Tom Heneghan and Stewart Webb

Comment and Opinion

Tom Heneghan and Stewart Webb
(In 2020, Stewart decided to block me from looking at his site, but the Internet Archive isn't blocked.)

This site won an Encouragement Award in the 2020 Millenium Awards. The citation read:

Anyone who feels the need to block my IP address from looking at their site (even if it took 14 years for them to notice) needs all the encouragement they can get. Paranoia like that doesn't come along every day and should be reinforced at every opportunity. Also, who wouldn't want to encourage someone who still uses blinking text from prehistoric times?

Some light relief (3/12/2005)
One Who is this man? day I will get back to updating Quintessence of the Loon. One of the reasons I hibernated it was that it was becoming increasingly difficult to find new forms of weirdness and I didn't want to keep repeating myself. There is a limit to how often you can laugh at conspiracy nuts, UFO fanatics and other oddballs and after a while they all seem to look the same. This week, however, I came across a site which would qualify as Loon of Any Month You Could Name. It is a site belonging to US presidential aspirants Tom Heneghan and Stewart Webb, and it takes loonity to new heights. It is written in the style expounded in Hate Mail for Dummies™, complete with bizarre capitalisation, punctuation and spelling to reinforce the incoherent ramblings. It is wonderful, and I think that everyone would agree that having Tom and Stew in the White House would lift the national spirit. Now that Frasier and Everybody Loves Raymond have finished the NBC News would be a lay down misère for the Best Comedy Emmy just for showing the occasional White House press conference.

To give you some idea of the flavour of the site, here is a quote from the front page:

Hillary Lesbian Rodenhurst Clinton has Incurable Herpies. Rumor has it Lesbian Rodenhurst was caught in bathroom stall with Carolina Panther cheerleaders. George W. Bush has Lethal Gonorrhea contracted from Jeff Gannon. Both Clinton & Bush considered major Biological Health Terrorists. Rumor has it Matt Dreck aka Matt Drudge operates as their pimp.

And here is something from deep inside:

Breaking News August 4, 2005 THE WHITE HOUSE IS FALLING APART: US Intel Sources are reporting today that The White House Occu-punk George W. Bush is secretly asking for Political Asylum with Australia Officials. This is the Country full of Nazi's from Adolph Hitler's Regime. Remember Prescott Bush George W. Bush's grandfather was charged with Trading with the Enemy Act by US Officials during WW11 after financing Adolph Hitler during World War 11. George W. Bush one would say thinks he will feel comfortable this his brother Nazi's. The American Revolution Continues.

Australia is full of Nazi's (sic)? Stew is understandably cautious, almost to the point of paranoia, and he has his web site protected by some software which prevents viewing the page source and which disables the Windows Copy/Paste functionality. Luckily, I am an experienced computer hacker with access to very sharp tools, and I was able to defeat Stew's security measures. At the risk of being seditious (which will be a crime in Australia by the end of the week) I am going to let you into the secret. You need two software tools to hack into the text of Stew's secret page. The first one extracts the page source from Stew's Secure and Secret Server, and the second program allows you to analyse the data. I found three programs on my computer to do the first step. They are called Internet Explorer, Netscape and Firefox. The second step is much trickier and requires the use of an undocumented feature of Windows named "Notepad". (I have heard that a similar exploit exists for Linux, but I can't check right now because it is Sunday and the above-top-secret computer laboratory in the nuclear-attack-hardened bunker at Northmead Technology Park is locked up tight. I could ask the people at Ratbag Graphics about whether it can be done on a Mac but they are all plugged into their iPods and dancing around like a mob of demented zombies.)

See Tom and Stew's site here. Laugh at them, not with them.

I'm blocked. Boo hoo! (15/2/2020)
I did my monthly link check only to find on the day after Valentine's Day that someone doesn't love me any more.

It's only taken a little over 14 years for Mr Webb to notice that I had something to say about his marvellous web site (or should that be webb site?), but my apple-cheeked old grandmother always said that patience is a virtue.

The site in question would have to be one of the most unhinged, batshit crazy things I have seen in my long association with the Internet. It even has blinking text, just like the old Geocities days of yore. You can go here to see what it looked like in all its magnificence, but keep your Ventolin inhaler handy in case the laughter triggers an asthma attack. If I hadn't been immunised against craziness by decades of doing sites like this I might have been forced to dial 000* and gasp the words "ambulance" and "anaphylaxis".

And yes, it really was my IP address.

*Footnote: Some moron once tried to insult me by saying "You're so stupid you wouldn't know how to spell 911". I politely replied that it's spelled "000" around my place.