MelCroucher.com - Mel's pages

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+ Zygote

The following extracts from Mel’s published work originally appeared in Computer Shopper, under the pen-name Zygote.

+ XXXPERT WITNESS

ICANN is the privately owned toady of the US Government, that controls internet domain registrations. Regular readers will know that Zygote hates the way ICANN is increasingly manipulated to exploit domain name registrations in the interests of profit and against the interests of the general public. On February 12th this year, ICANN held a board meeting to discuss creating a new Top Level Domain to identify “sexually oriented adult material intended for consulting adults or for other community members”. In other words, porn ID. The new suffix to appear after the dot on a so-called adult website is to be xxx, and every registration will cost around $60 a year. ICANN gave the global online community 21 days to pass comment, but it only took Zygote 21 minutes to contribute. Zygote believes the licensing of xxx domains has nothing to do with protecting the sensibilities of the innocent, and everything to do with ripping off legitimate website operators for sixty bucks a throw. Pornographers already have websites operating on hordes of domain suffices that can be bought, borrowed, stolen and impersonated. The last thing the porn merchants want is to shell out money on an identifiable xxx domain that people can avoid. So who will ICANN squeeze millions of xxx charges from? From the rest of us, of course. Legitimate brands, businesses and individuals will now need to protect their own reputations, and stop domain speculators from hijacking their names for ransom, using the new “adult” suffix. Perhaps direct action is the way to combat this global swindle. The names of the membership of the ICANN governing board are all available at www.icann.org, and Zygote hopes that if they have approved this mercenary rip-off by the time you read these words, they will already know first hand what it means to be an exposed member.

+ INSECTINSIDE

There are two interesting things about the thrips louse. The first interesting thing is that the plural of thrips is thrips, which must be very confusing for the wee beasties when they get together for a gossip. The second interesting thing is that the thrips louse has developed the ability to penetrate LCD computer screens. It normally feeds by puncturing the surface of a creature or a plant, and then sucking up the available nutrients. But recently, alarming numbers of thrips have taken to penetrating the polymer coatings of monitors and feasting on yummy liquid crystal diodes. There’s not a lot you can do if your monitor becomes host to a thrips louse, apart from stare at the little bugger for hour after hour in backlit silhouette. If you’re lucky, it will get bored after a few days and crawl off to the edge of the screen and disappear. But if you are unlucky, it will go and die slap bang in the middle of your display and necessitate an expensive replacement. Cleaning the surface of the screen is absolutely useless, and any attempt at digging the thrips out is invariably disastrous. But never fear, help is at hand. Zygote has discovered that there are predatory mites that eat thrips, and it should be fairly simple for manufacturers to preinstall them as a customer service. Apparently you only need a few hundred predatory thrips mites to colonise all the liquid crystal diodes that make up a 17-inch monitor. Of course, the predatory mites may affect your viewing pleasure, but they can be eradicated quite easily by introducing harlequin ladybirds into your system. You should be careful though, because harlequin ladybirds are very aggressive and have been known to attack humans. However, you can get rid of ladybirds by feeding them to wasps, and wasps are very easy to deal with if they become a nuisance, either by smoking them out or by running around waving your arms in the air and yelling. Come to think of it, if you find yourself looking at a thrips embedded in your screen, why not short-circuit the process and go straight to the running, waving and yelling bit.

+ MONK E-BUSINESS

How are you feeling? Buddhist monks are reckoned to be happy, enlightened folk. They are not burdened by possessions, and in fact they carry their material wealth around with them. All they own is a plain robe, and a simple bag containing a wooden bowl, a water strainer and a needle and thread. Last time Zygote checked, the full monk kit would only set you back twenty quid from Tesco’s “you shop, we drop” online service. Meanwhile, Zurich Insurance has recently profiled the exact amount of wealth the average British citizen carries around with them. Staggeringly, and the use of that word is highly appropriate, we are toting an average of £1,043 worth of kit around with us when we step outside the front door. Most of that is in the form of accessories and electronic gadgets, including MP3 players, laptops, phones, cameras, sat-navs and the like. If you think about these things at all, you may think that the more we are weighed down by all these bits of expensive kit, the less enlightened we are. But according to yet another government report, you would be wrong. There is one more important item that most of us carry around with us at all times, and it is represented by plastic credit cards encoded by smart little electronic chips. And what they represent is debt. Steaming great piles of debt. The average UK adult is in debt via credit cards, overdrafts and unsecured personal loans to the tune of £4,506. According to Zygote’s diamond-studded calculator, if you subtract the average UK portable wealth from the average UK portable debt, then we clock in at minus £3,463. In other words, thanks to useless electronic gadgets and virtual debt the average UK citizen is 173 times more likely to reach Nirvana than the average Buddhist monk. Now doesn’t that make you feel better?

+ BUSH TELEGRAPH

Dear President George W. Bush,

I was so pleased when you instructed a California court to force Google to hand over a week’s worth of its search requests. Let me declare how much I agree with you when you say, “This information will help the government understand how often Web users encounter material considered harmful to minors as a result of using a search engine.” And let me assure you that I promise not to spill the beans about the real reason you want the data, which is to fight the American Civil Liberties Union for taking out a successful injunction against your administration, accusing you of violating the First Amendment of the US Constitution. When Google had the audacity to say that the case against you was nothing to do with them, they proved they were a bunch of nonce-loving pinkos, determined to thwart your God-given mission of protecting America from child porn, terrorism and invasion by Martians. Anyway, Mister President, the reason I’m sending you this letter is that I’m a little bit worried about the legal expenses involved in your case, and I think I can save you millions and millions of dollars, that can be better spent on more useful things, like overthrowing the Chilean government or cluster-bombing Laos. There is a very fast and very cheap way to find out “how often Web users encounter material considered harmful to minors as a result of using a search engine”, and I am going to share my knowledge with you to help the cause. Here’s how. What you do is find somebody who can use a computer, and order them to log on to Google.com. Ask Condoleezza, I expect she knows how. Then get her to type some words into the little space at the top of the screen, that computer-folk call the browser bar. Now all you have to do is wait for a couple of seconds and look at the results displayed on the screen. Yes, Mister President, it’s as simple as that, but please, please don’t type in any naughty words yourself. After all, we don’t want you to be put on an FBI file for downloading porn, do we. Start off with some innocent search phrases, just to get the hang of things. For example, there are over 3,130,000 web pages celebrating the ruggedly handsome face that you see in your very own bathroom mirror every morning. It’s true, you son of a gun. Just ask Condi to type in “shaved Bush”, and you’ll see what I mean.

Your loyal subject,
Zygote.

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