Bring It On, Bob Cesca

Okay, Bob Cesca, you're on.

The wingnut mailbag? I gotta million of 'em.

Anybody who's been working in the news biz long enough accumulates a file of favorites, all kept under the general header of ''nutmail.''

In the age before e-mail, it actually cost these people some ink and a first-class stamp to insult you. The thrill of opening an envelope with no return address and finding the clipping of something you'd just written - well, that feeling never gets old.

Some readers still send nut-mail the old fashioned way. I recently wrote a column about lethal injection and the death penalty, and a reader clipped it out and sent it back to me. Around the margins, in black pen, he had written ''COMMIE SLUT [you & Jerry & Chessman ALL SAME],'' meaning former California governor Jerry Brown and Caryl Chessman, executed by Jerry's father, Gov. Pat Brown, for violent rapes - but not murder. So, I thought, that makes three of us Commie Sluts - practically a band!

Over my photo, the reader had scrawled ``Arm & Hammer College,'' presumably meaning ``Hammer and Sickle.'' I don't personally know of a baking soda institution of higher learning here or in the old Soviet Union. Less inventively, before the word ''natch'' he had wedged in the letter ''s,'' and I don't have to explain that to you.

Now that kind of pen-and-ink defacing inventiveness just isn't possible in e-mail. But here is another reader of mine, a member of the electronic generation, giving it his best shot in an e-mail response to a column I wrote about why Barbie deserves to die, ideally an unnatural death. The man signed his name and the city -- my city, unfortunately -- and I reproduce it here in part, because of its length, but with all spelling and punctuation faithful to the original.

...how about the ''morbidly obese, learning channel lard-ass Barbie, who gets bypass surgery on TV at the expense of tax payer Barbie.'' How about the Nigger with a misspelled name, ''Brarbie''? to give ethnic pride to the ghetto-dwelling blak gurl chil' Barbe who be speekin da ebonic ... How bout the good for welfare Barbe, wid a extra longwrist to get da handout Barbiiee ? You know what assholes and Negros have in common? They are both black inside.

Maybe a few courses at Arm & Hammer College would do him some good.