On Sun, 5 Aug 2007 [Jongware] wrote:
>You got issues. Lots.
When I was a youngster there were one or two kids whose idea of
sophisticated disruption was to sit near to the swings at the local park
and continuously shout "****! ****! ****! BASTARD!" at anyone within
earshot. Never "**** OFF YOU ****!" or anything similarly meaningful
because that would require a fully constructed sentence. Just the swear
words. They would sit there for six or seven hours almost every day
throughout the summer doing nothing but that. All they achieved was to
turn away a few mothers with younger kids who didn't want them exposed
to that language, and who would move on to a different park.
A few years later CB radio became fleetingly appealing to the UK m*****,
and what happened? Some idiots (in this case possibly the same idiots)
chose to spend all their time sat on channel 19 waiting for someone to
try to strike up a conversation, at which point they'd key their illegal
100W transmitter and broadcast "FUUUUUUUUCK OFFFFFFFFFF!" to the region.
This just seemed so bizarre. It's one thing to waste one's youth yelling
obscenities to a handful of shocked parents, but quite another to invest
time and effort setting up a transmitter, antenna, amplifier and
associated hardware just to tem****arily annoy a few local radio users.
Then along came the internet and amazingly the idiots (or, more likely,
a whole new generation of idiots) leaped right on it and chose to use it
to do exactly the same thing as their forebears. This time the effort
required was arguably greater even than that for CB radio -- setting up
a PC, internet connection, usenet software (or at the very least a
Google Groups account) etc. -- but of course it's now possible to
virtually yell "****! ****! ****! BASTARD!" at the entire planet in one
go, so perhaps the idiots deemed the effort worth it.
I've come to the conclusion that this behaviour must be universal. That
it's an inevitable consequence of the evolution of the sentient mind
that some individuals will feel an overwhelming compunction to blindly
and inanely swear at as many people as the technology available to them
will allow.
In light of this I suspect that if the SETI guys ever have a
breakthrough and detect an obviously extraterrestrial transmission, that
they will spend thousands of man-hours decoding the signal only to
discover it's a spotty green alien adolescent who's snuck onto his dad's
subspace radio for the sole purpose of cranking up the gain and
broadcasting "FUUUUUUUUCK OFFFFFFFFFF!" to as much of the universe as
possible.
--
Kev
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"Entrance only. Do not enter."
Parking lot sign in Ocala, FL
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