"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"
for 11 April 2001. Updated every WEEKDAY.

Filler 04.11.01

C Is For Cookie Now, the cyberlibertarians claim that those aren't cookies your browser is storing, they're cookie monsters. A website might actually know something about you and your preferences. It's as if you walk into your favorite restaurant and Emille, the waiter, asks if you'd like the usual. After you remind him what you usually have. Besides, with a name like "cookie," it's got to be Orwellian. Five years ago today in Suck.

Polly,

I notice you get a lot of mail (and publish a lot of mail) from Ben Schwabe at MIT. One of the benefits of being an MIT student is free, nearly-limitless web page hosting on the school's servers. You can learn a lot about people by their web page, I think, and MIT offers a consistent way to do this from an e-mail address. Using bshwabe@mit.edu as a start, just go to his web page and there you are. I would send you to my own personal MIT page, but alas, it was taken down after I graduated in '99.

Anyway, seems Ben is one of those in-your-face style geeks who rebels by going to a very expensive, near-Ivy League private school with an undergrad population that's about as politically active as a rock (or so I observed as a grad student). Sadly, his pot/satanism gotchas (though admittedly the satan worship link is to My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, a band about as scary as Marylin Manson) were mainstreamed twenty years ago by septuagenarian rocker Ozzy. Bens's sort of in that group of wind-pissers that includes the kooky kidz behind fuck-the-skull-of-jesus. You know, they're all Questioning Authority and socking it to the man and stuff.

For reasons unknown, I've spent too much time deconstructing poor Ben from my remote location. I guess I'm still fascinated by the MIT undergraduate culture. I went to one of those big, bad SEC schools U. of Alabama — as an undergrad, were football rules and nobody dated Uma Thurman (though Sela Ward went there).

Unencumbered by MIT undergrads,

Doug
<coffeed99@yahoo.com>

Next... More scattered pictures of the smiles we left behind!

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