Mr. Cerf and Coming of Age in the Digital Era

I introduced my brother to The Internets today, at least one part of Them: instant messaging. I'm finally setting up an AIM account for him so he can chat with his friends. He doesn't have that many friends at school, but I hope he'll find more on the internet. (He's not popular at school because all the other kids are Hell Munchkins.) He's resisted this for a long time, but now he's ready to enjoy the true bounty of the world wide web. He asked me to think up an SN that was wierd and cool. I said PizzaYak. He said Can'tYodel. I said YodelYak. Then I said MamaSaidYodel. This was mahvelous, so we stuck with it. If anybody wants to meet my little brother, who's almost as cool as me, shoot him an IM at MamaSaidYodel on AIM.

Speaking of The Internets, I met Their creators. *God who does not exist, was it cool!* We crossed paths at an award dinner for presidential science and technology laureates. I think our meeting was preordained by some higher power, like google.com or the devil. I looked up at the guy-there were two-who invented TCP/IP, and I'm like "I love the Internet!" right in his face like I was talking about some new kind of ostrichburger or something. The dude's like "Me too!" We really hit it off. The funny thing is, his name was Cerf. I said "That's an appropriate name! Hahaha!" No one else at my table thought of that stupid two-bit pun. (As in, I'm CERFing the Internet.) So then we walked over and started talking about TCP/IP, and I'm like "I thought Al Gore invented the internet." We laughed. For all of you who don't know me, I'm not that stupid, ergo that was a joke. So anyway, I was totally in awe of these two guys. It was awsome. Think about how much of our lives you and I owe to them. Without the internet, I wouldn't have any way to comfortably talk to girls! Another f*cking lame pun.

Anyway, I guess you can see that now the internet is such a seminal part of American life that coming of age requires getting a screen name. That's deep, huh? Deep and shocking.