As usual, I am concluding this year with a trilogy of columns — the good, the bad and the audacious.

This week, I’m letting my critics throw brickbats at columns I’ve written in 2010. Next week, I will bask in a shower of bouquets from my admirers. Following that, I will take a whimsical look at what lies ahead in 2011.

So let the brickbats fly.

The most unkindest cut of all came from a literal-minded reader who took at face value the piece I wrote mocking those who would take us back to the era of our founding fathers.

“Mr. Owens longs for the days of our founding fathers, ‘when government was small, women were docile, and a man was a man — or, in the case of African American slaves — three-fifths of a man.’ He would like to ‘reverse 234 years of regression since these United States gained their freedom in 1776.’ The idea of a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal is disdained by him. He labels Abraham Lincoln a ‘tyrant’ for coming up with this description. He hails the idea of an Electoral College chosen by state legislators, not ‘the ignorant masses’ to vote for president. … His reveling over the Old Confederacy, combined with all the aforementioned comments, suggests that he does not like having a black president.”

Serves me right for writing ironically.

There was no irony in my column on the Gulf oil spill in which I wrote, “Nuclear power is one way of easing the dependency on petroleum, but it too poses incalculable dangers.”

A nuclear engineer responded: “I do not like journalists taking potshots at nuclear power for sensational effect.” He noted that nuclear power plants are designed to withstand the worst earthquakes the country has experienced, whereas the uniform building codes in effect for most buildings — including hospitals and schools — are based on the possibility of an earthquake less than a third as severe.

Somebody who doesn’t like Alabama wrote: “Congratulations. You have finally written one whole column without mentioning Alabama a single time.” That may have been the same person who blamed me for everything that’s happened to Mobile since I retired from the Mobile daily newspaper and left the state in 2003: “You came in and helped with the destruction of the city and its newspaper; you moved away, so you did not see what the view of the MPR and [former Mayor] Mike Dow wrought, and you still get a check.”

And I’m right glad to get it.

One reader was outraged at a column I wrote about how to kill a rabbit in preparation for cooking it:

“I have owned rabbits as pets for many, many years, and find them to be the sweetest creatures God ever created. They are not only a pet but a cherished member of our family. And to open the morning paper and be inundated with such vile, disgusting filth.”

Another reader fired from a different angle, challenging my suggestion that “anybody who can’t kill a rabbit with a double-barreled shotgun doesn’t deserve a meal of rabbit meat.”

He wrote: “…Those of us who grew up in the Southwest … know that after shooting a cottontail with a shotgun you generally have only the fluffy tail left. … In New Mexico, we learned to aim by shooting running coyotes at 250 yards with a .22. Hitting a cottontail in the head at closer range is a piece of cake, is very humane, and allows you to enjoy the entire rabbit (perhaps with green chili sauce?) at mealtime. So I derisively proclaim Gene Owens to be full of baloney.”

I expected a certain level of flak after my column maintaining that government should stay out of the business of defining morality. I suggested that the courts should leave the propriety of same-sex marriage up to religious organizations, which could decide, each for its own members. One person responded:

“Such perversions as same-sex unions are not wrong because the Bible says they are wrong; the Bible says they are wrong because they are wrong.” The legal banning of such marriages, the reader contends, is not unfair, because “the law applies to any citizen regardless of sexual orientation. Any person, heterosexual or not, is free and encouraged to marry one of the opposite sex.”

I encountered unexpected dissent after I characterized the late Bobby Thomson’s pennant-winning home run in the Giant-Dodger playoff of 1951 as “the shot heard round the world.”

Protested an avid golfer: “There are hundreds of thousands of us out here who firmly believe that the ‘shot that was heard round the world’ came off the no. 4 wood golf club of Gene Sarazen who, in 1935, hit a double eagle on the par-four 15th hole of the Augusta National Golf Club in the tournament now known as the Masters.”

OK, maybe there were two shots heard round the world — three if you count the one fired in 1775 at Emerson’s “rude bridge that arched the flood” at Concord, Mass.

The latest dissent came from a Southern belle who objected to my suggestion that, as a concession to old age, one should wear loafers to eliminate the need to bend over to tie shoelaces:

“No way am I going to wear loafers with my fur (even though it is faux) coat or my Sunday outfit. I, too, am a Southern girl, and there are some things you don’t wear together. Neither am I going to abandon my high heels — not stilettos, mind you, but at least three inches.”

Male chauvinist that I am, I forgot that women wear shoes other than loafers that don’t have to be laced and tied. Were it not for the postmark, I’d swear that letter came from Miss Peggy.

Write Gene Owens at 315 Lakeforest Circle, Anderson SC 29625, or by e-mail at: WadesDixieco@AOL.com.