Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").

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Like my brownhouse:
   California geese
Thursday, February 11 1999
At the Mission Center Road bridge this afternoon, I sat by the edge of the north bank of the San Diego River eating a couple 99 cent Carl's Jr. Famous Stars. Four waterfowl swam over to me eagerly begging for scraps. Two were a standard male-female pair of Mallard ducks and two were a male-female pair of a tawny west coast goose, a species that features a prominent black bulb at the base of its bill. The male goose made a big show of groaning, hissing and bobbing his head at me, climbing up on the rip rap on the shoreline and approaching fairly close. He was so big and weird looking that I wanted to toss him food immediately. It occurred to me that the boldest of the rare species of waterfowl can probably lead a fairly cozy life begging from people in urban areas. This goose was so exotic looking I felt like I owed him something for his performance. Eventually I tossed him some bread and beef, but he was so full of himself that he completely missed it, and his wife and the two Mallard sidekicks got it all instead.
I decided halfway through the day today that I looked like some kind of Schteve. Last night I'd made the mistake of trimming away a few chunks of hair that stuck out. In the process, though, I applied a trailer-park fashion to my head. I looked like a victim of fetal alcohol syndrome who's grown up breathing second hand smoke, eating cheap frosted cereal, bathing in chicken shit-contaminated water, and learning about human nature from the Jerry Springer Show.
In the afternoon I was bored with my work and randomly decided to check my guestbook. I was pleasantly surprised to find the following animated GIF:

Surely anyone who would take the time to make such a creation must be an enthusiastic fan! I thought the overall negative tone was entirely in jest, since the animation superficially appeared to be the sort of thing one of the stranger of my readers might construct. But then I saw that my guestbook had been flooded with numerous identical postings, all including the above image along with some broken GIFs and occasional insults, mostly about my art. The sheer quantity of postings made it clear that this was a hostile act, and that the insults were sincere. Someone out there somewhere hoped to lower my self esteem with childish aspersions cast upon my art.
In one of the guestbook postings I found the only language alluding to my supposed offense, and this said I had "fucked with a Satanic site" and that I should have known better. Since I haven't fucked with anyone's site since August of 1998, it seemed as if this satanist's rage was terribly misdirected. Perhaps someone claiming to be me had fucked with these satanists, but I'd had nothing to do with it.
Though the satanist guestbook terrorist hadn't left any email addresses or signed his name anywhere, if he'd been trying to conceal his identity, he'd been terribly sloppy. The above image had been posted on a private commercial site with a pathname which indicated administrator-level control. I went to Internic.net and tracked down the contact information of the registrant for the domain name www.playhouse90.com. It turned out to be the webmaster of the site, a certain Maxaemillion Capone, warlock1318@EMAIL.MSN.COM. A cursory examination of the site, a typical bloated Geocitiesesque black-background monstrosity, revealed a number of anti-Gus postings by this same Maxaemillion Capone. These postings were more coherent and sinister, saying that a satanist thug had been sent to San Diego to lie in wait for me during my bicycle commute to work through Mission Valley.
I sent the following email to Mr. Capone:

Subject: your friend
Date: Thu, 11 Feb 1999 14:59:46 -0800
From: Gus Mueller
To: warlock1318@email.msn.com, xxx@spies.com

Perhaps you know whoever it is who put http://www.playhouse90.com/screw/you/Gus/gusani1.gif on your server. This person comes from 208.251.0.98, uses Netscape 4.0 on a Windows 95 machine

That IP address resolves to 1Cust98.tnt1.ontario2.ca.da.uu.net this person apparently flooded my guestbook on this mistaken notion that
I had done something to a so-called "satanic site," perhaps yours.

I would appreciate it if this individual would leave me alone. His GIF was funny in and of itself, but the obvious effort he's putting into this display seems to indicate a paranoid, delusional personality type. I've done nothing to this person or to any site, satanic or otherwise.

Your contact info is as follows, by the way.

Virtucon Industries (PLAYHOUSE8-DOM)
530 W. Alpine St. #12
Upland, CA 91786

Capone, Maxaemillion (MC11588)
warlock1318@EMAIL.MSN.COM
909 305-2000

sincerely,
Gus Mueller

My revealing my knowledge of Capone's street address and phone number soon had the desired effect. Within several hours, all the anti-Gus postings had been removed from Capone's message board and no further time-consuming attacks on my guestbook took place. For historical reasons, I left one copy of the tediously repetitive postings intact.

For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?990211

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