That's great about direct internet funding for the UN. Try as I might to resist the hype, the prospects for the Internet are making me a little more upbeat. Of course there's always Suck.com to help bring us down to earth, or put a negative spin on things. (Netaid is mentioned towards the end)
http://www.suck.com/ Hit & Run 10.28.99
Regular readers will note the absence today of a Suck interview. Sadly, we have at last run up against an interview subject who categorically refuses to speak with any publication that bears the name Suck. While most right-thinking Americans are more scandalized by the title "National Public Radio" than by a mere four-letter word, Nina Totenberg, NPR's Supreme Court correspondent, preemptively shot down our attempt at a Q&A by saying she wouldn't want her "name appearing in The Washington Post" in connection with potty language. (Little does she realize what a buzz-free black hole Suck really is these days.) We won't be so disingenuous as to claim surprise. Indeed, considering the number of celebrity writers, award-winning filmmakers, American heroes, and successful entrepreneurs with whom we have managed to kibitz, the amazing thing isn't that we finally got a sine vidisse refusal to an interview request but that it took so long. What hurts, though, is getting shot down by a two-time Esquire "Woman We Love," whose most celebrated contribution to the public discourse involved letting America hear about the pubic hair on the Coke can. We have such high regard for Totenberg's dramatic readings from the minutes of the Supreme Court's deliberations that we were truly disappointed when she so adamantly refused to consider our set of legal conundrums:
My state legislature is considering a bill to outlaw gay and lesbian marriage. But gay and lesbian marriage is already illegal in my state. Is there a chance the new law would cancel out the old one, inadvertently making gay and lesbian marriage legal? [Reply as Rehnquist, Ginsburg, and Souter]
I believe I have a constitutional right to assassinate President Clinton: The 10th Amendment says that all powers not given to the federal government belong to the states or to the people. Since President Ford's executive order forbids the federal government to engage in assassination, that must mean that they've given that right over to me. Don't you agree? [Reply as Kennedy, Scalia, and O'Connor]
My wife and I were married for 20 years, and I always thought our romantic life was fine. The other day she told me she's never "felt anything" in the bedroom. To make matters worse, she feels this is grounds for divorce. This morning I found that all my assets had been frozen and my wife has obtained a court order stating that I must vacate our home within 24 hours. Since she had previously assured me our sex life was fine, can I get an injunction on the basis of fraud? Please reply quickly. [Reply as Thomas, Stevens, and Breyer]
I am currently funding my 401(k) plan to the maximum allowable. A friend tells me under certain circumstances I can also contribute to a Roth IRA. I don't think this is true. Which of us is right? [Reply as O'Connor, Thomas, and Scalia]
My husband and I saw Eyes Wide Shut, which stars two of our favorite performers — Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman! I don't get it: Was the death of the woman from that weird masked ball an accident or murder? If so, was she the same woman Tom Cruise met earlier in the movie, who supposedly contracted HIV and left town when he went back to visit her? And what happened to his friend the piano player? Our son the graduate student says the movie is "intentionally ambiguous." I say he's all wet. Please explain. [Reply as Souter, Rehnquist, and Ginsburg]
I am convinced Ronald Reagan's policies were responsible for bringing down the Soviet Union. A co-worker says the USSR was about to collapse anyway, and all Reagan did was increase deficit spending. Don't you think it should be illegal to speak so disrespectfully about former President Reagan? [Reply as Thomas and Scalia]
In truth, we didn't expect heaps of comedy from Totenberg's responses, but her apparent belief in our toxicity was just impassioned enough to be entertaining. When our correspondent offered to fax our questions for her approval, she replied, "If you want to waste your paper, be my guest." How about an email then? "I will delete anything you send me." Maybe if she would just look at our questions she might find them diverting enough to use in some other venue, with no payment or acknowledgment to us? "I'm already working three jobs; I have no time to take on anything more." [Editor's note: These "three jobs" include the NPR gig and stints as a correspondent for ABC's Nightline and as a regular panelist on Inside Washington — hardly an unsupportable workload.]
Despite the brusque high-hat, we still think this would have made a great interview, so if you work for a publication with a more Washington-friendly title, feel free to steal our concept. And since we're nothing if not sporting, we recommend that you listen regularly to Totenberg's Supreme Court readings, which remain one of the few bright spots in the dense wasteland that is public radio.
Committing a hoax on the Web has always seemed an exercise in redundancy, the modern equivalent of Dr. Johnson's "blacking the chimney." When the exposure of the ourfirsttime.com "hoax" had online journalists breaking out in even-more- enthusiastic-than-usual self-congratulations, we never really figured out where the hoax lay: Was it that the young lovers were not really virgins? Were the site's sponsors not really planning to surrender the virtual pink to paying customers? It didn't really matter in the end, since the method had by that time been established: A Net porn entrepreneur comes up with a seemingly outrageous offer, the daily papers give the idea breathless coverage, hints of tomfoolery surface, and online reporters trumpet the whole affair as evidence that Old Media just doesn't get it. But while ovarian auctioneer Ron Harris hasn't returned any of our messages, we'd think twice before dismissing Ronsangels.com's business plan of bidding on model's eggs. If 52 models (from outside Harris' own stable of digitized cuties) have already approached the soft-core chieftain with offers to put their own ova up for bidding, there is clearly a market for this sort of thing, and the auction may yet come off without a hitch. Most important of all, the case has revealed that there are innumerable "fertility activists" ready to scream on cue at the first sign of a little free-market chutzpah. (And would the outcry have been so deafening if Ron had been offering, say, frosty mugs of Pete Rose's motile seed?) If nothing else, there's a cautionary tale here: Avoid breeding with media whores.
Even without the debate over catwalk baby factories, the various news media have in the past week been off on enough pilotless flights of fancy to make media watchdogs of us all. Salon bravely took the point on the latest round of George W. Bush coke tales (and we can say without sarcasm that this truly is a job somebody has to do), and for its troubles, the undervalued zine earned only the vituperation of self-appointed Perry Whites, whose credo — then, now, and always — remains, "Don't listen to what these Internet cretins say." (That the Bush story came from the well-known cyber pornographers at St. Martins Press did nothing to soften the flinty bosoms of Salon haters nationwide.) Elsewhere, an apparently well-intentioned but none-too-well-informed reporter for the New York Post has categorized Suck as being "among the best-written and most original sites on the Web," an accusation we vigorously deny.
[ New York Post 10/28/99 ZINE SITES LINKING TO GET MORE $
By JOSEPH GALLIVAN
Time to sell out? Some of the Internet's longest-suffering content producers, who have had to sit by and write about their peers growing rich, are on the verge of forming their own network. Normally outspoken commentators at a range of web properties have become tight-lipped over the last few weeks as the deal comes together. The network is believed to comprise the New York properties Feed (www.feedmag.com), The Smoking Gun (www.thesmokinggun.com), AltCulture (www.altculture.com) and Word (www.word.com), plus San Francisco's satirical Suck (www.suck.com). Bo Peabody, founder of free web-hosting company Tripod, which was bought by Lycos, is said to be behind the aggregation. Lycos Ventures, the investment arm of Lycos, is putting up the money. Industry insiders say the sites would be bought out but would retain their staff. Word's Marisa Bowe issued a curt "no comment" when asked by The Post if the site she edits was involved, and Internet entrepreneur and guru Esther Dyson would only confirm that she is, indeed, an investor in Feed, where co-founder Stefanie Syman is executive editor, and co-founder Steven Johnson is editor-in-chief. Writer Joey Anuff, one of the original staff at Suck, was also unavailable for comment. The Smoking Gun, a favorite with media insiders, hosts scans of actual incriminating documents, while Suck, which was a part of Wired Ventures - which was taken over by Lycos - provides scabrous semiotic explanations of pop culture. Many consider Suck and Feed to be among the best-written and most original sites on the web(!??!), but their cult status means audience and revenue opportunities have been limited. (New Yorkers, is the Post really wacked, or what? - pk)]
Most fascinating of all was the most recent exposé of how the widely dissed Net Aid fell abundantly short of its stated — and widely reported — goal of getting 1 billion "hits" during its set of subprime concerts. (Just what those billion hits constituted — pageviews, unique users, images loaded, or just the collective platinum power of such washed-up headliners as Jimmy Page, Sheryl Crow, and Bryans Ferry and Adams — was a question that, as always, went unaddressed.) On this topic, though, we can speak with some authority: Anytime anybody anywhere says anything about how much traffic his or her Web site is getting, it's all a goddamned lie.
courtesy of theSucksters [end]
Peter K.