I couldn’t sleep last night fretting over a blog posting that, in mentioning one of Stephen Gyllenhaal’s latest cyber ramblings, described him as “compassionate”. Now, of all the traits that might distinguish this aging Hollywood has-been and Swedenborgian washout, compassion is most definitely not one of them. But a blog with the tedious title, “Adventures in Compassion (in the Screen Trade): Jon Rubenstein is a Showbiz Manager... In a Business Full of Slasher Sequels, Bug-Eating Reality TV, and Fart Comedies, He is Promoting Compassion. These Are His Adventures...” begs to differ.

Surprise—today I’m singing the praises of the only Gyllenhaal in the world actually, you know, qualified to discuss Guantánamo Bay Detention Center, and that is Executive Editor of the Miami Herald Anders Gyllenhaal, great-grandson of the esteemed Swedish-American newspaperman of the same name and, oh yeah, Stephen “Mister-President-You-Must-Not-Close-Gitmo” Gyllenhaal’s younger brother.

As the owner of a shoestring literary press, I’m less a commodity publisher and more an ideas broker. Although sales figures are important because we pay royalties on the downloads of our ebooks, the real indicator for me that our authors are being read is the feedback they get. Who are their readers, where are they, what do they think about what they’ve read? Therefore my strategy has mainly been to get the word out about our authors as broadly as possible, which means I’ve been exploring to the maximum the capabilities of the web network.

I feel another rant on “Orientalness” coming on. This one has to do with an episode of Numb3rs, a TV series I talk about from time to time because it’s given my beloved Stephen Gyllenhaal his steadiest employment.

For whatever reason—I suppose they thought I was being too personal or off-topic—my comments on Stephen’s first piece at Huffington in 15 months didn’t pass the monitors. Read his piece, then read my comments below (I submitted it cut for length, this is the uncut version):