Website Hall of Infamy
December, 2004: The Best Page in the Universe
This is a website that's full of a guy's rants that would make Bill O'Reilly seem like Mother Theresa. I could go on to explain why I feel that way but I think it would be far more effective to include some words of wisdom from this guy's site:
On Bill O'Reilly: "O'Reilly wouldn't be such a bad guy if he would quit crying for a few minutes, step back, re-evaluate his life, and realize that he's a giant blubbering vagina. In June of 2003, O'Reilly attacked the only form of media he was powerless in: the Internet. In his 'Talking Points Memo' segment, he whined that 'nearly everyday, there's something written on the Internet about me that's flat out untrue,' continuing with his theory that 'the reason these net people get away with all kinds of stuff is that they work for no one. They put stuff up with no restraints. This, of course, is dangerous...' Yeah, real dangerous Bill. Next thing you know, people will get the crazy idea that they have the right to express their opinions as they see fit. Who knows? Maybe this idea will catch on and they'll add it to the Constitution of the United States, giving it a catchy title like 'freedom of speech.' What do you think of that you sock-sniffing bog trotter? "
On Elizabeth Smart (the 14-year-old girl who was kidnapped by a self-proclaimed "messiah" and his common-law wife): "When Elizabeth Smart was finally 'freed,' her father appeared on TV giving one blubbering speech after another saying 'I don't know what she's gone through and I'm sure she's been through hell.' I don't think he was referring to the pictures of Elizabeth hanging out at parties circulating on the Internet, the video of her having a picnic at a park, or the hippy drum circle she was spotted at when he referred to 'hell.'"
On child discipline: "Kids today need a good beating every now and then. If you don't beat your kids when they fall out of line, the next thing you know your son will go off and bang some dude in the ass just out of spite. You tell them to clean their room, they say 'no,' you smack them. It's simple; it works. Don't listen to these assholes on TV with their bullshit hippy psycho babble; if they had it their way, every child would be raised in a pastel colored room with Philip Glass pumped through the speakers 24 hours a day. Then again, it might not be all that bad because it will make your kids complacent, so it won't be as hard for them to swallow when they realize that they'll be spending the rest of their lives chained to a desk in a cubicle writing reports to make someone else rich."
On feminism: "Where the hell is the feminist movement today? I looked through some feminist books at the library, and almost every one of them bitched about male patriarchy. Oppression this and equal rights that. BORING. Where's the violence? Nobody wants to read about a single mom trying to raise a kid and keep a job. People want to read about explosions, monsters, and exploding monsters."
On the care of the elderly: "My solution: let's eat them! We'll dress up a slaughter house like a retirement home, and then we'll trick them into going with promises of free prune juice and quality health care (bwahaha). Then we'll throw them into the meat grinder and there you have it: instant geriatric burgers."
On abortion: "I have a different stance on abortion: I'm against abortion, but for killing babies. That way everyone loses, and I win. I'm neither pro choice, nor pro life; I'm pro you-shutting-the-hell-up. The only way I'd be 'pro choice' is if it meant I could choose which babies I could abort, and only then if I could lift the age restriction to 80. I was at this mall the other day watching some shitty documentary when I came out of the theater and saw old people dancing to country music in the courtyard. I couldn't remember the last time I saw a group of people begging this hard to be aborted."
On his own genitals: "I was sitting around the other day admiring how big my nuts are, when I came to the conclusion that they are somewhere between fairly giant and super giant. It's like I have a pair of Epcot centers dangling between my legs. Of course, you have to have a pretty big pair to say some of the things I've said, and then go on national TV. That's part of the reason my balls are so astronomical. The last nine or ten false readings in gravity wave detectors have been due to the gravity field of my nads. They're just under critical mass, a few inches away from collapsing into a super dense vortex of nutsaqutron (a type of radiation given off by enormous balls)."
Then there's a page that provides helpful hints on when to commit suicide. The page's title says it all: Suicide isn't so bad, give it a chance.
This site has even inspired another protest site called Mothers Against Maddox. The webmaster of The Best Page in the Universe has denied being involved in that site said that he thought it was a prank being conducted by someone else. Mothers Against Maddox has called that site "The Most Hateful Site on the Internet", which makes it obvious that the site's creator, Beth Robbins, has never visited previous Website Hall of Infamy inductees God Hates Fags, God Hates America, What the Heather Statue of Liberty Really Means, Abu Ghraib Iraqi Prison Fantasy Camp, or Martin Luther King, Jr.: An Historical Examination (which was erected as a front for the White Power group Stormfront.org).
November, 2004: The Official Rock Paper Scissors Strategy Guide
Remember "Rock Paper Scissors", the game where two people use their hands to make certain gestures to see whose hand would dominate depending on whether you throw out a scissor gesture and your opponent thows out a paper gesture or you're paper and your opponent is a rock or you're a rock and your opponent is a scissor? Sure it was a fun game as a kid but most people tend to outgrow their interest in this game once they reach adulthood.
Apparently there are a small minority of adults who continue to not only play this game to amuse themselves (rather than playing it with a child to amuse that child) but they even organize world championship tournaments around this.
It's one thing to have tournaments created around Chess or Scrabble because at least those games involve strategy. But Rock Paper Scissors is a game with zero strategy that's based purely on luck. If you happened to throw out a rock while your opponents decides to throw out a pair of scissors, you win simply because you were lucky that you threw out a winning hand because, under the rules, scissors cover paper. Unless you're a mind reader, you won't know what your opponent will throw out next so there is no way to plan to throw out certain hands in a certain sequence or anything like that.
This site even offers membership packages and an online trainer to help you become a Rock Scissors Paper master (or something like it).
Personally, I think the idea of taking a simple children's game like Rock Scissors Paper and turning it into some kind of quasi-competitive thing is pretty lame. Hell, even Curling is more compelling as a competitive sport than this.
October, 2004: Hal Lindsey Oracle
Back in 1969 Hal Lindsey wrote this book called The Late Great Planet Earth, which used the Book of Revelations in the Bible to prove that the Earth, as we know it, is condemned to destruction very soon. That book became such a big bestseller that it was made into a movie that was narrated by—of all people—Orson Welles. I remembered watching that film with my mother and grandmother at that time and we were pretty skeptical about the outlandish "evidence" in the Bible to support the claim that the Earth is doomed and the Rapture is going to come pretty soon.
Now Hal Lindsey is on the World Wide Web and he is still claiming that the Earth is doomed and the Rapture is going to come pretty soon. The site is also full of conservative commentary, including stories that are pro-George W. Bush and stories that have named Bush's Democratic challenger John Kerry as a traitor. Here's my take on this—if I believed that Armaggeddon was coming soon, I surely would not be worrying about the upcoming U.S. presidential elections. If the Earth is going to be destroyed soon as predicted in the Bible, it really doesn't matter who gets elected President of the United States next month. Unless Lindsey is simply sowing Armaggeddon fears as a way of enriching himself and he's yet another one of those so-called "religious" figures who believes that shilling anything for a few bucks takes precedence over answering Jesus' call to serve the poor, sick, and downtrodden among us.
Reading this whole site, with its "Armaggeddon is coming soon" message, brings to mind two childhood tales—Chicken Little and The Boy Who Cried "Wolf!"