the best feeling as a Minnesotan is to get somebody asking you for something truly outrageous… and being ever so sweet and compliant, and giving them exactly what they ask for… and then secretly passive-aggressively gloating as it all backfires in their faces.

(which it does! Because people who ask for outrageous things usually don’t have the sense to know that those things would not be good for them!)

one example was many years ago when the owner of a domain emailed me demanding I take down a mention of their domain name on my own blog (the mention was an entirely positive reference to that site, nothing objectionable about it at all!) because they said it was trademark infringement

I took it down. I think it was one of the very few sources of traffic to their site. I think they regretted asking me to do that.

This is the feeling I was talking about when I said I identified with the iguanodon, because of its perpetual thumbs-up to everyone… a constant positivity and agreeableness, which can on occasion be used in brutal self-defense.