I came home tonight to find my
little brother in tears. Hanging out at
the Cafe with
Jen and
Glen, buzz on home with
Kate Bush on the tape deck, windows down, turn off the headlights when I enter the top of the drive, it's a good evening. And my little brother, who earlier today insulted me in every way possible before
striking me, comes to the door as I let myself in at
curfew. Face red, eyes puffy and swollen, hands clasped in front of himself, begging me to help him.
Oliver Twist has nothing on
this kid.
Seems that little bro had been doing what
every red-blooded American boy does at one point or another. Using the glorious, wondrous
Information Superhighway to get himself some
porn. Somewhere between
Naughty Russian Cossacks ("
Wet Red Commies!") and
Net Lolitas ("
I'm Only Twelve But My Father Fucked Me Today!"), he'd accidentally set a porn index as the
home page for the computer. The same computer my
stepfather uses to check his
stock quotes along with his morning coffee. The same computer my mother uses to write her daily emails to her sister in
Florida. The same home page that pops up every time you hit that
Internet Explorer button on the desktop. With Kiddies 4-16 being spread across the monitor every time he logged on, what's a
boarding school brat to do?
Go to his
heroic older sister, of course.
Actually, he's not nearly as
thick as thought. He tried to fix, frantically I imagine, for a good long time before I stumbled in the door. He's just lucky
they couldn't convince me to go dancing. Because the
Tools menu-Internet
O was bloody useless. "You can change what page you want to use as your homepage." it promises.
Well, let me tell you something. IT LIES! 5 times I set the homepage back to
www.newyorktimes.com. 5 times! And I would clean out the
cookies and the history, and
fuck, even
blocked the sites that were popping up in place of the usual
Republican scum homepage. And I'm a
Blue Ribboner. Oh, it would work for a moment, taunting me, teasing me, leading me on! But upon hitting restart and waiting for
Windows to reappear, what do I see? Once again; "Hottest 4-16s on the Net!". Hmm, I think, maybe I can find someone on
Everything to help me.
Word Galaxy,
no love.
You know
those times when you would gladly take a sledgehammer to your beloved Pointdexter?
I eventually wound up just creating a shortcut on the desktop from
the New York Times, and changing the icon and the text to what it looked like before. It's
slapdash as all hell of course, and it'll fall apart as soon as anyone starts fucking with the desktop, but in this household, no one does that but me. And hopefully, on the eventual occasion
Pointdexter decides to follow
The Laws of Thermodynamics, particularly the one that specifies that he will fall to entropy, I will be far enough away so as not be blamed.
Of course, somewhere between the 3rd reboot and the 5th, I thought "Hey. I could node this!"
toastido, bless him, made a special trip over to the Bitcave just so he could physically plant himself in front of Pointdexter and find out what was wrong. He is to be worshipped as a god. Unfortunately, I really have no idea what it was he did, so he will have to add his own wu to explain.