A disaster which befalls the Internet from time to time is the expiration of Web sites tied not to any particular domain name, but to the sites’ owners.
I’m thinking here of generically-formed URLs, like:
Generally, when you get an email address from an ISP you also get some nominal amount of Web space, like 10MB or so, whose address is something like the above. Inevitably, some users make better use of this facility than others. And it’s those odd little back corners of the Web in jeopardy.
I recently came across such a site, called The Kooks Museum. This is a site built by one Donna Kossy, in support of her 1994 book Kooks: A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief. What does she mean by “kooks”? As she happily quotes from the introduction to the book:
What distinguishes “kook” from other dismissive and stigmatizing terms? The various words denoting insanity — “crazy,” “psychotic,” “schizophrenic,” etc. — are not, for my purposes, interchangeable with “kook.” An obsessed murderer may be considered psychopathic or crazy, but more often than not these words categorize action, not belief. The obsessed serial killer is not necessarily a kook.
We must also distinguish kooks from quacks, frauds and hoaxers, for kooks are invariably sincere. Their main intent is not to deceive or defraud; to the contrary, they are trying to impart an essential truth. A kook’s thoughts rarely turn to profit; some squander personal fortunes to investigate or spread The Word. A New Age personality who channels a wise entity from the Pleiades is not a kook if his channeled voice is designed to attract funds.
Finally, it is important to differentiate a kook from an eccentric. An eccentric is defined as someone with an unorthodox lifestyle, which may or may not include unorthodox beliefs. Is a hermit a kook? Can we call a scatological fetishist a kook? Not necessarily, especially if they haven’t codified their own preferences as an eternal truth.
Is this not a useful set of definitions? Is The Kooks Museum not a site worthy of a more permanent home?
I say yes to both questions. (God forbid someone clicking on that hyperlink above should someday be greeted with a dread “404 – Not Found” page.)
In the meantime, here are some samples of the, um, authors and their works commemorated there.
“The smartest man ever to walk on the earth” (according to “psychologists”):
November 30, 1985
Dear Sir:
Show the enclosed paper to others, make copies if you like.
I am 51, a Paranoid Schizophrenic, High School Diploma, Pentecostal, 6’1″ tall, 225 pounds, black hair, green eyes, and get Social Security Disability.
I was born in Forsyth and still live with my parents. My brother Bob is a medical doctor.
I spent 3 years in the No. Dak. State Hospital and had 50 insulin coma shock treatments. I escaped once with a car and butcher knife and was nearly killed by the Police.
I have never stolen, raped, or killed. A psychiatrist, Dr. Martin Freese, said it was a miracle.
I have had sex with over 120 women, most of them prostitutes.
I am a very handsome and charming Virgo, same as Alexander the Great, Ivan the Terrible, John Wilkes Booth, Jesse James, Admiral Bligh, Emperor Augustus, Cesare Borgia, Cardinal Richelieu, Marquis de Lafayette, von Wallenstein, General John J. Pershing, Louis the 14th and Richard the Lionhearted.
In 1965, I received a batch of letters from Wyoming school children, saying that my Buffalo Bill song called Pahaska, was their favorite song and was sung in class every day.
According to neurologists, I have suffered far more than any human who ever lived, because when I was insane, I had skeining power. Skein is found in Goulds Medical Dictionary.
According to psychologists, I am the smartest man ever to walk on the earth.
I would like to personally impregnate hundreds of bright single women in order to produce a crop of great geniuses to improve the world.
Thank you for disseminating this information.
State of Time Station Earth, per the Armageddon Time Ark Base Operation:
After 6000 years under free moral agency, ending on September 3, 1966, occupants of The Positive Birthright Terrortory on Time Station Earth were found, by the OUTER DIMENSIONAL FORCES, to be abusing themselves by still existing in The Stone Age, thereby automatically being MEASURED as humatons.
These humatons did retain some knowledge of The Circle, shown by use of The Wheel, but have only been employing it in a negative manner by producing friction, and by gathering and distributing Dump Energy for the sole purpose of debt creation against the Bondslaves.
This ignorance, by self-restriction of Perfect Knowledge, has produced the end product of capitalization of costly, deadly, time-wasting experimental research, with its voluminization of material and noise pollution, man-made sickness, disease, and death.
Humatons did go so far as learning how to square the circle, mainly from the measurements of The Great Pyramid, but have restricted its benefits to the negative use of numbers to satisfy their perverse greed for the evil power of man’s inhumanity to man.
The OUTER DIMENSIONAL FORCES have returned to find that the occupants of The Birthright Territory have degraded their environment to a terrortory of evil. They have de-monadized the soil, water, air, and buffer zone.
Timrascope tests prove that Homo Sapiens is afflicted with that fatal Armageddon disease (AIDS II) and is now measured as an endangered species.
For 23 years the humatons of the U.S. have refused to activate the protocol for the tapping of the Universal Time Bank for unlimited energy.
Seal no. 6 is now in functional position for activation at 6:00 P.M. preceding S. Day for the rendering of Time Station Earth safe for future habitation.
When there is no vision, the humatons perish.
When the original is lost sight of, humatons come to worship a fancy of their own.
As they have discarded their ancient perfect factual knowledge, they have substituted and confined themselves in a juzgado of ultimate Babylonian mysteries religious philosophy, based upon the restricted limitations of belief and faith.
The jailers who force the humatons to sweat and exist in this stone age juzgado (the great American dream that has turned out to be a nightmare) are the She-Man Devils, who perverfractionated the perfect knowledge, the false prophets of the many of the End Time, who are preventing you from knowing by restricting you to belief and faith, and the Big Brother Police State to insure that you remain in the Dark Stone Age of The Wheel, with its friction, pollution, disease and death as a reward for being a good bondslave.
The slavemasters could not exist without the continued creation and voluminization of debt claims for expansion of the Gross National Product.
This method now has become largely The Capitalization of Calamity based upon inefficiency and poor-quality, short-life products. The achievers who built the nation — the efficiency experts — were necessarily mentally executed by the end of World War II.
If you do not understand this plain English which you are trying to read, it proves that your mind is constipated by the enforced limitations of religious unreality.
READ —- INDEX —- FIRST
SUPREMELY IMPORTANT
SECTION 1-10 PAGES
THE UNIVERSAL PANACEA
NEITHER IMITATES OR IGNORES: DISTINCTIVE
AND INCLUSIVE OF ALL OTHER BASIC WORKS:
THE OLD BUT NEW PAN-MAN-GOD-LAW-NOW.Strictly Scientific: Nothing Occult or Omitted: The Acme of Simplicity and Practicality: Essential Knowledge — In Nick of Time: Final and Ready.
— THE GOLDLESS RULE OF LIFE —
This book cannot be fully forecast: The shortest adequate index that can be compiled is the entire work: Like the Bible, it often repeats and extends salient points in varying forms. a complete reference–as with many concordances, would exceed the volume. ‘Tis THE UNIVERSAL PANACEA, or complete final constructive science of life. A line of Natural Principle potentially limitless: Void of opinion or missing link — Personal, Social, Economical and Governmental — Globe-wide and Cosmic. The Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but The Truth. The result of tireless unbiased reasoning from Cause and Effect of Right and Wrong. Its value cannot be estimated except in many fold extension of Human Pleasure and Life — which it insures. Veritably the climax of justice and uniform benefit — THE ONLY PRINCIPLE THAT CORRECTLY SOLVES EVERY PROBLEM.
WRONGS OF EXISTING METHODS FULLY EXPLAINED AND WHAT IS RIGHT CLEARLY PROCLAIMED. ‘TIS THE BOOK OF NATURE ABOUT LIFE AND DEATH EVER BALANCED TO DATE AT ANY TIME OR PLACE. EVER LAW ABIDING — THE TAP ROOT, AND CLEARLY INTELLECTUAL — THE RIPE FRUIT. IT DEMANDS ADMISSION TO EVERY BRAIN AND IS NEVER DENIED — DESPITE YEA OR NAY, PER INVIOLABLE LAW.
It breaks my heart to think that resources like this will almost certainly disappear someday.
P.S. As long as you’re strolling around the museum, take a few minutes to visit the annex, operated by Donna Kossy’s husband: the Kooks Museum Collection of Collections. Among other wonders here, you’ll find “our vast library of thousands of the DAMNEDEST THINGS EVER PUBLISHED!!!” — books such as Space Aliens Took Me to Their Planet (“Published 1978 by the Canadian Raelian Movement”) and Stand Up But Don’t Get Off. Don’t overlook the proprietor’s interest in Pillsbury Doughboy figurines, either.
Update 2009-02-18: The title of this post refers, of course, to the second example I provide above. But searching on the term “humatons” will garner many, many references from around the Web. Most of these lead you to the text of Matrix Warrior: Being the One (2003), a sort of companion book about 1999’s The Matrix written by one Jake Horsley. This book describes “humatons” as a synonym for “plugged-in humans.”
All that said, searching on the phrase “Armageddon Time Ark Base Operation” will lead you down a different rabbit hole altogether. Which came first, The Matrix or State of Time Station Earth? One senses a chicken-egg riddle.
marta says
Strange…I’m sure I left a comment here… Maybe it wasn’t kooky enough?
The definition of kook is spot on, I think. That anyone thought to put all the kooks together: priceless.
John says
marta: I saw that somebody had tried and failed to post a comment here — “incorrect recaptcha” or something like it. That must’ve been you.
Had about a half-day of paranoia about this post the other day until The Missus talked me down. For some bizarre reason, this post all by itself suddenly got a flurry of “hits” the day I posted it, with no indication how they’d arrived here; I convinced myself that I was now on some sort of watchlist shared among the forces of the Interwebs’ shadowy underbelly, and had probably been targeted for elimination to boot.
Now, having said that, if I suddenly drop off the radar screen, please feel free to alert the authorities.