(DISCLAIMER: This totally fictional, totally made up story is made up of fictional characters not at all based on reality. I wouldn't want anyone crying to their mommies).

Once upon a time, in the kingdom of smogolonia, people started writing smogs. These smogs shared their viewpoints of the world from various perspectives. There were mommy smogs, political smogs, relationship smogs....smogs about every topic. If you could think of something, someone out there was smogging about it.

In this kingdom of smogs came certain places that promised to promote these sites. These places promised that, if you visited the smogs of others, others would visit your smogs. It was very promising, and in the realm of these smogs was one group, SmogSicker, that even promised to pay its users for bringing more smoggers to use its services, or for visiting more smogs than anyone else in a week.

One young smogger was especially industrious, and visited many, many sites. He made enough money to ask SmogSicker to pay him. They did not pay him, and he complained. He also complained because they did not give him services that he had paid for.

That's when SmogSicker turned into a horrible beastie: "How DARE you threaten SmogSicker, you impudent rapscallion! We will sue you, and your children, and your children's children! SmogSicker will not be denied justice!"

Well, the smogger, wanting to avoid confrontation, went about his merry way and decided to stop smogging about what SmogSicker had done to him. It wasn't important, and the money wasn't a big deal anyway. Until he noticed some unusual clicks on the account for the advertisements on his smogs. The advertising company threatened to pull his ads because someone, somewhere, was using software to generate bogus clicks to the ads on his smog. Well, it wasn't long before our smogger put two and two together, and decided that SmogSicker was probably acting in retaliation. The horrible beastie was going to make as much trouble for him as they could by trying to interfere with his other accounts. The smogger deleted his accounts on SmogSicker and decided he should warn others. But SmogSicker would most assuredly retaliate. So our industrious smogger, realizing someone can't sue you for slander if you don't actually openly accuse themselves of something, wrote a nice allegory about a smogger and a dragon.

Moral of this story: Don't take any wooden nickels!