The internet is a big and varied place. It’s like a city. You can do pretty much anything you’d do in a real city. You can go to the movies, listen to music, talk to people, even set up a little home of your own. The primary difference is that your average city isn’t 96% red light district. Today we are going to discuss a basic part of the city: the postal system.
E-mail is the most basic form of communication online. Odds are your internet provider will also provide you with an e-mail address. If not, you can always get one for free at a site like HotMail or GMail. Your e-mail address is your mailbox in the city of the internet. Instead of “136 Main Street,” however, you’ll have something like “catlover@aol.com.”
Your e-mail address is constructed as follows: the “something.com” part is where your e-mail address is located. In the above example, the e-mail address is provided by AOL. The part before the “@” is your specific name. In the above example, “catlover.”
Be careful when selecting an address. You are going to be fairly stuck with it, so make sure it’s a good one. If you’ll be using it for anything even approaching professional, avoid addresses based on likes or interests. It’s okay for your kids to e-mail you at “sockpuppetfan@hotmail.com” (though a little embarrassing for them) but it’s less okay to write down on a job or credit card application.
Once you have an e-mail address you’re ready to go! Now there are just a few perils and pitfalls to avoid.
1.Watch out for junk mail. It’s just like the junk mail that shows up at your house, but it’s a bit more clever and a bit more vicious. Don’t open attachments from people you don’t know. (Attachments are like little packages that arrive in the mail, as opposed to letters.) No one on the internet wants to give you free money or enhance your genitals. Never trust anyone from Nigeria.
2.Be careful using your e-mail address to sign up for websites. Less reputable sites will sell your address to people who want to send you junk mail. (See point one)
3.Show discretion when sending along chain e-mails. The ones about wishes coming true and ghosts coming to get you if you do or don’t forward them are ridiculous drivel made up by cruel-minded people who have nothing better to do. (Me, for an example.) Sneakier still are the ones with humorous lists, cute photos of cats, or crude animated pictures. They aren’t bad for anything in a technical sense, but if you become a chronic forwarder of these missives you’ll be seen as a nuisance. Many people groan either inwardly or out loud when they see an e-mail titled “Fwd: Forward: FWD: Re: FwD: Look at this puppy!”
Keep these things in mind when you’re at the keyboard and you should be safe and sound.
Congratulations! You now have a basic working knowledge of e-mail!he above example, catlover.”ove example, the e-mail address is provided by AOL. The part before the
Attention moms and dads and grandparents! I know it’s hard for you. You want to talk to your kids but it’s all “Facebook this” and “Twitter that” and “e-mail such-and-stuff.” What the hell can you do?! I understand your plight. I’m terrified of the day that technology is some sort of impenetrable riddle for me. And here you are living it!
Fear no longer! Starting soon you’ll be able to come and read the Separated Chaff Parent’s Online Guide to the Web and the Internet! Based on actual questions asked by actual people who have no clue as to what’s going on, the Parent’s Online Guide to the Web and the Internet is your destination to learn all about going online, the world wide web, the internet, the information superhighway, and whatever the hell else you think it’s called.
Everyone has some connection to someone famous. My mom, for example, went to school with one of the guys from “Happy Days.” I once sold ice cream to that red-headed guy from 90210. And Anne Hathaway went to my high school.
Even though I never knew her (She’s a bit older than I am) I still keep track of her career. Not in some over-the-top obsessed fanboy way. I just make a note of when she has a movie or something coming out. Imagine my surprise to hear she had a nude scene in the movie “Havoc.”
As an aside- I think that it says something that she was topless in “Brokeback Mountain,” too, but no one seemed to mention it at the time. Hell no one even said she was in it. Everyone was focused on the part about the dudes kissing. I’m not sure what exactly it says, but it says it nonetheless.
Anyway, I met the girl once. In a church. I almost never go to church so that was surprising. If only I’d seen the scenes in question before I met her. I could’ve said “Hey, Anne Hathaway, nice to meet you. I’ve seen your boobs.”
The first time I ever heard of “I Love College” it was because a friend told me someone wrote some of the lyrics on her Facebook wall. She didn’t know where the hell it came from. Later, another friend mentioned it. I said I didn’t know what he was talking about. He quoted it. I related the first two sentences of this post to him.
Tonight I heard the song for myself and it was even stupider than I expected.
Now so we’re clear the lyrics quoted to me were “That party last night was awfully crazy I wish we taped it / I danced my ass off and had this one girl completely naked / Drink my beer and smoke my weed but my good friends is all I need / Pass out at 3, wake up at 10, go out to eat then do it again. / Man, I love college”
If you haven’t heard the song, turn those lyrics over in your mind. Meditate on them for a second. Imagine how bad a song must be to contain lyrics like that. Now imagine something worse and you’re closer to the final cut of Asher Roth’s “I Love College.”
I was surprised to hear that Roth sounds vaguely like Eminem. That is, if Eminem were a bit mellower and perhaps swallowed a few bottles of NyQuil. Content-wise, though, the song lacks Eminiem’s gritty in-your-face “I’m gonna kill myself with my pregnant girlfriend in the car” vibe. This is more of a National Lampoon type of a song. By which I mean it’s devoid of any real substance and it’s really just about people between eighteen and twenty-four doing stupid, and more importantly unoriginal, crap.
I can only imagine the song came into existence thusly: Late one night a small group of friends were sitting around. A haze of marijuana smoke hung in the air as Dave Matthews played softly on the stereo. Finally one of the brain-fried sophomores looked up and said “Dudes! We should, like, make a rap song!” The sudden noise startles one of his friends who rolls off the sofa and lands noisily on a half eaten bag of Cool Ranch Doritos. “What?” He says, through the orange dust cloud. “Lets make a rap song, I downloaded Fruity Loops last night, we could make a beat and rap and record it.” “Why?” “Cause.” “Oh, yeah, okay.” So these budding songwriters stumble into a dorm room, bunk beds on the left, poster of Jim Belushi in a “College” sweater on the right, and begin to half-ass a rap song by tossing in bits and pieces of college life. It’s the sort of thing you’d spend a night on, maybe a weekend if a lot of people were off campus. Then you’d play it for your floor, they’d laugh, maybe it would be on the God-awful radio station that broadcasts so weakly the other side of campus can’t even hear it and that would be it. Instead, through some fluke, be it stupidity, malice, or some bizarre clerical error, the damn thing explodes into society at large. It’s like some sort of horrible bio-engineered disease, only instead of uncontrollable vomiting and anal bleeding there’s a guy singing rather sleepily about beer pong.
A chill wind swept across the field. The few patches of grass left on the dusty soil waved feebly. A tall figure in dark robes faced the two smaller forms a dozen yards away as the flickering green light of the Dark Mark glowing above them cast odd shadows on the ground.
“Ah. Harry Potter. The Boy who Lived. How I have longed for this moment, my chance to finish you once and for all.”
Harry’s green eyes narrowed and he stepped forward. His friend, Ron Weasley, hung back looking nervous. “Voldemort!” Harry shouted, “I’ve destroyed your Horcruxes! It’s over!”
The Dark Lord stepped back in shock and then hissed. “Impossible!”
“It’s true! Your evil reign is over. I’m here to end this.”
Voldemort laughed. “You think you could destroy me? I killed your parents, Potter, I’ve killed many wizards more powerful than you. How could you even think that you could stand up to me?”
“I’ve been studying, Voldemort. While you’ve been killing Muggles, I’ve been learning from them. I was raised by Muggles, I’ve decided to go back to my roots.” He raised a hand and then brought it down sharply. Voldemort’s thigh exploded in a haze of splattered blood. He howled with pain and dropped to the ground, supporting himself on his good leg.
“What- what is this?!”
“My friend Hermione was born to Muggles. She’s hidden a quarter of a mile away, Voldemort, with a high powered sniper rifle. Try finding one of those in Diagon Alley.”
“You dare try and defeat me with Muggle tricks?!” Voldemort screamed. He reached a pale hand into his robes and pulled out his wand. “Cruc-“ Voldemort’s Crucio curse was interrupted when his hand blew apart in another spray of blood and the sound of screams and splintering bone. His wand dropped, broken, to the ground. Ron stepped forward, slightly braver now that Voldemort was so incapacitated. He gingerly raised his wand.
“Accio cricket bat!” A moment later a bat whistled through the air into Ron’s waiting hand. “Brilliant!” Ron exclaimed, “I did it!” Then he swung the long flat piece of wood lengthwise into Voldemort’s back with a sickening crunch. The evil wizard fell to the ground and then rolled onto his back, gasping for breath. Ron kicked him, his trainers driving deep into Voldemort’s side.
“Enough, Ron!” Harry said, stepping forward. He bent over the bloody and broken wizard, grinning.
“P-Potter…” Voldemort gasped. “Have m-mercy…”
“Mercy? You and your Death Eaters never showed any mercy, why should I?” He spit in Voldemort’s glowing red eye. Then he reached into the folds of his robe and pulled out a gleaming silver handgun. Harry swung his hand around so the barrel was just inches from Voldemort’s forehead. “Avada Kedavra, bitch.” Scowling, he pulled the trigger.
I am a master of stealth. I am a hidden, silent terror that strikes without warning. I am doing it all by accident. Honest.
I’m a big guy (height, not width) and you would think that as a result I’d be fairly noticeable. Hell, oftentimes I am noticed. It’s pointed out to me that people are looking at me, and I’m frequently stopped and asked how tall I am. So what I don’t get is how sometimes people have no idea I’m around.
It happens most at work. Sometimes I stand by the front door and act as a greeter. Several times a week someone will walk past me and when I say hello, they jump. Or they look around and can’t find me right away. It’s the damndest thing. I suppose there’s some sort of psychological explanation but I’m just going to start robbing them.
The following was a pitch article for a project. The project has been changed so this is no longer needed. Enjoy this second-hand material.
I’m a sucker for word games. Text Twist was my number one “not doing my work” distraction at my old job. I have a copy of Bookworm on my phone. And when it gets to that part of a family get-together where it’s either a board game or more staring at one another, I always vote for Scrabble. So it was a notable day when that game of wooden tiles and triple-word-scores lost its throne to a little fabric banana.
Bananagrams is a game for up to eight players. The polished letter tiles are dumped out of the aforementioned fabric banana into a pile called the “bunch.” Each player proceeds to take tiles. (The amount of tiles is based on the amount of players.) The rest of the bunch is left in the center of the table. Take a deep breath and enjoy the peace and quiet of your tiles because things are about to get a bit heated.
One player yells “Split!” and the game begins. Turn over your tiles as fast as you can and start building. The goal is to make your own personal crossword quickly and completely. Stuck with a difficult letter like “j?” Shout “Dump!” and then throw it back into the bunch, replacing it with three fresh ones. Used up all your tiles? Nice work, but you’re not done yet. Call out “Peel!” and grab another one. The catch is that every time a player calls out a peel, everyone has to take a tile. Play continues along until there are fewer tiles in the center than there are players. Then once you’ve used up all your tiles you shout “Bananas!” and you’ve won!
Bananagrams quickly ran the full spectrum from “fun” to “favorite” to “game my family won’t play with me anymore.” If Scrabble is a war, with strategy and planning and evaluating your opponents, Bananagrams is one of those brawls in Old West saloons. (Yeah I compare board games to fighting, it’s one of the reasons my family won’t play with me anymore.) You’ll be sitting there trying to figure out a way to fit your last “t” into a crossword of “potion,” “new,” and “octopus” (good word, by the way) and someone’ll shout “Peel!” Now you’ve got to take another tile and you have two to place. How do you get rid of letters once you’ve built a crossword? Take bits of it apart and rearrange them. That’s where the “-anagrams” part of the name fits in. Say you have the word “and.” You pull an “s.” “Sand.” Now you pull an “h.” You can pull the “s” off the front, move it to the end and put down your “h.” “Hands.” Fun, right? Now imagine doing it on a larger scale with four or five words to rearrange while your family works feverishly on their own consonant shuffling and Granny keeps shouting “peel” so your extra tiles just add up faster and faster and you start to get a feel of the glory of Bananagrams.
Dr. Zaius from Planet of the Apes. King Louie from the Jungle Book. Clyde from Every Which Way But Loose. The Librarian from the Discworld novels. Dunston from Dunston Checks In. It’s a big orange ape with long arms.
Find someone and ask them what it’s called. Go on, I’ll wait.
I’ve found that if you ask someone they’ll say “orangutang. How do you know all those pop culture references.” I’ll reply “Wikipedia, mostly. And it’s orangutan, jerk.”
So where did the extra ‘g’ come from? It’s a widespread phenomenon. Hell, I even said “orangutang” when I was a wee lad. My best guess (and it’s a shoddy one at that) is that it’s so the word has a sort of rhyme to it. Maybe as kids we get into the habit of saying it that way (because kids are, on the whole, sort of stupid) and then it sticks until corrected.
It is with this is mind I want to start a group for the advancement of orangutan knowledge and eradication of the extra g. Go out into the world and educate. Be subtle if you like- work orangutans into your daily conversations and hope people pick up on it. Be aggressive- walk up to strangers and yell “It’s orangutan, not orangutang!” Be widespread- rent billboards and start viral marketing-type campaigns. Just, please, reach out and help your community.
And if anyone has a better (or more entertaining) idea of where the extra g came from, let me know. I’d look it up but I only use Wikipedia, and I use that to look up apes in popular culture.
Used to be, in the good old days, people ate whatever they could find. If you traveled back to Victorian England and offered a box of Chinese food to a starving match girl, she wouldn’t reply “Bless you sir, but no, there’s far too much MSG in Chinese food, there is.”
Ungrateful urchin.
But these days people can be good and picky. And picky they are! Pick any delicious food you like and I bet you can find someone that’ll turn it down. “Oh no, I don’t eat anything with a face.” “Oh no, I’m allergic.” “Oh no, that’s poison.”
More damn urchins.
I have a friend who is a vegetarian. She manages to survive on eating just vegetables! That’s amazing, she’s not frail or withering away or anything! One time I took her out to dinner and she was all “This is a steakhouse.” And I was like “I know, awesome, right?” But then she goes “I can’t eat anything on the menu, they don’t even have a salad without any meat in it.” So I say “I know that’s why I like it here.” Then she had to eat mashed potatoes and cole slaw for dinner and now we don’t talk as much as we used to.
A friend of mine in college one day proclaimed that he was going to become a flapjacktarian and we all laughed because who’s ever heard of a man who eats nothing but flapjacks. But he was determined and stuck true to the flapjacktarian lifestyle for the last year of college and another year after that. Then he was on the news because it was such an innovative dietary move. Also because they had to knock down the exterior wall of his house to get him out so they could hospitalize him.
Me? I have my own way of life. I try and eat nothing but eagles. Roasted eagles, eagle casserole, eagle pot pie… delicious eagles. I’m an egalitarian.
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