In a giving spirit, readers take aim

I like to end each year with a healthy measure of bile and vituperation -- not my own, but readers' vitriol directed against me. A scheduling snafu torpedoed last year's readers-strike-back column, so now I have two years' worth of sputtering outrage to squeeze into one short outing.

The lost year meant nothing, because some readers are still fuming about columns I wrote in 2004. Earlier this month, Devin Lockhart, who says he is a 21-year-old Canadian journalism student, shared his thoughts about a column I wrote last fall, (''No, Canada,") which suggested that anti-George W. Bush hotheads should think twice before emigrating to Molsonland.

''Thank you for the article," Lockhart wrote. ''The epidemic of Americans moving north is reaching critical levels. . . . The greatest threat of course is to the Canadian genepool, which stands to deminish [sic] steadily. The inbreading [sic] of Americans for hundreds of years has greatly taken its toll on their ability to think, speak, move, but unfortunately not their sex drive."

Lowell's James Dukowksi thought the Canada column might win a ''Pulitzer Prize for poor taste" and reader Jonathan Mason objected to my comments about Snow Mexico's speech codes: ''Canada has no free speech? How's this? [Bad word] you."

Is there a Pulitzer for demeaning stereotypes? There's another category I could dominate. Some Howard Dean supporters didn't like being characterized as Volvo-driving granolaheads. ''I'm a big Dean supporter -- teach school and pour concrete, 3 kids, can't afford Starbucks, never been in a Volvo -- who hasn't met any of your silly caricatures in my volunteer work for the campaign," wrote Leo Kostelnik, who called me ''Mrs. Beam," ''little gal," and offered to ''kick the teeth out of your little wise-[Bad word] mouth."

I revisited Vermont this summer, and again the Green Mountain boys fired back. ''What makes you believe that anybody really wants to read your ill-informed, negative stereotype-supporting drivel?" Aaron Woolsey asked in an e-mail with the subject line ''Regarding your idiotic prose on Vermont and Vermonters."

Lieutenant Steven Ford of the Revere Police Department objected to my indulging the ''stereotype of a donut-eating police officer" in a 2004 column about the Atkins diet. ''I have been a police officer for almost 16 years and take great pride in my appearance," Ford wrote. ''I would gladly take you along for one of my 50-mile bike rides, 10-mile runs and 45-minute swim sessions to show you what 16 years of 'eating donuts' has done for me."

In a similar vein, Amy Salvucci decried my depiction of invading ''Foster's-fueled, Australian madmen" during last year's Democratic National Convention. ''In today's column, you horribly misrepresented the Australian people, portraying them as a beer-soaked lot," she wrote. ''Quite the opposite is true. They are in fact a wine-soaked lot."

Two natives of Glen Ridge, N.J., objected to my calling their suburban Shangri-La a ''white-bread hell" in a column about Newton's alarming coyote infestation. (The actual text referred to a ''white-bread hell like Wayland or Glen Ridge, N.J." and, curiously, no one from Wayland complained.) ''I was born and raised in Glen Ridge," wrote Mary Beth Olbrys, ''so you can imagine my surprise to find out that I lived my first 18 years in a white-bread hell! I would be very interested to know what experience you had in Glen Ridge that brought you to that conclusion."

Now would be a good time to formally apologize to the residents of Glen Ridge, and wish them health and prosperity in the new year.

Just last week I took a swipe at my fellow baby boomers, the most cloying generation in world history. Fifty-six-year-old reader Peter Stern wrote that he has ''rejected my boomer legacy and embraced full-blown geezerhood. Over the last couple of years, I have honed my crankiness to a fine edge, scolding litterers, red-light runners, cross-walk speeders and similar miscreants with all the righteousness of a Pat Robertson cursing Darwinists."

I know exactly what he means. I, too, suffer from early-onset crank-hood. I move to the center of sidewalks when bicyclists try to wedge past me, and volubly remind them that there is a reason it's called a sidewalk. I observe posted speed limits on city streets; that drives Bostonians mad. I write letters to editors complaining about the misuse of Norman Mailer's coinage ''factoid," which does not mean ''small or insignificant fact."

Maybe I'll move to Vermont and join the rest of the nuts.

Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.