Weird Web (expletive deleted)

Tales from the Bitstream

The unspoken Commandment, the raison d'être, for "Tales from the Bitstream" from Josh, head honcho at the Advocate, has been "Go forth and find me Weird Shit." So, with NO apologies to Chuck Shepherd (we were the 41,125 visitor to HIS web page for "News of the Weird") OR to the "Channeling McLuhan" folks at Wired magazine (who think they own the word "Wired" the way Bill Gates thinks he owns the word "Windows" or the Year 1995), here's "News of the Wired."

Boob Cancer Survivors, et. al.

==> America Online lifted its recent ban on the use of the word "breasts" in chatrooms and messages after an outcry led by groups for breast cancer survivors. It's no secret that the Big Three (AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy) are terrified about their liability in the face of congressional efforts to police the Net.

But banning the "B" word at AOL proved a bit of overkill, as members got around it by using the apparently acceptable "boobs," "knockers" or "titties." It is now, once again, safe to say "breast" on AOL.

At least until Congress says otherwise.

==> Just to show that AOL isn't turning totally puritanical, let it be known that the email address for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws is NORML@aol.com.

Search for Intelligent Life

==> If you ever wondered what a *real* space alien looked like, warpspeed your flying saucer to the Web page devoted to the supposed actual photographs of space alien corpses allegedly recovered from the famous 1947 "US Government Cover-up of a UFO Crash in Roswell, New Mexico" incident.

We confess to wondering if highly-evolved beings from another galaxy *really* look like ripped-off props from the "Close Encounters" movie set.

==> Once again on the subject of space aliens, a Fidonet groupie recently described his "past life memory" as a spaceman whose ship was attacked by a bunch of lizard people storm troopers. He and two others escaped by hiding out in the toilet and then entering one of four synthetic environment modules designed after the four seasons. They knocked out the lizards there and launched the module.

The narrator remarked to his friends that they could try to head back to Earth but that 10,000 years would have passed since they'd been there last. Guess where they'd been hanging out on Earth before they left to save the galaxy from renegade reptiles?

The capital of Atlantis, of course!

Weird Wired Central

==> Carlos Alvarez's home page pops up at the top of the list when we did a search on Webcrawler for "Weird Web Shit." Number One with a bullet.

Carlos includes, for everyone's reading pleasure:

• A good narrative of a beheading in Saudi Arabia;
• Man killed by his own farts (true story);
• Penis home surgery;
• Butchering the human carcass for eating.

This is not to be confused with his "Tasteless Pages," which he differentiates from the merely weird. Visitors can read of the romantic adventures of a woman and her German shepherd and a detailed description of "violent anal dilation" surgery. But in an educational, family-values way!

==> From Usenet's alt.tasteless, the British tabloid "The Daily Sport" reports the sad story of 49-year-old Neil Wilson who was found dead inside a large green, finned bodysuit with no ventilation holes by a big reservoir in Victoria, Australia. Neighbors reported Wilson had been seen often at the water's edge swinging on a rope and pretending to be a fish on a hook.

Over the Counter

==> The anti-depressant drug Clomipramine has the unanticipated side effect in a tiny percentage of people of causing them to achieve orgasm merely by yawning, according to the Canadian Journal of Psychology. The periodical said it apparently worked for both sexes, especially the lady who wanted to know how long she'd be allowed to use it and the man who had to wear a condom at all times.

No wonder manic-depressives are looking happier these days...!

Suspension of Belief

==> Damien Royce and Jason Zolot have written a book around the thesis that the Devil made dinosaurs and God destroyed them. These saurophobic theologians postulate that the seven days of Creation included a hiatus of some hundreds of millions of years during which the two top supernatural beings in the Universe duked it out over whether the Earth was going to be populated by huge demon-spawned nightmares or regular people, presumably like Royce and Zolot.

Their work is immortalized in the Kooks Museum, which can be found with the same aforementioned search for Weird Web Shit.

Jeff and Nicole can be reached at jeffbot at this domain, where they would be delighted to receive flames, compliments, weird shit, or free doses of Clomipramine. Their home page, which isn't really weird and has no pictures of dead space aliens or Satanic dinosaurs, is at www.tftb.com, but you're here, so you already knew that. Josh can be reached in care of the Advocate.

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