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previous page's integer plus one
Wednesday, February 12 2014
Our friends Susan and David were supposed to be coming up for the night so they'd be here for an inspection on a house they are close to buying in the eastern outskirts of Woodstock. Initially they were just going to show up on the morning of the inspection and make a day trip out of it, but the threat of a big storm coming up from the south made them want to stay the night. But by this afternoon, that storm was looking so ominous that the inspection itself was rescheduled. As an indication of the kind of year this has been, this was the second time the inspection had been rescheduled. On the plus side, it meant I didn't have to vacuum up the tiny bits of wood sprinkled all over the living room carpet.
While Gretchen was off with the older women of her poetry group, I watched a number of television shows while drinking various alcohol-containing beverages. There was a fascinating episode of Nova about the construction of the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore, the first non-classical-period dome built without centering (temporary support framework below). The key to building it was the use of a herringbone bricklaying pattern as well as special template for guidance strings that caused the spiral of bricks to form a series of inverted arches.
I've been an Facebook troll since before there was a World Wide Web. I started with graffiti and information timebombs consisting of xeroxes of diary pages and then moved on to rabid faux right wing letters to the editor. During the 1990s and 2000s I made a fair number of satirical websites. In recent times, Facebook has shown itself to be the ultimate trolling ecosystem. It's also the first time I have come into contact with large numbers of other trolls with roughly the same sensibility as mine. One group of these trolls have erected a trollish Facebook page purporting to support Michele Bachmann from a Christian perspective, though it never lasts more than about six weeks before someone flags an image as inappropriate and it gets shut down. It always reappears though, looking much the way it did. In recent times, its URL has followed a specific trajectory: facebook.com/[its initials][integer].0.* Every new instance of the page gets a url that is the previous page's integer plus one. I looked to see if any of the future numbers were available. While the next one (eleven) was taken, twelve was available. So I took it as my own and set it up to look exactly like an instance of the Michele Bachmann trolling page. But then I fucked with it, changing out the eyeballs for blank red ovals and then posting a bunch of satanic messages on the page, as though it had been taken over by a satanic hacker who mistook it for an actual pro-Bachmann Facebook page. Taking it one step further, I had Suzy (my craziest troll personality — who recently posted about seeing the Grammys after the recording finally arrived from the company she pays to scrub her media of filth) post that the page had been hacked and expressing horror (as though she had understood the page to be an authentic pro-Bachmann page and that what had happened to it had been a hack by satanists). In the course of doing all this, I realized how fun it would be to simulate a hacker attack on a site that never actually left my control.
*I'd give you the URL, but I have readers who immediately send emails to anyone I mention in my posts, something that occasionally causes headaches for me.
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