" I can't wait til they start the internet." - Crow T. Robot, MST3K

 

How did we ever make it to the Moon without the Internet. Oh, yeah, really big rockets, lots of thrust. Sliderules.

I remember way back in the before-time, before there was the IntraTubes. Back then, The Mrs. and I would get in steel-cage death-matches over whether or not the actress in The Jerk was Jamie Lee Curtis (She wasn’t. I was, I know it’s difficult to believe, wrong on my actress identification.) or whether Jamie Lee Curtis is a hermaphrodite (Internet version: tie).

Now as The Mrs. sits and writes her novels (on the purchased one, the editor said, “I love working on your novel – editing is a dream.”), The Mrs. can effortlessly determine the average, real-time flow of water in the Sabine River in Texas, or view historical data on nose-picking rates among left-handed near-sighted dentists. Not that The Mrs. does that, since she doesn’t write about dentists or the Sabine River. But, The Mrs. could.

The Intertubes have, besides short-circuiting domestic disputes and keeping The Mrs. and I off of “Cops: Nerdville,” also given us instant access to meandering conversations from Pop Wilder in the Wilderbunker:

Pop Wilder: “John, I think they know where I live. Love, Pop”

John Wilder: “Pop, The code guy inspected the bunker when you pulled the building permits. The tax assessor valued the place at $231.34 last year. The Postal Service delivers the mail daily. Yes, they know where you live. Love, John”

Pop Wilder: “John, Is that why the President stopped by for scones and herb tea last week? It was nice. We watched The Wire on HMO. Love, Pop.”

Okay, there’s that, too. E-mail and instant messaging don’t necessarily lend themselves to the fifty-odd pages of letter that George Washington would write to Einstein (assuming that one wasn’t dead before the other was born) detailing the spring planting of hemp in Virginia and the potential ramifications on the Special Theory of Whoa I’m Totally Baked, Dude.

Instead, future historians will need to plumb the depths of recovered SIM chips in cell phones and attempt to decipher the near-hieroglyphic “LOL DUDZ IMO IDK TTYL.” In the future, Shakespeare’s lines of “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate,” may be replaced by Tiffany Q. Lowrisepants version of “U R 1 HOT T.” The English Lit profs will probably be ROFLPITP.

One of the nice things about the Internetnet is that you can get content that would otherwise be unavailable. The Mrs., Alia and I were watching South Park a month or so ago and they did a parody of the Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery.” Even better, they did a parody of the film of Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery,” done by Encyclopedia Britannica in the late 1960’s (featuring star of stage and screen, Ed Begley, Jr.). I remember (vividly) watching that movie when I was in fifth grade. Since Trey Parker and Matt Stone probably watched the same exact copy of film (Trey, Matt, and I all grew up in Colorado) I really wished I could show it to The Mrs. and Alia S.

Thanks to Youtube, we watched it that night, so the ladies in the house could understand why I was laughing like a fool at several scenes. Mainly, really, it was so they could indulge my narcissistic side and make them watch that.

The Mrs. and I also loved (back in the day) Mystery Science Theater 3000®. Turns out that Mike Nelson has a site (www.rifftrax.com) that you can download audio tracks that parody currently popular movies. (If you liked MST3K, go, visit, purchase.)

Me? I think can barely remember the before-time, when I had to go to bookstores, and if The Mrs. and I got into an argument that we could factually prove, I could yell, “OMG, IS THAT A HERMAPHRODITIC SQUIRREL THAT LOOKS EXACTLY LIKE JAMIE LEE CURTIS? ROFL!”

Less chance of me being a battered spouse on “Cops: Nerdville.”

Thank you, Internet.