Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

["tengu typed, not" <tengu AT unc.edu>]

Folks,
        I shall take this opportunity to explain what has confused more
than one InterNetWorker. The moniker "tengu typed, not" is used so that
when one quotes an email sent from this account and prepends "$moniker
wrote:" to it it reads as does the eleventh line following, and makes
the observant chuckle and think me very clever.
        Which I am.
        Not so clever, though, that I cannot be confounded by the Alchemist, 
who
prepends his quoted messages with
"At $time, I heard $moniker say :"
Which puts my bit of skullduggery in the wrong tense, nevermind the fact
that the Alchemist neither heard me type nor say anything.
All this is, of course, rooted in my obsession with communicating
properly- I neither wrote nor said, I typed.

"tengu typed, not" wrote:
> In Durham, the Durham Food Co-op (formerly The People's Intergalactic 
> Food Conspiracy #1) on West Chapel Hill Street has a fine selection of
> foodstuff.

        I don't sign my given name often; I'm trying to keep it off the
'net, as well as any/all my meat information.  My phone number is
unlisted, and my electricity and water accounts are under homophones of my
given name.  When ordering products from the 'net, I use a different name
for every vendor. I can then trace who sells my information to which
spammers, as well as cull junk mail quickly.  When buying from Radio
Shack, I happily state, "I'm sorry, I'm not authorized to release that
information" when asked my name, phone number, and address.  What does
Tandy need that information for, anyway? I'm buying batteries.
        After noting that the signatures of Best Buy customers are being
digitally read, I began using Edward Hyde's method of signing with my
non-dominant hand.
        Back in '87, I saw an episode of Max Headroom focusing on folks called
"Blanks" who systematically removed every trace of themselves from "The
Network" - a world-wide data-exchange network that _everybody_ was
on (Back in '87, folks). William Morgan Sheppard played the 
mohawk-sporting Blank Reg, who operated (if memory serves) Big Time TV.
        I was recently shown a copy of the October 2000-Volume 43, Number 10 
issue
of "Communications of the ACM," which has an article on this very cultural
reference.  The author, Brock N. Meeks, is also trying to remove himself
from the 'net, though he was apparently a prolific poster, and needs a
program to 'clean' his numerous previous newsgroup messages.
http://www.acm.org/cacm/1000/1000toc.html is the closest I could find to
the article; I've not found the text online yet.
        I realize my efforts are futile.

Disregard this transmission,
tengu
---
"Twenty Minutes Into the Future"
-MH