WEEKLY WHINE

Welcome back

If you noticed anything strange in the world in the last week or so, perhaps it’s because GoobNet wasn’t around to help you get through the madness of day to day life with our snarky remarks and insight-free way of examining our modern society.

So what have our GoobNet team members been doing whilst you couldn’t read us? Let’s have a look.

REGINALD J GOOBER

Founder and CEO, GoobNet Enterprises Inc [which doesn’t actually exist however]

Hi. I know we weren’t available for a while, and I apologise for that. But now we’re back, and slightly worse than ever. You’ll notice that our current host doesn’t even support PHP 5.1 and its enhanced timezone features. Come on, people.

Anyway, we hope you’ll agree that we’re going to be making some changes for the better. For example, one of these days we’re finally going to update GoobNet Football into the more efficient XHTML that we use here and on our other nodes. Who knows – we may even add tournaments other than the Men’s and Women’s World Cups.

As for what I’ve been doing this last week, I gave a large donation to a local scholarship fund, I participated in a major environmental activity, and I ordered one of those “How to become an artist” correspondence school courses.

DEB HARRATSCH

Editor, porthole.goobnet.net

I’ve been conversing with Amber Lynn Velt, whom I met last month on a cross country road trip that turned out to be far more trouble than it was worth. Nonetheless, Amber Lynn is very interesting and wants to become a GoobNet contributor. Reg wants to wait until she’s eighteen, which is still a couple of months away.

Elsewhere, I attended a rodeo for the first time and watched an entire NASCAR race for the first time. I also read Philip K Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. Not bad.

EDVARD VAN DE KAMP

Former dynamite eater; host, Adventures of the Schmilblick Patrol

This weekend’s Schmilblick Patrol featured Tim Hardaway and an interesting Schmilblick about why he said all those nasty things about the homosexual community. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but I will say that it’s probably not what you’re thinking.

Earlier this week, a class of schoolchildren visited the museum in Utrecht. One of them seemed to know a hell of a lot about dinosaurs. I told her to apply for a position, but I think she took me a little too seriously. She was pestering my boss the rest of the day for an application.

Their teacher was hot. Not in a Monika Zsibrita “I can’t believe anybody actually looks like that” sort of way, but more of a Lauren Michelle Hill “You can move next door to me any time” sort of way. I don’t usually like girls with hair that short, but I’d make an exception in her case. As they say here in the US, “Rules were made to be broken.” Or, as we say in the Netherlands, “Rules were made? When?”

DEBBIE MYERS

Host, Interaction

I couldn’t stand this week’s Interaction. It was on the popularity of “celebrity participatory programmes”, as we called them. That means any show with celebrities doing something they don’t normally do, like Celebrity Big Brother, Dancing with the Stars, Armed and Famous, and the like.

Nonetheless, I did find it comical that a lawsuit originated from Armed and Famous, when La Toya Jackson and Jack Osbourne stormed the wrong apartment. And this is probably Muncie, IN, USA’s most famous moment since The Hudsucker Proxy, or perhaps those characters from The Simpsons who went to Ball State.

One other noteworthy activity in which I participated this week was at a major media studies institute at a US university. I spoke to the students, and then some of them put on their own news programmes. I witnessed a couple of adaptations of The Daily Show, and I must alert Jon Stewart that there is a young talent there who may be stealing his job before long. I saw a programme similar to Interaction, discussing major campus issues; those involved should pitch an American Interaction for US television.

NATHAN S BROWN

GoobNet managing editor

Dammitall! I missed that three way tie Jeopardy!!