(Meme, myself, and mime)
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Happy Birthday, internet!

And that’s how fights begin.

Right now, somebody somewhere online is factchecking me not counting facebook, of course … facebook even factchecks my jokes). And, depending on which Google link that faceless somebody clicks first, they’ll be right.

Until they click the next link.

While searching the internet for a history of itself, I can discover on one single page that the internet was born in 1969, and 1983, and 1989, and 1991. Part of the apparent confusion, it appears, is due to an internal discussion among scientist-types about the difference between “internet” and “world wide web.” (The rest of us are too busy looking at British Royal memes to care.)

As far as I can tell, Prince Harry and Meghan’s newest BFF is Ashton Ku … oh, wait … sorry, wrong humor column. As far as I can tell, the internet was originally a secret military weapon, like hiding under school desks, or Dick Cheney. It was only after the Pentagon determined that the Russians didn’t much care to know what every American was going to cook for dinner that they released the tool to civilians: hence, the world wide web.

By now, most people know the basics: the internet is a global information system, based on a network of internet protocol (IP) addresses, with content based on a Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and it’s all completely free, once you pay AT&T or some other cash-strapped company to let you access it. The whole intertwined techno thing is known as the world wide web, or W3. (see what they did there?)

IP addresses are the actual numbers behind website addresses, like google.com, or facebook.com, or veganvampireinc.com (yes, there actually is). Each IP address ( or “domain”) presents a collection of webpages, built using Hypertext (meaning text that can’t sit still for long periods).

At least there’s some consensus that the world wide web was introduced in March 1989 by one Tim Berners-Lee, a British thinker working at CERN in Europe. According to legend, his first “web server” had a hand-written label announcing in red ink: “This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!” It was ignored by an over-zealous Swiss cleaning woman. (These days, of course, we have cleaning robots that are programmed to ignore instructions for us.)

Science-type sidebar: CERN is an underground facility in Europe where science-types force sub-atomic particles to run into each other, like the linemen on some kind of quantum college football team. The scientists have convinced themselves that this collision will accomplish two miracles:

• Recreate the energy that was generated at the beginning of the universe
• Unseat Alabama

Regardless of its actual birthdate, the world wide web has certainly made its parents proud. As of one minute ago (according to internetlivestats.com), there are 1,883,581,807 officially listed websites, but at least three to five more are registered every second, so now there are about a hundred more. And now there are nearly ten more. These things are like Catholic couples with a weekend to kill.

Interestingly, unlike many Catholic couples, only around 25% of all those websites are “active.” Most are “parked,” aa technical term which means the domain owners were not paying any hosting service to allow internet access to young males trying to search them for porn. They just bought the domain names and sat on them, like Mercury dimes.

Not surprisingly, about fifteen minutes after its introduction, somebody saw the world wide web’s marketing potential, and people began buying up domains with hopes of creating bidding wars. They just paid for a domain, parked it, and waited for nibbles. You can imagine what interested parties would pay for domains like:

• Coke.com
• FordTrucks.com
• RoomsFullOfNakedWomen.com

Even though the world wide web as we know it didn’t really take off until the early 1990s, the term hypertext was actually coined much earlier, back in 1965, but the team got distracted by sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll and forgot why they’d coined it. It didn’t help, either, that one of the team went to Woodstock and fell in love with a tie-dyed beauty named Dot Com. But, as we all know now, he remembered her.

Science-type sidebar: Memes were first proposed way back in 1945, by the Science Advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Soon, Eisenhower was flooding Italy and Germany with grumpy cat photos, and World War II ended.

Wrapping up for now, though, we all have to admit that the internet has changed everything. Were all the changes for the better? Still to be seen … the jury’s still out. Witness:

• For the first time in history, you can now insult people based on no empirical evidence
• Gluten-intolerant vampires now have a forum
• It’s now possible to join a bowling league without wearing someone else’s shoes
• You can now share your views on any imaginable topic, unless you’re a Republican
• Thanks to the internet, you can now order shoes from China that, with any luck and a good tailwind, will arrive while you or your heirs still have feet
• Before the internet, to watch all ten seasons of Friends, it took you ten years
• It’s now possible to publish an article claiming that large blue lizards are responsible for gluten, and not only will some people agree, but some people will demand that Congress regulate large blue lizards
• You can now buy almost anything from the comfort of your couch, which will soon be repossessed because you couldn’t afford to buy the couch in the first place

So there’s hope for humankind.

Hmm. I wonder if I can purchase and park hope.com…