"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun" |
Hit & Run I In our dreams, every Web site we slum is either so exquisitely skewed or such a colossal bummer that we're instantly motivated to toss off a Suck-length screed in its honor. Luckily, we're far less idealistic during our waking hours (which is pretty much all the time) - though we somehow manage to find a few howlers each week, our bookmarks always end up bloated with a mess of also-rans. It seems a shame to let our ambivalence and/or lack of ingenuity get in the way of connecting you, our readers, with the Great Morass of the Web's minor miracles. So, in the name of quantity over quality, we celebrate these one-hit wonders with our new semi-regular feature, Hit and Run...
Once upon a post-war America, the Book of the Subgenius was, like, a really cool subversive item for dweebs like us to show off on their bookshelves. But by this point, the joke has achieved a level of media saturation akin to that of Michael Jackson, where every potential disciple has already placed his or her sacrifices at the altar. Bob, it seems, is just another asshole hipster with a groovy pipe, like Flavor
Flav pleased that someone's taken the time to do justice to the holy one by building a first-rate Web
site knows? Maybe in a few years, when the Sega generation comes of age, they'll be allowed to re-discover what we knew all along: sloganeering and slack just keep on coming back. Eureka! The folks at Club PepsiMax must be sore from all the back-patting that must have followed this brainstorm: a Web contest featuring a *private* CU-SeeMe session with Cindy Crawford as the grand prize. Little do they suspect that the real jackpot will come when Cindy discovers that the killer app of videoconferencing is disturbingly tied in with the concept of "hands-free" computing. Is that a QuickCam in your pocket or are you just glad to CU-SeeMe? Morse McFadden Communications is threatening to periodically update its Walls '95 site with illicit photos of the construction of Bill Gates's $50 mil sea-side mansion. While we couldn't think of a better candidate for a little invasion of privacy, we would hope a schlocky gimmick like this would at least warrant a live feed. After all, the only compelling payoff for our daily patronage would come in the form of a well-timed natural disaster. Since neither we nor MMC have the kind of clout necessary to pull that off, we'll have to settle for the slow-motion tragicomedy of Bill and his minions drowning in a sea of greed, power-mongering and tasteless hype. If it's a truism, it's only because it's so true: the chainsaw is the most viscerally satisfying murder implement ever conceived. Sleek, messy, and unquestionably sexy, the chainsaw is rivaled only by mental retardation as a sure-fire winning plot device. These days, with Tarantino-style gunplay in deep vogue, it's easy to lose sight of the glory days of splatter, but if a game like Doom 2 can lay claim to the title of biggest selling computer game ever (with it's only real distinguishing feature being some righteous 'saw action), who's to say a website like Return of the Texas
Chainsaw Massacre shot at a Webby? courtesy of the Duke of URL
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