These goddam Koreans are starting to get on my nerves. What does this mean? The number 19 with hearts coming out of it. Is that supposed to... what? I have no idea. Why don't these fucking people just leave me alone. Maybe Wonderchicken can explain it. Though that link is primarily to thank him for the wonderful lead to his recent "Politics Chafe My Scrote." Never have I seen fellatio and the Caucasian Chalk Circle so succinctly juxtaposed and dispatched. Good work there, Stavros. So what the fuck is it with this Cabalistic spam about the love of 19. A 19 year old girl, I could understand, but this came in one of those rare emails I receive every other month or so that is not from a porn site. They're infrequent enough not to interrupt my contemplation of the other mail I must study so carefully, but these little hearts have got me irked. Don't these people have better things to do with their time? I understand they make excellent kim-chee. So credit where due, I say. But if you have any sway over there, Mr. Wonderchicken, Sir, would you ask them to knock this shit off? Thanks.

However, that's not what I meant to write about. I just had to get it off my mind first. Blow out the old pipes, you know? A man can only take so much.

My intended theme this time out concerns all these myriad goddam social networking schemes. Seems there's another of the motherfuckers every week now, each vying to add bells and whistles the others haven't dreamed up yet, all in an effort to what? I'll tell you what: make us fill in more bloody forms than the IRS could invent if they hired ten thousand more lifetime-tenured civil servants with the IQ of goldfish and the vicious demeanor of starving Rottweilers.

Jesus Christ. Wasn't the point of all this -- now forgotten somewhere back there in the dawn of Internet Time -- to stop feeding databases with fixed-field hor's doerves culled from the least interesting minutiae of our already beleaguered lives? I could never remember my own phone number before the World Wide Web. Now I know it by heart. I ask you: is this progress?

However, LinkedIn seems to have a distinctly cut-above approach to facilitating serious business relationships. The system is well designed to prevent the sort of free-for-all messaging whereby one suddenly finds oneself in receipt of 793,482 emails, half of which reflect hot debate about the best etiquette to adopt when attending a rodeo in Montana so as not to alienate the kind of dunderheaded local halfwits who frequent those barbaric events. In this, I would say LinkedIn has achieved a bit of an edge.

And it's true that you get a better class of people there. Not so many of the sniveling illiterate morons who have gravitated like lemmings to "the blopgosphere." Oh please! At least there's been a bit of a letup this month as they all got themselves positioned to attend these distasteful conventions that seem to be taking place. (Can anyone tell me what this is all about? Some new form of sporting event, I imagine.)

At any rate, I noticed that Kyle Shannon was on LinkedIn, and I haven't spoken with him for ever so long. I dropped by his sweatshop loft in NY City in the summer of, I want to say 1995, but it could have a year either side of that. Kyle is a great guy, very funny, and brilliant. Creative? Whooo-ee! As we say out here in Colorado. But only when we feel we really must.

I could have just sent him mail, which I've been meaning to do for a couple-three years now, but I decided to play along with LinkedIn's rather labyrinthine Way of Doing Things. I should explain that my visit to the Mac infested sweat shop was before he and his partner, Chow Yun Fat, cornered 93.7% of the then burgeoning web-mill racket. Then turned around and sold Agency.com for $723 billion to a South American herbal remedies cartel and started playing golf with the Bushes and Trumps. In other words, Kyle (I'm thinking) is fucking loaded, while I (I am certain; no surmising required) am dead broke. Can you connect these dots, class? Yes, that's correct. I've turned over a new leaf lately, deciding to get serious about earning a living again, even if it means I have to work.

First, it seemed I had to send Kyle some quasi-formal proposal concerning my desire to infringe on his time and good graces. Hmmm. I had to think for a second. Then I started typing...

Kyle,

RageBoy here. Listen, man, I think we could make a killing right now in nanotech reassemblers for temporal shifting. it's the future of entertainment. yes. not to mention the megabuck futures in GEOGRAPHIC transmission and reassembly. put the airlines, hotel chains, whole cities, even countries out of business overnight. I say we develop this at a convenient Lagrange point, say L5, to keep prying eyes away until we're ready to release the translight sub-beta BuckyBall refibrillation units to the usual Alpha Centaurian subcontractors -- after all they do have more experience with the Cauchy-Riemann equations and K-shell time-bending processes than any other outfit within a dozen parsecs. Am I right? I mean, am I right, dude?

Yeah, we make enough off this one to buy up two or three outer planets and set up The Migration from there. I'll split with you 60-40 in your favor (seed money advantage) but I get the slot in the 23rd century history books. Deal?

c'mon, man, it'll be FUN!!!

RB

Then it seemed I had to go through an intermediary who is already "linked in" (get it?) to both Kyle and myself. Thus have the good folks at LinkedIn not only spared us the bother of random overtures from strangers with harebrained ideas, they have also single-handedly reinvented the Department of Business Prevention for the Age of the Web. Good going, fellows. So next I wrote the following, which, as you will see, is to petition this contact-in-potentia to accept my offer of bilateral linkage...

From: "Christopher Locke" <clocke@panix.com>
Subject: Cortical Delamination on LinkedIn?

Kyle-san, you scurvy dog!

I found you while I was searching through my sock drawer at LinkedIn. Let's attack Poland so we can help each other with referrals. Does that make sense? I'm not sure. But if we also attack Northumbria, both of our networks will begin to glow with a strange subaqueous aura and our evil powers will be increased manyfold. Cool, huh? To add me as your corporate concubine, just follow the trail of bread crumbs below.

Yours for Transgalactic Migration!

RageBoy®

Now all I have to do is wait by my email client or phone and we'll be in business. And then, all you people who laughed at me for begging cheese whiz and pretzels will be laughing out the other side of your face as I go riding past in my brand new Cadillac Escalade and flip you a quarter out the window. Yeah, so who'll be crying then? Tell me that.