The Internet

The idea for the internet was a weird one. Al Gore and his friends threw the idea around of, lets give people limitless information at their fingertips through the phone lines at an astounding 56K. The military already uses a system similar to this, why not the general public.

This noble idea, once so slow that a misplaced picture could crash your computer, has morphed into a monster enjoyed and hated by people on their computers, cell phones, and gaming counsels. Our biggest problem used to be someone picking up the phone while we were cruising netscape 1.0, but now there are limitless amounts of smut and teenage turds spewing their vile on everything.

Thanks to the internet, nothing is pure anymore. A movie comes out, 2/3s of the words written about it on the internet are vicious lies, rumors and attacks, no matter if the movie is as good as Casablanca or Frankenstein. Although every now and then someone writes something witty about something in the entertainment world, but most of the time its a bunch of dick and fart jokes.

For example, today I was playing my Xbox 360 online. I'm in the midst of a warzone (Call of Duty 4) and among the exploding grenades and screams of pain, I hear a little arse start talking over the headset in his best Borat impersonation, "Do you like the smell of my meat? If you like the smell then you can taste." I stayed with this man for four games while he continued the onslaught of variations of the above, "Eat my wiener" jokes. None of them were funny, and you could tell that no one was amused. All radio talk ceased to exist while this joker talked. My assumption is, people were taking their headsets off in order to save precious brain cells. I continued to listen.

As our fifth game started (we retained 5 our of 12 players throughout these matches, the rest were noobs ("New-bies" That's another thing the internet brought, hip abbreviated words such as nades (grenades) l33t (elite) and lol.) that had not yet experienced "Borat's" hilarity. (I sweat TV producers. If you need new talent, look no further than the internet.) One brave soul finally decided to take him on and call him a "dumbsh*t foreigner." Yes this man opened Pandora's box. The worst thing to do to people like Borat, is to respond to them, and worst yet, respond negatively. This opened up a name calling "pee contest" between the two obvious 15 year olds.

I listened to these two ramble on into the sixth game, where their conversations turned into which country is better. Borat's India (at least he claimed he was from India) and the other's country of Texas. (Yes, Texas is its own country, cause I don't know anyone that thinks like a Texan.) Borat started with saying that America is a world bully, taking over every country they can by paying off the government. Tex went for the "you must be too poor to get out of your country. We're the best country in the world." Basically the normal cowboy American stereotype. BTW (By the Way) Tex was playing as a Afghani terrorist and Borat was playing as a U.S. Marine, please tell me the irony is not lost on any of you.

Now I know this has been building tension for my dear readers. How did Dan respond to these obvious girlfriendless gamers? Well, our seventh (and final) game spawned a battlefield with multiple factories, with some high grassy knolls. I was popping in and out of buildings with an M16 (I gave up the sniper rifle, my limited vision on this battlefield ruined that) in hand. Borat was one of those cocky teenagers that thinks he is invincible, so naturally he was running around making tons of noise, which means my radar was bleeping a red dot everywhere he was going. I started stalking him, in a crouched position, so as not to show up on his radar and got cut down by the shotgun, he eventually started calling his meat. (I guess his penis didn't taste as good as he thought) He ran up some metal stairs and took his place in a window missing most of its glass. He starts shooting at someone, so I come up behind him and stick a knife in his jugular. Jerk number one is dead.

Tex was a little harder. He positioned himself in a building and was sniping anyone that came near. However, he didn't know that I could penetrate his fortress through a hole in the foundation. I snuck up behind him and had enough time to decide knife, pistol, or assault rifle. I figured in his interest in the bank of idiot and decided that overkill with the assault rifle was the way to go. I took careful aim at his head and take him out. A smile crosses my face, and I quit playing for a bit. I feel satisfied.

That is why the internet is better than real life sometimes. If someone annoys me here, I can't shoot out his knee caps without facing the law.