Web Surfing
In looking for cool web pages, I hit the most-reliable and powerful search engine available, but I don't want to tell you what it is because even with a T3 and and alpha, I want to protect it from floods of inquiries which might delay my own. In any case , I do a simple search for "satire" and come up with several english pages, and a surprising number of german contributions to the net. I'm not so surpirsed in a moment though, when it occurs to me that if I had to live with their history, I'd probably b e into satire too.
Anyway, I hit www.gridlock.com/~grid/home.html and was amused momentarily by doctored photos of notable politicians with funny, if somewhat unoriginal captions like "Bigot" screamed over Pat Buchanon's head and "The Jerk" over Newt's. I wished there was more intelligently entertaining content, something in the vein of Bill Mahr perhaps, but I headed back to my search engine after reading an intro paragraph with more history than satire, so maybe I didn't give it enough of a chance.
Next I wanted to visit "Melvin," rumored to be a great zine, but bad links led me to Playboy Online. This was most distressing. First off, I have no interest in Playboy, and secondly, it takes forever to load because they're selling ad space at a fur ious pace. Nevertheless, I wait patiently in the hopes of finding Melvin. I don't see any obvious links, but despite my strengthening wish to depart, I persevere by hitting the playboy icon for "All The Rest." Again I must wait for huge Playboy images t o load, this one even more painful because it's the same stupid logo I see everywhere but those crack graphic designers at Playboy have decided to employ a multi-colored background to steal my time. My investment goes unrewarded as my choices for links a re "Playwear," "Playmates," and "Stockquotes," (Playboy has always been very adept at legitimizing it's existence and I'm sure Stockquotes is one of the more exercized excuses men give to their wives when caught at the computer -- "I meant to click stockq uotes, but I hit Pamela Anderson by mistake!")
Finally, I decided to give www.wordplay.com a shot as I wasn't about to hit the german sites without some kind of translation tool. Wordplay pissed me off immediately. The standard "This page is under construction and will be done soon" cannot be bel ieved considering the last update is listed as September 1995. But I decide to try to read one of the four listings and what do I get? An Ad!!!! They've been good enough to scan in the cover of this guy's book and generously include the $9.95 price tag and publisher, but they totally slack on including any content which might persuade me to at least think about buying the book. There is also another graphic that won't load. Sloppy is the word that comes to mind when I think about this page. I don't like being the object of cheesy marketing ploys, but the total lack of effort on the part of these web designers in even thinking about what people are looking for when they hunt the net disturbs me. From the color graphic I can even tell that this guy m ight be an OK cartoonist, but from looking at this page, all I can see is that he wants to make money. Needless to say, I made my departure post-haste and promptly gave up so I could relay the miserable experience to you.
From this short foray into the world of web satire, I've concluded that you've got to rely on something more than a good search engine to find the best o' the web, you've got to be willing to create it yourself.
