Remember when...?

Shortly after Fonzie went the way of the hula hoop (remember the hula hoop?), but well before the Red Hat IPO, remember... the "Webby Awards"? Of course you do. Suck.com used to make fun of them (remember Suck.com? Sigh...). They were lame, and irrelevant even by the shatteringly low standards of the late '90s, when people theoretically bright enough to feed themselves genuinely cared about theglobe.com.

Still, a few clueless baby boomers at rags like Newsweek (mis-)took them seriously for a little while, the same way the previous generation at Newsweek used to interview nehru-jacketed squares like Tom Wolfe to find out what the hippies were up to. Trying to get in touch with the kids, you know. Take the pulse and all that. "It's something with computers now, Bernie, who'd'a thunk it? You ever seen one o' them? Yeah, me neither..." But an awards show, that was safe and familiar. The oldsters could "relate", as they used to say back when Donovan strove with diplodocus in the primeval swamps. These were the same oldsters who used to write articles about dot-coms without mentioning the URL. They didn't know what URLs were; they "researched" those pieces over the phone.

Well, the Webby Awards still exist, by golly. Some poor dumb bright-eyed bastard is still trying to push that ghastly atavistic endeavor uphill, and still getting nowhere. Awards shows are so... old media, ahhhn't they? Squaresville, baby. A stone drag.

They at least got Vint Cerf to show up this year, and that's cool. Cerf's not small potatoes, but he was the only real "somebody" they could get their hands on. The rest of the guests were B-list nonentities, desperate to get their pictures taken, even by C-list nonentities like the Webby people. Al Gore, for example. I guess Leif Garrett was busy that week. Or is he dead?

Puppet Show

and

Former Vice President

You know how the Romans used to say "23 Skiddoo", right?