<Where the dickens do you find this stuff?

While looking for obscure information, I plow through the deep places of the Internet, where, as Gandalf once said, the "world is gnawed by nameless things."

Heck, I don't post a tenth of the mind-paralyzing crap that I see. Many of them have link names that are misleading, to say the least--common for sites that don't want their wares widely advertised--so it is quite possible to hit them by accident. Of course, many of the obvious weird sites--like the one I linked--I check out from morbid curiosity.

I assume the world has always been full of people whose elevators not only do not go all the way to the top, but whose elevator cars have broken loose and are lying in burning wreckage at the bottom of the shaft. Only the advent of the Internet gave them a worldwide voice.

The milder ones used to walk around college campuses, smelling like a dead moose, and passing out multi-page single-spaced mimeographs on the dots that only they can see to connect. The worst ones did...things...in the privacy of their homes or rural farms. Now everybody can enjoy them. I have more than once run across stuff that horrified me into wiping my history files out of fear that someone might find out that I actually saw this stuff.

I hit one or two sites a couple of years ago that were so foul that I actually called the FBI in on them rather than take the however-astronomically-remote chance that my linkage to these sites would have been somehow recorded on those sites and turn up in what I felt would be inevitable police raids on their computers. A panicked and paranoid defensive maneuver, and probably silly in hindsight.

I am still frantically looking for decent internet shields for the kids' computers...