Once again, The Onion brilliantly captures the narcissistic inanity of personal homepages and blogs.
"The purpose of barryploegel.com shall be twofold: First, it shall enable anyone to access all the information they desire about me at the touch of a button. Second, upon my death, the site shall serve as a monument to all that I was. Future historians need not wonder who this enigmatic 'Barry Ploegel' fellow was....As goes my life, so shall go my site. All of my many triumphs and tragedies will be inscribed in the dark-blue, Helvetica-fonted characters that leap off the site's black background. Like the many characters from mythology who can be summoned simply by shouting their names, I will be similarly accessible by entering my name in the browser window."
That reminds me...I'd better post that Angel fan fiction I've been working on.
Hmmm,so it begins: I am posting comments to a blog. }:)
I felt an acute pang of dramatic irony as I read this entry and, thus, must unfold the true story of Mr. Barry Ploegel. The domain is owned and hosted by my friend, Geoff, in whose apartment I lived for a time. The article is a re-print which originally appeared in May of 2000. At the time, Geoff scooped the article before anyone else, it seems, and went ahead and registered the domain barryploegel.com. He meticulously created the page according to the template set forth in the article.
I can't recall if the Onion had some sort of message boards or whether the discussion appeared elsewhere, but many readers were surprised to see the Onion picking on a "real" person/domain who was not a celebrity nor other typical target; some had conjectured that the witty minds at America's Finest New Source had created the page. In any case, there was some heated (for some reason) discussion about it on the wires. And when he got home later that night, Geoff found a message on his answering machine; the editor had called and told him how hilarious and flattering they found his efforts.
I imagine that -- given their role as a "one-way conduit of information" which does not accept submissions -- such acknowledgment is the closest to a submission that one can hope for. This should give Geoff an "Onion number" of 1, perhaps...
Ah, here's the original:
http://www.theonion.com/onion3617/barry_ploegel.html
Cheers,
/tom