MICROSOFT DESTROYED MY FAMILY!!!

Sex, Gates, and Christian Cults:
The Strange World of Joan L. Brewer

by Carrie McLaren

One of the great curiosities of the world wide web is how anyone -- regardless of race, gender, class or education -- can take a bunch of snapshots, a resume, maybe a few Bible verses, and pay some Dilbert to put them online. And though the web tends to lack content, there are plenty of browsers (Netscape, Mosaic), search agents (Lycos, Altavista) and directories (Yahoo, Point) insuring that anything that can be labeled is labeled. Indexes such as Yahoo divide sites into personal, commercial, entertainment, news, etc. Catagories branch off into subcatagories and subcatagories of subcategories until, eventually, they end up at Not Really the Best Pages or Entertainment:Humor, Jokes, and Fun:Internet Humor:Web Site Parodies . In the process, genres are created and standardized before there's a solid body of work to go with them. And since burgeoning web authors will often make their site fit a type, any type, we end up with even more of the same.

But considering the amount of stuff out there, something has to be good. Filed somewhere under Kooks (see also Bizarre, Geeks, Net Legends), I stumbled across the home page for Joan L. Brewer and thought the intro was a real hoot... until Joan started ranting about sexual harrassment. I assumed she must be parodying harassment victims, got outraged for a few seconds, then I followed a link to Joan's home page. It's contents: Joan's resume, several rants about Microsoft's math errors, a graphic display of MS bugs, tips on transferring large graphics on the internet and several other pointless documents and references. Very world wide web.

Ok, I thought, I was wrong. This isn't a parody; it's a disturbing and pathetic life story of some crazy woman who'll probably open fire at a neighborhood grocer or end up in a ditch somewhere. The poor thing. I felt sad.

Not sad enough to leave, though. I tried out another section:

Panhandling on the Streets of Seattle. -- Well, $505 is not enough to pay the rent, so now I am on the street. Here are some of the pictures of me and an explanation. This is not a joke. I'm scared and in very bad physical condition with no medical insurance or hope of working.

The same holds for Joan; to whit: A Sample Web Site in Progress -- Cool Breeze and Hot Bodies [sorry but this link is no longer up]. Surely Joan is putting us on. Economic Freedom through body cooling products? Plus photos of scantily clad, pumped-up bimbos, all on the same server as Joan's, halcyon.com...

The saga continues and Joan's story starts to read like a laundry list of medical problems; a downward spiraling of disabilities, disasters and lawyers. Homeless and unemployed, in and out of the hospital, and just when you think it couldn't get any worse, Joan's charged with a DUI ... and she's not even near a motor vehicle. Ok, fine, it happened to me once, but there's more. Lots more. Sifting through the seemingly endless pages of Joan's email to Gates (an amazing body of loose-cannon babble; one-way advice using pop psychology, fairy tales and animal behavior), technical reports, news articles, court records and other documents, it gets difficult to see this as a calculated gag. Not only is there too much stuff here, but much of it doesn't even attempt to be funny. It makes you wonder why anyone would go to such lengths to create it.

In the process of flipping back and forth between thinking Joan's site was a joke to thinking it was for real, it hit me how truly brilliant it all is....I'd already listed the possibilities in my head, but it was hard to pin anything down. Hypocritical, but brilliantly so, Joan's tirades against sexism are repeatedly undercut by "pro-human," "pro-male" arguments which refer to women as the weaker sex. Many of the accusations she levies at Gates could be directed at herself--it's hard to keep track of who's harassing whom.

Wildly conspiratorial, she could take out the Feral House any day. In her email to Gates, Joan warns of an ever-elusive Them (women, Saddam Hussein, the public, flimflam men, Peter Pans and Ginger Bred Boys). In a post to alt.fan.bill-gates, she suggests that Gates was involved in the murder of John Lennon. Everyone from uneducated Filipinos to ex-cooks are out to get her.

Taken with Joan's anti-grammar, anti-spelling (anti-form?) stance, her words are practically meaningless. She can say whatever she wants and still be part of a cause, still be a victim. It's as if she's saying: it's not how you say it, but it's not what you say either. So what is it?

Joan vs. Microsoft does not proclaim intentions, carry expectations, or follow any of the conventions that have made comedy as a genre unappealing. Rather, the site calls attention to our inclination to label things in oppositional pairs--Is this supposed to be funny or serious? straightforward or ironic?

Variations on the word "postmodernism" make me want to cough something up so I wish I could think of a better way to describe this than "post"-something...but for now I'll use "post-parody" since straight parodies aren't as involving, and they don't ask you to piece so much together... or, to use another cliché-of-the-'90s, they're not so interactive (interactive in that it requires a brain, not in the sense of pushing buttons and downloading coupons; the sort of interactivity that separates us from robots).

"Post-parody" even sounds like it could be a category on Yahoo. They could put it right there in the Humor section below Parodies (Religious, Political, etc.) The only problem would be finding more sites to fit there. The art of Joan vs. Microsoft is its blurring of boundaries, it's provoking us to wonder. That's not the sort of thing you can find with a search agent.

Better just file it under Kooks.