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had I been eating a hot dog
Saturday, February 3 2001
One thing I really don't understand about this whole Weblog phenomenon is limited extant of the web being logged. Creativity and innovation seem to be the first casualty of any movement the moment it is deemed hip ("hip" meaning "that which is admired when replicated"). From what I can see, nobody wants to mention anything that doesn't meet one of two criteria:
1. It exists on some prestigious fellow weblogger's page.
2. It was mentioned by a prestigious fellow webloggers's page.
This leads to the unnecessarily incestuous form of circulation that I've seen before in other networks of web sites. Other examples include the ever-schmaltzy Ladies of the Heart, the "online journal community" and the community of "shock loggers" who aspire to be the Stileproject and can be counted on to link to Bathtubgirl.
But the thing is, what with the miracles of modern search engines, one's surfing doesn't have to be restricted entirely to the same tired old haunts. You just have to be a little creative (I know it's hard!) when looking for new content. But the web is a big place and trust me, there is some sick shit out there. Here's an example: this morning I did a search in Altavista for "retard.jpg" and came up with the following diversity of links:
A photo album of a particularly unattractive group of Renaissance Faire geeks.
An insensitive Darwinian take on the physically challenged.
Other good searches can be made by limiting all results to those that contain intellectual or obscure English words. My favorite such limitation is the word "vapid," which I've used to limit results for the Backstreet Boys and N'Sync, among others. Conversely, limiting all searches for intellectual subjects to pages that contain certain key non-intellectual words can yield similarly interesting results. My favorite non-intellectual limiting word is "faggot."
I have a question: let's say a 14 year old girl decides to put naked pictures of herself on the web, entirely on her own. Would this be illegal? Who would get in trouble? The host of the site? The girl? Her parents? The geeky sixteen year old boyfriend who teaches her Photoshop and HTML? Joseph Lieberman when he's caught jerking his super-circumcised prick to it minutes before sanctimoniously condemning it on the Senate floor?
Here's a new advertiser-mentioned condition from which I can honestly say I've never suffered: "Scalp Stress Itch." The treatment, I learned tonight, is Scalpicin™. I'm wondering if perhaps there is no such thing as Scalp Stress Itch and this product is really intended for people suffering from an itch in a much more embarrassing part of the body. Itchy butt disease, now that is something I have suffered from, though it's doubtful I'd ever buy anything marketed specifically to treat it.
It was such an irresistibly beautiful day today that I felt duty bound, in the cause of continued peace on Earth and sustained economic growth (ha ha!), to get out of the house and go see some of the things people actually fly to Los Angeles to experience. So I rode my bike west to the 3rd Street Promenade, partook briefly of the warm weather crowd there, and then continued down along the beach to Venice. On a Saturday it's a nonstop outdoor spectacle the entire way. I referred to this in the past as a "stationary parade" - and that's precisely what it is. Starting on the Santa Monica Promenade, extending the length of the Santa Monica pier and then going south down the beach to Marina Del Rey, it's at least five miles long, perhaps longer. Many of its constituent elements and personalities, I'd seen before, even though I'd taken a similar journey only once before. The one thing I hadn't seen before, however, was a expansive pro-life display featuring, what else, huge blown-up posters of bloody, fragmented fœtuses. I glanced over and saw them all in an instant. One featured the top part of fœtal head, sans lower jaw. I don't know what I would have done had I been eating a hot dog or something; in my opinion this was much more a public nuisance than an uncensored display of hard core pornography. Sure, abortion is a messy business, but (as anyone who ever watches The Learning Channel knows) so are plastic surgery and liver transplants. I don't need to have my nose rubbed in this when I'm walking down the Venice Beach boardwalk on a sunny Saturday. The irony of course is that these protestors are probably also the ones who support the eradication of pornography from "the internet" out of concern for the "precious innocent children," and here they were showing disgusting images that affected me, a jaded adult, for the rest of the day.
I eventually made it down to Abbott Kinney and, my appetite mostly restored, had a couple slices of pizza from Abbott's Pizza. I was sitting outside on a bench with the warm sun shining down on me, all sorts of random people and dogs wriggling past me. They didn't know me of course but it sort of felt like community anyway and I was thinking that I should find myself a place where I can regularly hang out and develop, you know, a genuine band of homies. It's pretty telling that, for example, I don't know any unattached female human beings of any age except for my housemate's bitchy sister.
Annoying delays, many of them coinciding with mysterious and completely unnecessary accesses of the floppy drive (does anyone really use floppy drives anymore?) caused my MP3s to pause and studder. Then I did something really innocent, disabling all computer alert noises, and at that point the fucker just locked up. I came this (...) close to migrating all future home computing to my unused Linux box.
The amusement rides on the world-famous Santa Monica pier.
Pictures from the Venice boardwalk.
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