Rant-Man's Notebook

By Jim "Rant-Man" MacQuarrie

Oddly Enough

I hate my start page. My ISP (Irritating Sarcasm Provoker) has changed the way their standard start page works. Maybe it only does it on the Mac, but it does a really irritating thing. See, there are two types of web-users, hunters and gatherers (some things never change, and we're never more than a week away from the stone age). Hunters go to the net for a specific purpose. We know what we're looking for, so we fire up the browser and go right to it, or right to whichever search engine is most likely to find it for us. Gatherers, on the other hand, are the web equivalent of recreational shoppers, those people who go to the mall as a social event and like to just wander the stores browsing until something catches their eye. They're the people who earned the label "web-surfers." Anyway, my ISP, which I will call Smurflink in order to head off any possible lawsuits, tries to satisfy both camps with their start page, but so far all they've managed to do is tick me off. ("Tick me off" is a euphemism for "piss me off," since mom doesn't like it when I'm a potty-mouth. Oops.)

Smurflink has added a Google search box to the start page. Actually, they've had one for a long time, but apparently Google started paying them more money, because now it behaves differently than it used to. I start up my Explorer (I know, I know, the Netscape is supposed to be the hot browser now, and Explorer is part of the Evil Empire of MicroSnot; I just really can't be bothered to switch over until I have a compelling reason to do so, like say if I suddenly couldn't get into the message boards at Comic Book Resourses; then I'd switch in a heartbeat. But I digress.), and immediately start to type in the URL of whatever site I intend to look at. Meanwhile, the start page continues to load, and when it reaches a certain point, usually about halfway through my typing, the text will suddenly and automatically jump from the URL window to the search one. I'm a really crappy typist (anyone who's read my blatherings can attest to that, especially my friend Sue who unfailingly sends me an e-mail every Thursday noting all my typos; I really should send the rants to her for proofing before I put them up for the rest of you to read), anyway, I'm a really crappy typist, so I'm always either looking at the keyboard or whatever I'm typing from, never looking at the screen. What this means is, when I get done typing in the URL and hit the Return key (that's the Enter key for you PC users), I find that I have half a URL in the address box and the other half in the Google box. And now that I've hit the return, Google is happily searching for the half-URL that I accidentally gave it.

Finally I learned to deal with it, but it annoyed me to no end. I contacted Smurflink (if you can refer to screaming e-mails and an exasperating conversation with some woman in India via their online live help service as "contacting") and was ultimately told that there's nothing wrong with the way the start page behaves and I should just change my default page to blank.

I don't want blank. Blank is boring. The obvious solution, of course, is to create my own custom start page without the damn Google box, but I'm a lazy cuss and that sounds like work. And I want the news function that the start page provides. So I did a little exploring, and finally found a start page I can live with: Rueters Oddly Enough News page. Now that's what I call news!

Here are today's featured stories:

Dog Fight in Court Over Length of Spaniel's Tail ALBANY, New York (Reuters) - New York's highest court heard arguments on Wednesday in the case of a man who has refused to cut his dog's tail for national competitions.

Shop Sells Furniture Packages for Divorced Men BRUSSELS (Reuters) - A Belgian furniture shop is offering special packages for divorced men who hate shopping in a country where half of all marriages end in a divorce after five years.

Hey, It's Me! Send Money! TOKYO (Reuters) - Fraudsters have tricked large sums of money out of trusting Japanese this year by phoning and pretending to be relatives in trouble, police said on Thursday. In what domestic media are calling the "Hi, it's me" swindle, victims receive calls from fraudsters who identify themselves only as "me" and say they are in desperate need of money to cover anything from an uninsured traffic accident to an unexpected pregnancy.

Now this is the kind of news I want to read in the morning. The antics of all the usual suspects in government and entertainment fail to amuse me these days, but when I can read about lepers being snubbed, I'm a happy man. It sure beats what passes for news on the local TV.

The other night I was watching Gilmore Girls on the TiVO (what? I like Gilmore Girls; I wish I could be that quick and clever with my retorts, which I probably could be if I had a great massed phalanx of writers feeding me lines like they do... but I digress), and when it ended I went back to whatever was actually on the air at that moment, which happened to be WB's "news," which I refer to as news for lack of a better word. It must be sweeps month (do they still have sweeps month?), because the news that night seemed to be all sleaze. The lead story was on "stripper culture," which would seem to be an oxymoron. I can't really tell you what "stripper culture" is, since the point of the segment seemed to be merely an excuse to show the tape they shot at the Eyeful Tower or whatever the nearest strip joint is called.

See, that's part of the problem right there. Strip joints should be called strip joints, not "gentlemen's clubs" (another oxymoron, since a gentlemen's club is a place a gentleman wouldn't go to), and they should be located in the seedy industrial area on the bad side of town. Time was, if you wanted to be a sleazeball, you had to consciously choose to be one. You had to go to the skanky part of town, get past the filthy fat guy in the ratty wifebeater shirt at the door, hope you weren't recognized by anybody, and fully embrace the fact that you were being a sleazeball. Nowadays you can be a sleazeball just by leaving your e-mail set to preview the messages. I think we've lost something.

The second story on the news that night was about a new game show where young women compete for a chance to star in a porno movie. This is another way in which we've lost something. Back in the day, porno movies were something that stupid women got conned into or turned to out of desperation. It wasn't something anybody aspired to. I really don't want to raise my kids in a world where "porn star" is an option presented at Career Day.

I think we need to work to make sleaze sleazy again. It shouldn't be respectable or mainstream. I think if you want to be a sleaze, you should have to feel like a sleaze. It's part of the experience. But maybe that's just me.

As that famous sleazeball, Woody Allen once said, "sex is only dirty if you're doing it right." He should know, right?

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