"Greensleeves" on Bagpipes for the Holidays

I heard -- or perhaps made up -- that the second thing printed on the Gutenberg press was pornography. I f so, that would lend support to the "waffle iron" view of technology: You have to throw the first product away to get to the good stuff. Well, we're deep into the good s tuff with computers.

I was lunching with a big libertarian cheese the other day and we were talking about sex on the Web. He said, "Yeah, at first I had the Web sex stuff going all the time, but now...." I finished the s entence for him "...I have it going all the time." (I just couldn't let a free-speech-limited-government-good-guy lie to my face.)

However, the point he was going to make is essentially correct: A quest for Web sex serves both as a primer and exercise book. By the time you're able to Boolean to your exact kink, you can sure find the gestation period of a moose. (And if that's part of your kink, I want to see the links on your home page and I want to see them now.)

Getting my sixth phone line (I live alone) into The Slammer (my home) allows me to be online all the time. I just keep jacked into Worldnet 24/7. (The ISPs think people like me are piggy pigs who would camp out at an all-you-can-eat buffet and, well, maybe we would. I live in Vegas.) The Web is my entertainment and my reference while I "work." < tt> It's amazing how much information can flood into our monitors.

There's nothing funny about hating bagpipes; it's like saying you breathe air. Now someone who likes bagpipes, th at's news. That's more surprising than man bites dog (and not an entirely dissimilar sound), but there's nothing novel in yet another bagpipe hater.

I was at a music store the other day, buying a guitar tuner (first step to selling out) and a tambourine. (I have a joke here, but if you don't know me, well, it's just offensive. I'll probably get busted just for thinking this joke). As I was trying out the tambourine joke on the music store clerks (i t way didn't play, that's one of the reasons I'm not doing it here), one of them mentioned that a guy in the store was learning bagpipes and practicing every day in the back room.

I involuntarily shook my head in sympathy, and the clerks, not being comedians, thought anti-bagpipe jokes were novel and got into it. They complained about the "god-awful caterwauling." (One has to use "god-awful caterwauling" whenever the subject of bagpipes comes up. It's like how buses always "plunge" off cliffs. My friend Dennis Ritchie collects news stories of bus plunges. Errant buses "plunge." Bagpipes "caterwaul" in the style of "god-awful.")

Then one of the clerks gave me some new information: "There's this disease that bagpipers get from their bags (that's a pleasant image). It kills them. It's like a bacterium that lives in the bag. Now, if we can just find a disease that'll kill mimes...." Since it was after Thanksgiving and before New Year's, I joined i n the holiday spirit and shared the information that years ago the "clown white" makeup used by mimes contained face-rotting lead. For a moment, the clerk and I felt a divine benevolent presence in the universe. Joy to the world.

I got home and went straight to Web for confirmation. I did a search for "bagpipes +disease" and found nothing but 72% hits on gag pages created by people claiming to like bagpipes. Then I tried "clown +white +disease" and got lot s of stuff on "Spawn." No luck.

My friend Ron Gomes, who knows this searching thing inside out (yes, he can find your kink), found some pretty convincing refutation of the bagpipe-fungi miracle. It seems this was just another hopeful holiday folktale.

But for that one moment, in the music store, I kinda felt a Xmasy maybe-there-is-a-benevolent-guiding-force-in-the-universe vibe with my rock-star-wannabe clerk. It's the closest I' m going to get to a traditional holiday feeling.

Thanks to the Web for bringing me back to the truth of this wonderfully complicated world. Fungus and toxins aren't ruled by a omniscent force overlapping our artistic sense. You have to use your freedom and intelligence to avoid bagpipes and mimes on your own. Again, the truth is ultimately empowering and joyous.

Happy Solstice.