User Profile

My name is David Nadeau, and I'm here to tell you about Jessica Porridge.

As part of my workday routine, I scan the local news on the MaineToday website, a publication umbrella that includes the Portland Press Herald, Kennebec Journal, and Waterville Morning Sentinel. Occasionally I glance at the reader comments, which have the advantage in a small-town paper of occasionally containing additional useful information from citizens well acquainted with the subjects of the article. Last autumn, in response to an article about septic trucks causing problems on a certain Waterville road in the Sentinel, one woman wrote:

"I Have heard those trucksaround town and they've have had enough. I speak for ALL Watervile residetns when i Say we want this septic reatment plant SHUT DOWN NOW~! It is a blite on our city and do not want to be known as the city of sewage, I could think of less polite thigns to call it but I"m a lady!!Mayor Lapage is a bozo to think tourists want to see this!"

I shook with laughter until tears were streaming down my face. Such passion in service of such an... unconventional opinion! I initially wondered whether this was the work of the sort of trolls who haunt lackadaisically moderated sites like the Sentinel's, but resolved nevertheless to keep an eye out for comments from this "Jesscia Porridge" [sic] in the future.

What I found has kept me amazed ever since. Jessica is the proverbial pearl in the vast, grimy sea bed of sophomoric blog comments the world over. Her posts evince a certain alternate-reality logic that is simply indescribable, her rants bursting with a rare conservative humanity rewarding those who bother to decipher the often befuddling sentence structures and punctuation. It's all peppered with her thoughts on politics, family, the youth of today, and the (in)conveniences of modern life. (She shows particular disdain for uncooperative retail clerks and all social trends she considers liberal.) Here are a couple of good articles to act as an introduction to her world-view:
WATERVILLE ARTIST LINKED TO HOLLYWOOD STAR: Greene dishes latest on Lohan
Storm warnings stay in effect into morning

Recently, I've begun an email dialogue with Jessica and have found her thoroughly friendly and personable. Once you understand that there is truly no malice in her words, the strongly phrased diatribes for which she has become known cease to irritate and take on a certain homespun wisdom. The instant gratification paradigm of "new media" reader comments provides her an outlet for her honest initial reactions to news stories and like most of us, she may be quicker to criticize than to praise, but her perspective is ceaselessly fascinating. She has neither the ability nor the desire to censor herself, and the associations she creates between her frame of reference and any given story's content are marvelously unique.

That said, Jessica has given me permission to create this journal, an ongoing log of her commentary as published on the MaineToday site. I have collected all her comments that I've been able to locate, either directly from Jessica or through the MaineToday archives. I feel her comments--and, where relevant, responses from other MaineToday users--speak for themselves and I will make no attempt to offer my own commentary on either the articles or her responses to them. I suspect this journal is the sort of database Jessica herself would create had she the know-how. Even had she not repeatedly told me of the pride she takes in her comments about the Morning Sentinel's news stories, she clearly takes seriously her small role in contributing to the American public dialogue. I hope she appreciates having it all in one place.

I am NOT making fun of her. Jessica would be the first to tell you that she is hardly a professional typist, and she does not always exactly use the SQRRR method for reading comprehension before she posts her thoughts on an article, and personally, I think that sort of "from the hip" honesty is both charming and a unique mirror back at us as a media-saturatd society. In a blogosphere with literal millions of amateur journalists scrabbling to be heard and register their opinion as the wittiest, most insightful, most full of "cut through the crap" commonsense, it takes someone who makes no pretensions to any of those things to grab attention from within the cacophony. (Even if it's just to make you say, "Huh?")

Now for the legal stuff. Most importantly, I am NOT affiliated with the Waterville Morning Sentinel, MaineToday or Blethen Maine Newspapers. All articles reprinted in this journal originally appeared in the Waterville Morning Sentinel and are copyright Blethen Maine Newspapers, with whom all rights remain. I have to the best of my ability listed each of them under the date of their original publication in the Sentinel and printed them in their entirety without alteration. They are reprinted for purposes of review and reference only, as this journal exists for purposes of examining the subculture of new media "reader comments" sections. In each entry, I have hidden the articles' actual content behind cut links in the hopes of minimizing their appearance on search engines, as I have been unable to locate links to all the original articles on the MaineToday site. All articles and comments were (and to the best of my knowledge, still are) available as free content on the MaineToday site (http://morningsentinel.mainetoday.com) and it is my sincere hope that this constitutes fair use (cf. Fandom Wank, The Comics Curmudgeon, etc.)

Furthermore, all comments reprinted by Jessica Porridge or others are also the property of Blethen Maine Newspapers. (Though Jessica Porridge has given me permission to reprint her comments their copyright still resides with Blethen.)

I claim no responsibility for authorship of any content in this journal except this introduction and do not warrant the accuracy of any facts presented therein. You'll see why that's important. :-) (Man smiling.)

--David Nadeau
Maine, May 2008

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