By Heather Garvey on alt.sysadmin.recovery.
"Come to think of it, there are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is nothing like Shakespeare." — Blair Houghton.
There it is again. Some clueless fool talking about the "Information Superhighway". They don't know didley about the Net. It's nothing like a superhighway. That's a rotten metaphor.
Suppose the metaphor ran in the other direction. Suppose the highways were like the net...
A highway hundreds of lanes wide. Most with pitfalls for potholes. Privately operated bridges and overpasses. No highway patrol. A couple of rent-a-cops on bicycles with broken whistles. 500 member vigilante posses with nuclear weapons. A minimum of 237 on ramps at every intersection.
No signs. Wanna get to Ensenada? Holler out the window at a passing truck to ask directions.
Ad hoc traffic laws. Some lanes would vote to make use by a single-occupant-vehicle a capital offense on Monday through Friday between 7:00 and 9:00. Other lanes would just shoot you without a trial for talking on a car phone.
AOL would be a giant diesel-smoking bus with hundreds of ebola victims on board throwing dead wombats and rotten cabbage at the other cars, most of which have been assembled at home from kits. Some are built around 2.5 horsepower lawn mower engines with a top speed of nine miles an hour. Others burn nitroglycerin and idle at 120.
No license plates. World War II bomber nose art instead. Terrifying paintings of huge teeth or vampire eagles. Bumper mounted machine guns. Flip somebody the finger on this highway and get a white phosphorus grenade up your tailpipe. Flatbed trucks cruise around with anti-aircraft missile batteries to shoot down the traffic helicopter. Little kids on tricycles with squirt guns filled with hydrochloric acid switch lanes without warning.
NO OFFRAMPS. None.
Now that's the way to run an Interstate Highway system.
10. Enormous, hairy pig with fan
9. Hey, ignoramus — win profit? Ha!
8. Oh-oh, wiring snafu: empty air
7. When forming, utopia's hairy
6. A rough whimper of insanity
5. Oh, wormy infuriating phase
4. Inspire humanity, who go far
3. Waiting for any promise, huh?
2. Hi-ho! Yow! I'm surfing Arpanet!
And the number one anagram for "Information Superhighway":
1. New utopia? Horrifying sham
If you are still here, go take a look at the computer quotes.
