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.
