onkeypox, the African virus spreading through the Midwestern U.S. by way of human contact with infected pet prairie dogs, would make a bitchin’ name for a new movie, announced health officials today when asked if there were any new developments in the outbreak.

“I’d expect it to be in theaters by late this summer, if some TV movie doesn’t snatch up the name first,� explained CDC head Sumner Alimony. “Actually, it would have been perfect for that Outbreak movie with Kevin Spacey and those sick monkeys a few years back, too bad they can’t go back in time and rename that one. True, we’re mainly dealing with sick prairie dogs right now, but monkeys are way more marketable, plus then you don’t have to explain why your sick prairie dog movie is called Monkeypox. People would probably think Prairiedogpox was a foreign film or something boring like that. And prairie dogs aren’t really monkey-level scary, unless you get the camera really super close to their faces.�

Twelve human cases of monkeypox have been reported nationwide so far, with 53 more pending testing: 25 in Indiana, 17 in Wisconsin and 11 in Illinois. One additional case was suspected in New Jersey, but turned out to be a false alarm after a Papa John’s pizza delivery driver called in sick with the complaint that “Dude, I’m sick as shit. I got Monkeyballs.� According to the Centers for Disease Control, the driver later turned out to have a combination of a hangover and athlete’s foot unrelated to the exotic pet scare.

Undisclosed federal rat-disease-tracing techniques have sourced the outbreak back to infected prairie dogs sold by Phil's Pocket Pets of Villa Park, Illinois, a small exotic pets dealer who has been inundated with faxed Polaroids of infected genital lesions marked with messages like “Thanks a lot, asshole,� ever since the outbreak began. According to Phil of pocket pet fame, the prairie dogs were infected by a Gambian giant rat, also known as a Gambian pouch rat, also known as an African Holy Shit rat, also known as a What the Cock is That Under the Sink rat.

The outbreak has renewed debate over lax restrictions governing the importation of exotic pets in recent years, and onto which of the lowest social rungs their owners desperately cling. Besides prairie dogs and numerous varieties of unsavory international rats, owners of other ridiculous exotic pets such as the Polynesian Scum Shrew, the Tasmanian Screaming Hedgehog, the European Couch Mouse and poodles have been fighting for their right to purchase, grow bored with, and then discard trendy non-domesticated animals.

New fears have arisen in recent days over monkeypox being transmitted from humans to other humans (as happens daily in Africa and other monkey-fucking cultures) and not just between infected prairie dogs and humans who don’t have the common sense not to stick their finger in a prairie dog’s mouth.

“Man, you gotta be sick already to fuck a prairie dog, I don’t care what anybody says,� stated a nearby teenager claiming to speak for the CDC.

Government health officials have recommended smallpox shots for all people exposed to the monkeypox virus, thinking that using the vaccine for a similarly-named ailment sounds about as good as anything. Other officials have recommended not sticking your dick in holes in the ground, though it was unclear whether or not they represented the federal government’s official stance on hole-dicking.

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.

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