First off, this isn’t really a rant. I am tired of hearing about Trump getting arrested, and I feel compelled to change the subject to something else. Nothing about what I’ll say here makes me grind my gears. It’s about something completely trivial, but highly entertaining, at least to me.
This is much more recent than any faded memory from my childhood or teen-age years. I want to recall how much fun the internet was during its early years. I’m not referring to the earliest years of the internet, but the time when it was new to me. I had an internet connection at home, as early as the late 1990s (1997?), but it was quite slow, as my computer itself was slow, and I used a dial-up phone line connection. As a result, I used the internet only when I had to.
By 1999 or 2000 I had a high speed internet connection at work, along with a job that required I learn to use its search abilities. I’ve always found I learned computer applications much better if I had to actually perform a real task with it. But I, and others, at work also used it for entertainment too. As the internet was largely new to me, this turned out to be a whole lot of fun.
The internet was great to learn about things from our past that we never really knew much about. If you had vague memories of a movie you saw in the distant past, but could remember very little about it now, the internet made it easy to look up and find definitive answers. I came of age during the 1960s when popular music groups exploded from Great Britain and the US. Most of us only learned of them by listening to the radio. Real information was scarce. Rumors, most of them false, spread rapidly. Apparently there were fan magazines, but I never read them. The internet allowed sorting out that kind info once and for all. I won’t bother with examples of this, but I’m pretty sure many of us can.
I particularly enjoyed stumbling over websites that were simply goofy. One of the first gems I remember was a website called the Database of Misheard Lyrics (or something like that). There were many pop music songs we heard over the radio, where the lyrics weren’t very easy to hear. This web page offered a long and growing list of songs that people often heard or remembered in garbled form. A common example was Credence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising”. Instead of “there’s a bad moon on the rise”, many people swore they heard “there’s a bathroom on the right”.
Showing the correct lyrics was only the beginning. It went on to show people’s accounts of how they first learned they had the lyrics wrong. It usually involved innocently singing the wrong words out loud, among friends. It was hilarious to read those accounts. There are now versions of that old site that are better organized, but they’ve lost the sense of fun when it came to the first time someone learned how silly they sounded.
I looked for this website – it’s still around,
https://www.kissthisguy.com/ . It might still be funny to others, but it’s lost the appeal it once had for me. Like many jokes, they’re never as funny as when you first heard them. I also admit that I’m not at all interested in misheard lyrics from Taylor Swift songs. All the advertisements on that site don’t help. But if you’ve never seen it, it’s worth a look. A decent example: Robert Palmer’s song Addicted to Love, where the words “Might as well face it, you’re addicted to love” were misheard as “Might as well face it, you’re a d!ck with a glove”. Someone posted “I thought it was a song about Michael Jackson, so I asked a friend if he had heard this song. He had me recite the lyrics. He laughed at me for days”.
Does anyone remember the website about Ninjas and Pirates? The website I remember presented itself as being written by an immature 10 or 11 year old boy who obsessed endlessly over whether Ninjas could beat up Pirates in an all-out fight. He favored Ninjas because they he felt they were just cooler. I’m doing a poor job at conveying how funny it was, I guess you had to read it. And, you had to read it back when it was a fresh idea. Since then, the Ninjas vs. Pirates theme has been beaten into the ground, over and over. It quickly stopped being funny. I looked for it as I wrote this, but couldn’t find it.
(continued …)
