Re: relay still open at 246.234.111.233

[Candy]

to create a
Web-cum-e-mail newsletter. I wanted a catchy title, so I called it
Entropy Gradient Reversals, EGR for short. In the beginning, I thought
it would be a perfect vehicle to deliver my profound pundit-grade
insights about the Internet and show everyone how smart I was. That
didn't last long. I ended the very first issue like this:

[_] From time to time we offer to share our list of subscribers with
door-to-door aromatherapy salespersons and ritual ax-murderers. If you
would prefer that your data not be used in this way, please check the
box. Whoa! What a response that brought! Everyone was laughing. People
subscribed in droves. I was ecstatic. I wondered whether IBM would have
given me permission to publish such material. Probably not .. on the
off-chance of offending the aromatherapy and ritual ax-murderer market
segments.

I started wondering what other sorts of noncorporate things I could
write. What if I broke all the rules? You know, the unwritten rules
everyone learns by telepathy at birth: be pleasant, be brief, don't
speak down to your reader, don't use big words, don't use obscenity,
don't make yourself the center of attention. First and foremost, do that
all-important market research. Find out what your audience wants to hear
about. Ask their permission.

Wait a second...hadn't I been through all this? I had, and I'd had
enough. I decided to go against the grain with a vengeance. I told
readers they were clueless hosers. I interviewed an imaginary horse .. at
exhausting length. I used vocabulary so obscure that people needed
unabridged dictionaries to figure out what I was saying. I developed an
alter-ego named RageBoy®, a