Welcome to Planet Mongo, a demi resort that exists strictly to promote fun and decadence, and allows me to mock the media fools (and for them to mock me) on a more efficient basis than simply shouting out the window. (I don't know if the mediafools (tm) actually shout out the window, but I wouldn't put it past them).

I've already lost several clever paragraphs to a setting error, and if I run out of things to say you could assume that this is what's happened; and that profundity will follow in no time at all. Just keep hitting the reload button and praying to the appropriate deities and maybe you'll get lucky.

Planet Mongo is a Stirner Asylum, just like the one YOU live in, except that I get to rant all I want. I've been meaning to leap into the blogosphere for months. After reading Web Gods like Andrew Sullivan, Tim Blair, the Mystic Dolphin, and She Whose Name Cannot Be Spoken, I wanted to contribute. Or perhaps contribute is a funny word for whatever it is I'm doing.

Today is an interesting day for me. I invented spam ten years ago today, on March 24th, 1993. You can see the first commercial spam of the internet here:
Port Watson Project

My two co-conspirators were Ben Power and Sean Sheedy. (All the funny stuff in the article was Ben's, I was responsible for the finished version). We meant well. There will be more on the Port Watson Project someday if I feel like telling the story---but no utopia resulted from our efforts. We gathered names and email addresses from any newsgroup that looked sympathetic or promising and sent out this massive (at the time) text file.

The flames were incredible. You can see how naive we were; spam in the beginning had our names, addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers on it. Pissed off recipients used all of these to let us know what they thought about getting unsolicited email. Of course we never planned to spawn the hideous evil that IS spam today...and thanks for asking but I have all the spam (and more) that I can stand. I do apologize, though. Until later...newer...and fresher atrocities.