So it turns out that I listen to crap music. Or, at least that is what I gather from my most recent interaction with a particularly charming Winmx user. Apparently the music I listen to is SO bad that this person felt the overwhelming need to instant message me "Yo, git out of here wid yo whack ass tunes." Interesting.

But in the past year, this kind of exchange has begun to occur with alarming frequency, specifically via the Internet. I don’t know how much I am dating myself here (the first-years probably don’t remember this), but I remember when the Internet was introduced. It was supposed to connect people around the world in ways we never could imagine before. Oooh… instant communication and a free flow of ideas across national borders!

Well, I don’t know about that. Whilst apparently everyone else has been chatting on-line meaningfully with the Dahli Lama, I met Scooby Jean. Oh, Scooby Jean. There was Romeo and Juliet, Cleopatra and Alexander and now, Scooby Jean and Me. In the golden age of Napster, a time of crazy free love and music, I met Scooby Jean. He was a French Canadian construction worker and he wanted to be my boyfriend. But alas! The ephemeral nature of love… my dearest Scooby Jean soon tired of our "chats" and after a few conversations, he didn’t want to be my boyfriend anymore. Between you and me, I think it stopped when I refused to send him photos of myself in my underwear. Oh Scooby, Scooby Jean, where are you? The Internet was never supposed to be used as a poor man’s love connection anyway - what a cheap use for this great intellectual tool that was supposed to unite people of all sorts of diverse backgrounds.

In the long run, everything was okay: I chalked my lost love up to experience and turned to more intellectual stimulation. And I met Father James Malone.

I was looking up a picture of an ass to leave on my roommate’s computer desktop, because I am a thoughtful friend. Anyway, during my image search for "ass" (which resulted in less interesting pictures than you would think), I saw a picture of a donkey held aloft by a cart. How could I not click on it? I don’t know what I was expecting, but I was not expecting the website of an Irish priest who is currently preaching the good word in Nova Scotia. I don’t really know where Nova Scotia even is.

As I toured his website, I found pictures of a road kill armadillo, his (purported) dog posing with movie star Kevin Spacey and himself at the Eiffel tower on New Years Day with a kilt and a beer in each hand. But (haha) if you hold the mouse over the picture… you’ll find that it’s not really him. It’s just his head on someone else’s body. Hmm… I wonder. Oh! And under his list of likes: good whiskey. Those crazy Catholics.

Okay, so how could I not e-mail him? Here I was on the verge of an ideological discussion the likes of which would make the creators of the Internet positively wet themselves with the prospect of their own expectations becoming fulfilled. We started out slowly discussing our favorite whiskey. Did you know that Granddaddy whiskey has the highest alcohol content of all whiskeys? Now you do, thanks to Father James Malone.

Eventually we began to discuss our perspectives on faith and God and Jesus Christ. It was a beautiful thing, until he called my ideas "dinosaur shit: old and stinky." And on that note I ended my excursions into the intellectual and social Mecca of the Internet. Nowadays I’m just happy if I don’t get an IM from someone named "hunglikeahorse69".