An elderly cousin of mine, Clara (not her real name) lives in Minnesota. She likes to write and also needed something to help her organize all her recipes, so her family bought her a PC last Christmas. She really enjoyed it; even took a couple of classes. Early last summer I heard she had gotten an Internet connection. Well, she found out about Internet Relay Chat, and the next thing the family knew she was into a budding net romance with a gentleman from Ohio. But, all that was off the day he told her he used a Mac to connect to the net. She said she wasn’t going to have anything to do with a man who claimed he could communicate using a hamburger: either he was a liar or involved in voodoo or some such thing.

Some wag we know is starting a new service providing the names of unsuccessful Web hosting companies. I think this is going to catch on. When you think of it, you’re much better off with an unsuccessful Web Host: they won’t grow, you won’t get great service for a while and then gradually watch it degrade as you would with a successful one; you’ll not have to try to remember everyone who has your email address to give them your new one, because the mail server at the successful site is crashing with the regularity of Big Ben’s chimes; you won’t have to wait 36 hours to find out your post to alt.binaries.kitchen.nudes went instead to alt.home.cooking. A list of losers is going to be a winner, I think.