Not all dogs are poodles.

So the other day, we took our kids to the park. I hope, sincerely, that you can't see where this is going so far.

It was innocent enough, a quick walk down the street for Crystal and the baby, and a slightly quicker run for Steven and I. The park was busy that day, with about a dozen kids in a space designed for slightly fewer.

This is a relatively new development around here, as the "play structure" (or whatever it's called) had been installed just last summer. As a matter of fact, this was my first visit, and i was immediately impressed with both the quality and size of the thing. The second thing that I noticed, unfortunately, was the graffiti.

Swastikas. "White Power". "I jizzed here".

Since it was supposed to be a nice, innocent day out with the kids, I tried not to make too big a deal out of it. Crystal noticed it, and said basically that, expressing her disappointment. In an effort to file the whole thing away for later, i snapped a few pictures with my cell phone and tried to get on with the rest of my day.

It wasn't that easy, though. Something like rage kept on boiling up inside me. It snuck up on me every time i gave it even a moments thought. Why would someone do this to our new playground? I'm well aware that the people who write these kinds of things aren't what you'd call brilliant, but on several occasions, they've shown that they can restrain themselves to some extent. To vandalize a new piece of playground equipment, though? I must have been giving them too much credit in the past.

But what to do? Write a letter? To whom? I suppose that I'd be a bit happier if the city came and cleaned it up, but would that really solve the problem? The people that do these things will just come back again and again.

So i decided that i'd try to find out who did it. Not in a Hardy Boys mystery kind of way, though. Nor would i employ the types of vigilante detectivism popularized in the Batman comics i read as a kid. I reasoned (while i should have been playing with my kids) that the best way to find an idiot is on the internet. And that was where i found them.

I'll preface this next part with this one caveat. I didn't find the specific idiot i was looking for. Not yet, anyways. What i found was something i'd long ago forgotten about. I forget about a lot of things, so if that doesn't narrow it down very much, here's a bit of back story.

Back in December of 2006, 4chan's /b/tards took offense with a few prominent racists who'd somehow managed to have a significant presence on the intertubes. One of these was a fellow named Hal Turner, who is best described as an "american white nationalist and white supremacist". Members of 4chan's (then quite young) "Anonymous" faction harassed Mr. Turner on a daily basis and many lulz were had. One of the websites, stormfront.org, that came up during the exchange caused more than it's fair share of surprise to many Anonymous. Though it had been featured in a documentary several years earlier, many 4chan users (including myself) were astounded by it's very existence.

It's mind-boggling.

It has an alexa traffic rank of 12,602. It's absolutely bustling with activity. And worse, it's full, and i mean full, of idiots.

Granted, my definition of "idiot" includes a whole lot more people than yours does. It's just the way I am. But even by the tamest of standards, these people are screwed. They can't do anything right. Anything. I could ramble on for days about these guys, but instead i'll just send you all off to check it out yourselves. The site is stormfront.org and you can read the entire site (archives and all) without joining up or becoming a member or anything. Just be careful who sees you surfing it.

So in the face of this idiocy, i noticed a trend. A commonality, similarity, whatever. The vast majority of real hard-core idiots on there use bible quotes and the like to get their point across. Don't get me wrong, i'm not saying that I've suddenly (just now) noticed that people use religion to further stupid causes. But I did just remember a quote that (even after googling it) i can't quite place.

"Not all dogs are poodles, but all poodles are dogs"

It made me wonder how many white supremacists are christian. I lack the census data or, for that matter, anything empirical to prove it; but i'll take a wild guess and say most are. Horrible scientific principle at work there, but i'd be willing to bet that i'm right. I almost fired up photoshop and made a venn diagram to describe it. But i didn't.

So then i thought "Hey, what about my people?"

How are the secular humanists doing? The SubGenii? The Pastafarians?

Again i leapt forward with absolutely no research and decided that there probably weren't that many agnostic/atheist/humanist white supremacists out there. That made me feel better immediately.

But i still had "kill everyone thats not white" scrawled across an area that my kids will be playing in all summer long. And that wasn't going to change because i'd had an epiphany about how the stupidest of our culture happen to all be of a particular faith.

So who will clean it up? Who will take the blame?

I'm going to go find a church group to do it. I believe that my argument for them doing so is valid, and that the most responsible christians always end up cleaning up the messes left by the least responsible ones, anyways.

I'm currently hoping to see how many of you can accurately opine about how this will go. Feel totally free to post comments and send this to your friends. As a matter of fact, any input would be greatly appreciated.

In a nutshell; I'm going to see if the rest of the dogs will clean up the mess that the poodles made.

So, uh...

I'm not sure if i should even be using this thing. I even went to the trouble of naming it in a fashion that totally keeps me off the hook if i leave it for long periods of time. I suppose if you were looking around and found this thing, you might read it, but dont' expect any regular contributions.

Even if (somehow) it does end up getting updated regularly, dont' expect it to continue to do so on a regular basis. Just assume you're watching soemthing unusual, and that it can stop at any moment.

Because it can.

Wh00t.

Well, apparently that little update to the look of subgenius.com was up to snuff. It went up before it was even finished, actually. After an updated version was sent, everything got updated and all is well. Quite the debacle to begin with, but well worth it.

So go now, already!

It's shiny and new!

Oops, I Did It Again

SubSite

Become an Ordained Minister NOW...

It's hard ot believe that it's been this long, but it has.

In the fall of 2003, after having lost my job, i sat down and banged out a new set of index pages for subgenius.com. It took a few weeks of plugging away at it, and several attempts at different "looks" and whatnot, but it finally got done.

A few months after that, (maybe six, but i wasn't counting) it ended up on the web, as the new look of subsite.

Well, i got bored again and redid the whole damned thing. The version i'd done back in '03 was not my best work. Actually, it was a "quicky" version that eventually went up. It took me several tries to get anything done with the damned thing, and when i fianlly established what needed to go where, and how much of it needed to change to present a complete index, etc, etc...

I was about to move!

See, i was just about to move to new jersey and had to show something for all those weeks of frustration, so i threw something together that i wasn't totally happy with. But it worked. It replaced several multicoloured, hard to read, mysteriously laid-out pages with a group that all looked the same, and that linked to all the stuff that was most commonly checked up on by regular visitors to the site.

But now, i've managed to sort out all the things that i'd wanted to do, and actually do them right! It took a total of 25 months from start to finish, but i finally got things sorted out to my own satisfaction.

Now i'm just hoping that it meets with the approval of the Rev. Ivan Stang. It's usually his responsibility to update and maintain the thing, so if it turns out that it's not to his liking, it's back to square one.

Here's hoping!

Oh yeah, and the Cabal has a new site...

The Taphouse Cabal

It all began one evening over many beverages in a bar called the Taphouse Grill. Three patrons enjoying their beer, decided to form a super-seekrit society whose aim it would appear, was to experience and celebrate all the effects of drunkeness. Taking for themselves the secret latin motto "Bibere, Pervertere, Caedere" which they were certain meant something, these intrepid explorers then went on to spread their message of whatever it was far and wide. Born of too much Drink, the Taphouse Cabal meandered it's way through the flotsam and jetsam that is the IntraWeb, settling at last on an IRC network protocol that encourages, amongst other things, freethought, black humor, white Russians, good beer, and bad jokes.

I should probably mention the website we got running for the Taphouse Cabal. Now on to patching up SubSite.

Will They Ever Learn?

Who The Hell Is THIS!?

Registrant Name: Scott Brower
Registrant Organization: Oceanic, Inc.
Registrant Address1: 611 W. Horatio St.
Registrant Address2: #23
Registrant City: Tampa
Registrant State/Province: FL
Registrant Postal Code: 33606
Registrant Country: United States
Registrant Phone Number: +1.8138560301
Domain Registration Date: Sun Jul 31 07:03:19 GMT 2005

You gotta wonder why people keep doing things like this. It's been a year and a bit since I really had anyone to pick on for doing it, so I guess it's not all that bad. It gives me something to do for a while. Picking on people who insist on pulling stunts like this is almost a hobby of mine, now. I'll post a few clips and things from other "incidents" of the same type in the next few days.

You may also wonder how I find out about things like this. Well, in this case, it was fairly simple. Allow me to paste from an edited log of an IRC channel I frequent.

[01:34] * Joins: DaRev (SubSITEJav@THC-FF633774.tampabay.res.rr.com)
[01:35] * scalpod tips hat
[01:35] (scalpod) mornin' rev
[01:35] (darev) Que pasta?
[01:35] (scalpod) Tierra del fuego!
[01:36] (darev) If it aint fuego it aint worth the match.
[01:38] (darev) Free SubGenius.us email addresses for the first 10 that ask.
[01:38] * vertigo asks
[01:39] * scalpod axes - being 'ebonicized' and all...
[01:39] (scalpod) sorry about the mess there...
[01:41] * vertigo retracts the request

So, yeah... The guy wanders into a chatroom from a link on www.subgenius.com (a site that offers "@subgenius.com" e-mail addresses for sale) and offers free e-mail addresses to a very similar domain. That's a bit stupid, don't you think?

I'll give details about how my fight to rid the internet of jerkoffs like this is going over the next few days/weeks. I guess it kinda depends on how long it takes to shut the guy up.

It should also be noted that what I do and what I say aren't indicative of the policies/opinions of The SubGenius Foundation Inc. They are in no way responsible for my actions. They own the domain www.subgenius.com, not me. I'm just a guy that gets a bit pissy when someone tries to use the work of others to make his own site a bit more popular.

Fun With Feces

Man charged over bizarre conduct

BY MELANIE BENNETT

Staff Writer

An Atlanta man was arrested Thursday afternoon after he smeared feces on himself and walked around a department store in Columbus, police said.

Antoine Williams, 26, of 438 Vine St. NW, was charged with disorderly conduct after the incident at Macy's in Peachtree Mall, said Columbus Police Lt. Richard Gaines.

Okay, so some guy decides to do something like this, and he isn't crazy. So why did he do it? Perhaps we'll see a follow up story in which it all turns out to be a prank of some kind. Probably not, as we never get a chance to see why this happens.

All the cool stuff that you read about and ask "Why in the hell would anyone do that?" end up disappearing into some bottomless void. I don't know why, but I'm going to speculate. I figure that for every story like this there's a reporter that had to report it originally. Some poor guy had to call up the police department and ask for the details, snoop around the store and bug the employees for eyewitness accounts, etc. etc. Then he had to type up the whole mess and have it put out for publication. Check spelling and grammar, have editor check same, have ten other people check it.... All the while everyone who reads the damned thing ends up scratching their heads and asking that poor reporter guy for the same details they're currently reading. This must annoy said reporter to no end.

So anyways, assuming he even does a follow up on the story, he's probably not willing to have those same people bug him about it all day the next time, so he just reports back that it's not newsworthy anymore, the interesting thing was that it happened at all, not why.

Another theory I'm working on is that the whole process slows down the workplace because everyone's talking about the story and there's no current hurry on news because this kind of thing usually happens (or gets into the paper) on slow news days. You wouldn't have the whole office talking about some guy covered in poo if the WTC was falling down.

So we never get to hear what the guy's whole story was.

But rejoice, dear friends, because sometimes there's a silver lining to the shitcloud (to quote TrailerPark Boys' Mr Lehey). In this particular article, the give the guy's full address in the second paragraph.

So you can send him a congratulatory bouquet of flowers or something. Maybe a basket of bran muffins, if you're the type to make the best of a shitty situation. He may even write you back, or show up at your house bearing a gift of his own.

What a great way to meet interesting people!