[obnoxious introductory self-promotional hype:]
Over 6 dozen readers! Many of them literate!America Offline: The Obvious Headline & The Untold Story
"I laughed once!" -- top exec at engineering maintenance firm
"When 3MR adds sports and weather, I'm canceling my newspaper!" -- top administrative assistant at high-tech PR company
"It's where I went for all the latest Olympic coverage!" -- top IBM exec
Dulles, VA -- For 19 hours yesterday, the lives of 6 million AOL customers were changed forever, as they lost access to email and the Internet. While CEO Steve Case is peddling the usual muddy explanation, "we were installing high capacity switches," moles inside AOL have provided 3MR with the real cause for the meltdown. The names have been changed to protect the guilty. Johnny Peters, 14, recently addicted to AOL's rowboating forum, went online yesterday morning after being grounded from summer camp. Peters told fellow chat roomer, alias PaddleMe12, "why don't you just f*** off," when asked why he wasn't at camp. AOL chat room monitor Dolores Finkbetter immediately hit the Terminate button on her RemoteView controller. At this exact moment, AOL systems administrator, Dan Glibber, spilled a piping hot cup of coffee on hAOL 5000, the mega-computer which takes up a whole room in AOL's main data center outside of Washington, DC. The artificial intelligence of hAOL 5000 was short-circuited, causing Steve Case's monthly newsletter to contain bomb-making blueprints. Other side effects: attachments from Internet mail started working, the AOL browser sped up, and online AOL games were fun. This would only last a fleeting few moments, before hAOL 5000 completely conked out, uttering its last immortal words: "Dan, I wanted decaf...[then singing:] daisy, daisy, give me your answer, Steve..."
Why Suck Sucks
(or) A Fish, A Barrel, and a Gun Pointed at its Own Head
Our roasting cousins at www.suck.com have always provided a fresh jolt of ridicule to an otherwise ridiculous World Wide Web. Suck's recent take on the denizens of S.F.'s South Park area (the dreaded "Multimedia Gulch") hit so close to home, it must have been written in front of a mirror. Though the rant by pseudonym Polly Esther touched on early adopters in the Web "revolution" waking up knee-deep in "hoopla," and how big corporate types were taking all the fun from the lattes-and-T-shirt crowd, the mid-life crisis she spoke of was going on within the walls around her. Ranting about the Web, while being supported by the Web, is one thing. Ranting at your bosses and co-workers, while the whole world reads the gory details, is quite another. Or does Polly pass up the quad frappucinos and croissant sandwiches, really munching on sardines and pumping gas as a day job? Doubtful. Instead, Suck (owned by Wired) is on the forefront of the Web's latest game, Crap on Our Corporate Bosses. David Letterman made an art of it at NBC/GE...oops, an EX-employer. But this game is popping up all over the Web: Slate makes Microsoft's Steve Ballmer look like a cad, MSNBC's "The Site" uses anti-techno ranter Cliff Stoll for commentary (then again, who don't they use as a talking head?), and now Suck dumps on each new section designed by their co-horts at HotWired.
Is this a new form of self-criticism, to be hailed as the First Amendment's greatest triumph, or are these Suck rants the product of disgruntled stockholders of a non-existent IPO? Or perhaps, the cynic might surmise, Wall Street was ready to shower IPO bucks on Wired Ventures, then read the fine print of what it was buying: Suck crapping on its parents, advertisers -- anything that moved. That bouncing baby, green goo dribbling down its chin, just bounced itself right out of the money. Gulp down those frappacinos while you can, folks. Make it a quintuple.
"3-Minute Roast" is a weekly, advertisement-free, opinionated rip on anything that strikes our fancy in the online world.
Max Schlickting - Editor-in-Chief
Barbara Yalpsid - Online Editor
Lefty Periwinkle - First Amendment Expert
Mark Glaser - Unpaid Editorial Intern* If you hate our rantings, send a reply message: "Bill Gates is funny
and you aren't," and we'll discontinue service.
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