Regis Philbin Teaches Computers In His New Book.
"So the first time I got on the computer, my niece was showing me how to set up an e-mail, back in the 90s, this must have been 1996, 1997. And I thought, great, saves me a stamp. But she said, Uncle Regis, it's so much more than just e-mail. You can look up stock quotes. You can order flowers. You can research the rainforest. So I thought, heck, that's not bad. And I can do all this, through my phone line? She said, just you wait. One day, you won’t even need a phone. She’s always been so sharp, my niece.”
"I remember when I discovered chat rooms. I went in one under my screen name, BIG_PHRANCIS_X, totally pseudonymous, and I thought, wow, this is true freedom. The World Wide Web, at my fingertips, and no expectations, no one knows its me. I can surf anywhere. I can say anything. I had a great discussion with some folks that first time, talking about video games, which was better, the Sega or the Nintendo. I didn’t have an opinion. No idea! Then a man sent me some sexual chats, talking about his power tools and so on, and so I skedaddled.”
“My first webpage I visited was a hoot. The way it worked was, you put in your name at the top, or any name, I suppose, and it generated a fake doctor’s excuse for you. Really outrageous stuff — “acute case of Sunday hangover,” or “Got bit by a llama,” that kind of nonsense. Who comes up with this stuff? I would go to that site, every day for about a month, first thing, right with my morning coffee.”
“Eventually, I went to a second webpage, website, whatever. It was a repository of stories that this man, a European I believe, had written. Long, really detailed fiction, lots of plots, but the general recurring theme was that a woman would end up sitting on him, or rather, the main character, who always seemed to be about the same type of European male, and the woman would use the main character as a chair, of sorts. Sometimes a stool, sometimes a bench. The women varied — tall, short, mean, kind, fat, thin, all sorts of women just using this guy as a chair. Sometimes they’d be drinking wine, sometimes reading a book. I didn’t realize it at the time but I think this guy really got his jollies from it. I guess that’s one of the purposes of fiction, to let us imagine the world as it could be, and this guy, I guess, he just wished he had been born as a chair.”
“Eventually I started racking up the pages. Dozens of web pages, hundreds even. I ordered more flowers, that first year, than Joy knew what to do with. “Reg,” she’d say, “more flowers?!” hollering back to the computer room whenever the delivery guy would show up. I also learned a whole lot about the rain forest, information I still rely on to this day.”
“But then, one night, I couldn’t sleep, and I was up, surfing the web. And I found a new web page I’d never seen before. It was written in riddles, long, recursive sentences, and when I’d go back to read the opening part, I swore it was changing.”
“The topic was vague, hard to understand. It touched on many things — pain, loss, love, triumph, fear, sex, death, the ego, the id — there was embedded music, a haunting leitmotiv played on an electric keyboard — it was a winding narrative, water down an escarpment, and the water came from a machine, an automatic author, a robot of sorts, it seemed mournful, a helper looking for someone it had lost, another script, another automaton, knowing only how to describe the world through its medium, maybe it was telling me the story as I read it.”
“I scrolled, and read, and scrolled, and read, and there, at the bottom of the page, I met God. I could recognize God, as a word, of sorts. God was a series of letter forms, glyphic, immutable, conveying nothing, conveying everything. God was a cursor. God was a scroll bar. God was script that helped track my visit. God was a broken image link. God was the embedded song that played on loop. God was the banner ad, loading at the bottom. God was offering a chance for me to click here for a free iPod, years before the advent of the iPod. God was not dissuading me, God was not encouraging me. I do not know if I have free will, I do not know if I am forsaken. I did not click to try to win that iPod.”
"Do you believe that? Do you believe God is at the bottom of a website? I believed it then, and I still do.”
Regis Weekend Has Been Extended Through Saturday, September 16.
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