And then came the Simpsons Halloween segment.

"It's good that you made that awful thing, Bart."

 One account has been closed, and the other set up their account Sept. 25, 2009 and their last log-in was Sept. 25, 2009. Not much to fear from these people. In any case, if someone has an inappropriate user name, why not just report it to chess.com?

Or post in on the forums for everyone to see?

I am certainly not going to waste my time reporting something like this, I just don't want to communicate with such persons. The user names were chosen because they were obvious enough to make the point.

But you wasted your time blocking the person who probably wouldn't have ever contacted you. Mlle. Enorme has certainly never come across my screen until you posted here.

Do you imagine that I was searching the site for these user names and then blocked them, of course I spotted those persons in Live chat and their comments were probably what you would expect from their user names.

I probably had (maybe even still have, somewhere . . . ) that same collection volume, as I recall all of those stories, although they are all famous enough I'm sure they've each appeared in multiple sources over the years. I started exploring science fiction about when I was in junior high school, which was 1972-1974 for me, so I had lots of great material available.  That was when published collections and anthologies of earlier sci fi stories were just starting to become common, and there was beginning to be easy access to older short stories by Clarke, Heinlein, and lots of others.

You know, this thread title is one of the best ever for the forums here. I laugh everytime it pops up on the latest comments board

You know that was a long time ago because it's probably been 30 years since they stopped calling it junior high and began using the term middle school!  At least that was the case in Michigan.  Wikipedia says the middle school configuration now outnumbers the junior high configuration in the U.S. by 10:1 .

Say, I just learned an interesting tidbit-- Wikipedia says the first use of the term middle school in the U.S. was in Bay City, Michigan, in 1950.  The term wasn't used in my home town until somewhere around 1980, and middle school added another grade (6th) to the 7th and 8th grades that were originally junior high.

Having just 7th and 8th graders together, as it was for me, was bad enough.  When I was in 7th grade the 8th graders used to torment and beat the hell out of us on a regular basis.  Seems like a mass-scale sacrifice to toss 6th graders into that mess and expect them to survive.  Oh well, not my problem. 

So on the new comments board is:

-Why do people post pictures of themselves here?
-I want to be your friend.
-How about ban EVERYBODY?

I am still waiting to be given my allowed list...