Any wimp can Web surf.
But it takes someone who measures their stream of consciousness in megabytes to handle the repartee of alt.personals.spanking.the.monkey on Usenet. We wonder why people engaged in this sort of behavior would need their own personals group, but perhaps that's a question better left to Ask Isadora. Today it's ballooned to more than 15,000 sites and is for those who prefer their news unfiltered by the liberal-biased media or Nazi talk show hosts, or who are just alien abductees who want to know whether others wake up in the middle of the night covered with slime and an extraterrestrial's phone number in their pajama pocket. Usenet is simply the most anarchic, colorful and unruly manifestation of the Internet, and it astonishes us that many folks we run into who have made their way online in the past couple of years don't venture there. The World Wide Web may be the future of the 'Net, but the Usenet community remains its soul, wacked-out as it is.