Satan's Sixes Sunday

In the early days of the Intertubes, before there were web forums for very specific interests, before spammers filled your inbox, there was Usenet. Usenet is a distributed, hierarchical, threaded discussion system.

One of the hierarchies that I followed was:

• rec.* – recreation and entertainment
• rec.humor – a free-for-all group to post jokes and funny stories
• rec.humor.funny – a moderated group where funny (as defined by the moderator) posts (usually originally from rec.humor) are posted. This group saved you from having to hack through the non-funny stuff in rec.humor.
• rec.humor.funny.reruns – a moderated group where a daily post was made from items in the rec.humor.funny archive.

In the early days any post that had even the faintest trace of commercialism would be flamed and repeated posters of these commercial posts were banned. Spam was born. The anti-Spam forces lost the war in groups such as rec.humor. It was impossible to find humor among all the get-rich-quick messages so I just quit reading that group.

I depended on the moderated groups for my humor.

One day this message showed up in rec.humor.funny.reruns:

(Here's a link to the post in the repository of rec.humor.funny.)

One of the numbers of the beast, "Route 666 - Highway of the Beast," has been discussed before.

I thought I had an illustration for "668 - Next-door neighbor of the Beast." Ronald Reagan, well, Nancy, didn't want to be the Beast, they wanted just to be the next-door neighbors. So they changed the address of the house they bought after Reagan's terms were over. I thought I had a clipping of the story. Shoot!

Speaking of rec.humor, I posted some jokes there. On the morning of October 1, 1987, the Whittier Narrows earthquake struck the Los Angeles area. Before we knew how bad it was I posted something like the following:

Subject: Old joke, new application

Body: I've heard the earthquake in East LA did 50 million dollars of improvements.

(The old joke I heard involved some disaster in Española.)

A day later the slightly reworded joke was posted again on rec.humor with the subject "L. A. Earthquake." A few days later it made its appearance on rec.humor.funny with its new title (the link is to Google Groups' record of it on rec.humor.funny.reruns...I can't find it in the official archive). I made the big time but without attribution.