We lately received this interesting link to a post in the BaCoN Hobbyland Chat Room:

http://beadcollector.net/cgi-bin/anyboard.cgi/openforum?cmd=get&cG=4373234323...=

Totally disturbing!  Let me translate and condense this allegory, for indeed, the central message is probably lost in the heartfelt Teutonic expression.

"Deep down inside, the bead world is shallow."  [Now which comedian first said that?]  Beads are gathered from remote and romantic spots around the world, and although they're just beads, they're elevated to some high philosophical pedestal, as if they're some embodiment of meaning and truth.  Yet, they're just beads, made for ornamentation, and, in particular, when they're "off the string", so to speak, they're truly nothing but beads, having lost any ethnographic value and meaning they might have had.

Long Nose smells the superficiality displayed by most participants in the bead forum.  All beads shown are beautiful, heart-stopping, fabulous, great, or etc.  Nothing is trash if it makes the forum and nothing is what it is until Ralph Beader sprinkles the Research Results [read Holy Water].  When everything is "great", nothing is.  If there were a genuine comprehensive catalog of beads (as there is for many other "developed" hobbies), we wouldn't need this forum at all.  What's even worse, the handful of participants playing "Show-and-Pretend-I-Have-Something" don't even bother to label the specimens shown, so we're left with 10,000 images of "great" beads, a worthless mishmash of photos of no lasting utility. 

It's a fun place!  Controversy is not tolerated and, by all means, don't challenge Ralph Beader.  Show those arty shots, use amateur thoughtless terminology, pretend beads have meanings, get duped by phony lying folklore, kowtow to the criminal eBay collaborators, pretend to do "research".  That's what Long Nose wants to say.  Ban this guy!  He's upsetting the puppies!

They won't go for war no more; great Midwestern hardware store; philosophy that turns away; from those who aren't afraid to say; what's on their minds; the left-behinds; of The Great Society; do do do do do!  [Thanks, Frank!]