If you haven't left your dignity behind and wallowed in the mud with the rest of us pigs, there is a wonderfully inane comment thread war developing here at the Bastion, and if you're interested in Chicago comedy in the least, please do stop by and drop your calling card. 45 inflamed comments and counting! What a delight.

This seems like as good a time as any to make another loud and plaintive plea for contributing writers. We do have a few, and we appreciate them very much, but even the willing are busy people like you and me.

Yes, there's lots of good stuff that goes on in Chicago comedy that we can't cover, because we are human beings unable to manipulate time and space in such a way as to be present at six physical locations at the same temporal destination, and we don't have a Pulitzer Prize-winning staff culled from the top ranks of the Washington Post and the New York Times.

We'd like for the Bastion to be on hand for more Chicago comedy happenings, and that only way that's going to be possible is if we wrangle more scrappy writers into the fold. As we said in a passionate response in the comments thread, "We're a small creative community here, brothers and sisters. And we're all in this together." (We also said something about a bottle of "Chill the F*ck Out" pills, so it's not all sunshine and lollipops.)

Want to make this a better, fuller, more well-rounded site? Send writers our way. We promise not to bite, scratch, or smack them. Send us an e-mail with a writing sample, a little info on your comedy background, and an explanation of what kind of stuff you might be interested in writing about, and we'll give you a try.