Higgledy-Piggledy |
James "Kibo" Parry was one of the first "net.celebrities", known for his machine-assisted ubiquity in UseNet and the surrealist manner in which he responded to virtually every message in which he found an instance of his nickname. His apparent omnipresence throughout the Net inspired the creation of the newsgroup alt.religion.kibology.
Beyond this, he's probably best known for his 1992 "HappyNet Proclamation", which amid a flurry of in-jokes and Dada commentary declared the imminent reorganization of UseNet into three new top-level domains -- nonbozo.*, bozo.*, and megabozo.*.
As of 2006 Kibo estimated that in the course of his life on the Net, he'd written and posted nearly eight million words of original content.
Some sample Kibo pronouncements:
- "Usenet is William Shatner and George Bush trading places after being hit by lightning."
- "Usenet asks no questions, but gets many answers; Usenet is the biggest pencil in the world. Usenet is a sword whose blade is in Schenectady and whose handle is everywhere."
- "Usenet is Frosty the Snowman comitting suicide with a flamethrower."
- "Usenet is sans-serif but oblique."
- "The net is like a vast sea of lutefisk with tiny dinosaur brains embedded in it here and there. Any given spoonful will likely have an IQ of 1, but occasional spoonfuls may have an IQ more than six times that!"
- "What would happen if you ran up to Hitler and mentioned Usenet?"
Not to be confused with Kiba, the Japanese science lab that is part of the International Space Station, or a slang term for "outhouse".