Beauty is Truth, and Truth Beauty

April 29th, 12:49 Pacific time
People Magazine is, as I type this, holding votes in their Most Beautiful People contests. The winner was to be put on the cover of their publication. Leonardo di Caprio is not topping the list. Hank the Angry, Drunken Dwarf is.

Hank is a write-in candidate that occupies not only the top spot, but spot 2 as "Drunk Dwarf" and "Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf" (no comma) is in spot 15. Note that I said "was to be put on the cover". People is now scrambling to say that they only meant it would go on their Internet ezine, not on the actual print publication.

It seems a fair bet that if Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny had won this sucker, we'd have eerie green lights and a slick cover for the People in Black. I'm not saying that Gillian and David aren't Beautiful -- I'd lift my skirts for either of them if they bought me dinner first.

Unless, of course, I got a better offer from Ken-darling. But I digress.

Since Hank is patently a shoo-in for Mr. Sex, People is not only insulting the net community by not slapping his photo from sea to shining sea, but they're passing up a great opportunity to show that they're not nearly as shallow and offensive as... as they most likely actually are. They could choose to be graceful instead of huffy that their silly contest was shown to be as silly as it is.

Who knows? Maybe Hank is actually a sex bomb waiting to happen. Maybe he will tip off a whole new trend where fat and bald is sexy. That'd be a boon to computer programmers everywhere, although I'm not convinced that the effect on the gene pool would be a positive one.

What I really want to know is what People expected. If they've read the surveys, they know that net denizens are largely overpaid, overeducated folks with a greater knowledge of Monty Python than of Sidney Sheldon, and whose idea of a good practical joke is the Internet Worm. Sure, I've been to the Revlon web site and filled out their survey to get a free summer lipstick in the mail. But there I was being bribed to take them seriously. I have no reason whatsoever to care what People wanted from me.

The net is a wonderfully anarchistic place. This column co-exists with dripping smut, with the Complete Works of Shakespeare , with pages on how women can learn to pee while standing, and big red buttons that kill people when punched. If People had any understanding of the real nature of the net, they never would have put any power into our hands.

This is a place where it's not only statistically likely that there's a FAQ on how to find a good whore in Nevada, but where said FAQ includes ratings of all the women that the FAQ maintainer has graced. How could they possibly expect us to take their Mr and Mrs Sex contest in the spirit they intended it? Hell, their interpretation of spirit makes Zima look like pure wood alcohol.

Sure, I laughed until I nearly coughed up vomit. This whole Hank situation is exactly what People deserves for thinking that the kind of bullshit tactics that they normally apply will work on the net. Maybe People will learn something from this: that no matter how hard they try to enforce their idea of a good time on us, there are a hundred thousand other options that we've considered and they haven't. They no longer control the media in a fashion even vaguely approaching what they used to, and they can't do anything about our detestable attitudes.

We have the right to do what we want, when we want, and for whatever stupid reason seems right at the time. We won't be giving that up. We don't want to, we don't have to, and they can't make us.

April 29th, 16:49 Pacific time
To my inexorable bafflement, I got fan mail on this story, as well as a hairy eyeball on what my sources were regarding my assertion that People Magazine intended to do a print cover and then backtracked.

(Where were you people before? If you like this column, write me, damnit, so that I know I'm not just spitting in the void. If you've already done so, your big wet kiss is in the mail.)

Last night I heard about Hank, and I thought it was tremendously funny. I'd previously heard the allegations that he was a well-intended practitioner of CPR who ended up drunk because his ministrations were mistaken for a sexual harrassment attempt. You'll notice that I didn't comment on that, not because it was unverifiable, but because it didn't seem relevant to the probability that People was, and is, trying to pull a fast one on us.

I did in fact have a source on my claim that People meant to do a cover with the winner of their baby doll contest. However, I consider that almost entirely irrelevant. What are the odds that they wouldn't have done a cover if Gillian and David had tied? How stupid would they have to be to not pump the fact that they'd managed to extract some sugary nonsense from the notoriously unpredictable and frequently irascible Internet?

I do, however, owe an apology to People for presuming that they were going to be entirely graceless. They're just being mostly graceless. They did in fact add Hank to the voting possibilities, in another color, down at the bottom, looking like it was smacked in by a secretary that thought HTML was a Prozac derivative.

Their voting system is also incapable of comparing "Hank the Angry, Drunken Dwarf" to "Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf" and admitting the two are the same. It has comparable trouble with "hank the angry drunken dwarf" being equivalent to "Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf".

I believe my point stands that People decided to do something without considering the nature of the net. I don't pretend to totally understand net dynamics myself, but the basic things that you have to consider are short attention spans and whimsical senses of humor. Yes, we would rather vote for a midget with armpit hair than some prettyboy movie star -- if we're provoked. It's the same spirit that makes us hate junk email and generally be perverse in other ways.

Hank now, as of about 17:20pm, occupies multiple slots on the top twenty, courtesy of People's inability to handle punctuation and caps variance. I genuinely think there's somebody over there right now screaming "What're we going to do for a cover?"

I hear you can get access to a lot of free clip-art on the web. They'll be fine.

(For more info about Hank, visit Auntie Dynamite Volume 10)