(Monty walks into the bathroom. He looks in the mirror.
In the bottom corner, someone's written 'Fuck You!')
Monty: Yeah, fuck you, too.
Monty's Reflection: Fuck me? Fuck you! Fuck you and this whole city and everyone in it. Fuck the panhandlers, grubbing for money, and smiling at me behind my back. Fuck squeegee men dirtying up the clean windshield of my car. Get a fucking job! Fuck the Sikhs and the Pakistanis bombing down the avenues in decrepit cabs, curry steaming out their pores and stinking up my day. Terrorists in fucking training. Slow the fuck down!
Fuck the Chelsea boys with their waxed chests and pumped up biceps. Going down on each other in my parks and on my piers, jingling their dicks on my Channel 35. Fuck the Korean grocers with their pyramids of overpriced fruit and their tulips and roses wrapped in plastic. Ten years in the country, still no speaky English? Fuck the Russians in Brighton Beach. Mobster thugs sitting in cafés, sipping tea in little glasses, sugar cubes between their teeth. Wheelin' and dealin' and schemin'. Go back where you fucking came from!
Fuck the black-hatted Chassidim, strolling up and down 47th street in their dirty gabardine with their dandruff. Selling South African apartheid diamonds! Fuck the Wall Street brokers. Self-styled masters of the universe. Michael Douglas, Gordon Gecko wannabe mother fuckers, figuring out new ways to rob hard working people blind. Send those Enron assholes to jail for fucking life! You think Bush and Cheney didn't know about that shit? Give me a fucking break! Tyco! Imclone! Adelphia! Worldcom!
Fuck the Puerto Ricans. 20 to a car, swelling up the welfare rolls, worst fuckin' parade in the city. And don't even get me started on the Dom-in-i-cans, because they make the Puerto Ricans look good. Fuck the Bensonhurst Italians with their pomaded hair, their nylon warm-up suits, and their St. Anthony medallions. Swinging their, Jason Giambi, Louisville slugger, baseball bats, trying to audition for the Sopranos. Fuck the Upper East Side wives with their Hermés scarves and their fifty-dollar Balducci artichokes. Overfed faces getting pulled and lifted and stretched, all taut and shiny. You're not fooling anybody, sweetheart!
Fuck the uptown brothers. They never pass the ball, they don't want to play defense, they take fives steps on every lay-up to the hoop. And then they want to turn around and blame everything on the white man. Slavery ended one hundred and thirty seven years ago. Move the fuck on! Fuck the corrupt cops with their anus violating plungers and their 41 shots, standing behind a blue wall of silence. You betray our trust! Fuck the priests who put their hands down some innocent child's pants. Fuck the church that protects them, delivering us into evil. And while you're at it, fuck JC! He got off easy! A day on the cross, a weekend in hell, and all the hallelujahs of the legioned angels for eternity! Try seven years in fuckin Otisville, Jay!
Fuck Osama Bin Laden, Alqueda, and backward-ass, cave-dwelling, fundamentalist assholes everywhere. On the names of innocent thousands murdered, I pray you spend the rest of eternity with your seventy-two whores roasting in a jet-fueled fire in hell. You towel headed camel jockeys can kiss my royal, Irish ass!
Fuck Jacob Elinski, whining malcontent. Fuck Francis Xavier Slaughtery, my best friend, judging me while he stares at my girlfriend's ass. Fuck Naturel Rivera. I gave her my trust and she stabbed me in the back. Sold me up the river. Fucking bitch. Fuck my father with his endless grief, standing behind that bar. Sipping on club soda, selling whiskey to firemen and cheering the Bronx Bombers.
Fuck this whole city and everyone in it. From the row houses of Astoria to the penthouses on Park Avenue. From the projects in the Bronx to the lofts in Soho. From the tenements in Alphabet City to the brownstones in Park slope to the split levels in Staten Island. Let an earthquake crumble it. Let the fires rage. Let it burn to fuckin ash then let the waters rise and submerge this whole, rat-infested place.
Monty: No. No, fuck you, Montgomery Brogan. You had it all and then you threw it away, you dumb fuck!
(He takes a breath and tries to rub away the words.)
-- Monty, 25th Hour
6.4.05
I'm not a poet, and I do know it
As of late I've just not been in the right kind of mood for any kind of literary output, so I've decided I'll start throwing up some random monologues I've liked for a while. God knows what'll come next....
28.3.05
The Story of a True Capitalist
I came across this story as I was scanning the news after my spring break, and I could not resist imparting this little gem. On a different note, I'm starting to feel like my cute little Aunt who e-mails everybody all those chain letters or vaguely amusing websites with reckless abandon... maybe I am my aunt, isn't that a scary thought.
14.3.05
But where's the edge?
I'm not sure how many people are aware of the various internet trends that pulse through the system from time to time like a general and omnipresent malaise. While most people seem content to live meaningful lives that don't involve netcode and the semantic differences between a white hat cracker and a black hat hacker, there is also a whole other online world which can appear just as vibrantly alive despite its one's and zero's.
Today I bring you a bit of a story from the other side... (cue crazy temporal vortex effect sound bite)
Ever since the adoption of the internet, there have been those who wanted to use its broad demographic reach commercially. It began with random American online pornographers seeking to generate advertising revenue through dozens of click-throughs and grainy twenty second videos, but with the advent of automated HTML programming and cheap digital cameras more and more people tried to get into the (highly profitable) action. East Coast American women would grab a camera and put out a site earning money from American subscribers hungry to make a personal and sexual (and most importantly anonymous and safe) connection with another, while European pornographers would take advantage of the economic and legal differences and compete with the established Silicon Valley brands in putting out (more or less) quality porn for profit.
Meanwhile, spammers were losing their profits as their sites became lost in a sea of metatext competition, so they developed trojans to take control of unsuspecting computers across the world (mostly academic and corporate machines who had large bandwidth and relatively little personal ownership) and use those computers to distribute large quantities of spam advertising their porn sites to the ever growing amount of e-mail accounts. This in turn generated other profits, as spammers sold lists of valid e-mails (which were found using zombies searching webpages and Usenet), collections of compromised computers (or zombies; collectively known as botnets), and superior hacking programs, as well as creating off-shore ISP's in West Africa and Indochina that could host a plethora of spurious originating spam accounts without fear of legal ramification.
As the industry grew, it turned from just advertising for porn and invested in other popular areas of business - like medicine (viagra), debt counselling, credit cards, and other areas that can generate easy cash. This attracted more concerted organizations to get in on the money, and East European and Asian crime syndicates began using technology and spoofing to generate easy cash to support their activities, often hiring freelance Western hackers to develop software and run the operations. This led, among other things, to blatant identity theft from unsecured web-pages and stores of personal information held by corporate, government, and academic entities (often involved with insurance and payments), as well as the infamous Nigerian 419 scams that signified the '90's and sometimes ended in outright hostage taking and ransom.
Spam blossomed, and users turned to each other and their ISP's to produce anti-spam software that would limit the excess. This software would reject certain geographical IP strings, as well as certain commonly spammed words like "mortgage" in the subject, and was eventually incorporated into most mainstream e-mail services. Also, the commonly used HTML trick known as the "pop-up" that also generated so much click-through advertising money was being stopped by new and innovative software that was developed by the community to combat the increase in irritating webpages, and was incorporated into most browsers. Facing a loss of profitability in their activities, spammers turned to other programs that would search the internet for unsuspecting people that could afford to lose a bit of cash.
One such program is google. The advent of google and its immense (and for the most part vastly under-utilised) power led to a general public acceptance of the service. Millions of people used the program everyday, and "googling it" entered the public vocabulary, topping lists by various media sources as the top new vocabulary of the year after it was introduced. Suddenly achieving top ranking was not merely a matter of including as much meta-text as possible in your site, but in getting yourself linked to and talked about. The bubble has popped, but creativity still abounds: dozens of ideas surface for how to do this. Virus marketing occurs, catch-phrasing, site-chains, what amounts to search engine bribery, all sorts of things. However, much of this occured below the public's eye, away from its notice. Their only interaction was that first page of Google results (quickly licensed to most other search engines, ever used Yahoo? not lately).
With the introduction of blogging, this changed. Services like Livejournal and Blogger hosted personal sites for budding teens to explore their inner angst in front of millions of anonymous strangers (and if voyeurism becomes a more common activity in a few years, don't be surprised). After a few months of happy posturing, black hats began to take notice. Each site represented a tiny, mostly unregulated, percentage of google's page rank system. Combined with an anonymous commenting system common to most blogging services, and often HTML support, these unsuspecting teens became the target of a concentrated exploitation scheme. Scammers would go through these quiet websites one by one adding their advertising to be displayed below the latest terrible news from Pleasantville, and this would be found by the spidery Google bots that go to all sites on the internet finding links and catalogueing the results. And they would add up.
Suddenly strange sites were being found by Google. After some serious consideration this activity was found to be the cause (or at least one of them). Some automated software was developed, but it was not very effective. After a year, the international commission responsable for managing the internet created a new HTML tag called 'rel="nofollow"' that would tell the bots to not count the contents for ranking, and most blogger services have placed those tags around any publicly accessible sections. However, the effect of this new tag is yet to be seen. A little while ago, some bloggers decided to fight back. They have started an anti-gambling spam campaign that is working to ruin the efforts of gambling sites to promote their websites at the expense of the spammers. By voluntarily placing the link online poker on their webpage, the Google bots would associate the wikipedia page with the term "Online poker" and send aspiring poker players there, easily ruining the efforts of the gambling sites. The efforts have already been felt, the page is already ranked third in Google's list of terms regarding "online poker". Obviously, remarks to this somewhat controversial response have been mixed. Clearly, this story still has a few more chapters before it is finished, but it is safe to say that the effect the blogging community has had against the bloggers has been chilling. In an environment where the vast majority of web-surfers will only check the first few results of a query, driving sites from those all-important positions could serve as a powerful problem for the profit hungry spammers. Or it could be totally ignored. And it is all up to you, the consumer...
Come back next time for another exciting story from the online campfire - where spooky nerdiness comes to life (cue temporal vortex but this time mixed with a series theme with a nice C major chord at the end)
Today I bring you a bit of a story from the other side... (cue crazy temporal vortex effect sound bite)
Ever since the adoption of the internet, there have been those who wanted to use its broad demographic reach commercially. It began with random American online pornographers seeking to generate advertising revenue through dozens of click-throughs and grainy twenty second videos, but with the advent of automated HTML programming and cheap digital cameras more and more people tried to get into the (highly profitable) action. East Coast American women would grab a camera and put out a site earning money from American subscribers hungry to make a personal and sexual (and most importantly anonymous and safe) connection with another, while European pornographers would take advantage of the economic and legal differences and compete with the established Silicon Valley brands in putting out (more or less) quality porn for profit.
Meanwhile, spammers were losing their profits as their sites became lost in a sea of metatext competition, so they developed trojans to take control of unsuspecting computers across the world (mostly academic and corporate machines who had large bandwidth and relatively little personal ownership) and use those computers to distribute large quantities of spam advertising their porn sites to the ever growing amount of e-mail accounts. This in turn generated other profits, as spammers sold lists of valid e-mails (which were found using zombies searching webpages and Usenet), collections of compromised computers (or zombies; collectively known as botnets), and superior hacking programs, as well as creating off-shore ISP's in West Africa and Indochina that could host a plethora of spurious originating spam accounts without fear of legal ramification.
As the industry grew, it turned from just advertising for porn and invested in other popular areas of business - like medicine (viagra), debt counselling, credit cards, and other areas that can generate easy cash. This attracted more concerted organizations to get in on the money, and East European and Asian crime syndicates began using technology and spoofing to generate easy cash to support their activities, often hiring freelance Western hackers to develop software and run the operations. This led, among other things, to blatant identity theft from unsecured web-pages and stores of personal information held by corporate, government, and academic entities (often involved with insurance and payments), as well as the infamous Nigerian 419 scams that signified the '90's and sometimes ended in outright hostage taking and ransom.
Spam blossomed, and users turned to each other and their ISP's to produce anti-spam software that would limit the excess. This software would reject certain geographical IP strings, as well as certain commonly spammed words like "mortgage" in the subject, and was eventually incorporated into most mainstream e-mail services. Also, the commonly used HTML trick known as the "pop-up" that also generated so much click-through advertising money was being stopped by new and innovative software that was developed by the community to combat the increase in irritating webpages, and was incorporated into most browsers. Facing a loss of profitability in their activities, spammers turned to other programs that would search the internet for unsuspecting people that could afford to lose a bit of cash.
One such program is google. The advent of google and its immense (and for the most part vastly under-utilised) power led to a general public acceptance of the service. Millions of people used the program everyday, and "googling it" entered the public vocabulary, topping lists by various media sources as the top new vocabulary of the year after it was introduced. Suddenly achieving top ranking was not merely a matter of including as much meta-text as possible in your site, but in getting yourself linked to and talked about. The bubble has popped, but creativity still abounds: dozens of ideas surface for how to do this. Virus marketing occurs, catch-phrasing, site-chains, what amounts to search engine bribery, all sorts of things. However, much of this occured below the public's eye, away from its notice. Their only interaction was that first page of Google results (quickly licensed to most other search engines, ever used Yahoo? not lately).
With the introduction of blogging, this changed. Services like Livejournal and Blogger hosted personal sites for budding teens to explore their inner angst in front of millions of anonymous strangers (and if voyeurism becomes a more common activity in a few years, don't be surprised). After a few months of happy posturing, black hats began to take notice. Each site represented a tiny, mostly unregulated, percentage of google's page rank system. Combined with an anonymous commenting system common to most blogging services, and often HTML support, these unsuspecting teens became the target of a concentrated exploitation scheme. Scammers would go through these quiet websites one by one adding their advertising to be displayed below the latest terrible news from Pleasantville, and this would be found by the spidery Google bots that go to all sites on the internet finding links and catalogueing the results. And they would add up.
Suddenly strange sites were being found by Google. After some serious consideration this activity was found to be the cause (or at least one of them). Some automated software was developed, but it was not very effective. After a year, the international commission responsable for managing the internet created a new HTML tag called 'rel="nofollow"' that would tell the bots to not count the contents for ranking, and most blogger services have placed those tags around any publicly accessible sections. However, the effect of this new tag is yet to be seen. A little while ago, some bloggers decided to fight back. They have started an anti-gambling spam campaign that is working to ruin the efforts of gambling sites to promote their websites at the expense of the spammers. By voluntarily placing the link online poker on their webpage, the Google bots would associate the wikipedia page with the term "Online poker" and send aspiring poker players there, easily ruining the efforts of the gambling sites. The efforts have already been felt, the page is already ranked third in Google's list of terms regarding "online poker". Obviously, remarks to this somewhat controversial response have been mixed. Clearly, this story still has a few more chapters before it is finished, but it is safe to say that the effect the blogging community has had against the bloggers has been chilling. In an environment where the vast majority of web-surfers will only check the first few results of a query, driving sites from those all-important positions could serve as a powerful problem for the profit hungry spammers. Or it could be totally ignored. And it is all up to you, the consumer...
Come back next time for another exciting story from the online campfire - where spooky nerdiness comes to life (cue temporal vortex but this time mixed with a series theme with a nice C major chord at the end)
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