What is the Internet missing?

From many years of experience on this beautiful Internet of ours, I can assure you that the answer is "nothing." Near-perfect anonymity and near-universal accessibility have combined like the powers of a perverted two-man Planeteer team to create the wonderful patchwork quilt that has become a symbol of the information age at its best and worst. Anyone who wants a webpage can make one, and I'll gladly offer up this thrown-together blog as Exhibit One. The lack of publication standards or required capital or even initial public interest has created a wealth -- and diversity -- of information the likes of which humanity has never seen before. Instead of hanging around downtown wearing sandwich boards bearing dire warnings of impending doom, the paranoid-schizophrenic prophet of doom has moved his message into cyberspace, where it can be heeded by millions around the globe rather than ignored by unsympathetic passers-by who don't care enough to tell the difference between a sign asking for spare change (possibly for the purpose of getting loaded, maybe even with an amusing "fwd: Fw: Fwd: omg funny hobo!!!"-type footnote assuring the viewing public that at least he is not, in fact, bullshittin' them) and a sign with a message intended to prepare us for the coming reptilian invasion. Public craziness has moved into an entirely new arena, and I think the acceptance of it has gone up as well. People, by and large, are uncomfortable when they meet someone on the street who comes up to them and babbles about the coming apocalypse. Maybe it's something that's evolved over millions of years to prevent people with obvious mental health issues from breeding, or maybe it's just the result of cultural conditioning. Whatever the reason, that barrier is not an issue here. Rather than quickening our pace down the street in an attempt to effect an awkward escape, we can pause and read the ramblings about chemtrails and mind control, maybe even laugh to ourselves a bit.

Hell, there are rich crazy people too, or completely sane people who have somehow come to believe in ridiculous conspiracy theories. Stick all of these people into a faceless, anonymous medium like the Web, and the line between poor lunatic and rich eccentric becomes so blurred as to be nonexistent. Where does that leave us? Well, it leaves us right here, right now. If you read these websites, maybe you do it for the sake of fun and morbid curiosity. Maybe there's some lurking, primal suspicion that some of it just might be true. Or maybe you're a wholehearted believer and genuinely want to keep up to date on the progress of the fight against Reptilian Karl Rove and his army of shapeshifting androids. Me, I'm in the first camp. Why? I figure that, say what you will about the Internet and its wonderful applications for business, communications, and all that other good stuff, at its core it's really just another way to pass the time. We're all guilty of goofing off, using the Internet to look at comedy websites, when we should be working. The allure of the massive amount of untapped information at our fingertips is simply too strong to resist.

For me, websites like the ones I've been talking about -- the ones about conspiracy theories, Planet X, chemtrails, crystal healing, orgone energy, and so on -- are pure entertainment. When you put something up for the public to see, the public decides how to use it. Some use those pages to build their own cancer-curing black box machines. I use them to laugh. And really, isn't laughter the best medicine of all?

In this now hopelessly long-winded blog, I hope to share with the Internet-using public some of the best, most amusing, or otherwise most notable crazy-type websites I've encountered in my travels. And I'll try to keep the hypergraphia to a minimum in the future...