How the Internet Works
the commune’s Griswald Dreck downloads the straight shit (the other stuff was just out of curiosity, dig?) 

To kick things off with a bang, and also give you a taste of my own personal pain, I’d like to start off this column with a slice of reader email I received recently.

“Yo yo yo Griswaaaaaaaasssup Dreck my man! Shit baby! Anyway, dude, the Internet? Fuuuuuuuuuuck. Whatup wit dat?”

Now that I have your sympathy and perhaps your piqued interest, let’s dig the morsel of inquiry from the verbal turd above.

Nearly everyone, and at least half of the commune staff, knows what the Internet is. But how many really know how it works? Is it all techno mumbo-jumbo too daunting to penetrate, or just wicked voodoo best left alone? Thankfully for curious minds and Internet columnists who’ve already spent ten minutes on this column, it’s neither.

The Internet was started in 1961 when a teenager named Frank Shultz in Flatbush, NY covertly connected his homemade computer to his neighbor Darcy Stanley’s homemade computer in order to send the world’s first Internet virus, which consisted of the following code:

10 PRINT “DARCY ISA SLUT”
20 GOTO 10

In response, Stanley sent Shultz the world’s first spam, a message detailing the modern miracle of penis enlargement through the revolutionary technique of shooting yourself in the head. From these humble beginnings the Internet grew into several larger computers in Shultz’s bedroom, which were connected to the homemade computers of several of Shultz’s friends for the purpose of downloading brief text descriptions of pornography.

At this point the scientific community took an interest in Shultz’s network, and appropriated the technology for their own purposes, namely sending science geek jokes and chain letters back and forth to each other. Thanks to a particularly popular joke about an amino acid, a Mexican and a Polack, the network eventually grew to include thousands of computers nationwide.

Things stayed about like this for a very long time, until the 90’s, when computer manufacturers were maligning the fact that people stopped buying home computers just because they were only good for playing solitaire and pretending to balance your checkbook with Quicken. Some genius realized that people would buy more computers if there were some way they could be beamed faux-inspirational quotes and other heartwarming Chicken Soup for the Soul bullshit on a daily basis, so they developed the modem. A modem is a device that translates computer information into teenage slang so it can be sent over phone lines. Thanks to this breakthrough, five new computers were sold.

But before long retailers and scam artists everywhere discovered that Americans would pay to get kicked in the face as long as it had a .com attached and they got a box in the mail, and the real Internet was born. The thrill of getting a box in the mail has fueled economic growth in America since the beginning of time, and the online age was to be no different.

As for the nitty gritty of how it all works, the concept behind the Internet is that your computer is connected to your neighbor’s computer, which is connected to his neighbor’s computer, and so on and so forth until you get to the local computer geek’s house, where there are big computers connected to the homes of larger and larger geeks until you get to central command. This is why the Internet is often slow and crappy, if one of your neighbors is playing Quake or running an analysis of where his life went wrong it can bog down your shit for real.

At central command there are a bunch of guys who sit around and monitor everything, laugh at your poor email grammar and the fact that you visit spankspock.com thirty times a day, distribute Xerox copies of really embarrassing stuff and generally just make sure everything keeps on truckin’. This is where the string of computers is actually connected to the Internet, which is a big metal thing that looks like the ghost containment unit thing from Ghostbusters. Nobody’s sure what exactly goes on inside that thing.

Today the Internet is an indispensable part of modern life, providing us with news, sports scores, bad blind dates and solutions to modern problems like what does the girl from One Hour Photo look like naked. Some wonder how we lived before the Internet, and the answer is we didn’t. We thought we did, but what the hell did we know? Back then we had to get all our information from books, which is a little like getting your news from popular music. And you had to jog down to the library every time you found unlabeled prescription medication under the couch or wanted to know what happened to the cast of Goonies. You may call that living, but it sounds an awful lot like Cast Away to me.

Who played Tom Hanks’ fiancée in that movie? I bet she looks good naked.

What the Fuck Is Up With That New Matrix Movie?
Some saw the new Matrix film expecting to be entertained, and others still expected to have their horizons challenged by a pasty white guy faking karate. Most left the theater confused, while the rest are still there, trying to figure out if the movie is really over or if they’re still watching a movie about the movie being over.

From Lute to Guitar: A Guitar Primer
Upon his death, the guys who killed him made off with the strange instrument, which they called a lute, because they were uneducated and couldn’t spell “loot” correctly.

Colonel Gandhi’s Chicken
Mohandas Gandhi was a cigar-chomping Indian entrepreneur with a short temper and a talent for the tall tale. His story is one for the ages, and not just because it’s long. Gandhi’s vision for India: that everyone everywhere should always have access to delicious chicken.

Why Do People Have Kids?
With the birth of modern science, it was discovered that children were high in cholesterol and snot, and subsequently the practice of child-eating fell by the wayside. Eventually it was replaced by the unfortunate practice of child-rearing, which has persisted in one form or another to this day.

I’ve Got Your Atlantis Riiight Here
Throughout the ages much debate has arisen over the location of Atlantis. Many scholars have argued that it simply doesn’t exist, and that Plato was just yanking our spank. Other scholars have argued that fuck you, what do you know about Plato, you spank-yankers? A third group of scholars called for a more civilized debate, and were pantsed.

Sand in the Vaseline: The History of Iraq
In ancient times, Iraq was famous as the birthplace of the donut. A romantic land rich in donut-making resources, Iraq was the envy of pastry-loving empires both far and wide. All was well until neighboring Iran developed the bagel, a less enjoyable but more religiously sanctioned round breakfast food.

The Guinness Book of Weird Records
Long ago was the day when determined freaks had to rely on police reports and local folklore to record their unbalanced escapades, in the days before the Guinness Book came into being. Like a crazy asshole bible, it changed the world.