (and carefully re-studying the Blogger Community Guidelines as well), we have replaced the post’s image of Middleton Jameson’s painting, “Cupido und Psyche,” with one portraying them as adults (Émile Signol’s painting, “The Abduction of Psyche”).
    If the motivation for the complaint had to do with the plaintiff’s taking seriously the soliciting of funds for erotic research, consider that the author (Mr. Jim Rix, who has published a book about our criminal justice system, Jingle Jangle: The Perfect Crime Turned Inside Out) was making a literary jest, because he specified nowhere to send funds (unlike a certain former, one-term president, who never failed to tell his supporters where to send their money).
    We trust that the post’s republication with “The Abduction of Psyche” image will satisfy the Blogger Community Guidelines.
            Thankful for your diligence,
            Morris Dean (aka Moristotle)

The Blogger Team was satisfied, and they re-instated the revised post within minutes of submission. The jury must not even have retired to deliberate its verdict.
    You can view Jim’s original discourse, with the original image, in our Back Pages.
    However, there might be one question more: Was the plaintiff’s real motivation simply to make Jim even more famous than he already is?

Copyright © 2023 by Moristotle